skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple absolutely does anything they can to avoid their platform being beholden to another vendor's technologies. Their execs have spoken on this several times; it's a key part of their strategy. They have a strong confidence that the results will be better if they take pervasive responsibility for their customers' experience. We'll see. Everything's a tradeoff.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me for developers to be wary or even turned off by Apple's tactics. But just as people complain about Apple hindering innovation with these moves, I think there's something to be said for somebody getting out there and trying out a different model [can "open systems" as a model be a monoculture?] than just putting out a platform and then disclaiming responsibility for how it's used. Not saying the results will necessarily be better, but for somebody to try a different model doesn't seem outrageous in a world where there are many intensely competing platforms. If Apple dominated mobile devices, it'd be much easier for me to see these moves as outrageous. As is, they're one option among many and as a result of their policies their platform has both unique benefits and drawbacks.
I know more than a few med students who take Provigil to help them study.
Moved to ubuntu as my main workstation since past 6 months. No problems as yet. And its fun to tinker around the system. Finally librated !
I never commented a lot but still ran into trouble - with my voting. I was silently banned from voting and I have no idea when. Now I just read - very liberating! So, thanks HN and go to hell.
Adobe used to be behind SVG a lot before the acquisition of (referred to as the merger with) Macromedia.
I wonder what the hardware testing lab at Microsoft looks like? It seems like Ubuntu really needs to beef their testing up. In reality Ubuntu and MS have the same problem, an infinite number of possible system configurations to release against.
What is your point? Based on your straight 0 ratings in this thread, hating on Rails is also a niche. So what?
I would think this is not hacker news.
Mr. Surkov says the new city will isolate new businesses
from the bureaucracy that handcuffs the Russian economy today.

Why not fix that bureaucracy instead, and let all businesses around Russia experience that freedom?
If you consider the output "object code" there would be no need to edit, let alone roundtrip. You don't edit the object-code or byte-code from your compiler either.
Thank goodness I have more than one computer so I can report bugs on my working one while trying to keep the Linux box running.
But you could argue that society (the "employer" here) will benefit a lot from having smart, well-trained workers who keep high-paying jobs in America and such. It also might allow them to roll back some of the budget increases that were meant to increase performance but failed.

So though they're not generating the revenue now, they might save some money now by being able to succeed in a cheaper-to-run school, and they'll generate lots of tax revenue later if America stays the economic powerhouse that it is instead of having a lot of those jobs move to Europe and China and India.
The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook
There's also a gui OS X tool that does the same thing.

http://derailer.org/paparazzi/
"Should adults be bribed to do well at work? Of course!"

So what is it you know that disproves the mainstream OB research?
The thing is, schools already use a reward system. What do you think a grade is? An A is like a gold star.

Moreover, those rewards mostly go to kids from the richest families at present, without genuine regard for "work ethic" or "performance" or whatever else grades are said to reward.

http://www.amazon.com/Wad-Ja-Get-Grading-Game-American-Educa...
A device can simply create entertainment.
No, a device shows entertainment. And people consume it. Creation means that the end user has something new when they're done. Not that they've just passed the time.

And you're ad hominem attack on being saturated in your community was most likely a projection, buddy.
My guess is that the bias is caused by the black shapes. You can see that each black shape is closer to its bigger "parent" on the left on the next row out than it is to its bigger parent on its right. Also the connection to the parent on the left is through dark blue, and the connection to the parent on the right is through light blue. That's enough to give a bias.
>most of us are perfectly capable of getting into nasty arguments on the internet. Perhaps more so than average people

I agree, and I think that's what TheAmazingIdiot means by outliers. The intelligent thinkers that frequent HN have such a command and understanding of some topics that they would feel compelled to provide, er, 'helpful input', but not when the consequences of doing so might be more destructive than constructive. I may be wrong, but I think such people are outliers.
Have a look at your average comment score: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=new_account

It needs to be at least 2 for your votes to count (unless it's now changed). The calculation is something like: over your n most recent comments (for some n), and the top score is discarded.
Why would you post this here? If you selected a random article from the Telegraph front page, you could hardly have chosen a worse one.
I don't think that's why robak was banned. My theory is that the ban kicks in after the offending comment. This would explain the cases where it seems like someone was banned for an innocuous comment, but was actually banned for the comment before that.

In robak's case, the ban came after a silly ramble about the economy. Presumably a moderator looked at his post history and saw it was only one of a string of silly rambles, and decided to ban.
By definition, 'what you wish the iPad to have that it does not have' equals 'what the iPad is missing'.

If I expected it to operate as a razor and it could not while other similar devices did have that feature, then yes, I would say shaving capability was missing. That doesn't mean every irrelevant concept I can come up with would be called missing, though. 'Missing' is based on what one would expect, desire and can get elsewhere.
Well, you're on the best way of becoming a "free software zealot". See, free software zealots by and large are what they are because they invested a ton of time and effort in some platform only to have that destroyed by a stupid or greedy management decision.
I've noticed this quite a lot for reasonable commenters lately; i.e. people that aren't spammers.

fatdog789 was one that I'd noticed that while abrasive, usually had insightful things to say when legal topics came up.
Except this wasn't possible until very recently?
Now this is exciting. We've been pining away for a while that there are no good authoring tools for canvas as good as the flash tools. Hopefully this just makes that problem disappear.
Seems kinda silly that you're referring to Scheme as a "modern programming language" and then excluding C/C++/Objective-C. Scheme dates back to 1975, while Objective-C is only from 1986. So by your standards, Scheme would be considered less modern than Objective-C.
/circlejerk (it begins....)
It's not just that applications will be better today if they're written in Cocoa Touch.

It's that Apple is moving the platform forward using Cocoa Touch. For instance, look at how they built multitasking: as a series of Cocoa Touch APIs.

The issue for them is that applications will be better tomorrow because of Cocoa Touch.

If 1,000 new applications are written using Flash, and some small subet of them become popular, Apple will have problems building new features directly in Cocoa Touch. Those 1,000 applications might not have access to the new APIs until Adobe supports them. That's an unacceptable scenario for Apple.
I hate to say it, but that actually sounds like another excellent reason to keep that developer out of the market.

Remember that the App Store is a business and a marketplace, where products are being sold to real consumers who want their phone--and everything that runs on it--to be reliable. IE: this is a professional realm.

Professional programmers don't have a problem with learning a new language, if that's what's required to target a new platform. If someone "has trouble writing in ObjC", then they really need to work on their skills. This person sounds like a hobbyist who probably shouldn't be selling his wares to run on consumer electronics devices with limited RAM and battery life.
just a quick bug to point out, the code under "Start a shell with GProc" isnt html escaped, so we see the html entities for >
This doesn't happen as often as it used to. So good to see it now and again :-)
it would have been possible 10 years ago if swf was an open format and not a closed plugin.
You'd make a stronger counter argument if you provided evidence of your claim ("the less preservatives the food is stuffed with, the better it is for the consumer") rather than just saying people should trust you because you studied diets for 2 years.

Vitamin C is a preservative, are you arguing that it's bad for you ?

Or are you saying some specific subset of preservatives can be bad for you ? - in which case you should be specific about which preservatives you're talking about rather than talking about them in a generic way.
You know the best part? The best part is that when some company retools itself to use one of the anointed languages, at some considerable delays, expense and likely with quite a bit of employee turnover -- and just for argument's sake let's say they pick C++ -- Apple may decide they actually don't like C++ in six-months and ban that as well.

Or even better, they may release some new "mobile optimized" programming language and tool-chain that's completely different than anything anybody is using, and force the entire development community to move to that in a year.

No matter how good the business reasons for it were, or how the decision made strategic sense, it puts development shops on sand during an earthquake instead of on mountains of their own devising.
We're the outliers and exemplars of thought

George Clooney, are you posting to HN again?
How is that though? If you were betting on Java for iPhone apps, you're just as screwed here too.
Nice rule. It's not in the FAQ though. The rule is secret and the enforcement is secret too. That's my problem. BTW I meant my old account.
I was ghosted for making a somewhat aggressive post about H264 once. It was a moderator's mistake and super hard to get someone to talk to...
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Why is this on hacker news? Not interested
Hacker News "works" because it's all a big job interview. The job in question is being someone PG thinks is cool. That's the glue that holds this community together and keeps people in line.
You need a underlying accelerated 2D operations in both cases, like an implementation based on OpenVG.

It's just that <canvas> has a shitload more momentum than SVG ever had.
This is a Fraser spiral - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_spiral_illusion

Here's another great spiral-based visual system hack - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JVJsPpg1-8
Sure - it was awhile back and water under the bridge by now, but the original ticket was here: https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/2628-r...

The bug was a Ruby 1.9-specific issue that another user had stumbled on which I hit as well. Unicode support in the 1.9x series is great, but brought some trouble along with it.

The problem in this case was that ETag generation in ActionController tested the response data using a method that threw an exception if it hit a string with an encoding issue. As such, the request would die after being processed, but before being returned to the user. Because it occurs after calling render in ActionController::Response, the exception was unrescuable. (Ed: No 500 error page, no rescue_action_in_public, or any indication of an exception - just an HTTP response with an empty body). It was a sticky situation. Read my longer comment if you're interested in a full explanation.

Anyway, I don't mean to re-open the discussion now. I eventually resolved the issue by applying this patch locally, then moving to a new encoding-aware MySQL adapter. Life's good.
How Incompetence Stimulates the Information Technology Economy
Well, in this analogy, you sit back and let the cashier do it all. All of you in the queue do. Nobody helps the poor cashier.

Nobody helps the cashier because you would be accused of trying to steal their money if you began grabbing money up off the floor.

FWIW: I did volunteer work for years and years. At some point, I concluded I would rather get paid for what I do. I am still trying to work out how to give away stuff I think 'should' be free but also get paid for my time and effort. It isn't easy to resolve questions like that -- at least it isn't for me and, from looking around me, it seems it isn't for most folks. At some point, I decided that if it made me bitter and angry to give my time and energy to something, then I was somehow doing it wrong.

At the risk of going down in flames horribly, my observation has been that a lot of hackers have, shall we say, limited social skills and this fact leads them to be enormously frustrated with things like this -- ie they often just don't know how to get people to do what they want them to do. Rather than go to someone who has actual social skills/management skills/whatever is needed, they then rail about the problem, usually in a way that alienates the very people they want to win over. My experience so far has been that most such individuals are not interested in constructive feedback on how they could more effectively manage that end of things. They feel "wronged" (or whatever) and telling them that what they are doing is counterproductive just seems to make them defensive. (Well, it seems to make most people defensive, regardless of their backgrounds.) But the reality is that if there is something you could do differently that would be more effective, learning about that is very empowering. About 99.99% of the time, you have no control over what other people do but you can exercise some control over your own behavior. So regardless of how badly I feel someone else has wronged me, I typically turn my attention to "what could I do differently?" and "who might help me learn to do something different and actually be effective?"

Good luck with this.
Discovery that quasars don’t show time dilation mystifies astronomers
Fighting Allergies by Mimicking Parasitic Worms
The worst is when corporate decides in advance that a certain distribution of rankings needs to be done, so managers need to give average and poor ratings to some of the team regardless of if the employees really deserve it.

By having a fixed distribution isn't management pre determining that a certain percentage of the employees are sub par performers? If they believe that's the case shouldn't they be actively trying to solve that problem? Shouldn't they expect everyone to be giving outstanding performance?
Anybody know if this rule change is retroactive? Will Apple now go through the App Store and cleave out all the apps that don't fit this requirement? I'm betting there are a fairly large number of popular and high quality apps that don't fit into this prescribed tool-chain.
with flash being able to export to iphone apps and now canvas, I am guessing they have done more of the work necessary to uncouple the ide format from the swf format and that exporting to svg shouldnt be too hard either.

webgl could be another candidate.
> just go ahead and go to walmart for an hour to see what the average person is.

I spent five years working in various discount supermarkets as a cashier. The average person there is struggling with challenges that make typical hacker problems look trivial.

- They either have very unfulfilling jobs, or none at all

- Many people they meet pre-judge them as weak or stupid because they're poor

- The community that does support them also holds them back, by criticizing attempts to get ahead and condoning self-destructive behavior

- They have no safety net for when they screw up. Failures like a marriage breakup or losing a job have massive and immediate impacts on their lives

- On top of all this, they're often raising kids in the same environment, desperately hoping they can escape

Don't take too much comfort that we're 'outliers and exemplars of thought', actions and attitudes that we regard as obviously stupid have a strong internal logic in their world. Religious fundamentalism is a joke? I agree, but for a woman who's had a family devastated by marriage breakups and substance abuse, its tenets are pretty damn attractive. Smoking or overeating? If the rest of your life is unfulfilling, at least you can be guaranteed a little pleasure in your day.
The perfect iPad stand - you probably have one...
I'm not sure Entrepreneurship fits his model. I suppose it could but I don't think it has to.
It can't be much worse than the bug-ridden Flash runtime which is horribly slow and has generations and generations of compatibility hacks trying to provide, except the 2D vector graphics, pretty much the same functionality as browsers and JavaScript do.

This is a good thing: Adobe/Macromedia's expertise on the authoring tools combined with a good open platform instead of their proprietary backend. I have no complaints against the former, and if the latter will work out it's just a plain good move.
Ask HN: A simple wiki which supports Markdown syntax?
I'm looking for a wiki which has the following features

* supports markdown syntax
* Written in PHP/Python/Ruby/Java
* Allows only authenticated and approved users to make edits (approved = all users have to approved by an admin)
* Free

Mediawiki does support all the above with extensions but it is a beast :)

Even if a wiki doesn't support markdown, please do comment. I would like to know of all the alternatives. Any experiences with Docuwiki/TikiWiki/MoinMoin?
> I hate to say it, but that actually sounds like another excellent reason to keep that developer out of the market.
Remember that the App Store is a business and a marketplace, where products are being sold to real consumers who want their phone--and everything that runs on it--to be reliable. IE: this is a professional realm.

By that argument, we should keep anyone that isn't professionally certified out of every activity where people are also professionals. Want to create a start-up? Sorry, you're not professional enough to create a start-up, so you're legally banned from doing so.

> where products are being sold to real consumers who want their phone--and everything that runs on it--to be reliable

How can you hope to speak for all iPhone users? Do you really think that the interests and goals of every single iPhone user align perfectly with no conflicts?

> Professional programmers don't have a problem with learning a new language, if that's what's required to target a new platform. If someone "has trouble writing in ObjC", then they really need to work on their skills. This person sounds like a hobbyist who probably shouldn't be selling his wares to run on consumer electronics devices with limited RAM and battery life.

We should also make it easier to identify 'professional' programmers from the lowly hobbyists by creating a 'professional programmer' certification program. Sort of like a bar-exam for programmers. Then we would know that no professional programmer was lacking in any respect. All code produced would be perfect and of the highest quality. I mean, it works for lawyers. No incompetent lawyer has ever passed the bar-exam, and no medical professional that was incompetent has ever received a license practice medicine.
>>I'm not terribly interested in judging this as "right" or "wrong" for this forum, much less in some absolute sense. <shrug>

Until it happens to you.
Be careful with the type of app you want to make. For example, we're trying to port our iPhone dual-thumb shooter and we've run into touch-recognition problems on the Nexus One and Droid.

Nexus One doesn't handle multitouch correctly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsSUqkh8pcI

Droid doesn't register a tap if one finger is already touching.
I wouldn't describe the flash IDE as fantastic. The only reason it's passable is because it's really the only game in town. It's slow, its UI could use a lot of cleanup, and its code editor is particularly slow and lacking features (as compared to XCode or Visual Studio).

I think people use Flash because it's the best (major) browser-targeted tool that handles animation design decently.
Notice there are only three requirements, none of them language-specific. Even these can be thought of as only two different demands, since learning languages quickly and being a really smart engineer are nearly the same thing. This means that, probabilistically, there's a reasonable chance they'll get a lot of applicants that actually meet all the requirements and from there they can hire someone they like based on the bonus points section, people skills, etc.

In contrast, the average job listing makes it very unlikely that anybody can comply with all the requirements, so the hiring manager ends up hiring someone who does not meet requirements. This is the honest approach to the problem of hiring good hackers.
I never got excited by the iPhone OS, then I was a bit unsure for a while, but now I know again why I wanted to miss that boat.

Well, more land for Android.
Who cares about banning. I applaud all banning. I think everyone including myself should be banned. Banning makes this a better place. You can't disagree if we can't hear you.
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No, just Lance Armstrong. (Many allegations have followed him.) To be fair, he's accused of blood doping, not steroids.

Cycling seems to be governed by the phrase, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."
The difference is that in the article, the experiments were all done at failing schools. The cash wasn't to make B students into A students; it was merely to get kids to read at all, or to achieve a baseline score on a standardized test.
I hate to be callous, but I don't see a problem. HN is not the US government. We don't tolerate all forms of speech here. Most of us have come here over the past few years because of the high signal::noise ratio and the high level of discourse. If you don't like decisions that the mods make, then by all means, please go some place else.

I much prefer that users who don't not make positive contributions to the community be quietly removed. Enough people complain about the degradation in quality of HN. I'm hopeful that things will improve, however and if it takes loosing a couple of users that harm the community by diluting the comment stream, then I'm okay with that.

I say let the culling continue.
Looking at the code from the video, it looks like they're just putting out an FXG file (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FXG) and have a JS library to read that format and execute it on the canvas. This is actually very interesting because then the Flash plugin is really just boiled down to a Javascript library (which some folks have already done before with the SWF format).

Combined with HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, there's really only webcam and cursor access that I can think of missing in this kind of implementation. Cool!
Your argument is that Apple might next decide to abandon Objective C?
I'd be fascinated to see how fast he could run if blood doped.
BTW: Is there a market in 3rd party libraries for the iPhone?