skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A secret of success: do only the things that you are capable of doing, like shaking hands and making deals.

I hardly think that this is all that zuckerberg is capable of doing, since he was the one who initially hacked on facebook (as well as some music sharing program in high school, iirc)
Can you point to some data for that? All the ranking sites I see still have Google at the top.
If only computer scientists had invented an introspectable state-carrying structure ;)
The screenshot shows PHP, and it's conceivable that you could work entirely with remote files by keeping a local copy in sync, so you'd just preview in Safari...

Not that the whole idea appeals to me, but I'm just sayin, if you were on a mission to build some websites on the iPad, you could pull it off...

(Not that you said it was impossible or anything)
I think the school, that conducted the study had some effect on it being published.

I don't suspect any school below a rank of 15 would be taken seriously.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/455698/best-visual-client...
I was under the impression that the A4 chip had been cut up, put under x-ray, etc and looked to be a fairly standard chip... not a C2D or similar.
Oh, I post it because I wanted to know if anybody had any experiences along these lines.
How much sense does it make to use one search engine's traffic to gauge usage of another's? Anyone with ask.com as their home page / default is not counted.

Hmm. I just checked with quantcast, and the graphs are similar:
http://www.quantcast.com/ask.com
http://www.quantcast.com/nytimes.com
http://www.quantcast.com/cnn.com

also it gives an estimate of 110M visitors per month. Not too shabby.
I've installed and played around with p9p (Plan 9 Port, aka, Plan 9 from User Space) and 9vx, but never managed to get the text to render acceptably. (If any of you have seen the text in Emacs over X11 before the integration with GTK+ or whatever in Emacs 23, it was at least as bad as that.) I tried 2 third-party "softwares" (hacks on p9p) which aimed to do text smoothing, but no joy. I might have tried to get used to it, but I believe I would never be able to get used to switching back and forth many time per hour between p9p's or 9vx's text and the text in graphical browser on Linux, OS X or Windows.

In general, I do best when all the text I view during a session at the computer is rendered by a single system, like Aqua or Gnome/GTK. My visual system is defective (exotropia and "lazy eye") but not so much that I have any restrictions on my driver's license. I can read 12-point text on OS X (and probably 10-point text, too), but when a system can handle it without complicating my life, like Carbon Emacs 22 can, I prefer 18-point text, and part of the reason that I do is probably that there is more visual information per character. (I'm a little far-sighted, and my head is usually 4'-5' from the monitor.)
Randomness in game design: Blight or Bane? (2009)
"Not a good reason, in Jobs's view, because the code could easily be reverse-engineered. No it couldn't, said Tim. Could, said Jobs."

I don't know where Jobs gets his instincts about this stuff, but he was totally right: http://tlb.org/scooter.html
I'm a little confused by the use of the term "third-party" in this context. In these situations the first two parties are the User and either other Users (for multi-user or social apps) or the application server (for client-server type apps). Does that mean Apple itself (and iAd) is some kind of new zero-party?
There's a Google talk that Randall Munroe did. Knuth was there and Munroe asked him about that story, Knuth seemed to deny it.
Thank you for body slamming me. But in a nice way. I stand corrected.
"With a classmate, Adam D’Angelo (now a student at CalTech and still a close friend) Zuckerberg designed a program that learned a listener’s musical tastes, and then designed a playlist to match.

“It learned your listening patterns by figuring out how much you like each song at a given point and time, and which songs you tend to listen to around each other,” Zuckerberg says.

The friends created a plug-in for the popular MP3 player WinAmp and posted it up for free on the Internet."

"When Zuckerberg starts a programming project, all else takes a backseat. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t talk to friends."

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerber...
My view:

- Voting for STORIES is retarded. It can be EASILY gamed.

- There should be editors who pick news RELATED to the main purpose of the site.

- Let the people SUBMIT stories but let the editors PICK the most relevant.

- On the other hand, voting in COMMENTS is ok.

A good idea would be to have say ten editors and let them vote on stories submitted by users. Stories with 5 votes or more go to the front page.

Can it be gamed? Sure!

When that happens it's time to change editors.
Ah, but that doesn't matter, because they're emulating ARM, you see.
"My father/mother/uncle lost a limb/eyeball/lung and were happy about it too, so they shouldn't even complain."

That's not what I said, please to be not putting words in my mouth? kthx.

"Sweatshop trinkets are not a requirement for industrialization or lucrative economies."

Straw man - "sweatshop" labor produces a whole lot more than mere trinkets and souvenirs - they are, in this case, producing valuable electronics in great demand elsewhere.

Like I said in my previous post - safety should be utmost, even in developing countries, but what this article brought up is not safety, it's quality of life standards.

You can work people like dogs, make them hot-bunk, and serve them watery gruel, and maintain effective safety measures at the same time. This isn't to say that you should, but rather that we are talking about two distinct and separate issues. This article pecks halfheartedly at one, but fails to address the other (IMHO more important) one.
Interesting to discussion to kick off.

1) Do you think that having a sell angle on your site can be a traction killer? Will you be stickier if things are free and happy for a longer period of time?

2) Isn't integrating with billing solutions and going through all the necessary legal/tax/yada rigamarole the exact kind of "dip" that tends to demotivate people in the first place?

3) Isn't the customer service that comes with keeping your paying customers happy also the kind of thing that tends to take away from development momentum? Esp. if you are solo?

Would love to hear what other people have to say. I think this is a great question.
CTO, VP of Engineering and CEO (again)
About a year ago, there was a long discussion about CTO vs. VP of Eng. where a CTO who was acting as VP of Eng. was getting paranoid about the CEO wanting to hire a new VP of Eng. with the VP of Eng. directly reporting to the CEO. Here is the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509571

I found the discussion very interesting. My situation is slightly different - I'm the Founder and CTO of a six-year old company, with no CEO initially. We then brought on a CEO, who then brought on a VP of Eng. & VP of Marketing.
These hires were with my active participation and involvement. For the first two years, I worked with the VP of Eng., and along the way, discovered many gaps in day-to-day execution, the result of which I was also "half" VP of Eng. It was very awkward, because the VP of Eng. was essentially the CEO's pick, and the VP of Eng. had a free ride with me doing the work and him taking the credit. However, it turned out that the key folks reporting to the VP of Eng. saw through this, the CEO could not keep propping up the VP of Eng. and the VP of Eng. was forced out. Of course, I am pretty sure that the CEO, to this day, keeps thinking that I caused the VP of Eng. to be dysfunctional and forced him out,
even though the board and the rest of the company knows fully well that that was not the case, and that it was more important for me, as a founder and a large shareholder, I had a stake in the VP of Eng. success. In any case, we went through another VP of Eng., and after two more years, he was also out, this time he could not work with the CEO. Eventually, the third VP of Eng was brought on, but for him to be successful, myself and the rest of the exec team
have to walk extremely carefully, and back off any questioning of his work, and the engineering team is increasingly isolated from the rest of the organization. Moreover, given the prior history, my relationship with the CEO
is very delicate, with me having to play a much less reduced role. He tends to brush off any suggestion from the CTO as not sound business sense, and any suggestion, even when constructive, becomes a negative comment on the
work of others. Given my position in the company, the stake in its success, I cannot quit. Naturally, working in this environment can be difficult, since there is really no one who is there to offer support for me. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to proceed?
Since this is the iPhone Developer Agreement we're talking about, Apple is the first party. The developer agreeing to the agreement is the second party. Any outside analytics company being used by the developer would then be the third party.
Presumably you still need to use their compiler toolchain.
Yes, I have used it in two projects myself and been involved in another project where I added a few features. If you are working on a straight forward CRUD web app that does not interface with other services there is some value. One project in which I was involved and 5+ interfaces with other surfaces. Maintaining all of the mocks became very expensive. At one point it was determined that maybe half of the development time became devoted to test case maintinance. Eventually it was decided to abandon unit tests and just do integration testing. Another project was more xmpp based. I started with TDD but eventual gave up because the architure was in flux. All the experimentation put a great expense in test case maintenance. I also ditched unit tests for integration testing. You have to decide how much effort you are willing to put in test maintenance. If the expense is to greate scale back to something affordable.
Unix came with its own programming language.
Coding is therapeutic especially when you don't have to do it. Besides, its an easy way to enter flow.
"The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29
Jeezus apple. You guys are going to kill your partners (the developers)
Thanks for the clarification. I thought you could only play music in the background while using other Apple apps (Safari, Mail, whatever). I'm glad to hear that I'm wrong.
Yep, but this is true for RSS and most news sites generally as well IMHO. You see it, read it and then unless someone reposts it, it's gone forever. I use delicious to tag that I've liked it and then can search, but it doesn't search content etc.

But the primary reason I use the feed is that it's filtered high quality new material that I'm genuinely not likely to have seen before.
If you do, then you become a bald-headed boss. :)
While you're right that Apple didn't explicitly mandate XCode, I imagine that was considered just a bit too blantantly monopolistic for serious consideration. It seems to me a lot like the change is influenced by Apple's desire to keep developers buying Macs. They stopped short of mandating such things explicitly because they probably didn't expect to be able to get away with it, but I believe that continually high Mac adoption rates (through developers buying Macs for XCode/Apple SDKs) was the main reason for the change.
Changed the title. I posted this because it made me think that Apple is truly becoming the most vertically integrated company in the world, from Silicon to AppStore.

In the movie, Objectified, by Gary Hustwit, the legendary designer Dieter Rams (of iconic Braun fame, the electric shaver), is asked if there is any company that really gets design today. He answers, after a moment's pause, "Apple".

My point here is Apple is integrating design down to lower levels anyone has done before. Some companies talk about corporate DNA but Apple is going to Jurassic Park levels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBF1rOxWsxg
Unit tests, though-- not super common to write those for demo code, right?
How did the Japanese empower the KMT? When the Japanese left Taiwan after WW2 the incumbent Chinese government (KMT) took over. How did they actively help the KMT in any way?

> "that was being concentrated and wasted by the Japanese entrenched upper-class."

You mean KMT-entrenched upper-class... I'm still not sure what socioeconomic imbalances in post-war Taiwan have much at all to do with the Japanese. A large portion of the extremely-wealthy Taiwanese are "mainlanders" - people who retreated to the island with the KMT during the final days of the Civil War.

"How many man-years do you think were wasted in low value trinkets instead of going straight through education and more lucrative industries?"

Um, in my parents' case, without sweatshop industries they would never have gone to school. Keep in mind also, we did invest in extremely lucrative industries, including the at-the-time burgeoning electronics manufacturing industry. The expertise in semiconductors developed via production industries helped drive a large portion of the semiconductor explosion later, and was instrumental in transforming Taiwan from a industrial to a knowledge economy. I disagree fundamentally with the claim that mere millions in US aid would have given us a self-sufficient knowledge economy, without any industrial development.

No offense, but I think you've really got a hate-on for the Japanese, because a huge portion of what you seem to have against the Japanese make much more sense when pinned (IMHO rightly) against the KMT. Government corruption and nepotism was limited during Japanese rule, but reached a fever pitch once the KMT arrived on the island in force. The minted upper classes are mostly old-guard KMT families and politically affiliated as such. It seems like you're taking a large portion of Taiwan's socioeconomic ills, rewinding the clock, and trying to insist that the KMT's gross mismanagement thereof is but a symptom of Japanese evil.
He mostly did business, but he was somewhat well versed in electronics. He was nowhere near a match for Woz, so he got out of it fairly quickly. He probably did lend a hand on the assembly line in the early days.

With the Apple I and Apple II, there was a lot of work in assembling the machines, lining up parts, and arranging sales. It's not like a startup now where it's mostly software.
Even if you do, mathematics in LISP is not looking pretty, or "normal" in the beginning for the newcomer.

However, as you start using LISP more and more frequently, the expression you gave could be evaluated within your head at sight. It's just to know where to start looking for a opening/closing paren.
the terminal.app for jailbroken iphones wasn't that bad. i could fire up emacs and key in complex keyboard shortcuts via programmable gestures.
Ask HN: How to turn my web application into a lifestyle business?
I wrote WeekPlan.net as a weekend project for myself and it grew into something that is getting me excited.

It got reviewed in KillerStartups.com, MakeUseOf.com and LifeHacker.com and is getting some positive buzz on Twitter.

The communication is flowing with the users, they are giving constant feedback and are asking tons of new features.

I haven't fully commited my efforts to WeekPlan.net yet because I haven't found a way to turn WeekPlan.net into a lifestyle business (via a subscription based model). How would you do it?

I don't want to be rich, I simply want to live comfortably helping people achieve their goals.

What process should I follow to understand what features would the users pay for?

I guess some of the HN crowd use todo apps. What features do YOU think could make WeekPlan.net worth paying?

Thank you for your insights.

(one of the WeekPlan.net users actually suggested I sent this message to Hacker News, thank you!)
Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?
I guess beauty is subjective.
So it's okay to be sexist if you aren't doing it because you're attracted to the person?
> "So unless you question the authenticity of that quotation"

I do not, and I sympathize with the frustration. That being said, this article is alleging some kind of gross, inhuman, deplorable condition in the plant, and attempting to pin this on Microsoft in the process. This quote does nothing to justify this conclusion, and the fact that someone can perceive this kind of dissatisfaction as some sort of harsh indictment on the working conditions shows a complete disconnect between them and the realities of production line work.

Note that I mentioned that blue collar industries in our country are the same - if the author himself had any notion of how factory work goes, he would know that his quote from a frustrated Chinese factory worker proves exactly nothing. If he wants to allege unacceptable conditions by virtue of the fact that managements acts without consultation with line workers, he should rightly level this claim at just about every factory in existence, everywhere.
On this topic, there's an interesting debate scheduled June 8 in D.C.

Mike McConnell and John Zittrain versus Marc Rotenberg and Bruce Schneier.

See http://www.thenewnewinternet.com/2010/04/12/upcoming-debate-...
In other interesting news: kids like candy.
Never. If your product is generating revenue and profit, the profit the only wise thing is to invest in the product. If you do so, the product will have more features and becomes bigger. If you did not, your competitor will have done so, and will have innovated to a build a better business.
A third party app (Pandora, for instance) can stop the iPod if it wants to, but not all third party apps (Mint) do.
"concept"? What is new about this? You type in text and it shows up. OK, great.

What the iPad needs for programming is a touch-board for common constructs, because typing is going to be too tedious. Sort of like snippets, but some minimal set that gets you everything you need. Seems difficult, but it would be mildly neat.

Text editors that can't be customized suck, though, and Apple prohibits proper editor customizations. So my guess is that this won't be replacing a $200 netbook with Emacs anytime soon.

Oh, and after you type your code in, what's going to run your code for you?
Perhaps the suppliers in the primary market should resort to auctions when demand is high?

For extra corporate do-gooding they could sell any proceeds that exceed the usual price to charity.
My First BillG Review
The iPad crash reports claim to be ARM. symbolicating an iPad crash report with the wrong architecture would produce garbage.
Except you can't actually try your code without a server to connect to, because Apple won't approve an app that can run code.
We can call it Slashdot!
1. Get rid of the CEO; let's look at the record:

First VP of Eng. "was essentially" his pick, couldn't do the job and the VP wasn't honest about that.

Second VP of Eng. could not work with him.

At this point, you can't work with him either.

Can he work with technical people? Might the current VP of Eng. have a better chance of working out without the CEO?

If that can't be made to work, maybe without this CEO in the loop the next VP of Eng. will work out....
"Full of shit" seems a very un-Knuth-y expression.

[edited to add: I should of course just have called it "unknuth", but my pun-sense wasn't quick enough on the mark.]
Awesome to read a detailed account of instant-on insight and tough questions from two giants. Steve's intolerance of business as usual is particularly inspiring.
A very common misconception. There's an active scientific field, sociology of performance, that studies exactly this, how excellence is made, and they have simply concluded that talent equals experience.

I recommend "The mundanity of excellence" by Chambliss. Here's a scribd link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-Excellenc...

"So, anyone who sings (deliberately trying, I'll grant you) for long enough will be a great singer. Anyone who swings a golf club long enough will be a great golfer."

Yup, that's it, as long as it's deliberate practice - which is not just practicing deliberately.
Why not, you want the demo code to work, right?
> do only the things that you are capable of doing

..if you want to never challenge yourself, learn anything new, or push the boundaries of the possible.
Where to Submit Your Web Design and Development News
Quickly drive traffic to your website by submitting your content to websites featuring user submitted community news. Featured in this article are over 110 websites supporting community news.
So they didn't value you there, but got angry when you quit?
The captain of the ship does whatever he has to do to keep his ship running. Part of management is picking up the slack.

While it may not be wise if Zuckerberg wanted to pretend he was just another production coder, there's no evidence that that's what's happened here. Why shouldn't a CEO be able to express some ideas in code? If that code is production quality there's no reason it couldn't go into production.

A lot of managers get this idea that they shouldn't consort with the little people anymore. That is a horrible idea that leads to horrible abuses and problems; for some hard-to-understand reason involving ego and job security, the reality of things tends to warp a bit as it travels up the chains of management, even if the organization has a relatively flat hierarchy.

The real way to make sure everything is going well is to interview and trust the people who are set out to do the job. imo every CEO should cut through the managers and interview a random selection of "low-level" people, i.e., people who actually build the thing your company is selling, or whatever, very often. They are the ones which are most passionate, best informed, and best equipped to help.

I understand that sometimes organizations get to a size where managers are required to oversee the day-to-day, but it's vital that the highest levels at a company are concerned and informed more with front-line opinions than the warped reports passed up through five levels of managers.
Paul Graham is often saying that the value of Lisp is in large part due to its being so concise. If we have to throw away four lines every time we have a moderately complex arithmetic expression, we're losing quality.

... none of which is to say that Lisp Is Bad (which is certainly not the point I was trying to make in the original article) -- just that the good points are to some degree balanced by some bad ones, and Lisp evangelists don't ultimately help their cause by pretending that even the bad bits are good.
The jailbreakers are emulating ARM too? The conspiracy deepens!
> The company told a developer whose app it was rejecting: "It is not appropriate for applications to gather user analytics. Specifically, you may not collect anonymous play data from a user’s game."

OK, that's pretty crazy if true.
I don't see how athletes in what rjett calls fitness-based sports can scan sleep without impairing their health. I recall studies from years ago that showed athletes requiring more sleep than the general population.
This story is the subject of a fascinating exchange between Knuth and Randall Munroe in Munroe's Authors@Google talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24#t=25m25s

Knuth neither confirms nor outright denies the story, but says "I've only met [Jobs] a couple of times and in each case I was impressed by him probably more than he was impressed by me".
Go read _Neuromancer_. It's a little dated now, but in the 80s this was cutting-edge science fiction.

Black ICE were security countermeasures that would infect you, even kill you, for getting to close to a machine in cyberspace.