skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree in general thrust with your focus on infrastructure -- one may argue that a lot of improvements of ignoring language have occurred. .Net allows for multiple languages on a single infrastructure, I believe Java VM does as well, and there is Parrot too.

I do think that there is a healthy focus on syntax -- at least my own experience bears it out. It was the syntax of doing things the python way that allowed me to grok polymorphism and MVC despite programming in an OO language for .Net for years. I find that if I want to learn a concept, the syntax is extremely helpful. I also find that if I have to program quickly, syntax being close to how I think is also helpful, and will get frustrated having to make yet another translation of my thought into a syntax that wasn't well thought out. I would also bet that a lot of people find a different syntax to intuitive, and others counter-intuitive than I do. And I'm fine w/ that! Just because there is difference doesn't mean there has to be division!
Duh! Thank you for wasting your time to answer me. I have no idea why that didn't register. So now anything on his network will fail to load those URL's; rather I was thinking there was something larger at play that was going to be disruptive beyond his local. Don't ask why I was assuming this.
Flagging this because the story itself has no link to the free registration and the Palm dev site makes no mention of this. There is no proof and other sites I've found mentioning this are link bait (with irrelevant links in the story).
http://axod.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-closure-compiler-adv...

In my tests, it's extremely good. It requires some effort to get things working with the advanced mode, but it's worth it to make things load quicker.

Certainly far better than YUI.
Perhaps the biggest danger is a lack of any structure that encourages the reader to follow through the whole item. If you can give a teaser for the pot of gold that is buried at the end of the rainbow so much the better.

I find mind maps really help me enormously in getting that right structure. My first draft or two is purely at the Mind Map level. It's amazing how letting my thoughts simmer away suggests some new angle or aspect of the subject. I find FreeMind very user-friendly and I endorse it wholeheartedly. I have no connection with the creator(s). I'm just a very satisfied customer.
Well, I guess it is you that don't know a few things. My notebook in question was running Windows and it is made by Dell. There was no fan noise, just my CPU being used all to much to display a one inch big Ad on screen. I love how people presume you are defending Apple when you are not.
> 'OMG STOLEN' drama is over the top

Unless it is happening to you. Empathy, geeks are known to lack it, you should at least learn to fake it.
Ugh, Perlmonks allows anonymous blog comments? My eyes, the goggles do nothing.
Declared by Searchenginepeople.com, which, I might note, does have a home page. ;)
"Perl 6 is Lisp with a decent syntax,"

Calling perl syntax "decent", and by implication better than lisp syntax (such as there is) is mind bending.
Has Apple's new iPhone hit the limits of industrial design?
I found the book underwhelming, but then I realized that programming blogs have probably ripped off every single paragraph.

I preferred Kernighan and Pike's _The Practice of Programming_ to both TPP and Code Complete, though. _Programming Pearls_ (and its sequel) have also held up well to repeated reading.
This is a pretty clever modal, free streaming course to get some publicity, then pay for the download.
Jeff Sutherland: How to make your team hyperproductive
More iPad Bans continues
Landscape sketch becomes Jules Verne portrait when viewed in cylindrical mirror
Reminds me of the movie "Galaxy Quest" when Jason (Tim Allen) snaps on his fans (lead by Justin Long as Brandon) who're trying to resolve potential inconsistencies in some episodes Galaxy Quest:

BRANDON: Commander, as I was saying... In "The Quasar Dilemma", you used the auxiliary of Deck B for Gamma override. But online blueprints indicate Deck B is independent of the guidance matrix, so we were wondering where the error lies?

JASON: It's a television show. Okay? That's all. It's just a bunch of fake sets, and wooden props, do you understand?

BRANDON: Yes but, we were wondering-

JASON: There IS no quantum flux and there Is no auxiliary... THERE'S NO GODDAMN SHIP, YOU GOT IT!?

I highly recommend the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it.
My take on Apple iPhone 4G story: Gizmodo, Engadget and chequebook journalism
NASA highlights from 2009 slideshow
Every religion has some form of meditative practice (though some are less advertised than others - I never did hear about Jewish meditative practices until I was deep into Buddhist practices). And for the non-religious, there are folks like John Kabat-Zinn (see link below) who take a more scientific approach.

http://www.mindfulnesstapes.com/ (I have not used these but it was a decent enough link to give an overview)

http://www.umassmed.edu/behavmed/faculty/Kabat-Zinn.cfm
The only reason I keep Firefox around is for the extensions. I only hope developers read this and notice that it may even be easier for Chrome and it's pretty much the same work for both. Thanks for spreading the word. I'm sure many of us will benefit from the results of your words.
I teach at a public institution of higher learning. Over the past 30 years funding per student has declined. This causes a shift in perception. Society is no longer my client as a result of this shift in funding. My clients are the students and the students want to pass. This pressure to pass people is especially present in adjuncts and the use of adjuncts has dramatically increased.
I think the point is "with rules you don't need everything to be and s-expression". I don't know how much to agree or not with that point. Currently I'm of the we'll see where is goes point of view.
Please Wait...
A lawsuit is much different than criminal charges and yet they also lost the cases you linked. This time they would be up against a much more formidable defense too--Gawker has money and connections.

It would be a really tough sell to send a blogger to jail for taking pictures of something that was in a public place.
Urban young women earn more than male counterparts:

http://blogs.eweek.com/careers/content001/wages/young_women_...

Women outnumber men in the workplace:

http://www.electwomen.com/?p=3123

Women outnumber men in college enrollment:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html

(article about implications on dating)

There are a ton more links on Google for each of these.
That's because it's just so hard to mind-meld ourselves for collective thoughts like these.
They make at-least $8 CPM for one ad spot.

http://advertising.gawker.com/rates/

Also, I remember reading not too long ago that their "authors" gets paid by page views.
The problem with (most) work is that they really aren't having fun. all they are doing is working through a list of documents.
What comes after location?
I'd expect a less boring answer from a writer, or at least not along the lines of "well, it's just a book I wrote, there is nothing beyond it". As if we are so stupid not to understand that. Every good fiction book is a world within and beyond for the reader. And I think questions like this are more like a test for the writer: "Are you that great?". No, apparently he's not.

His answer on why 42 is as disappointing.
Thanks—I'll check those out!
> "with rules you don't need everything to be and s-expression"

I am unsure if I would call it a feature.
According to the Antipatterns book, only 1 in 5 programmers "get" abstraction, which roughly matches my quarter century experience in the real world.

A corollary of this is that absent really good hiring practices, "democratic" design processes are doomed to fail, since the non-abstractionists invariably out vote the ones who get it.
Okay, but empathy towards a /corporation/ for something secret being leaked? Not so much.

Maybe you're talking about Gary Wotsit being outed - I wasn't referring to that.
This was an excellent article.

I've dabbled in this field in my job, but I don't have any real training, so I've had to teach myself.

The classic text in this field is _The Design of Everyday Things_, by Donald Norman.[1] Also very useful is _Interaction Design_.[2] The first is a very quick read (it's only about 200 pages, and not very technical), while the second is a textbook intended for use in university courses on HCI.

I've found both very valuable in trying to figure out how users approach things without any formal cognitive science or HCI training.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Interaction-Design-Beyond-Human-Comput...
>Classical liberals, whose modern counterparts are libertarians and small-government conservatives, believed that the state's duties should be limited (1) to provide for the national defense; (2) to protect persons and property against force and fraud; and (3) to provide public goods that markets cannot.

I happen to agree with this definition of the state's duties, but I have a more expansive notion of (3) than most libertarians. For example, universal health care and education are public goods that generate more market wealth in higher productivity than they cost in taxes collected to pay for them, but markets intrinsically cannot produce universal education or health care by themselves.

As for the article, crony capitalism is precisely what happens when capitalists control the levers of government.
Good to have statistics to back up my anecdotal observations.

My hypothesis about the cause: students complain more than they used to, and professors cater to them. Student evaluations amplify this: the common formula is "2 points easiness, 2 points sympathy, 1 point good looks."

(Evaluations are out of 5 points.)

I received the following complaint this semester: "Linear algebra is supposed to be an easy A! But people are failing!" Linear algebra is the first class where you do proofs and see abstractions like vector spaces. It's meant to be a weed-out course. Some profs remove all the proofs and just teach you to multiply matrices, which is indeed an easy A.

Interesting fact: there was a much bigger spike in grade inflation during the Vietnam war. Professors graded more easily at that time to allow students to remain in college and escape the draft.
Syntax has two problems: (1) it is the most visible thing in programming languages, and (2) there is only one per language.

I believe we should be able to modify, fork, or debug syntax the same way we do libraries. So what about a syntax meant to be read by computer instead of by humans?

# Factorial example, machine syntax
fac
-> int int
\
0 -> 1
n ->
*
n
- n 1

It could be displayed in human readable form by an IDE or converted back and forth by suitable preprocessors:

-- Factorial example, Haskell syntax
fac :: int -> int
fac 0 = 1
fac n = n * fac (n - 1)

// Factorial example, C syntax
int fac(int 0) { return 1; }
int fac(int n) { return n * fac(n - 1); }

No more quibbling over prefix vs infix, curly braces vs indentation, familiarity vs terseness… That would take a flame war away from language design and put it where it belongs: the IDE.
Yes, perhaps when all those devices exist you will be able to write an application that runs on all of them, specially if you write an application that works on the oldest version of the OS as right now new phones are being released with widely different versions of Android. If your application does not try to match the particular look of a phone as each company is customizing the OS in a different way.

Each one of the platforms you mention are tiny in the application workspace right now. Palm is just about going under, Android is widely heterogeneous in implementation by manufacturers. If you are writing a game,the interface bit might not get in your way as games generally do not match the OS anyway.

All of this describes a very fragmented market. Now I will call your attention to a situation when many companies had their own implementation of what many considered a more powerful OS and one company had a simpler to use OS with a much larger number of applications.

Hummm... that happened in the 90s with Unix and Windows.

Well, iPhone OS looks a lot better now than Windows did then.
Why consult?
As is said, he sounds like an a great guy. However we should not accept what he says just because of that. The fact is that his business model will lead to success and that is what should sell it to other CEOs.

His picture looks very similar to the core values in the Lincoln Electric approach. They have achieved profitable success for over 100 years. What more could you ask?
We have an update going in today that will fix a number of additional firewall cases, can you tell me a little about your network setup?
GMail hacked for real? Mini-epidemic going on.
The author makes a good point about dependency on another company. Having your side project or startup completely at the whim of another company is not a good business model.

Might be good for a quick dollar, but it's not sustainable.
I would worry far more about the editors that allow this behavior and the higher ups that gave the ok on publishing the guy's name.
Yes, if you look more depth in the PDF, Whole Foods is really killing it, especially when compared to competitors or even the S&P 500.
Thanks! The app has been a great help internally and we're hoping other people find good uses for it as well.
Intelligence is not normally distributed
I recognize that's the point the author made, I'm just not convinced of it. Show me the power through code. Right now it's just words.
I wish them every success. Our funding ecosystem here makes the US's look positively sane. (Japan is collectively sitting on trillions and there is no efficient way to get it to twenty- or thirty-somethings. This is particularly acute outside of Tokyo and, to a lesser extent, Osaka. I am struggling to recall any significant funding for the hundred firms at the technology incubator I used to work at which wasn't a grant, payment from a customer, or friends/family/founder resources.)
Differs from the normal startup stories you so often hear about - they don't have funding, they don't have much in the way of private cash, they're not ridiculously young, and it's taking them a while to get traction. They're basically going it totally alone on a wing and a prayer. Kudos to them.
I love how the article ends with ...

"Mr Mackey seems like a wise man and I look forward to meeting him one day. But I’m too price sensitive to shop at Whole Foods – I shop at Trader Joe’s, where cheap prices, great product, chill staff and convenient delivery make me a happy customer."

Good example of true capitalism and 'healthy' competition.
Don't forget:

* The passive voice is to be avoided.

* You want to not split your infinitives with a negative.

* In order to streamline your text, take out superfluous filler like "in order to".
No, not really. As I joined this community recently I submitted some articles that are not news related and which, as the welcome statement for the community says, stimulates deeper thinking about some issues.

The blog has had over 130 posts in the last two months, of which I've submitted 7.
How many page hits to pay for the lawyers to defend disclosure of trade secrets lawsuits? What about trafficking in stolen goods lawsuits?

They basically sold their soul for such little gain.
I really hope not: "The touch-screen is a fixed element of its design; for at least the next decade, you can expect the front of every new model to be dominated by a flat sheet of glass, the same as on every previous model."

I disagree. I can understand why it is easy to make that assertion, but there is no imagination in that statement nor due respect for progress and advancement in technology or industrial design.

For instance, as silly as this may seem right now, who is to say that for at least the next decade there will assuredly be a "front" on the device? Is it not possible
/likely that within a decade front/back won't matter just like how portrait/landscape/upside-down/right-side-up do not today on iPhone and iPad?

Just a thought...
I've had it break (without generating any warnings) some javascript just this morning using the simple mode (haven't had the time to sit down and look at exactly what was broken). So I would urge a great deal of caution in using it: test, test, test!
Oral History of Richard Greenblatt
Hello productivity
contents of /etc/hosts, ready to :w right after I submit this:

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
127.0.0.1 reddit.com
127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com
127.0.0.1 techmeme.com
127.0.0.1 www.techmeme.com
127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 www.slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 theregister.co.uk
127.0.0.1 www.theregister.co.uk
127.0.0.1 news.bbc.co.uk

of course, undoing it is trivial as well, but seeing 'unable to connect' will hopefully take me off auto-pilot and remind me there are better ways to spend my time. See you around YC
universal health care and education are public goods that generate more market wealth in higher productivity than they cost in taxes collected to pay for them

That's not clearly the case, at least for medicine: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/meds-to-cut.html
Over the past 30 years funding per student has declined

Source? According to this paper: "From 1970 to the present, state support for higher education has generally kept pace with both enrollment growth and inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index." http://www.sheeo.org/about/paulpres/Baruch%20College.pdf
Because It doesn't sound like they paid for the photographs, it sounds like they paid for iphone
I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds like they really didn't do anything wrong. Check out this write up which brings up a number of good points. http://www.edibleapple.com/gizmodo-paid-10000-for-lost-iphon...
Still waiting...
In all of Firefox, Chrome and IE.

Our firewall is an MS ISA server. There is websense in between. The browsers are configured with an automatic configuration script (a .pac file).
What Makes A Kick-Ass Tech Team?
When something is regulated by the government, the nature of that regulation is subject to being influenced by the regulated.

If the regulator itself had competition and participation in the regulatory scheme was voluntary, there would be real pressure to honestly regulate.

The government could, instead of regulating companies itself, manage a system of competing regulatory regimes and let people decide which one they trust.

There could be a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" for accounting competing with FASB, companies could pick one and then publish to investors which one they adhere to.

If investors find that they are consistently burned by companies governed by FASB, they would start to favor companies governed by the alternative.

There would be real pressure to perform honestly over the longterm that a monopoly is not subjected to.

In technology, we have all sorts of competing standards that live and die by how good the results are.

Competition is a good thing and we need more of it, especially in government.
I love meta humor...
It looks like they recommend the use of the permanent 301 redirection for a temporary redirection. This could be interpreted as a misuse, and search engines may not like it (like <meta> keywords).
2 and (especially) your version of 3 are incompatible. Something has to give way. Some of us don't want to give way on 2.
I have to disagree with this conflation of laws and morals. Journalists certainly break laws; and this may have happened in this case; but I don't see how that makes them immoral. For example, the theft and sale to a newspaper of UK MPs expenses details was illegal but not widely considered immoral.

I'd like to quote from [1] before continuing:

"Last year, an employee at Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that is one of Apple's biggest suppliers, committed suicide after being accused of stealing a prototype for the iPhone.

Sun Danyong, 25, was a university graduate working in the logistics department when the prototype went missing. An investigation revealed that the factory's security staff had beaten him, and he subsequently jumped to his death from the 12th floor of his apartment building."

If you want to talk about the legality and morality of Apple trying its damnedest to keep trade secrets, then what is your opinion of Apple using a supplier which beats an employee suspected of theft/loss and pushes him to suicide?

Because, (morally speaking) that is far more reprehensible than a journalist getting a scoop by acquiring a trade secret through theft.

As to the way Gizmodo treated Gary, well, it sucks that he lost it but that's life, Apple should accept that in-field testing will lead to some losses. Gizmodo couldn't have hidden his identity since presumably only one iPhone 4G has been lost.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7330986/Apple-ad...
This is doubly ironic with Apple's hipster, Manhattan-liberal gestalt...
How Steve Jobs Got Sick, Got Better, And Decided To Save Some Lives
Yeah, my wife and I write together.
A very nice backgrounder on the Redbeacon team that won TechCrunch50 this past year.

Most impressive item for me (besides the talent, prudence, discipline, and perseverance of the founding team, which is evident): having the willpower to defer VC funding until they can do it on terms that are reasonable for the founders (a lot of startups use this strategy now but to be able to do it after drawing interest from 19 VC firms in the wake of the TC50 win is commendable). Also, their realizing that getting premature VC funding can actually mess up a company by skewing its goals toward premature expansion.

These guys have a business model that will live or die by whether it can scale well, and that challenge still lies before them. But what they have done so far is really the perfect picture of a highly disciplined lean startup that is done right.

I must say, I am growing weary of the "fail" theme. It is just not in the spirit of an entrepreneur to be focused on failure and I wish those who write about them would stop beating this theme to death. Founders have better things to focus on, as do those reading about their ventures.
These danger signs are like code smells, but for literature!

I will use these tips to improve my comments.
I love whole foods and respect John Mackey tremendously... Some people day that Mackey is not really a capitalist or that he's an apologist because he advocates values other than the profit motive.

I think that Mackey's approach is most accurately termed entertainment capitalism. We pay extra for the story behind the purchase, and that story adds value to the purchase. We identify with the story and feel better about ourselves after the purchase.

It doesn't matter what the story is... but it's every bit as capitalistic to sell a story + a good/service ... Apple does it, Harley Davidson does it, etc. However most people only buy a new laptop or phone or motorcycle once every few years. Mackey has successfully applied this business model to something people buy one or more times every single week.

If I am willing to pay $7 to go to the movies to be entertained for 2 hours, why wouldn't I be willing to pay $30 extra for groceries to be entertained all week long?
Interesting write up on the pros and cons of developing for a platform like Facebook.

Is there any information on how much money Facebook apps usually make? What are the earnings like on free apps that don’t charge subscriptions?
Legendary rapper Guru has died after a battle with cancer
Essay writing services on your desk
As providers of a premium writing service, we have always been aware of the importance of good essay writing skills. A child who is in primary school would probably have the same kind fear of writing,