skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that it is entirely a myth that the video game crash of '83 had anything at all to do with a decline in the quality of games. The fact that a couple of anticipated games (ET and PacMan) turned out to be dogs is coincidental. There had been dogs all along. What actually happened was that the videogame fad had finally run its course. For a while, videogames were novel enough that consumers were willing to buy just about anything that they could play on a video screen. Then, as invariably happens with fads, they were old hat. It wasn't just console games that hit a slump--it was arcade games and computer games as well. Videogames had to rebuild a market based not upon novelty of playing games on a video screen, but upon the quality and features of the individual games.
And yet up it climbs in the rankings, until enough people flag it.
If I could pinch and zoom the government, that'd be A-Okay by me.

Hahahah.

Apple is not the government, silly.

But think, for a moment, what if the HN readers downvoting you were not HN readers… but the government? What then?
Same in Safari 4.0.5 on SL
The move by Apple could be roughly compared to saying Dreamweaver is banned from the web because of the sub-standard HTML it produces, but the argument presented here is a stretch to say the least.
I wonder how the author accounts for people like me who specifically buy an iPhone because they don't want to deal with UI consistencies, application computability problems, or low quality puked out ports? Everyone raging over iPhone OS seems to come off as really sanctimonious to me. It is what it is. Buy something else, develop for something else. We have a very high level of competition in the SmartPhone industry today. Why not find something more ideologically compatible for yourself? I made my choice, you make yours.

A fun analogy might be that I decide to live in a condo and you decide to build a your own house. I don't come over and demand you move into a condo but you certainly seem to be demanding I build my own house because a condo somehow threatens your ideology. I'm sorry but that's lame. We all make choices and they should be respected. This type of idealogical obsession is more appropriate in a market without competition. As it stands today we have plenty of choice. If you simply don't like the choices people make it becomes increasingly hard to argue on the side of freedom. We quickly reach the point where you're impeding on my freedom if you want to take my choice away in favor of yours.
This post is yet another example of the incredible inferiority complex of the New York tech scene.

//sarcasm
The problem is, his description of his morality crisis don't quite match with his actions.

He did quit, but it was probably because everyone else saw the ship sinking and was jumping off.

His $16k "sacrifice" at the end was not much if he claims he would have made enough to retire by 30s and just live off interest. So, yes, he had a bit some moral struggles, but it sounds like he managed to successfully "overcome" most of them via rationalizations.

The blog post was written just to make himself feel better and to somehow turn not taking a little bit of hush money into a great moral victory. Perhaps his future employee will read how honest and devoted to the truth he is...
The whole notion of the "Hard Problem" is completely dismantled in 'Consciousness Explained' (1991) and then later 'Sweet Dreams' (2005), both by Daniel Dennett.

Highly recommended for philosophers who know about computer science, or computer scientists who know about philosophy.
or perhaps he can break RSA in polynomial time or something like that
Pills sold for profit discovered by for-profit companies and pills sold otherwise by non-profit companies probably have the same curative rates. People like to demonize drug companies, but really, they are just confronted with terribly complex problems. You see pills that treat symptoms more often than pills that cure because of this complexity. On the road to a cure, there are many things discovered. They can be applied to make the patients life better in the interim -- and they should.

However, I agree whole-heartedly that this is the type of medicine that needs to be done more often. Researchers are victims of the "can`t see the forest for the trees" problem -- especially in medicine. There is a disconnect between bedside and lab bench that is artificial and limiting.

Interestingly, patients are starting to collaborate, swapping notes about things they remembered -- looking at things from an admittedly naive but certainly systemic approach. There are now even websites designed to help patients conduct what are almost emergent trials. (See: http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_broth...)

However, it should be noted that (thankfully) medicine is moving towards a more systemic approach.
So you go to an Apple store, or friend's house, and try it.

Purchasing something with intent to treat it like a free trial is sketchy. And then writing a post complaining is worse.
or maybe he's finished another book!!!! :)
"Innovate or die, bitches." Childish at best. And I'm certainly no stickler for grammar and style, but I had trouble reading past this one: "Matter of fact, it was sure of its decision to forget OS X development that it focused Premiere solely for Windows only to see Apple turnaround and buy a Macromedia offshoot, repackage it as a Final Cut and cut Adobe out a lucrative stream."
It had been in the back of my mind to reread this, thanks for bringing it up.
Off-topic, but: That moving tag cloud is really distracting. A seriously bad idea. =(
Yeah, but I doubt the average employee cares about the revenue they are generating. They are just glad that they can buy an HDTV and watch it after work.
What sort of fucking joke is this? Saying that some sort of karma game should determine developers' freedom to use the tools necessary for the job? That not supporting a certain platform merits an artificial limitation on the platform?

Please.
The problem with cross-development tools is that the people using them tend to focus on the app working on all the supported platforms, making it effectively using the lowest common denominator. If Apple releases a new API not available in the cross-platform tool, cross-developers are far more likely to ignore it than developers targeting Apple's platform specifically.

I would agree with you that Apple's been doing the same lock-in with Mac OS for a long time, but I'm not so sure they've been on the losing end of anything. I remember that when Jobs came back to Apple, they had free WWDC videos online, and attendance was very much in decline. Since he came back, they removed the Java bridge stuff, Carbon and at the same time they're charging good money for a WWDC that tends to sell out really quickly. Lock-in on the Apple way seems to me to be a fairly successful strategy.
Activision sues two fired developers
> Apple's making the right business decision now and I don't think you can fault them for that.

Yes, I can. Restricting developers' rights isn't a valid business decision. That's like saying Highway robbery is a respectable income source.
Would you be willing to hire students part-time this summer? I'd like to work in web development since that is where most of my experience is.
Thanks, 3rd party library are a healthy sign for a platform. I was thinking they go partially towards the fears in 3.1.1, of a layer, potentially cross-platform, and out of Apple's control. But I guess if they are iPhone-exclusive, it's less of a concern.
This story is written with a wonderful naivete. Consultants like BCG exist only to lend credentials and competent temporary labor. The companies who hire these consultants are looking for affirmation and peace of mind -- most of them too mired in bureaucracy or incompetence to draw even the most basic conclusions by themselves.
Keep three and only three lists: a Todo List, a Watch List, and a Later List.

Nice tip. I keep 5 lists - the 3 above, one Projects list (from the GTD book) and one Errands list.

The projects list is a list of projects that I have on my list (anything with more than 1 TODO against it is a project). The only reason for this list is to drive the Todo list (there can be one-off items in the Todo list that do not belong to any project). Once I am satisfied that all the necessary Todos for any project are done, I strike off the project off the list.

There are times when the Todo item of a certain project lingers way too long on the Todo list. This is usually indicative of

a) The project needs to move to the later list

b) Take the project off the list altogether. If it's that important it will come up soon

The Errands list is not that different from the ToDo list, but it's essentially stuff I have to do as I am out and about. Shopping/Going to the Bank/Public Library all go in that list. This way, once I am in "errands" mode, I just make sure to knock out as much as I can off that list. Usually a few hours, and I am good to go till the next week.

[Updated for formatting]
Which keyboard do you use for taking notes?
While the city of Washington used to exist as a legal entity within the District of Columbia, these days it's all just the District. Including both D.C. and Washington, D.C. on the map would be including two names for the same thing.
My favorite singularity treatment. It explores some original, and very scary implications of such a world...
You forgot the next step: why do you need to get anything done in the first place ?
It says in the about page

>Colin Rose MD PhD, Cardiologist, Associate Professor of Medicine, McGill University

And there are questions about whether CABG really reduces mortality or not.

As for Zamboni's procedure, I was psyched about it until I read Rose's debunking, and then some posts in a forum for MS patients by someone who had the surgery and is still having problems with MS. I'm not going to say for sure that it's BS, but I'm skeptical.
Landscape, because I find using the portrait keyboard difficult for long periods of typing. Unfortunately, this means that the formatting controls are not visible unless I turn the device. Hopefully Apple addresses this in a future update.
Just so Tex and Latex stay the same, I'll be happy :-)
N900 default browser: 55

I'm pretty surprised at that. I expected higher due to it's Firefox roots.
Flash is indeed slower on Mac - both plugin and authoring - but the 10.1 plugin seems to have closed the gap. Photoshop Mac definitely seems to perform better than it does in Windows.
Rampant cheating hurts China's research ambitions
Sight Glass Coffee is using it as a POS.*

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mager/4487454328/

*I don't have one
"There will be custom features for iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile."

Are there examples of this happening consistently in other cross platform development environments? My understanding is that cross platform frameworks cater to a lowest common denominator among platforms, perhaps occasionally supporting a custom feature here and there. Even then, the people developing the app need to spend the necessary effort to take advantage of platform specific features, as opposed to just deploying the identical app to all platforms.
Python or Ruby
I seriously love both, but now that I've worked a bit with both of them, I need to focus on one. I love the lisp mentality in ruby (the ? and ! in methods, no need to explicitly write return, block, etc.).. But, as a software engineer, I find python more structured and I find the code to be overall easier to maintain and read. (With Ruby, it's really easy to make those one-clever-liner perl-like).

So, I don't want to start a flame war, but I would like to seriously have good point for one of them. If you could become an expert in one of them, which one would it be?
Given that "teabaggers" is a moniker that the Tea Party adopted for themselves, it's not "tarring" anyone. Moreover, the Tea Party astroturf group clearly does not command anywhere near half of a country. I don't think that neonfunk in any way sullied himself.
Magnitude 6.3 Hits Spain
You say it's false that genetic factors account for 60-80% of variance in IQ. What is the current consensus about the actual number? 50%? 10%?
If that's true (and Wikipedia says that it is), then Google Maps already uses two names for the same thing:

Map showing the "District" of Columbia: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=40.010787,-78.09082&#...

Map showing the "City" of Washington: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=38.548165,-77.34375&#...

Why not just list them both?
That's a complex question. The answer depends on whether there were more Poles on the left side of the plane, or the right.
Just a heads up: Audio in German, subtitled in French.
But you can get the main idea without knowing those languages.
With ahead-of-time compilation, not all the layers even have to have a representation at runtime so the overhead can be really minimal.
As a user, I'm not interested in the custom features. In-app buying? No thanks. Interactive ads? No.

That stuff is good for Apple (who gets a cut), and the developer (who gets money), but it isn't good for users (who have to be annoyed with requests for their money).

So fuck Apple's special features.
A Lange &amp; Replica A Lange &amp; Sohne, A Lange &amp; Sohne Replica Watches
So you're trying to be a Rock Star coder.
As Calvin and Hobbes put it, the disturbing thing is not that everyone can be bought, but that the price is often so low.
We Were Wrong to Resist Apple
Review my startup: twecan.com (A real time news search engine)
Why use periods between each word? I makes it look like a domain name.
Honestly, my first thought was:

"To 'thwart' 'terrorists'."
They should just accept HTML is becoming the more appropriate foundation to the multimedia web, and stop trying to control it via their dumb plugin.

They already can do it, to some extent: http://www.9to5mac.com/Flash-html5-canvas-35409730
The Psychopath - The Mask of Sanity
Http://www.cheatcodesgalore.com/pc/cheats/Conquer_Online_20/?filter=2
Google Buzz Privacy Flaw Snags Another Victim: White House Deputy CTO
Yes, a mostly right/libertarian protest movement adopted a crude sexual term of their own free will. That makes lots of sense, for "those sorts of people", they're all about the crude sexual innuendos. (Given the likely way you feel about "those sorts of people", that doesn't fit at all.)

Sorry, it turns out you are right, it's more like a quarter: http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly-Mainst... Still way too many people to be tarring with a brush while claiming to be rational about disagreement.

The politics of the tea party are not my concern here. My point is that you shouldn't claim to be open to disagreement, except for that thing over there that commands the "support" of tens of millions of people. That's simply called not being open to disagreement. Honestly, that's fine; I doubt there's anybody here who is actually open to every argument you can find 25% of a country or world to agree to. Just don't pretend otherwise. As that link shows, there's no obvious "well, that's just the stupid people" argument available, either.

(I do draw the line at the "supported by millions of people", though of course I can't draw a bright shining line, because there are practical limits; one need not spend a lot of time pondering one guy's theories about the Time Cube. But dismissing entire quarters of a country at a time isn't anywhere near the line.)
NASA GOES-15 Eye Opener
To me, MS is practically a separate universe from everything else. That's not to say that there aren't any significant differences between the nixes, but they are at least similar in terms of the big picture. It would seem that learning to administer a Windows system would require a lot of unnecessary retraining for a nix admin. And I'm pretty sure that's doubly true of the opposite.
In what way does MonoTouch clearly contribute to the user experience on the platform?

An argument I started contemplating after reading the article is that there are a lot of non-iPhones out there with a physical keyboard, for instance. I can imagine someone writing for another platform experience makes concessions in creating apps that work flawlessly in a touchscreen-only environment, in much the same way some people might have been tempted writing CLI-apps for the original Mac had it provided one. Granted, most new phones seem to focus on the touch screen, but I can imagine there are other similar differences that might affect how native an app feels on the iPhone platform. After all, it seems that there are iPhone app developers moving to the Mac that create iPhone-like interfaces that don't quite feel at home on the Mac. If there are subtle but noticeable differences between Mac OS X and iPhone OS, I can imagine there are more than a few such subtle differences between the iPhone feel and the feel on other platforms.
Bingo. Apple doesn't ever want to find itself in a position where it has to depend on 3rd party tools keeping up with its OS evolution. If/when Android ends up being the dominant mobile platform, every dev house will likely make a "business decision" to use cross-platform tools. The control point for app innovation would then be in third party hands.

And as for losing out on innovation because developers can't make their own tools, I'm sure Apple isn't worried about that at all. They seem to have enough in-house innovation to run circles around what the competition has to offer, for the past ten years.
It can be beneficial to all "participants" but disastrous to society as a whole, can it not? Look at the current rage against free market instruments like CDOs and other complex unregulated derivatives.

Are you really claiming we dont need "coercion or force" from regulators like the SEC or FTC?
It is ONE language. NOLOH extends PHP, and you only develop in NOLOH. NOLOH has it's own syntax that's different than PHP. We accomplish this through the use of extensive syntactical sugars. You can read a little bit about this in our developer zone at http://dev.noloh.com.

You don't code any HTML, JavaScript, or deal with the client as you would with any other framework, whether it's PHP or not.

You only write code in NOLOH on the server and don't have to worry about anything else. In this regard it operates very much like it's own language, but to appeal to search engines we have to phrase it as a PHP Framework.

Clearly our phrasing and presentation was confusing to you as I'm sure you simply took a cursory glance, rather than create a sandbox, or watch our numerous videos on our YouTube channel. This is clearly something we need to work on since most people will only take cursory glances.
... I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I had the same problem with the article for the first two paragraphs, though, so yeah ...
Amazon used book marketplace, but for algorithms
You can also use the captions translation option (hover the red cc, and select Translate...).
I think it shows closed-mindedness on his part. They taught him analysis at MIT, but they didn't teach him to think properly.

You're a guy with a degree from the top technical school in the world and you've got one of the world's most prestigious consultancies on your resume: you don't think you could go on to find a job in which you could afford your kids' education AND not be a hypocrite?

I respect him for standing up after the fact and saying "I'm a wealthy hypocrite." But I don't respect him for going to work there in the first place. You'd have to have spent junior year of college buried in sand not to know it's a game, mostly dirty.
But someone else could have.
In this case I think they could be sued or investigated the same way Microsoft was regarding their unfair business practices in licensing.

No, they can't, because the predicate for the Microsoft enforcement action was their monopoly position in the desktop market, and the cause of action was their attempt to use that monopoly to create new monopolies.

Apple has nothing close to a monopoly on smart phones (they are crushed by RIM).

I'm also confused by the thesis of this blog post, which seems to be that there was a bait-and-switch pulled on the Apple dev community writ large. The vast, overwhelming majority of iPhone apps are written in ObjC, and Ruby is no more a second-class citizen on OSX today as it was last year.
http://gist.github.com/363190

ruby lilwiki.rb
Is your workplace as rough as the Arctic?
nice. was going to comment on it before you shoved it into a gist that you should gist it.
19 days later, Apple still hasn't approved the Opera Mini app
The Wellington Declaration (counter-ACTA)
Nice. Some things to consider...

-I'd be concerned with the privacy of my text

-In what form is the reminder?

-What am i supposed to write? Some examples (diary, fictional stories, grocery lists) would inspire my use of it.

Those 3 points should be addressed on the homepage.

A more pronounced signup/login link would also be good.
Fred Wilson: The Father of VC Marketing
I wrote that in 40 minutes. Obviously you need to add stylesheets and some error handling.
Up your font size? I've read 6 books on mine already (in iBooks and Kindle app both), no eye strain problems. [And strangely enough, I like the Kindle app better. Just wish there was a way to put my non-kindle ebooks into it].
I've been using a similar system for awhile now. The offline approach is extremely effective, however, I find it even more effective when combined with ideas from The Pomodoro Technique.

I have the same type of weekly planner (the author calls it a To-do planner) and a sticky note on my desk for the day that lists 3 to-do items. I draw a series of squares beneath each item.

The Pomodoro Technique simply recommends focusing on a single for 25 minutes, followed by a 5 minute break. The squares I draw below my to-do items represent the number of 25 minute intervals I anticipate the task to take. I cross them off each time my timer rings. If I underestimate the intervals of a task, I add a circle for each unexpected interval. This allows me to see patterns in my planning and works as a mechanic to finish things as scheduled.

Once the day is over, I remove the sticky note from my desk and "archive" it by re-sticking it on that day in my planner.
Main uses so far... book reader, and watching video courses while being able to code/take notes on the laptop.

I think we'll need to wait a few months for the real killer apps to show up. The really great ones take time to code, and it takes time for people to come up with brilliant new ideas. When the iPhone first came out it was not very interesting either - it became an indispensable device only 3-6 months down the road, as amazing apps started coming out.
Still, it's hard to believe that peace of mind is worth paying 5 kids graduated 6 weeks ago in Political Science from Stanford to come give Powerpoints on meaningless, vapid crapola billed to you each at $300/hr, even where such figures don't make much of a blip on the bottom line.
nice. although seems like pretty much the same idea as http://750words.com
I look forward to Steve not allowing any software other than those developed in XCode and solely for the Mac OS to be run on my Macbook Pro. Put an end to all software piracy and buginess and one place to run all OS apps.

// I was just being sarcastic but given Apple's behavior I wouldn't be surprised if this happens.
One of the pitfalls of tabbed browsing.