skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Java is dead"

Saying that is childish, although I am interested to know why you think so.

IMHO, I can answer why not ... generational state of the art GC, JITting with inlining of virtual methods, meta-circular hosting researchy projects (Jikes RVM, Maxine VM), ecosystem of open-source libraries rivaling only with CPAN, JRuby, Clojure, open-source license.

If your favorite language/platform doesn't have these right now, you can always wait for a few years.
That Willy Wonka-style competition drove me up the wall.

The county I'm in turned down a chance to get 10x matching funds from the federal government and decided to buy a ticket in the Google lottery instead.
With $120M in funding, this blows my mind. I'm reminded of Ho Nam's Fat Startup Watch. Today's announcement suggests that despite massive growth and traffic, Ning did not find sustainable product-market fit.

http://www.blog.altosventures.com/vc/2010/03/fat-startup-wat...
I don't think the author makes a claim that he is a psychologist, he refers himself as pop psychologist,probably jokingly

From the article:

The term arrested development is now deprecated by
professional psychologists and has been replaced by
developmentally disabled.This is good news for <b>us pop
psychologists</b> hawking crude over-simplifications about
functional adults, since we can safely steal the term.
Exactly. His ideas aren't science, even social science.

His philosophy is a prism--like analyzing a story in terms of Jungian archetypes, or a picture in terms of phallic imagery. There isn't a falsifiable theory in there anywhere. Yes this applies to Freud too, which is why his ideas have largely been discredited and ignored in mainstream psychology for years.
bad taste in names:

type FloatArray []float

type StringArray []string

type Interface interface {
It seems like it could get the task switcher, though. Word on the street is it doesn't, at least in beta 1.
That's a saturated market too. :)
Library of Congress to preserve Twitter posts
I know this is a late response, but...

My concern is that the article felt like that for cases of institutional corruption, the article reasoned, "A, therefore C" instead of saying "A implies B, B implies C, therefore A implies C." The article didn't adequately give the reader reasoning or context for an anti-institutional slam out of the blue like that. (For religion, a few paragraphs discussing historical examples like the Inquisition or pedophile priests would have both strengthened the argument and smoothed out the narrative.)
One thing to remember about focus groups (like your 2 potential customers), is that they will tell you great things about a product, and they'll want to play with it, but the story changes when you ask them to pull out the credit card.

Take the iPad, for example. When my coworker brought one in, a half-dozen people crowded around it and marveled, and no one could put it down, but in the end only one person was willing to pay $500 for it. Make sure that your potential customers like the product/service enough to pay the price you want for it.
Wow...amazing no one has heard of these guys. I love the fact they have a business model and are cash flow positive. Sleeper hit...
>>....he felt he could do a better job than ConnectU and was compelled to do so

If you are aware of the background to the story, it seems like he gave the impression to two fellow Harvard students that he would help them build an internal dating site for Harvard, but some time into the project he decided to stop communicating with them and used the code for what would eventually become Facebook.
It's probably partly because of that funding :)
That's a great point. The relationship matters, and there is compatibility issues involved.
Actually, it really shows that hype is overhyped. Cashflow and profits are where it's at.
"Sorry, we were unable to geocode that address" for every address entered. Different browsers, all the same message.
This is a really enjoyable video, especially if you've ever dabbled in game development. By happenstance I sat next to Sid Meier on a bus at E3 a few years ago. He seemed every bit as friendly and gracious as the video portrays, which is great to see from someone who's firmly at "legend" status.
From the article:
"Why? Discussion on the Scratch forums suggests that it’s because Apple wants to focus on consuming media using these devices, not producing media. Want to be truly computing literate, where you write as well as read? There’s no app for that."

No, it's because (as far as I can tell) the Scratch iPhone app was acting as a Scratch interpreter which is explicitly not allowed on the App Store to begin with.

The authors of the iPhone app (http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/Scratch.html) made a nice post in the developer forums (https://devforums.apple.com/thread/46425) pleading their case for any you with access to the forum and an interest in digging deeper.
Why doesn't Nokia buy Palm?
I really wonder what the 500M and 750M valuations are based on, or are those just the numbers needed to justify additional investment.?

Also, it would make sense that this is slimming up with the hope of being acquired. Reduce head-count, pour effort into premium services to bump revenue, then sell.
I like how he says "you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible"
The usual arguement is William Smellie's forceps.
He was a doctor in the 1700s that invented the forceps used to deliver babies, but because if he publicized them anybody else would have copied the idea he kept them secret.

They were independantly rediscovered about a century later - but how many lives were lost in those 100years!
The upper bound is 250GB/mo. Check your comcast.net account center, and they'll give you the details.
Want to go to Israel? Leave your iPad at home
Even with patent protection, there's only direct incentive to develop new drugs for rich people, who can pay for them---which is why you don't see as much research on medicines for malaria as, say, erectile dysfunction.
My point is that professors aren't overcompensated, because they "bring in" about $100k per class of tuition, which is about $667/hour-- although obviously deductions need to be made for administrative costs, classes are the main service-- assuming 150 hours of work per class, but are paid substantially less.

The fact that they also do research as a full-time job means that they're even less overcompensated (by which I mean, "more undercompensated").
For my dislike of it? No, it's that I love firebug's way of displaying your CSS entries, and the webkit inspectors way is just less enjoyable to me. I like that in Firebug you inspect your CSS like you would normal CSS, but in inspector it's presented differently. It also has a lot of quirks (try changing a color, it will bork on whitespace in a strange way).
Ning Free had way too much Ning branding.
That depends on whether you prefer to die from taking an untested drug or die because the drug isn't invented yet. A severely ill person would probably prefer a chance of the former to the certainty of the latter. Also you have to account for the odds of both these events: which one do you think will happen more?
Fred Wilson Is The Truth
Asana: The Interface is the Product
Actually, the final link to this Sep. 2009 longer piece about the Nokia perspective is even more interesting: http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1325729/print (or the 'normal' version with pictures, but multi-page, at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/iphone-envy-you-must... )
Woah. I'm a big advocate of deregulation of many things but doing it to drugs seems a very dangerous idea.

In the first place these are things that can seriously affect your health - it makes sense to demand these are tested before they can be sold to people.

Secondly it would give more credence to the anti-drugs and pseudo-medicine movements. At the moment at least the govt. agencies can make a decision on if a drug is safe or not; with that out of the way it becomes even more of a PR war. :D

(additionally I would argue that the bar for entry into drugs research is higher than it is into software development, I don't think you could evolve an environment as diverse and self sustaining as the software world)
Unfortunately, far too many people take advice from the main priest of the Church of The Flying Zombie...
So you perform the sterilization yourself? How costly/difficult is it, and do small farms normally practice this right now?

Is it really that big of an issue in terms of food safety? (I know nothing about farming or plants).
--then they act like they should be happy to have even had the chance.

This is a common tactic of a con-artist and or sociopath. They try to deflect back onto the one drawing attention for two purposes. One to discredit the one lodging complaint and two to try and strong arm the more passive party into silence.

Humans, as a general rule of thumb, dislike conflict. You can see it in Jamie's responses where he is still apologetic to these guys, when logic would dictate that he should want their head on a platter.

Sociopaths see human responses such as this, like an artist sees a completed painting on a blank canvas, and they will use it against you. When I read that line quoted above, I realized right then that Dan is most-likely a sociopath and a person to be avoided.
This viewpoint seems to go against the HN zeitgeist -- a lot of programmers are self-taught, especially in the sciences. Just by necessity, students in molecular biology and genetics learn some scripting and how to push data around on the command line, and from that point a fair number of them really get into it and start studying the finer points of software engineering on their own.

(NB: Nearly everyone in bioinformatics has to accept some gaping holes in their education -- who has time to become an expert in each of biochemistry, medicine, computer science, and statistics?)
I think the bar is just far too low.
promises broken.
5... GIGS?

I probably sync that much back and forth in source code garbage and sample data sets between work and my house. Not to mention the fact that all of my video consumption is streaming now (Amazon or Netflix via Tivo).

That's... wow.
The newly industrial US ignored foreign patents and copyrights - claiming they were an attempt by europe to keep the new country down.
Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is an attack on the widespread (legal) piracy of his works in the US.
It's also how US steel got it's head start - by not having to pay a license for the Bessemer converter.

Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents.
It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
Yeah, that's linux now, and only for software dev creativity.
Basically we're trying to recreate Hacker News but for educators. We were surprised to see there isn't something like this for the #education community, so with some help from Slinkset we've built this. Hopefully we'll save teachers a lot of time and help everyone find the best content, just like HN.
An offtopic questinn, where do you save your bandwidth data in your Tomato router? NVRAM? It is suggested "Frequent saving to NVRAM or JFFS2 is not recommended".
It's out only from the store. There are other ways to install it! Legal ways.
That's something of a straw man though. Because the vast majority of people taking drugs aren't dying. If new drugs created in the deregulated industry were only given to terminal cases as a last resort it might work; otherwise it is just endangering everyone else (taking drugs).
Great news source! Sad to see so many VA schools with such bad news
I can see the opposite side too. Prestige isn't worth much if nobody willing to pay for it. But the fact is there are people willing to pay for it. EDIT: I guess that's what you're saying as well.
Quite right. My statement was based on my judgement that I (or perhaps other individuals less circumspect than myself) am more likely to die from an inadequately tested drug than from the lack of a drug which would have been invented in an FDAless free-for-all.

Or another scenario: maybe the drug to treat my disease has been invented, but nobody knows about it because it hasn't been properly tested and is competing with thirty other startup drugs (mostly useless, some harmful) which claim to treat the same disease. How is my doctor supposed to magically know which one to prescribe me?
HN on Linkedin
Ok, starting to enter all names and do the randomization. If I had 50 hard drives, I'd give you all one. Additionally, some people seem really in need of these hard drives. If you are, I certainly hope that you are one randomly picked. I can't take the time to try and evaluate who needs it most etc, but I hope that whether or not you are someone who receives one, that you still do a random act every once in a while.
"Apparently the Kin is intimately connected to the net through something called the Studio, which is basically an online backup for absolutely everything you do on the phone. Texts, emails, photos, contacts, all of it end up in the Studio and displayed in a glorious collage for your viewing pleasure. Does this disturb anyone else? Seriously, a place where everything you do on your phone is plastered up on screen?"

I'm sorry but if you're on a site called "bigtimewireless" and you're posting a phone review (of sorts) you should at least be knowledgeable enough to be familiar with that phone's immediate predecessor. It's not like the Sidekick's popularity was that long ago.

In fact, it was less than a year ago (Oct. '09) when a big controversy in the online world was Sidekick losing the very online data that this reviewer is treating like it's a brand new thing
The comment in http://bmannconsulting.com/2843/personal/keep-calm-and-carry said it best.
Yep. Not even available in Canadian iTunes store.
The interesting part is that, if 75% of their traffic are from paid networks, all that much heralded viral growth must have really just been bizdev deals to get existing brands and communities onto Ning. If that's the case it's pretty shocking they didn't do this sooner.
That post really puts the "C/C++/Obj-C" thing into much starker relief than the "wish I could use lisp" discussion. Geeks can get around 3.3.1 if they're clever enough; replacing a democratizing technology like Scratch, on the other hand, may be impossible.

That said, if their app really was an interpreter, I'm surprised it made it into the store in the first place. And if anything, the typical Scratch output of a crayon-drawn animation designed by a 13-year-old only bolsters Jobs' point about cross-compilers bringing down the average app quality. But I'm very impressed that they had Scratch working on the platform and I hope Apple can find a way to incorporate that educational mission into their world-domination strategy...
It is amazing how many parallels there are between industrial design and software design. In some way the two disciplines are indistinguishable.

Yet, the software industry culture tends to prefer designers with computer science background/training, rather than "proper" design background.
"No, it's because (as far as I can tell) the Scratch iPhone app was acting as a Scratch interpreter which is explicitly not allowed on the App Store to begin with."

Which goes to show, once again, that this policy is really stupid and that it doesn't affect exclusively developers, but also the educational potential so vehemently touted by all the iPad/iPhone/iTouch fans.
Visual culture on the iPad
I'm working on a medical device, so can't say I am only thinking about software patents.

I would suggest the bounty system as a way to deal with the need for CURES to disease. Or treatments if cures are not possible.

There is a cost to innovating and a cost of dealing with the government. Yes, dealing with the government is a very expensive process.

Ensuring safety is important. Does the current approach accomplish this? Some would question that it does.

Still, whoever pays that bill and takes the risk of never being paid back should get a fair return if successful.

If one feels that the government has the right to create this enormous regulatory burden, than it can certainly assign the benefits of going through all of that to the one paying the bills for a sufficient time to recover those costs.

I qualify that because I don't quite agree the government should be involved or that coercion is necessary, but that is a whole other can of worms.

If there is a benefit to be had, there is a price worth paying. I just don't automatically assume government is the way to make that happen.

We are quite used to seeing government or coercion as the method, but I think other mechanisms can make the same beneficial occur. For the most part, I think government is a far greater impediment to many good things than most people realize.

But I give your comment a point. Its a valid concern.
Ask YC: How to launch?
We are going to launch a bug tracking tool shortly. The product isn't completely ready but some of the core features are usable. We want to do a limited release so that the product can benefit from some customer interaction before we promote it aggressively.

Do you think that a invites-only beta is a good idea for such a product? Is there some other way of doing a selective/limited release without over exposing the product before its ready?
I'm not sure the ad as it stands quite convinces me I'd be doing interesting work (though it is possible I'd have thought of "commerce on the Internet" as pretty interesting at the time).
You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again. Most of your costs and effort is put into writing contracts and NDAs and making sure that no information leaks from your engineers to the supplier.
If the supplier makes faulty brakes - you sue them, spending 10x as much on lawyers as on engineers.

You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again.

Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world.

But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.
Without games? Without web? Unlikely.
from @dhh:

Ning raised spent $120MM of other people's money over 6 years to come to the conclusion that free doesn't pay.
If you stop taxing investments and corporate income, you've "greatly reduced tax evasion" by eliminating the most-evaded taxes. The taxes that are the hardest to evade (sales tax, payroll taxes) are the ones that disproportionately impact the lower middle class.

"Ease of enforcement" is an irrational standard for designing tax systems. If you want to lay off the rich in the hopes that they'll create jobs, just say that.
My first thought was "How do I become someone who designs and builds large and complex (yet maintainable) systems in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible?"
"It looks like it might work a lot better"

Gorge the beast might work better at raising tax rates, but I'm not sure if it is going to work out better for the country
This is more generous than what I'm doing. I'm giving away something I don't have much of a use for and other people need. You're choosing to turn down something you need so someone more fortunate can have it. It's good to see people like you existing.
Nobody's endangering you. You're free to take only drugs approved by the newly private FDA Corp.
Is that true? Is there really less research on medicines for malaria than erectile dysfunction? I've met a whole bunch of malaria researchers, but never an erectile dysfunction researcher.
Historically and for most of the world's population, your economic condition would prevent you from being fat. Poor in the US are so well-off, they can afford to be overweight.
No. It shouldn't.

Yes it may make money, but who honestly believes this is a contender in this brave new world of smartphones? There's nothing exceptional about the phone at all. And it would take something exceptional to break into the market.
Which of these estimates do you disagree with?

A. Top school tuition (U.S.): $40,000 per year
B. Average course size: 25
C. Number of courses taken by average student: 10
D. Price per course (A / C): $4,000
E. Revenue generated per course (B * D): $100,000.

This doesn't mean that each professor is "worth" $100,000 for each course, because there are administrative costs for the university. Given this, a reasonable cut for the professor might be 30-50%-- this assumes that for each professor, you need 1-2 educational staff. However, let's consider the following:

Not all courses are taught by full professors; many are taught by postdocs making less than $60k/year. Let's generously assume that the average college teacher makes $90k (although I'd bet against it being that high). Let's further assume that half his job is teaching and half is research (although research is expected to be a full-time job, and teaching is fairly part-time). So he's being compensated $45,000 for his 5 courses per year, or $9,000 each. That's 9% of what he brings in-- a tiny fraction.
> Why do I lose my right to do something because you write that thing down before I do?

The inherent problem with patents and (to a lesser extent) copyright is that they attempt to fix one problem and as a side affect enforce this too.

Playing devils advocate for a moment; a society without patents is unfairly weighted (in terms of invention) towards BigCo. i.e. you get a lot more innovation but only those with big cash can do something with it - and not necessarily by paying the inventor.

Under current law things are potentially unfairly balanced to the patent holder. I realise that in practicality it is still weighted towards BigCo anyway because they can fund lawsuits etc.

There is, surely, a balance between the two extremes (I don't believe we have it at the moment).

As it happens I think we need to be careful considering the broad concept of patents. We are all familiar and, probably, all opposed to the idea of Software Patents in their current form (or at all). However making software is reasonably trivial - and getting a patent is, thought relatively costly, not too difficult.

This is not entirely the case in other industries; which makes a slight difference (in the sense that the investment for software development is generally lower for an individual inventor)
Wjat does Tiger Woods have to do with your investment strategy?
That's a straw man. Nobody's saying you can't have opinions. I'm just commenting about a particularly flimsy opinion.
Great idea! Also, make an inventory of what you're taking, and get a receipt. It's a tax deduction. It may not be much depending on what you're donating (T Shirts are $1-2 for example), but it's a little extra bonus for being nice.
I agree that it should cause more concern -- but how about more "reflection and rethinking" than "outrage". The kids with the most to gain from an encouraging tool like Scratch can't afford iPods anyway.
You seem to discount the amount of people that are dying due to the slow development cycle of drugs. If there was regulation there would be more experimentation, perhaps more people would die from the effects of new drugs -- but you could choose to only use drugs that have been stable and well studied while those who have nothing left to lose could use medicine directly off the chemists work bench.
good point

I would also argue that a lot of people invest in finding a solution to problems that affect themselves or loved ones without any thought to the possible financial return. The cure is what they want and its worth spending money to obtain.