skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One interesting phenomenon is when big players "panic" and try and shift their entire companies instead of feeling out the market for the best path forward. The AOL/Time Warner debacle was a great example.
In some sense I think he might have a point.

I think the iPhone is a lot like the Wii console. Touch screens on phones are somewhat like WiiMotes, it's a novel approach but I do think it's questionable whether touch screen technology has staying power.

One of the biggest signs it is a fad is the inability of competitors to gain significant traction with similar devices. "WiiMote" like accessories for other game consoles has largely fallen flat, and likewise there hasn't been a significant touch screen competitor to iPhone.

Whether you agree or not, just looking at the market trends I don't think having a touch screen or not is going to be a key differentiator in the next big smart phone.
FreeBSD built with clang now selfhosting - testers wanted
Apropos of your comment (and possibly the source): http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/01/the-real-difference-betwee...
> you (with a "mom" nick) used "men" to restrict

man is a historically recognised contraction of human. I think your analysing it too deeply ;) (I also doubt you will find many people here who abide by the idea of political correctness)

(and your comparison doesn't work too well; is Europe on a par with the East in terms of obesity problems? If not then the original statement is, surely, correct).
I'm currently tracking a news story on a different matter. I just use google alerts, it's much better imo.
haxe, targeting Flash; yeah I'm serious, haha!
Apple wants the conversation to be about Steve Jobs and not their shitty products. It's working.
My takeaway?

Using Xcode and Objective-C are not surefire ways to build decent iPhone apps, and using "meta-platforms" and other languages are not surefire ways to build crappy, non-Apple-like iPhone apps. Are they indicators about how much passion someone has for the iPhone platform and building quality iPhone user experiences? In my experience the answer is yes.

I think we've already demonstrated here that this is patently false. There's plenty of "shit" in the App store that's written in Objective-C, C and C++. What Jobs should have done then was not ban apps by language, but ban "shitty" apps.

The rational for this move is well understood, it's a strategic business decision designed to force developers from writing cross platform apps. Like it or not, the Android store is growing in size. But it lacks quality apps, if a developer can write for both stores at basically no additional cost, then they can offer apps on the Android as well. Eventually, if enough developers do that, it'll be a real competitor to the iPhone. Jobs simply wants to prevent that.
The extra click is so that you can add a description of the changes, but if you want to resist even that level of organization you could script it down to one click as well. Your system just gives you a big dumb useless tarball. For the exact same effort, you can view changes to past revisions, revert any single file to a previous version, see exactly what you changed and when. Why you wouldn't want that power for the same effort, I don't know.

> This attitude is unproductive, as I witness from other programmers' experience:

You said your are a solo developer so you're telling me if you had the power to branch and merge you wouldn't be able to control yourself? You'd just branch and branch and never merge and make a mess of the whole thing? Even though you could do that right now just using the file system?

The whole point of tracking your changes in version control is to prevent the very thing that you describe. I simply wouldn't be able to function without that ability. Our stable production version is live and we have big changes in development (over 5 months now). Without version control the bugs fixed in production would likely never make it into the new version.
http://www.buynlarge.com/disclaimer/disclaimer.html

(For those that can't work out, Buy N Large is the corporation from WALL-E... this is a parody done by pixar)
A friend of mine has a theory that the rise of depression over the past 20 years has a lot to do with the low-fat diet kick the country has been on, even though low-fat diets have never been proven to prevent obesity or to reduce it. Since our brains are mostly made of fat, maybe low-fat diets aren't the best ideas? I personally eat less fat than most people I know, yet I'm still fat.
I strained my back a couple of years ago, causing a cascading pain reaction that locked up all the muscles in my back and resulted in a trip to the ER, pumping me full of muscle relaxants.

The simple, best and most effective treatment has been ab crunches and back extensions, a couple of times a week at the gym. As long as I do them, I'm perfect. If I skip them off for even a few weeks, I get the warning twinges of another cascade.

You don't have to be a crazy gym person, kids: just do something, anything, physical with your body on a regular basis, and it will repay you many times over.
Steve Jobs arguably has reason to be arrogant, and yet he manages to be less of a prick about it than this guy, whoever he is.
It's not a trade-off of power or flexibility as much as it is a difference in priorities. Git puts all of the powerful -- and potentially dangerous -- tools front and center (history editing, to name a big one), whereas Mercurial supports all of the same functionality, but hides away some of the more dangerous tools until you're ready to enable them.
RIM is rapidly finding it's way into obsolescence. It's still the most "popular" smart phone. But the devices stink by today's standards, and their attempts at an App store and a touch screen have been bombs. Their devices are simply not capable of keeping up with what people want to do on their phones.

I'd wager that they'll come out with an Android device in a year or two before slowly fading into Palm like obscurity.
Right, cuz that's what we're about here at HN, just expressing opinions. We don't care about which opinions are right or wrong, we just want people to be able to express themselves and have a positive self image.
Not my submission, but I would assume because:

1) It's in the original.

2) While not in Hacker News style, the caps really do belong in this headline because if the analysis is correct it is a very weak case and that's pretty significant.

E.g. WRT the financial industry regulation bill that's being worked on, the one that zaps angel investing among many other things. It would be a shame if an abusive prosecution helped push that over the top.
It depends on where you are. I spent 6 months in Jakarta, and due to cultural arbitrage, was able to date incredibly attractive women there because I was pale and fat, and I tend to go for women with darker complexions, who are considered ugly due to the same "working outside" cultural bias.
You know that RIM is desperately trying to come out with their own touch screen smart phones. But their previous attempts have been disasters.

Looking at the recent Blackberry OS's, it's clear that they aren't putting very significant engineering resources to improving the user experience. It's really too late IMHO unless they have some uber-project on the back burner a la Palm's Web OS.
"The government bailed out Detroit, why's this any different?"

Here are some differences:
- The bank bailouts are turning out to be at least a 100 times as expensive as the Detroit bailout. Detroit is not even worth mentioning in the same breadth as the banks.

- In the detroit bailout, most people that were responsible for the failure did not benefit. CEOs were sacked, all equity holders lost their money, debt holders lost most of their money too. In the bank case most people responsible kept their jobs and many of them are now back to getting multi million dollar bonuses (supported by government loans). Some banks wiped out their equity holders, some banks had only temporary drops in stock price. But pretty much all of the bank debt was guaranteed by the government.
Explaining JavaScript scope and closures (2008)
Through its unique patent-pending method of anonymously detecting copy and paste behavior on any website

Really?
Facebook claims that increased use leads to happiness
He is me. I'm on Reddit and HN all day long reading very passionate articles and comments saying how much Apple now sucks and Jobs is a maniac. I happen to be just as passionate for the opposite point of view and wanted to get my thoughts down and get some more discussion started.
K-Sketch: The Kinetic Sketch Pad
git is the first revision control system I've used where "revert" actually does what I "intuitively" expect it to: begin a new commit that reverts a commit in the history.

The rest of the clown-car VCSes use "revert" to go back in time to that commit in the history.
hg branch new-feature

If you want it to branch from a different changeset than the one you're on, then:

hg update deadbeef
hg branch new-feature

No flags, no orgin/newfeature (what does that even mean?), just the commands describing exactly what you're doing.
To be pedantic, "Objective-C 2.0" features are things the iPhone always had, like properties and fast enumeration, and/or had first, like the modern runtime (which solves the fragile base class problem, and which Mac apps still only get if they're 64-bit).

Blocks were a Snow Leopard feature, implemented as a C extension, and sprinkled throughout Apple's APIs; no direct relationship to Obj-C.
Does anybody but the "waggle sucks" crowd really think Wii-style motion control doesn't have staying power?

I would be surprised if video gaming goes back to being as much of a "niche" thing as it used to be, and shocked if non-motion control gaming became preferred by the mainstream.

Besides, competitors don't have seriously competitive "waggle" devices out yet to compare market success against, and, what's coming doesn't seem to be substantially better than Wii on a level that most people are going to care about.
Erm... if the problem is that stdout may be fully buffered, just set it to line buffered explicitly? (See setbuf(3) and friends.)

(Note that only stdout is the issue, see ready's comment.)
That's a fantastic resource! I've been fascinated with continuations recently because of just what you cover: they are an tool that can be used to implement many higher-level tools, like exceptions, generators, and cooperative threads. Things like this get much more clear when you see how closely they are related.

I am curious about your assertion that "with macros, it is not difficult to simulate preemptive multithreading". How would one go about doing this safely?

(The font changes partway through, btw. Maybe you forgot to close a tag?)
Because those apps are running on the iPad unmodified. Nothing at all to do with IB.
boo, that's disappointing.
Why start a new database company in 2010?
Their hardware is decent (not excellent, but decent) on the quality factor

Who builds better quality hardware than Apple?
Clearly, you don't know your clown-cars.

Mercurial uses hg backout to start a new commit that backs out a previous commit, hg rollback to undo the previous transaction (without a separate commit), and hg revert does undoes the uncommitted changes in your working directory, very similar to MS Word's (now defunct) and Photoshop's (still active) File > Revert command.

To me, revert means "revert all my changes to the last saved version", which is exactly what Hg does.
There's another factor: rules seem to apply non-uniformly. This is most pronounced when an app by an small-time developer is rejected, but a very similar app from a major publisher (EA, Playboy, etc.) is accepted. If this is what Apple wants (for whatever reason), then secrecy is the only way to do it while maintaining a semblance of fairness.
Health insurers make big bucks from Big Macs
What if I want to use another language precisely because I'm passionate about programming and therefore have strong opinions about which languages and tools are best?

For example, there's a long thread at Lambda the Ultimate ( http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3905 ) mostly lamenting this development. This is a site filled with Ph.D programming language researchers. Do you think they are upset because they are too lazy to learn a new language?
> For the exact same effort, you can view changes to past revisions, revert any single file to a previous version, see exactly what you changed and when.

Tarballs let you do that as well.

> You said your are a solo developer

Right. Those people are working on their own code base (total disaster, much of it due to branching and following the VCS "methodology". I feel like slapping their lead whenever he mentions tagging or branching. That stuff ain't free! You only have one brain! /rant)
Sorry, haven't approved any yet as I'm in an airport without wifi. I'd never not publish a comment just because someone puts me in my place :)
This is the only news article/commentary on this that I've seen so far that mentions what I suspect. The current charges are civil. I suspect it may well stay that way; civil charges do not threaten GS' ability to do business with the federal government (and some state governments, I would suspect).

Further, it appears that they have picked out a vice president to serve as figurehead and scapegoat, taking the fall while the real/rest of senior management uses him as a a convenient shield/raincoat.

I may be wrong, but so far, I'm not terribly impressed.
Apple sets its sights on event ticketing, patents reveal “Concert Ticket +”
# this creates the branch and switches to it (i.e. does a checkout)

git checkout -b new-feature

The only diff is -b, which is fine to me because it makes it clear that you are doing two things. You don't need the origin/newfeature stuff for the common case. I'm assuming this is what 'hg branch new-feature' is doing. How do you create a branch and not switch to it?
You're comparing Android sales to iPhone sales in the iPhone's worst buying season, though. Expect the iPhone numbers to blow up when it's been one month instead of ten since the last hardware refresh.
3) You have a small patch and want to update it to the HEAD version before submitting. You worked with the source you obtained in some other way (from a source package for example). Now you have to wait 10+ minutes on a large project, downloading all the changes since 1970, just to change the newest version of a single file.

4) The project has grown into several sub-projects - but you don't control that repository.
> If you're say, changing an API,

You obviously take the snapshot before. No different from the more over-engineered approaches.

>> How does "bisect" know where the boundaries are?

> Clever algorithms.

Really?! You change two methods in a class, and "bisect" knows how to undo only one? No, you have to spoon-feed it, "staging" your changes (I did use GitX for a day). So it's not as simple as taking snapshots after all, is it?

Edit: typo, formatting
Actually, the worst problem with submodules in modern DVCSs is handling dependencies. If project A depends on project B and project B and the API exposed by project B varies over time it is pretty easy to keep both in sync and working. Except, when someone needs to check out an older version of A they need to figure out which version of B to check out (and it might not be as easy as checking out the latest B in the date that that version of A was committed). Git allows you to mark a specific revision of a submodule, but then updating the whole project is no longer a single command, and there are some problems with not pushing everything at the same time.
I've always liked Neal Stephenson's take, from "The Diamond Age": http://steveedney.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/hypocrisy-relativ...

(Note: that was just the first link I found, I'm not trying to start a debate about the rest of the blog post)
Have you ever owned an IBM Thinkpad?
> if a developer can write for both stores at basically no additional cost, then they can offer apps on the Android as well

The simple, obvious, solution is to build an iPhone to Android translation layer. Replicate the APIs that exist on the Apple side and/or compile Obj-C to Java or Java bytecode flagging whatever does not exist on either side, making it easy to write code that is compatible with both platforms while maximizing shared code between both implementations.
If you look at the source code for Sizzle, and know something about compilers and virtual machines, you'll see that the Expr object is modeled as as set of VM instructions. chunker is a regular expression that "tokenizes" the selector into sets of instructions. The appropriate VM instruction is then run for each chunk inside a loop in the Sizzle function.

That's my explanation for how these selectors are, in fact, a language that is compiled and executed.
Few significant achievements come without putting yourself through a lot of bullshit. The closed model is really only valuable for a toy. A real tool has to be a little dangerous to be properly useful.
It's not remotely the same. All iPhones made to date run the current OS, and are prompted to upgrade to it when users activate their phones or sync their music libraries or back up. Android's OS is upgraded by the carrier; most carriers aren't even a little bit interested in doing it; the few that are interested spend more time dithering than Google spends cooking up each new release.

Meanwhile, iPhone OS 4 will support all phones except the first generation (even if the second-gen phones won't support multitasking, they'll still run the third-party apps). No comparable statement can be made about any Android OS release, referring to handsets of any age, from any vendor.
He did. He used them.
What if I just want to use languages and environments I'm familiar with instead of learning some niche language that is of absolutely no other value to me?

This is my latest piece of Flash. It's unfortunate it's "too shit" for Apple, but the 1/2 a million people who've played it in the last 4 days seem to generally like it so I don't feel too bad about not just making a site-specific RSS reader like I should have to meet yours and Apple's high quality standards.

http://www.gamesgames.com/game/Trickochet.html

It's not coming soon to an app store near you because I've got better things to do than re-make my games so I can spend a day somewhere in the new section before the constant flood of crap pushes it into irrelevance.
That and Perforce is a commercial company that provides support with their product. By default perforce doesn't lock, but it knows when a user has a file checked out for "edit".

By default all files are set read only. This was a big downside when you had no internet connection.
I'll hazard a guess (and it is no more than that - IANAL), based on the complaint and the cited statute:

- about $2 million in direct fines

- return of the $15-20 million GS made in brokerage fees

- return of any bonuses made by 'Fab' Tourre

- 'equitable relief...appropriate or necessary for the benefit of investors'

This last is extremely open-ended and the nature of such relief is up to the court. It can take many possible forms and I have no idea what the norm is in such cases, only that it is technically complex.

It does strike me, however, that the complaint specifically mentions two investors; IKB, a german bank, lost $150m; and ACA (who may or may not be considered 'investors' in this context) fell into the arms of Royal Bank of Scotland, who ended up paying ~$860 million to GS, most of which went to Paulson & co. This figure is mentioned explicitly in the complaint.

Now, RBS got into trouble themselves (partly as a result of this), and at this point are ~80% owned by the British government. Fabrice Tourre, the Goldman VP at the center of the complaint, currently an executive director of Goldman Sachs International, based in London.

This coincidence might or might not have a bearing on the outcome. Knowing the British tabloid press, I'm willing to bet that at least one of tomorrow's front pages will feature a picture of Mr Tourre with a caption along the lines of 'have you seen this man?'
I do this all the time with git. I create a branch, do all my incremental commits, get it all working. Then I merge it into the mainline as one squashed commit. There a few guides on how to do it with the command line but I'll admit I've gotten lazy and now just use smartgit which lets me do it easily without having to remember the commands.
Personal Use: Tweetie desktop and iPhone.
Business Use: Tweetdeck.

From time to time I use Seesmic web.
Yes, and it didn’t pass the creak test.
It is absolutely possible to do this in git. It helps if you forget about "files" as something to "move".

I did it in the project I'm working on now! It originally had one main repository, and another for an extension that was used as a git submodule in the main one. Active development proceeded in both, with shitloads of commits in the main one just to update the reference to the submodule.

I decided this was retarded, so I took a clone of the extension repository, used filter-branch to rewrite it's entire history so that all the paths were always prefixed with "vendor/extensions/project_name/", and pushed it as an unrelated branch into the main repository.

Then in the main repository I made a new branch, removed the old submodule junk there, did a nice clean merge that melded all the commits from the extension branch going back in time, and made that the new master branch.
Perhaps the same way that Blockbuster CEO, Jim Keyes, was baffled by the success of Netflix, by drinking his own bathwater (hubris and willful blindness to alternative ideas).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280425
This would be a cool iPad app.
(Obligatory nerdy nitpicking) Of course, Android doesn't execute Java bytecode. It runs Dalvik bytecode.
Related previous discussion:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235153
Google wants to clean up printer drivers, offers unified cloud-based printing
For the record, I agree with you on Git (on Windows at least). It's improved at a rapid pace but it's still a bit awkward.

However, that's no reason to dismiss all version control.
Is that from a movie? Because if not , you really need to start being a screenwriter!
Yet in the past year they've purchased two "fabless" processor designers. Now it's time to buy the fab.
I agree this is a definite weakness compared to svn, but the problem is that svn gains this facility by having no concept of a project. Let me repeat that: in svn it is technically impossible to identify the project tree.

The problem with that, of course, is that merging only makes sense if you are merging branches that occur at the same tree-level in a project. This is why subversion merge tracking is so buggy and half-baked... because any given directory could be a project tree, a subtree, a branch, or a tag, and you could merge any of them. Sure if stick to certain conventions it works pretty well, but technically the whole implementation is a minefield, which is why svn will never be as robust as other systems that don't make this mistake.

Even though git's submodules and subtrees leave a lot to be desired, and have significant room for improvement, they will never be as convenient for partial checkouts, because the requirements for svn-style partial checkouts require crippling the entire system.
I was thinking more along the lines of the garbage collector. That's sort of the "tent pole" feature of the last cycle of objc revisions.
Today I am spending time on the semantics of exception handling in Orc.

http://orc.csres.utexas.edu/