skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You couldn't be further off base. I've built two companies from scratch and I did all of the "cleaning the trash" work as did all my team members.

Nevertheless, it takes different skill types to build a technology organization. Some will be super technical while some will be more process driven. Some will be inspired to work on all of the latest technologies but hate doing garden-variety feature coding or bug fixing while some people are great utility players.

My post was silent on the issue of whether people with "titles" should do grunt work. And to imply that I said otherwise is a misrepresentation of the post.
Ethics and all aside, this was a good deal for Gizmodo (I thought it was $5K though). More (evily?) genius was demanding a letter from Apple before returning the prototype to ensure another exclusive.

Of course it Apple unleashes its legal department on them it may turn into a negative balance really quickly....
We're definitely looking to add tx speed. I just pushed an update that should fix the long filename issue. Thanks for the notes!
Oh, it will cost a lot more once they factor in the legal fees. Unless they want to become the next ThinkSecret...
I see this recommended everywhere, so I nabbed it from a library a while ago. My two cents (for others, not picking on you, rhythmAddict):

Ick. Bloated with manager-speak, light on quality suggestions, and massive. Not worth your time. Reading a few coding-suggestion articles here is significantly more likely to improve your code quality.
I completely feel for the guy. I've been trusted with a few prototype phones in my life, in most cases prototypes from companies I didn't directly work for. I once left one behind in a bar in Idaho Springs Colorado (a Sony Ericsson P910 I think)... this at a time that a phone like that was an absolute marvel (particularly in the U.S.).

Thankfully in my case whoever found it was a saint. I called, the bar had it and I picked it up. End of story. I'm a pretty responsible guy, I just screwed up that one time.

I wish this had all ended the same way for this guy.
Essential Mobile & Social Media News You May Have Missed
Overall mobile happenings seem to have slowed a little since the release of the iPad and then the announcement of iPhone OS 4.0 the week after. That doesn’t mean that things are still happening. In fact, there were some interesting things going on in the space last week, with one story in particular getting some attention from some influential sources.
But you can make crap by any means, including objective-c, as evidenced by all the 'buddha quotes' etc apps. My idea is that having to pay per app published, say $25, would help disincentivize the shotgun approach.
Larry Wall himself said that:

Perl 6 is Lisp with a decent syntax, and minus a lot of assumptions about how lists should be represented :)

ref: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2010-01-15#i_1905210

He then goes onto to mention that despite all the trappings of OO, Perl 6 is fundamentally more in the FP camp
Yes, it's server-assisted p2p. It's a great tech for getting around firewalls and serves as an effective solution to the "I can't send you the file for some reason" that we were running into daily with our various IM clients.

Glad you like it!
That's an awesome book. Anyone interested in Javascript as a language, not just the browser library operations, should definitely read through it.

edit: Disclaimer for any planning on buying it: it only covers the language. There's no browser interaction code at all. I've seen a few people surprised / annoyed at that, but it keeps it lean and focused.
> This no doubt casts a shadow on his career and life.

It's no doubt going to suck for him until this blows over, but it will blow over, and I doubt that his career and life will suffer too much in the long run if he just rides it out. Any rational person looking at this will think it an honest mistake that they could easily have made, as Gizmodo points out tirelessly. Apple would be crazy to fire him.
I live in Austin and don't agree with the bulk of the modern 'conservative' movement but living here I see stark differences in the way business is conducted compared with California. First, the local banks are /far/ more conservative with loans. There is no rush to jump on the next big thing and they do not hand out loans, sometimes even when thy are well deserved. It is pretty old school. You have to really prove what you say, and if they don't understand it, no way in hell are they loaning any money to it. Frustrating at times and in some ways short sighted, but you don't have everyone scrambling to make a quick buck (and the banks financing it all) either. IOW, the position Texas enjoys is only tangentially affected by the state gov't.
2nd -- I personally don't like Rick Perry and I was foaming at the mouth when he cut education funding but, tough as the cuts were there and in other places, Texas has a surplus. There is wiggle room. I have to grudgingly admire that kind of discipline. It is not like the Governor or Legislators did not catch a lot of flak for their policies the last 10 years.

Contrast that with California where my brother in law got to take 8 weeks paid paternity leave at least partly on the State's dime and you begin to see the difference.
Climate sceptic wins landmark data victory 'for price of a stamp'
I think you missed the point. The point is that Perl 6's "rules and grammars" are a profound innovation that will affect the future of language design.
Twitter is a bad place for conversations, that's kind of the point/charm of it. You fire and forget. You don't expect (or want) a response. It took off because it played to the ego of popular bloggers, then to the ego of corporations and celebrities.

If you prefer conversations to context-free statements, Twitter has never been interesting.
Danger signs to search for in your writing
you are counting only a single day of page views, chances are that one article will bring in a ton more traffic over the coming days/weeks/months.

i.e. even now gizmodo ranks in #1 position for iphone V4
Erm... actually I find this phrase funny; it can be of course related to anything, and this thread seems relaxed enough to insert it.

But whatever the collective wisdom says...
Perhaps someone should point out that Matt Mackall is the creator and lead developer of Mercurial (according to wikipedia). I've been using Mercurial for some time but I had no idea who was the author of that email.

What I would like to see is some way to "vote" towards some features. For example, FSEvents support on OSX.
Get Rid of the Accreditation Requirement
I haven't read through it yet, but CoffeeScript's source is particularly well documented:

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

I realize it's a huge investment to make, but dammit, every open source project should do something like this.
An Economy of Liars
The Inner Ring, by C.S. Lewis
The are plenty of big companies that could stump Mercurial some cash or development time. Mozilla for one uses Mercurial heavily.
It's more of a personality trait that a "role". A typical CTO in a small organization is less of a people person and more of a technologist, the VPE is more of a business process person (it needs to ship on tuesday, don't forget the customer). As organizations upside into big entities that role separation still exists, where the VPE is very much management (performance reviews, schedules, budgets) and the CTO is now more front facing but still more focused on the technologies/industry than the process.
No you don't think differently. You're a bloody pirate and you're infringing on Apple's IP.

Cease and Desist.

You have no RIGHT to modify that device you bought, and under the DMCA I hope you are charged with an IP crime against Apple.

If you wanted to freely use your phone you should've PAID for a license to do so instead of STEALING IP and making a derivative work. Did you wipe the device? No you didn't, you modified Apple's software to do so.

You should respect the wishes of your IP overlords.

If you don't want to, then don't use their products, stop making excuses for your blatantly disrespectful, immoral and illegal behavior.
On a somewhat unrelated note, why do people use Sitemeter over Google Analytics (honest question)?
Web start-ups almost always fail. So why are these guys launching one?
Gizmodo, and the entire Gawker network, is geared towards one thing, that being to generate page hits. Page hits equal ad imprint revenue.

After curiously inspecting the article, I looked at their legal page. They specifically spell out that any and all legal communications will be disclosed (even DMCA take down notices).

From what I can see, Gawker wants to stir the pot as hard as possible to generate the maximum views. Content is relevant only so far as it achieves that goal. Apple contributes to this goal by its maximum use of secrecy.
Well, I was interested in how they got their data from my undergrad, Cornell, so I went looking...

Cornell publishes median grades, and they "estimated" the mean GPA from the medians. As far as I know, there's no statistically valid way to do that. You would have to assume a normal distribution, and I know for a fact that many of the courses do not have one.

There could be a systemic bias if private schools differ in the way they report their data. For instance, are public schools required to report mean GPAs, whereas private schools can cherry pick their data?
I used Twitter quite a bit about a year ago, but stopped using it for the last several months. I went back recently to see what had changed and was really underwhelmed with what they've done.

Spam is what really stood out to me. The trending topics were littered with spam and I had bogus followers as well. I had hoped they would have cleaned things up a bit and added more than lists to the service.
well GA is delayed by a day or so in reporting. could be one reason.
A better answer: "What kind of Apple Mac do you imagine that Arthur had when you read the book? That's the kind he had."
I enjoyed the article, but "where's the beef?" it just seemed a little light with the exception to the second to last paragraph:

"If you do wish to break or limit the power of the major banks, running a balanced budget is probably the most important step we could take. It would mean that our government no longer needs to worry so much about financing its activities. Of course such an outcome is distant these days, mostly because American voters love both high government spending and relatively low taxes."

Now it is getting somewhere, but it basically ends on that note--although the last part of the last sentence was a baseless jab. Unfortunate this article had potential but the focus was wrong.
First among SQLs - COBOL for lawyers
Title should probably be "Better JavaScript Minification with YUI". It's just about ways to hack around YUI to improve its compression (ie, what to avoid, because it trips up YUI).

Or, ya know, you could just use another library. Like Closure: http://code.google.com/closure/

(anyone used Closure? Know how good it is?)
Speed guide? You mean crap introduction to a handfull of crap products.

BerkleyDB wasn't even covered. Come on.

Crap article.
I think on the whole peoples reaction to Code Complete is very much connected to when in their coding career they first come across. If you come across it early in your career while still inexperienced it can completely change your approach to coding for the better. If you come across it later in your career it just seems like a collection of obvious ideas that you already know.
And Perl5 already has some of those features:

* multi-methods - There are two implementations on CPAN, Class::Multimethods (old) and MooseX::MultiMethods

* rules - Ditto. Perl6::Rules (old) and Regexp::Grammars

* macros - Have a look at Devel::Declare. Not Perl6 macros but still powerful stuff!

* and a whole bunch of other good stuff - Lots have been backported to Perl5 (direct and into CPAN). For eg. smart match, given/when, Perl6::Junction, Perl6::Gather and also things like Moose & Class::MOP which are heavily influenced by Perl6
MathJax: High-quality display of LaTeX and MathML for all browsers
It has been said that Ruby is Smalltalk with a perly syntax.
Perl6 extends on that: Perl 6 is Lisp with a perly syntax.

Interesting idea, but I would have loved to see some examples or comparisons. For all of the mindshare that Perl has, I haven't seen much content (especially code) about Perl 6 over the last couple of years.
Do any HNers write fiction? I recently started writing some things just for my own plesure. It's more rewarding than I expected.
Science classes require more work because the average GPA is lower. To get the same GPA in a science class as a humanities class, you have to do better than more people than you would otherwise, which means more work.

And yes, I agree that decreasing the average GPA in humanities classes is better, but you're ignoring one thing; students are horrible complainers. If you give them a poor grade, they will whine and wheedle. If it's on a test, and their answers are demonstratively false, they have no room to argue. If it's a paper, they will plead and annoy you until the cows come home.

Simply put, poor grades in a science class are much more defensible because science isn't as subjective. It's hard to grade hard in a humanities course.
SSRN-Models, Reflexivity, and Systemic Risk: A Critique of Behavioral Finance
We use Omniture and Sitemeter. I suspect many big sites use at least two stats tools also. Sitemeter is real-time, and makes it easy to see where you are getting linked from.
I found Kernighan and Pike's _The Practice of Programming_ to be a much more appealing (and concise!) approach.
I am embarrassed to ask, but what does this do? (regarding this from the link)

"Until Gizmodo publicly apologizes to Gray Powell, this is going to be in my /etc/hosts and in all of the DNS servers under my control:

127.0.0.1	gizmodo.com
127.0.0.1	www.gizmodo.com
127.0.0.1	m.gizmodo.com
127.0.0.1	gawker.com
127.0.0.1	www.gawker.com
127.0.0.1	m.gawker.com
"
not by a day anymore, more like 2/3 hours tops
I write quite a bit, and my start-up project is aimed at writers. Writing is a lot of fun, if only to serve as a break from programming. Although I would argue they are rather similar activities, particularly once you get to refactoring.

National Novel Writing Month (http://nanowrimo.org) is a great way for people to get started, as are local writers' circles. Writing circles are generally very accepting of new people/outsiders, because everyone is on the look out for new perspectives.
Short-term profit (page views), long-term possible net loss (denied access to WWDC, Apple events)

Gizmodo had a problem with CES and Tv-b-Gone
1. The live stream is the point of Twitter. Notice how the major search engines made agreements with Twitter to get up-to-the-second results.

2. "in reply to"...right there on twitter.com, and any halfway decent client.

3. Retweets and favorites allow you to recommend/rate individual tweets.

EDIT: swombat already posted these points before me :/
جديد برنامج gsm لفك الشفرة للعميل مع خدمة rpl - شركة الصباحي
Although targetted at fiction, it's relevant to documentation and other technical writing. We all bemoan the quality of technical writing, but good writing is hard, and these hints apply across the board (with some liberal interpretation).
Well, for what it's worth, I really liked it and consider it a keeper. It's on my bookshelf between "Programming Pearls" and "Mythical Man month".

It's less about programming per se and more about how to think about programming.
> To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.0 or greater is installed.

I know nothing about your service because all I see is a little bit of text that might as well be a middle finger to the user.

and an adobe icon.
Gizmodo has also been generating lots of attention (albeit unwanted) for Apple.

So, Gawker and Apple need each other in a strange antagonistic way? How about Steve Jobs as The Dark Knight and Ryan Tate as The Joker? It sorta fits. Steve does seem to like dressing in black.
This is another brilliant marketing move by Steve and an attempt to influence the news media's view of the Android phone.

If the news media starts talking about Android phones as "porn" phones then the iPhone will be presented as the shiny white alternative to that.
I really hope Apple never invites them to any press announcement again, sends them review devices and boycott them as much as possible. Usually I disagree with Apple's policy a lot (who doesn't?), but what Gizmodo has done was really cheap and deceitful. No company deserves that kinda treatment.
General principle: short sentences convey speed, long and meandering sentences will give the reader a sense of drawn out time. A pitfall many writers fall into is over describing their action scenes, which makes them seem oddly sluggish and dull.

The revision shown in the article to "A Bad Uncle lifted Captain Samson over his head and hurled her over the edge of the catwalk," is an example of this problem. The reader knows how you throw someone, they don't need an explanation.

"The Bad Uncle hurled Captain Samson over the edge." (Presumably the reader knows they are on a catwalk, too, so "the catwalk" is unnecessary.)

If it is really important to convey that the Bad Uncle is very strong you could do "The Bad Uncle hurled Captain Samson over his head, off the catwalk," or something similar.

Edit: Also, the article discourages adverbs, but doesn't mention that adjectives are similarly bad. Most adjectives can be better conveyed through an action or specific detail. Don't say "she was nice", but do show her helping a lost child.
Is Boston Short Angels, or Good Companies?
I came across it pretty early, though admittedly I'd read quite a few suggestion articles & management articles prior to it. It's still largely obvious, and super management-oriented. Even the little check-lists at the end of each chapter reek of a manager looking over someone's shoulder, tsk-ing, and marking "flaws" in code, rather than actually being a useful metric of any sort to measure quality against.

I can't get past the feeling (as it's a subjective assessment, I can't say "fact") that it's a book for non-programmers who are managing programmers, and it's being mis-applied as something a programmer should read. It's meant to raise the minimum code quality on a project, and it very well could with rather poor programmers, but it does so by sacrificing (nay, slaughtering) potentially better strategies which a decent programmer should know / be learning.

"Do X, Y, and Z and your code will improve" is something only managers believe, and they all want to find some magic combination which will work that way. Code Complete bills itself as exactly that.
Recent trends in grade inflation at American universities
Manage your ideas with this portable wiki
I doubt video calling will work very well on AT&T. Sprint's HTC EVO will have a front-facing camera, and with 4G the experience will be better, but the iPhone is bound to be more popular anyway.
Here are some links showing recent Perl6 content/code:

* Perl6 advent calendar: http://perl6advent.wordpress.com/

* Moritz Lenz perl6 blog: http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-6/

* Carl Masak perl* blog & github projects: http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/ http://github.com/masak

* Perl6 planet: http://planetsix.perl.org/

* Perl6 book: http://github.com/perl6/book

* Perl6 examples: http://github.com/perl6/perl6-examples
Fate of network admin Terry Childs now in jury's hands
Denton paid $5,000 and you need to subtract the hits they would get anyway, but it looks like they made out great.
$787 Billion Tax Dollar Funded Bank Bailout engineered by the former CEO of Goldman Sachs -- nope, nothing suspicious there.
I know there has to be some great accountants, CFO's, finance people, etc on HN that can offer more detail about a Repo 105 and what the benefit is for an organization (maybe an individual?) to do this, not just in Lehman's case. WSJ explanation is straight forward, but I would like to hear a little more about this practice--hopefully I'm not the only one.

From the article: "We have now learned of the creative way Lehman Brothers hid its leverage (how much money it was borrowing) by the use of a Repo 105. The Repo 105 meant Lehman temporarily swapped assets (such as bonds) for cash. A Repo, or repurchasing agreement, is a way to borrow money. But an accounting rule allowed Lehman to book the transaction as a sale and reduce its reported borrowings, according to a report by the court-appointed Lehman bankruptcy examiner, a former federal prosecutor, last month."
The CEO of Whole Foods on "Conscious Capitalism"
Other companies get the same treatment all the time, it's only such a big deal because Steve Jobs runs that campus like they are shielding nuclear secrets.
It redirects those urls so you can't access them from your computer. It's the simplest way to block a site.
I guess it depends on what porn exactly. I know a few people in the biz, both the indie side and the pro side, and they have a ton of fun.... I'm sure there's some folks who aren't, but I don't watch that stuff:)
Gawker uses it so that the stats are public. I don't think you can do that with Google Analytics. They have also been using Sitemeter since well before GA was around.
Objective-C Tuesdays: instance variables, getters and setters
LWall
> Lisp with a decent syntax

I'm no Lisp guru, not even proficient but isn't saying that kind of missing a large point of Lisp in that code is data and data is a list/sexpresion or what ever it's called?
The Clojure core is usually a good read, as is a lot of contrib.
Open Network Lab: Japan Gets “Y Combinator” For Incubating Global Startups
All this 'OMG STOLEN' drama is totally over the top

+1 for that.

I haven't even looked at the Gizmodo page in question. That's not for any moral outrage, but because I just don't care. A new Apple product is not going to change my life by one iota. Hearing about an Apple product under development makes even less difference to me.

I have to say: Apple's marketing -- and this is part of it, make no mistake, even if it was precipitated by accident -- are the masters. That they can get the press into such a tizzy, and have such a legion of fanboys, for nothing but a handful of tech products, is what's truly remarkable -- and makes me kind of sad.
Actually they shifted their focus away from sheer page views to unique visitors: http://www.businessinsider.com/gawker-switches-to-unique-num...
Did not work for me as I could not connect to my peer and my peer could not connect to me.
Repo's are essential to banking. At the end of the day, a bank must be in a certain financial state. Fluctuations in withdrawls and deposits can lead to a need or surplus of cash. Financial institutions balance their books daily with repos. (The market is HUGE.)

IB's have a need for repo's also, but they often push the limits of sanity. LTCM used repos for large leverage also. (When Genius Failed is an interesting book to read; essentially the crisis of 2007 was LTCM on a larger scale.)

The financial crisis of 2007 was actually a run on banks through the repo market. IB's used repos on a rolling basis with very little margin for error. Suddenly, the haircuts got large and blew them up.

For an excelent paper on the crisis and the repo markets huge (dominant) roll in the crisis, see Gary Gorton's paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1401882
Absolutely (:P); this afternoon I went through a 5000 word essay and cut about 40 adverbs.... it's such an easy trap to fall into.
Google Building Water Recycling Plants for its Data Centers
Get a lawyer