skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Corporations can't generally be scofflaws or practice principled civil disobedience. Google has adopted a standard -- complying with the censorship laws of democratic governments, withdrawing from other places -- that takes these limitations into account. Your alternative standard is just a macho pose, that would cost Google a bunch before being run out of many mostly-free societies. (I don't blame them for choosing battles they can win.)

You can argue that respecting Germany's Nazi taboo and Turkey's Ataturk taboo begins a slippery slope that results in more and more censorship over time, and I might agree. (In particular, it rewards the fabrication of new taboos -- new poses of victimhood and danger -- to control speech and thought.) But you haven't suggested a workable alternative for a legally-chartered organization that must yield to the laws of local authorities where it has a presence.
The argument makes little sense, since Apple takes 30% of App Sales
SEO for Local Business Essentials
When real estate prices are high, repairs aren't made because there's no need to-- apartments sell themselves. When they're low and vacancy rates are high, repairs aren't made because there is no point.

How does that make sense? You're arguing that repairs are not worth it if it's easy to sell apartments (what does that mean? That the new tenants do repairs, or that everyone is willing to live with a leaky sink as long as they pay for it?). Or that repairs only happen when apartments can sell (so you'll only let the sink leak if you're going to live with it for a long time).

The utility of repairs can be positively or negatively correlated with real estate prices, but it's ridiculously unlikely for it to be both.

For what it's worth, I've lived in cheap and expensive parts of New York, and, miracle of miracles, people took better care of apartments they paid more for. As it turns out, it really stings if you'd be able to rent someone a loft for $8,000 a month, but you can't because they saw that that ceiling was cracked. People paying $400/month for a room aren't nearly as picky.
More startup accelerators – the list of programs grows from 77 to 93
I bet the volume buttons are going to be multi-fuction. They appear to be spaced far enough apart to be useful as action buttons in games. If you hold an iPhone in landscape you can get a pretty good feel on how that could work.
These people seem almost mythical... I've never met anyone like that.

There are tons of people like this! I'm sure these people are mythical/rare on HN, but in the big company 9-5 world they are definitely real. Maybe these people are the NNPs of the world who are happy with obscurity because it hides that fact that they aren't adding value, and are just riding on the coattails of a company that's big enough to support them.
At most, the only case made here is that Apple doesn't care one way or the other if you make any money selling your app; as long as apps are there and people are using them, Apple is happy.

The apps are a marketing tool for Apple. While they make some money reselling them, I can't imagine it's enough to get stockholders excited. All the sound and fury regarding app rejections and keeping the riffraff (Flash) out has more to do with brand management than technology or protectionism (not that Apple isn't protectionist...)
"Far too many girls don't even consider trying to program, and regret that later in their lives."

Funny, I've talked to tons of women about what I do, and not a single one has ever expressed that programming is cool, or interesting -- much less that they regret not having done it.

Look at the success of women in all other "intellectual" professions and you'll see the numbers increasing, not decreasing.
Doing so, you expose yourself in propagating penetration from a compromised server to a previously secure one.
A Modal Interface Combining Gestures and Direct Manipulation
You completely ignored the part of my comment where I mentioned that fb already has much better brand relationships and is already a household name.

if facebook does NOTHING, yes foursquare could go somewhere. but the bottom line is they already releasing privacy settings with location awareness in them, it's only a matter of time before they have their own LBS. and for $125mm trust me, they will develop in house thank you.
Man, I'd love to rewrite the god-awful son-of-windows-3.1 UI on citrix.

Solid software, terrible UI.

Glad it's a good company though! "We're not the sort of company that tosses a man out because he's over 40. How old are you Reggie?"
Short answer: Yes, I am, including without testing.

For several years I ran a challenge for exactly this question. I have a test harness and test suite, and would run people's programs through it. Roughly 1 in 30 or 40 of those submitted without testing (self-certified) would pass all the tests. Those who tested before submission passed about 1 time in 3.

The vitriol heaped on me was quite unbelievable, and in one case led to concerns for my physical safety. People who had decided to try the challenge then rounded on me and said it was unfair, unreasonable and unrealistic. I didn't affect the results - the vast, vast majority of people simply could not write a binary search that passed my test suite.

FWIW, my first attempt had exactly one problem, to the best of my knowledge. I decided to derive my code formally from the specification. The mistake concerned computer arithmetic, not the algorithm, and was the one lunk to from the article.

But my background is unusual.
> It's complex, let's just give up with laws. Not a good stance.

Think of legislation as a script written by a committee that's then deployed with no testing. Sometimes it's the only way to solve a problem, but it's a very blunt instrument.

There's no contradiction in dreading the thought of legislators tackling a complex problem when it's not necessary, whilst accepting that there are some issues that can only be solved by passing laws.
If this really is a prototype that Apple lost, and gizmodo publicly admits that they know that Apple wants it back, wouldn't disassembling someone else's property and publicizing it on a major web site be pretty risky from a legal standpoint? (Unless this is a controlled leak)
The TSA has posted an official reply to this:

That's the Customs and Border Control's Job not ours. You can tell the difference because their uniform is NAVY blue and ours is more of a ROYAL blue. (I'm paraphrasing here but only barely. THEY ACTUALLY POINT OUT THE UNIFORM COLOR DIFF).

I wish/hope this was/is a joke:

http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2010/01/can-tsa-copy-your-laptop-har...
No, you need a server that speaks HTTP, at least minimally. This is by design so an XSS attack can't connect to arbitrary servers.

However, you could very easily create a simple adapter that accepts Websocket connections and relays the data to a TCP server.
I don't think many people would be happy with legislating against global warming either.

Legislate to use less energy, to recycle, etc. But it's hardly clear cut that we're seeing anything more than a temporary heating phase.

The other point is that technology is changing so fast that by the time lawmakers understand it, things have all changed.
You are right. A better title would have been "Apple Doesn't Care Whether Your iPhone App Makes Money."
Microsoft bought a lot of goodwill from me when they productionized F#. Finally, functional programming that anyone will be allowed to use!

Then I found out that they want you to pay them $80 to change the desktop background in Windows 7 Starter.

So now I have forgotten about F#, and recommend Haskell instead. OCaml and Scala are also fine. Fuck Microsoft, they'll never change.
Oslo, Norway. $65/month: http://www.speedtest.net/result/787586116.png
There's also a bus. Or you can leave your bike locked at the train station overnight.
> "And even now (after we peaked at the No. 7 paid app), we still have no relationship with anyone there."

This, for me, is a real problem with the Apple model (the "hide the engineers" model, also followed by Oracle), we can not simply write an e-mail about a bug (Apple do have a closed bug tracker) or suggest a feature or even get motives about why some features do not exist in the iPhone (such as OpenVPN support), compare this with the extensive network of blogs that Google and Microsoft engineers have.

This is sad, you're always dealing with a cold company and not with people just like you that probably have some good motives for including or not a feature in a product, I wish to be alive in the day Apple becomes more open.
See here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/216788/output/print
turn the 'Net into landscapes of "walled gardens" in which consumers are reluctant and even afraid to explore new services

I think the only reason so many aren't afraid now is that they don't know very much about those services and the information collected.

So the argument here is, don't tell people what we do because it might upset them.

That said, I think the point about driving people to centralized identity systems is valid, because, again, they won't understand the risks.

Interesting that there's one outcome Google does not anticipate: less mining, storing, and sharing of private data by websites.
Or create a pair for each...
I like that this resurfaces from time to time. Here're the comments from when I submitted the link to the deck to HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740524
Classic 80/20. 80% of the best apps in the App Store are probably created by 20% of the developers.

Therefore Google is smartly attempting to come in and skim the cream from the top.
The Disappearing Sense of Place: longterm effects of mobile/telecommuting
To be precise, the post says that only 10% of programmers can write it correctly without testing. I agree that this is an interesting statistic, however the industry has been deprecating implementing an entire algorithm in one go in favour of implementing algorithms incrementally.
Were I to write it without testing I would probably write it incrementally and try to perform the testing in my head as I went along. It feels very retrograde to try to write the whole thing out and only then start thinking about off-by-one errors, computer arithmetic issues, and other edge cases.
Try the test at an off-peak hour. Cable speeds go down as usage in the surrounding area picks up. My 30mbps is usually 12 or so in the evening and the full 30 at night.
I don't think the problem evaporates if it's inherent. Let's say, for the sake of the argument, and women are on average more intelligent than men. If that's the case, we should still run programs to encourage men to explore higher learning.

I guess what I mean to say is that regardless of what the source of the problem is, the solutions are the same. Battling against problems of socialization is done the same was as fighting against problems of inherent difference.
What you have is a plan that provides _up_ to 20Mbps. Since you're most likely a residential customer, there are no service level agreements that you can hold your ISP to.
Founder Institute is training minds for a great idea
Exactly. PHP is notorious for its standard library's inconsistent API. Griping about PHP standard library, if anything, reveals familiarity with it.
"why trust them to understand any other complex subject?"

Because politicians do a great job, re: managing the economy, protecting social security, foreign relations, IP law, education, not inflating costs of all things medicinal, and just putting the public interest first, in general.

With such an impressive track record, why not trust them to start inching their toes into the most complex, most creative, most free entity in the history of humankind?

/facetious

I'll be among the first to question Google's motives in the long term, but in this instance, I'll take Google's obviously-self-interested stance over that of a career liar claiming to act on my behalf -- by adding yet more legislation to an already immense corpus of unintelligible jargon.

So no, I _don't_ trust politicians or any other bureaucrats to understand (or at least cogently react to) any complex subject, and I'm continually flabbergasted that so many people do.
They really should come with a .txt version for people who get sad/upset/irritated when they see information presented in color.
Facebook "Likes" World Domination
ssh-agent?
> Those who tested before submission passed about 1 time in 3

"Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis." --Alan Perlis
to whoever downvoted this to -1, find yourself a sense of humour.
Yeah, they did. I was thinking about the "find my phone" feature.
CHROMAom (YC W10) founder's awesome rainbow birthday cake
Apple's AppStore reminds me of Google AdSense policy of isolation and almost inexistent customer service. If they ban you: They ban you. There's no possibility to discuss things.
Perlisisms - "Epigrams in Programming" [repost]
For anyone with concerns about business structure, I highly recommend "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law"--while it doesn't cover all of the tax implications of each structure, it is a great general reference for LLC vs. S-Corp vs. C-Corp (and a myriad of other topics).

http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurs-Guide-Business-Law/dp/03...
Strange - Firefox is 3rd or 4th in the JavaScript, DOM and CSS benchmarks, yet somehow it has the best overall page load time...
Universities Banning iPads Left, Right and Center Due to Bandwidth Overload
I was spurred to repost this by the discussion of testing and the idea that even programmers who test their code can submit flawed algorithms. The epigram "Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis" came to mind, and here are all of Alan Perlis' brilliant observations for another look.
This is a great question: One thing I have been surprised by is that few from NetFlix have spoken up (to agree or disagree) with the points in the deck.

As for why developers don't leave FogCreek, are we sure they don't leave? We don't hear their names that much, so not sure we'd notice if we stopped hearing one. But, my guess is that attrition is relatively low there. If it's on thing Joel's good at, it's recruiting/retaining developers.
An interesting chapter in what is likely to be a long and interesting story. As a 17+ year Microsoft developer I have always been impressed with Microsoft's developer support & tools relative to those of Apple and, earlier (for me) Sun's Java. I am often SO VERY underwhelmed with the support offered to non-Micorsoft developers. Google seems to be using this (the Microsoft) approach and I imagine they will have a lot of success with it!
2010 We're Linux Video Winner Announced
flipping over to browse the web the moment you have a couple of minutes free is probably why some companies block access. Employers expect their employees to focus on their job and not flip over at every chance. But what the blocking means for us is something that they ll never understand..
There were no women in my class of 15 Computer Science majors at a small liberal arts college. There were definitely women in my class who took some CS, and took classes initially intending to complete the major. Now, while there are I'm sure a variety of causes for that, it's unquestionable that a class of 15, all of the opposite sex, is an inhospitable environment.
The profession's title literally means "to suckle at the breast." If it were commonly called something like "doctor's aid" I'd bet it wouldn't be as pronounced a problem.
Johnny Long's Google Hacking Database
My guess is its the real 4G and this is part of an intentional leak because the 4G wasn't getting the level of coverage Apple wanted (iPad hangover?). I mean, otherwise Gizmodo would be in hot water (I assume it is technically reported as stolen).

Next, how is Apple planning on playing this out? Will the lawyers play their part and blow some hot air?
Where'd you get the money to live on while you were doing your unpaid internship? What I'm getting at here is that part of the point of the article was that unpaid internships favor people who come from more privileged backgrounds.
HN is good at containing spam, but only because it constantly polices for it. I shouldn't have been so rude about it in my opening comment on the thread, and I know that's why I'm being downvoted to oblivion, but I really do think this was a lame spam submission. I'm disappointed and a little dismayed that other people seem to disagree - I'd really hate for this site to pop up on corporate radars as a place they could drop FREE iPad! job offers without getting called out as completely lame for it.
Side-issue: why isn't Golden section better known ?

Luenberger's book [1] convinced me that a line search should be done with golden section, when I was hacking non-linear optimization. Yet I rarely see it mentioned - seems always to come down to binary search ...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Linear-Nonlinear-Programming-David-Lue...
If you're in London and don't want to leave or commute outside then we (labs.yell.com) are looking for 20 to 25 developers at the moment to help establish the newly formed labs.

We don't offer ipads but you will get an octo-core mac pro on your desk with 2 large monitors, an iphone, pension, bonuses, good pay, etc... and we'll give you work you will find challenging (whatever your level of challenging is).

Further more we are in the centre of London, cross-section of Grays Inn Road and Theobalds Road, so you'll still have access to whatever turns you on (hipster highway leads to Shoreditch, we're equidistant from both the city and West End).

I saw your background is C# from StackOverflow, but hope you'll find yourself comfortable with picking up whatever tool is required (Objective C, C, Java, C#, Python, etc). Training will of course be there and if this doesn't interest you specifically then please tell other devs in London (or willing to move to London) who you think would fit into a really creative, relaxed and passionate team.

Drop me an email on my personal email (on my profile page) to sidestep the HR obstacles and get yourself in front of the devs who work there.
I would love to see this as well, but I doubt this information is available for most (any?) of the companies.
but the more devs profit, the more they profit

The average App Store customer buys less than $20 worth of apps last time I saw numbers quoted. 30% of $20 is $6. Apple is a hardware manufacturer that sells $X00 phones at one of the highest markups in the industry and also gets a kickback from AT&T for every customer they bring to monthly billing.

Apples' incentives are almost totally non-related to developers' incentives: their primary interest in apps is to move more hardware and contracts.
Isn't the classic VC model an expectation of only ~10% real successes, a larger amount break even/moderate success, and about half failures? Although that may be a better success rate than non-funded companies, getting VC is not in any way equivalent to a guarantee of success.
afaik TruTap is dead.
Romania - 10euros for cable, phone and internet : http://www.speedtest.net/result/787608943.png (on one server I'm getting close to 45Mb.)
I don't think one can generalize so strongly from a niche app like this (it seems to be a personal DB that you can use to catalog your CD collection or other lists).

It would help if there were sales numbers for the same app at the same price on the iPhone, but instead I wonder if the low sales are due to low demand rather than Android customer demographics/spending habits.
It is not that they aren't interesting. I think the problem is that they aren't available. Most startups are not in a situation where they are legally required to publicly disclose their finances, but they usually are required to publicly disclose their investments.
They're not just a marketing tool - they're also a switching cost. When you buy a new phone you have to consider which apps you'll have to replace, and which data you might need to move across. Less so than a large iTunes music collection, but still.
it's unquestionable that a class of 15, all of the opposite sex, is an inhospitable environment.

I'm curious as to: a) your solution to this and b) whether you intend to implement it to more than just computer science, like say Women's Studies and such.

I'd think it would be really nice to have a 50/50 split of every possible class, especially when women currently make up 57% of grads.
I would add - and their completeness in testing the correct implementation of those cases, and the correctness of the implementation.
I am confused, how did these keys get put on paste bin? Did people place it on paste bin thinking each paste is private?
Reminds me of the "first-to-market advantage" that entrepreneurs talk about all the time. Apple took a huge, huge chunk of market and has had it since the iPhone came out. I think we'll see over the next year or two how well that works for them, and if developer sentiment is an early indicator, there could be some big changes in market share.
The fact that most women don't want to engage in programming is not a natural phenomenon

You need a citation (or several) for this "fact".
Binary means division into two. Dividing in unequal parts is still a binary search.

And Golden Section is only indicated under some circumstances. It's big-O the same, but not little-O the same, and it depends in the exact details. It's also hard to get those details right.
Art Made at the Speed of the Internet: Don’t Say ‘Geek’; Say ‘Collaborator’
"Well, OBVIOUSLY," I muttered to myself and then realized that the title said "bones".
I think I get it now:

1) Men's poor choices == men's irrational hangups.

2) Women's poor choices == men's systemic sexism.
I didn't intend the title to reference anything in particular, thanks for the comment.

I'm sorry that you've found our field to be so inhospitable. That hasn't been my experience at all, though I appreciate your point about making technology hospitable to everyone.
>It makes evolutionary sense for women to invest heavily in being good-looking and men to invest heavily in, y'know, accomplishing actual stuff.

You really have no understanding of what housekeeping entailed before the washing machine, dryer, running water, the supermarket, etc. These were fundamentally hard tasks. Women had to get their hands dirty just as much, if not more than men. This historic role of women has disappeared because it is no longer an accomplishment to say "I did the laundry." The idea that a woman's ability to reproduce is a function of looks is a product of the past century, during which society's gender roles have not kept pace with the obsolescence of formerly 'feminine' tasks. All of the tasks once reserved for women due to their difficulty (and possibly innate ability) have become trivial tasks. As such the only thing that influences reproduction is looks.

At least, unless we can start using that wasted human power to, y'know, accomplish actual stuff.
And there are plenty of disadvantages related to the drawing.

Most annoyingly, the fact that you can't alt+drag or alt+nudge (arrow keys) to duplicate an object. For me that's the single biggest time-saver when doing wireframes and mockups. Otherwise you spend a lot of time repositioning and realigning pasted objects.

Most desktop apps get it right. I've yet to find a web-based app that does.