skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know an independent software developer who says his kids are going to learn to program and configure servers at the earliest possible age. He doesn't care if they pursue programming as a career later on, helping him with tech jobs will be just another one of their chores; like taking out the trash or mowing the lawn.

I think he's on to something as far as spotting what modern "chores" should be. And the kids will probably benefit from knowing they are doing something skilled that actually benefits their family.
Why do you want to do this? Because you don't want to work for the man, because its hard to service your web app and keep your day job? Do you have a family that is getting strained from this?

If you are young, on your own, and can manage it - keep both. Theres no reason to go independent soon as one of your apps goes Ramen profitable. Consider the situation where profit plummets quickly before you can figure out how to turn it around and you can't pay your bills. You'll be scrambling for a job and you may end up taking one you don't like.

Consider why you are thinking about doing this, and look at your own situations and emotions on the subject. We can give great advice but in the end you'll know you situation better than anyone else - even if you explain it.
Peppermint OS One-06172010 Screenshots
Maybe depending on how "sweaty" people are, which would affect the contact resistance of their fingers?
>Among iPad apps, $9.99 is top-shelf.

You think that because that's what the fine Apple iWork apps cost, but keep in mind that they normally sell that as a package, and now each application costs $9.99. So the total price for many people will actually be $29.97, 38% of the cost of the Mac OSX version.

Now that the "iFart" craze is over, expect to start seeing more specialized apps selling at higher prices. "Things" is already about $20 and they are a top grossing app.
I haven't used the feature yet, but from reading the forum thread it sounds like the 6 random characters are only created if someone chooses to shorten their link with db.tt (presumably Dropbox's shortener). By default, resources have 15 random characters. Since URL shortening is mostly for use with twitter, I think the number of non-public files/folders with a corresponding 6-random-character link will not approach 10MM any time soon.
How would you feel if someone uploaded all the source for Woobius to TPB?

I would feel pretty stupid for having allowed someone untrustworthy access to the non-public source code of Woobius. Then I would move on and continue adding features for our registered users, who like to deal with a company like us rather than "someone on the internet who stole the source of one of the up-and-coming construction web 2.0 companies on the web". It would make very little difference to our business model.

However, if someone copied the app, interface, functionality, etc, and made more money than us by doing so, well, I would have to take my hat off, because building a good app is hard, but selling it effectively is harder. If such a person existed, I think we'd be talking to them and trying to hire them or join forces somehow.

The value of an SaaS business is not in its source code (though keeping it private is generally a good idea), but in its existing customer, users, reputation, business connections, etc. Which is why it is an inherently stronger business model than selling bits and bytes (like the record companies do). If recording artists switched to a similar business model (which is perfectly plausible) they wouldn't care about piracy either.
I should add this to http://www.73primenumbers.com somehow...

Oh wait, the Trailer Park already has this functionality! http://73primenumbers.com/trailerpark.html
Why has Microsoft seemingly stopped innovating?
Actually a good story, I hadn't thought about this but yes, clearly, Apple is slowly abandoning the professional video/design market. If there is still a market there (not a sure thing), someone else could step in.
Rob Glaser shares his views on why Microsoft seems to innovate less and less.
> > I'm saying that if you're not interested in different programming paradigms, you're not interested in programming.

> I'm going to go ahead and call B.S. on that. At my most interested, I've had no interest (nor awareness) in functional programming.

FP is just one programming paradigm. Other important concepts in programming include: object orientation, stack based languages, model-view-controller, macros, templates/generics, structured programming, lazy evaluation / dataflow-based programming, interrupts, cooperative v. coercive multitasking, memory protection, pipes between processes, serialisation, event loops, modularity / seperation of concerns, common data structures such as lists, arrays, binary trees, hash tables, etc.

My contention is that a programmer who doesn't have a large number of concepts such as these is likely to build bad software when confronted with a large, complex software project.

> You seem to be saying that functional programming can be used to greatly reduce code. But if my employer doesn't allow it, and my teammates aren't experienced in it, what good is it to me?

Functional programming doesn't just mean esoterica like Haskell. In the wider sense of the term, it means anywhere where you're passing a function as a parameter or the return value form another function. You can do it in such mainstream languages as Python, Ruby, C#, and JavaScript. They're even adding closures to Java.

I'd be very surprised if your employer has a blanket edict against higher-order functions, because employers are either clueful or clueless -- clueful ones will allow it, clueless ones won't know what it is.
The sequence is because Google uses binary diffs for their updates.

The latest release candidate (?) is FRF83. You can download an update.zip from http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-pa... (requires updating to FRF50 first).

You can check the build in Settings -> About phone -> Build number.
How to detect high-risk PayPal Phishing Emails
Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication (Source: Wikipedia). How to detect high-risk PayPal Phishing Emails
It sounds like http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/false-dilemma/ to me. And I agree that that's what the argument sounds like.
grellas,

Thank you for taking the time to post this explanation and make it so clear. I know that takes quite a bit of effort, and I for one appreciate it.
I imagine it depends a lot on what you do. Fortune magazine targets rich manager type people so I'm assuming they mean best companies to work as a highly paid manager. I have no reason to believe that Walmart or EA (the actual EA, not one of their game studios) couldn't be great companies to work for if you're a senior manager in charge of major aspect of the company. If I was a global logistics guy, Walmart might very well be at the top of my list of companies I'd like to work for.
Agree with your sentiments on enterprise douchbaggery, you are probably undervaluing what you have learned: You still have a chance to learn how to milk the enterprise when roles are reversed.
Behavioural game design is a/the topic you should be checking out.

I linked to a couple of good articles in a post here: http://www.lonegunman.co.uk/2010/03/19/behavioural-game-desi...

Design with Intent's "Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behaviour" post is worthwhile: http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2010/03/22/learning-fr...
Then they need to change the way they operate their labs, because they don't need someone with 25 years of education picking cotton.
That's a great point. The truly great works motivate derivative works and copyright doesn't play well with this. No work exists in a vacuum so locking up lots of our culture behind copyright will limit the space of ideas pursued. I've read that book publishers won't even allow quoting from other books without permission from the publisher (they don't trust fair-use).

Still, many of the other inputs: the time of lots of people (many of them very talented) and the money of investors are definitely scarce. I think it's a tricky balancing act. However, I'm not sure the status quo is so terrible. By getting permission or paying, many copyrighted works can be used in new works. In cases where they can't some works may not be created. Along the way, creators can be compensated.
And now we know why other phone manufacturers haven't put the antenna on the outside.
I think you're overstating the risks of random URLs. Unlisted cell phone numbers are not considered public even though you give them to all your friends and to every nearby cell tower. Credit cards are not considered public even though you might hand yours to a lot of strangers.
Self confidence is not a sin. You are no less well prepared than many folks here (my previous management experience was a WoW guild, and many quite talented folks go to YC straight from undergrad).

I know some folks with software that fits your description, but most either consider it a failure or have it on autopilot. They typically do not talk too much about it. Absent putting something on autopilot I think that certain dynamics of Internet marketing favor sustained growth over statis but there are plenty of examples of either. For example, an app reliant on Google will tend to grow automatically over time as the site accumulates trust and Google grows the search pie. All bets off on app store.

Do not assume existence of a profit cap. Google does not stop sending traffic after you hit your projections.
Android Marketplace has (and just used) a Remote Application Removal Feature
I see they have a VP of Sales. Looking at their website got me really excited about their technology.

But its Javascript, so its basically open source. I wonder what the revenue model is? Obviously something compelling enough to get $14 million in round A, which if I can recall, is a lot for a first round.
AND he decided that Comic Sans was a good font; so he also has really poor taste.
Watch out for this Y Combinator spam.
Great, so I can get the latest Holywood blockbuster online from you for $3 instead of have to walk to the back of a Walmart and pay $20?
> GNU make is objectively horrible.

It is, but it's simple, clear and readily understandable. It will never surprise you.

I have come to dislike surprises that happen during build ;-)
What are you using for OCR?

I can imagine the fanciful graphics of such menus often make it harder to convert them to text.
One problem: he never discuses how to analyze the results. That is a pretty big missing piece for an "ultimate" guide. There should be some discussion of statistical tests. Yes, it may seem obvious, but there have been A/B case studies posted to HN where nobody performed any inferential statistics at all. If you don't do any statistics, you don't have all the information you need to make a decision. Results that may look conclusive may not be conclusive at all.
If you take a look at patrick's bcc sales page http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month , it shows that it took him more than a couple of years to be profitable enough to comfortably quit his day job.
I'd say that this is especially relevant to hackers in corporate environments because of this passage:

"Hansen heard a flood of complaints early on: The urinals stank. They were dirty. Where was the flush handle? In one building, the complaints were so vociferous that Hansen started an investigation. He found that the bathrooms did indeed stink, but the urinals appeared clean ....

... The urinals, however, emitted nothing. The cartridges were doing their job. Hansen moved the sewer vent and replaced the cracked toilet. The complaints stopped. Hansen concluded that the smell had always been there, but people didn’t have anything to blame it on until the new urinals arrived."

I've experienced this many times. I create/modify/install PROGRAM_X and immediately receive complaints that it's causing problems on the server where it's running. Investigation eventually reveals that these problems have been going on for some time, but now there's something to blame. I'm sure I'm not alone.
EDIT: nevermind.. you're right. WTF is right.
Interacting with Machines, with Feeling
That site breaks cursor key--based scrolling. Quite unpleasant.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/some-iphone-4-models-see-...

Engadget/AOL doesn't have any big and well-known axes to grind, right?

Here's my take on it: Galvanically shorting the WiFi and GSM antennas is indeed an inherent design problem that Apple solved through some clever adaptive capacitance circuit or something. That solution is working on your phone, but on a certain lot of them, it's not properly adapting.
Seth's Blog: You're already self employed
The gambling man who co-founded Apple and left for $800
The selection of Good Research Topics is the First Step Towards an Excellent 
Writing research papers increases your knowledge and helps to become excellent writers. Good research topics can result in excellent research papers. Selecting good research topics is often a challenge. If you understand the principles of selecting topics you will be able to find topics easily.
I don't understand the negativity. You could make an argument that there are too many startups duplicating effort with similar ideas (with the counterpoint being that there are often valid reasons for that, and established companies certainly do the same thing). But Etude doesn't really fit that mold. It has its own niche.

His story is that he worked for software development shops but didn't enjoy it, built up his own side business until it paid the rent, went full-time and released a new, solidly profitable app, and moved to SF to try his luck in the startup scene. It fits the HN indie template to a T, but that's not a knock. He's taking a more independent path than most people no matter how you look at it.

The first project grew out of software he wrote for himself, and Etude grew out of his tinkering with an iPhone music synthesizer. How does his awareness of a target market and prospective acquirers dilute his entrepreneurship? I'm asking seriously, because I don't understand your point.
Licensing and support. Look at their other products; they aren't cheap.

They are apparently coming out with a commercial version of Sencha Touch if you don't want to release your code as GPLv3. Like you said, it's javascript so it seems you could get away with using the open source version for commercial apps since the code is available anyway. But this was asked in their forum and the person was redirected to a licensing contact so they probably don't see it as so clear cut.
Job ads would suggest CSFB.
I know the most disappointing thing about WWDC this year, for me, was the nearly total absence of anything Macintosh from the keynote.
Intro to K, by Arthur Whitney
Japanese wave-shaping machine
I was a bit glib there and I'm sure you're right that the GP was speaking from experience. But it's also a useless comment to me (and likely all other HNers without relevant experience) because all it tells me is that some guy on the Internet thinks science is a terrible industry to work in. Why? What's the reasoning? What did he/she experience that led to that conclusion? The GP could have given me some insight, even a mere anecdote, to make me think, but given the sparse context, I think the only reasonable thing I can do is dismiss it as crankery or bitterness.

As for your friends, who's to say that academic science is the culprit? There's assholes everywhere, and neither you, nor the GP has convinced me it's endemic to science research.

As for my anecdote, I work in bioinformatics now. I've only just started, but so far my experience couldn't be more different.
Reminds me of the tech-company I worked in for a few years.

One of my friends was working as a programmer there. The guy was crazy and when the inevitable relaunch came, he worked insane hours, would code at night and on the weekends at home.

Our CEO, egomaniac that he was noticed that he would arrive late at work.

He made the technical manager chew him out despite his protests while standing watch next to him.

The developer quit shortly after and the company tanked after one more year.
(Late notes, mostly to jot down a few URLs; also, the R.Young post I linked to above got further debate)

- At http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084150, late in 2009, there had been some debate on the merits/etc. of DB2.

- R.Young is giving the "DB2 9.7 freebie" a spin under Linux: http://drcoddwasright.blogspot.com/2010/06/bill-teds-excelle...

- A bit of search led to a series of articles by Chris Eaton. List at http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/db2luw, best practices to configure DB2 guides at http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/db2luw/best-practices-for-db2-fo...

- Another post in that series includes a comment which clarifies what is and is not included in DB2v9.7 Express-C:
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/db2luw/db2-97-announced-by-ibm-i...
["What is not yet included in Express-C is PL/SQL support, CLPplus or build in package libraries (DBMS_PIPE, UTL_SMTP, etc)."]
That is a good question. Since I've only just started exploring the possibility of using a Brett strain in a batch of beer (I have ordered a Brettanomyces Claussenii culture) I haven't really explored it's use in other areas.

For what it's worth Yoghurt is produced by bacterial fermentation usually with Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, not by a Saccharomyces ferment.
> I've always really liked it.

Every time I have to parse Hungarian notation, I feel compelled to change my name and renounce my ancestry ;-)

But it's a matter of taste. I also find it weird to start method names with uppercase in C#. Again, taste.
And we're making policy on the basis of our ignorance.

Isn't that what politics is all about?
1st-party accessories are a rare move for them.

What? They've had tons of first-party accessories.
I would love to see someone with artistic talent create A/Button.com. I've tried a number of Windows based button generators, and they all sucked. Same could be said for the on-line tools I've seen. Recommendations are welcome.
Try o Make Sure That Each Post Has Something Useful
Could somebody point me to the mailing list where this was set up?
To be honest, it doesn't matter what they are hosting. The important thing from a legal point of view, is how they respond to DMCA takedown notices. If you have 100 infringing pieces of material on your site and you only get 1 takedown notice, you only have to remove the 1 piece of infringing material.

The law is pretty clear. It's not the webhost or ISPs obligation to police it's own content. That would put the ISP or webhost in the position of having to determine who the copyright owner of every piece of material on their site was. It is the copyright owner's obligation to send a proper DMCA takedown notice when infringing material is found.
"switch statements are by far less maintainable than the alternative polymorphism-based implementation"

You know, everyone says this, and I've never quite gotten it. Why is writing another class and implementing another virtual function so much better than adding another clause to a switch statement? At least all the cases of the switch statement are in the same place instead of scattered across a bunch of files.

Polymorphism to me just seems like a switch statement you have to think harder about. Maybe that's why I've always preferred a functional style to an object-oriented one.

Disclaimer: I program in Fortran for a living, so "SELECT-CASE Stockholm Syndrome" is definitely a possibility.
The original iPhone had an aluminum backing, with a small black band that ran horizontally along the bottom of the back of the phone. If you covered this area while using the phone, you'd find that your EDGE speed would drop dramatically, and you would lose signal strength. Once you knew this, you had the choice between avoiding this area with your hands for maximum network performance, or holding the phone exactly how you liked and having reduced performance.

The iPhone 4 (mine, at least) has the exact same issue, and it's almost in the exact same place, the only difference being the reasoning behind why it happens (in this case, it seems to be about bridging two pieces of metal with your hands), and how it can be avoided (buying a case might help with the iPhone 4, whereas it didn't with the iPhone 2G).

I've owned many other phones that were sensitive to where you held them, in fact I think every phone I've ever owned without an antenna that sticks out is sensitive to this problem to some degree. I had to "train" myself not to cup my hand behind the top-backing of the Nokia I had before my iPhone. And now I'm already "trained" from holding my iPhone that I don't touch the bottom left of the phone when I talk anyway.

It's not a big deal, just something to get used to (and it might turn out that a case will resolve it, which can't be said about many other phones with this issue). It is a legitimate "con" when determining whether to buy the phone, but it doesn't deserve all the ridiculous comments about how the phone is somehow flawed because of this.

(And just to give some more specific details of how this affects my phone: if I put pressure on the bottom-left corner of the phone with my hand where the seam is, the signal strength drops: by 1-2 bars if I hold it normally, or all the way to 1 bar if I give it a death grip. In either case, the calls don't seem to drop).
By default all my folders are linkable.

Can you tell us how to change that?
If I'm reading the article correctly, though, iBooks is making content less consistent. If the author puts custom fonts on all their tags, iBooks is going to honor all of them except <p>, <div>, and <span>. So you'll be reading along in Apple's serif typeface, then suddenly there will be a word an <em> tag rendered in sans-serif italics. As the article author said: "Ew."
This must be phone dependent. I have my Blackberry 8900 on wifi all day and it maybe goes down by 20% in 24 hours. I'm currently in Mexico so I leave the GSM radio off and it seems that the battery lasts longer this way.
from the folks who could not reproduce the reception issue, i would be curious to know whether your body was grounded or not. for example, were you wearing sneakers with a rubber sole. did you have your free hand in your pocket or not touching something conductive? what would happen if you tried the same activity barefoot, or while you were touching a faucet or anything else that may be grounded. i'd be curious if individuals body's are, in-fact, changing the impedance of the antenna and rendering it less effective, or if its a combinaton of factors that contribute to the issue.
Aha! So you have to do what PR people do anyway, which is send a pre-canned interesting story which just happens to highlight your company.
News.YC Innocuous News
People win the lottery everyday, it doesn't change the fact that the odds are stacked incredibly high against you.
hadn't noticed that before...
No. I don't make it, so I don't determine the price. That doesn't mean you have the right to steal it.
http://www.iers.org/nn_10398/IERS/EN/Science/EarthRotation/U...
It's something different. I used to tune in radios by waving my hands around the antenna like a theremin. Some people seem to throw off more of an electrical field than others. Yes, I am available for bizarre scientific experiments.
It was originally posted to HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1434964

Here's the HN London google group: http://groups.google.com/group/hn-london

And the facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6677098162&v=info
Apparently, Fire Flowers Make Bushes and Clouds Look The Same
OK cool. Society determines copyrights - I think that's good too. Most people think those who make stuff get to determine the price they sell it for (except a few rare cases, eg AIDS medication), so that's what the law states.