skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough, I'm glad to see them improve. I don't hate MS or anything of the sort I've just traditionally had bad experiences with their products. I used Vista SP1 for 8-9 months in 2008. It never crashed (when I wasn't OCing) and was great for surfing the web, listening to music, and gaming. I still programmed in a Linux VM though. Cygwin and coLinux don't quite cut it.

It's way too late for me now. I prefer Unix and there's no going back to Windows. I'm a command line junkie. :)
The screen is stunning. I found it annoying that Apple released the Ipad but a month before without it. It seems they could have pulled that one easy, but i guess we will see this in Ipad2, its fair business, but still kind of a dick move in my mind, I am glad i didn't get the ipad yet. I can wait for the retina enabled one.

I am not an Iphone user, but I held friends 3gs and the 4 to compare, and found the smooth block disconcerting, it was harder to cup the phone, and introduced a mild strain on the fingers, it felt slippery, prone to fall out of my hands if i am not too careful, which is often the case when i pick my cell. I suspect that I would have got used to it had I handled one for a longer period of time , but I have to ask, why should I?

The design strikes me as beautiful (the most elegant mobile phone design i have seen to date) But I also think that the design choices Apple imposes, exclude a good number of people physically,(minor discomfort for me, due to a hand injury) some people prefer physical keyboards because of the physical capabilities of their hands,why not make a version for them? Not to mention the great benefit IOS4 and apps can give people working in more physically hazardous environments that are missed by not having a little more variance in industrial design choices.

Its pretty much agreed by both people who dislike and people who love apple, that Apple is not looking to fulfill every niche of the market, it is a source of contention or pride, depending on where your sentiments are.

I am too much of a tinkerer to use an Iphone, i feel it restricts me. Indeed, Apple products, restrictions and other idiosyncrasies drive me mad, and so i don't use them.

I do recognize that these are issues of personal preference, and by most measures i am not the hypothetical "normal person" that always appears in most Apple reviews.

So I fully recognize the genius behind the design, it is elegant and beautiful, without peer in the industry (for shame) and it is also true that the "just works" cannot be overstated. It is simply of no personal concern to me, because i take pride in making things work on my own, and rather enjoy it, as i mentioned... tinkerer

But I would have bought my mom one without thinking twice about it, ware it not for the limited physical options, she cant handle it in her age with her hands, this exclusivity by Apple is a pity, and in that sense it is a bad design choice, I suspect elderly people, factory workers, or people that need to work with gloves would love to have a phone that indeed "just works". this exclusion is something I always found to be the chink in apples design ethos, imagine an apple designed product specifically tailored to the elderly, or an Apple designed tough industrial strength laptop or Ipad.
Except that Gruber is anything but colorful -- his whole aesthetic is dour gray
To a lot of you criticizing how in love with Apple he is... well it's not like Gruber hides being pro Apple, or that him taking sides on a personally owned blogged makes him a bad source of information and observations.

How biased he is can certainly be borderline infuriating at times but I don't know any other blogger right now that writes about Apple and consistently makes observations that weren't obvious to make. He also has a compelling talent for seeing the big picture and making pieces of the puzzle fit.
Right, which is why I talked about marriage in my analogy. A deeper commitment means that you ought to give it some time to see if you can shake the loss of passion.

In the case of a 3-5 month old startup, though, with no employees (dunno about investors), I imagine it's a bit closer to a girlfriend than a marriage.
Interesting. I can see why Craigslists competitors haven't caught on. The incentive for both buyers and sellers is to go to the site with the most users. But I wouldn't have thought the network effect would be nearly as strong for a ChatRoulette competitor.
According to the NYT, the FBI was worried some or one of the suspects was about to flee the country.
Thanks for answering. Not sure how to address your concerns except that #1 is sort of pedantic.

#2 is an interesting issue. Is this true of all versions (jruby, rubinius included) or just the MRI?
Even though this is the Haus of Gruber (why, exactly, does everything he post get FPd here? Confirmation bias, perhaps?), I'll take my downvote suffering-

>In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone

Except multitasking in apps. Actually, scratch that, except apps altogether. Two major shifts in direction.

Of course Gruber led into that talking about hardware. There you can look at the fact that the iPhone pre-4 had a worst-in-class DPI, but now with the 4 it's all about the Retina display. DPI is suddenly where everything is.

The original iPhones were about feminine curves. The new iPhone is about kick-you-in-the-face masculine squares.

And then the front-facing camera (a common complaint on the original iPhone). The volume buttons. And on and on. Original perfection indeed.

The iPhone 4 is a brilliant phone. I'm morally against Apple's dominance of mobile, yet it's hard to gather the strength to argue when a friend talks about possibly getting an iPhone 4: It's a hard choice to argue with.

Yet Gruber's salacious, disturbing love of all things Apple; his automatic justification of everything Apple does; is very tough to stomach.

As a somewhat unrelated aside, one thing that really strikes me about the iPhone is the large amount of wasted space. It's interesting seeing it near >=4" phones and they barely eclipse the iPhone in size, the huge bezel (esp. on the bottom) of the iPhone making a small screen in a large phone.
Corrected. Yes, you're wife comes first. But you're wife would understand the dream you have been working on and make concessions to support it.

In my view, he had two commitments, his company (involving employees, investors and the journalists they signed) and his wife. Weighing these two are the question. I'd argue that the honeymoon could either wait or being shortened up even though it was probably planned first.
How do I structure an Independent Contractor Agreement for an incubator?
My friend is starting an incubator and wants me to contribute ideas for new mobile apps. He sent me an independent contractor agreement, but I'm concerned about who owns what.

We both agree that there should be some co-ownership of the new apps that are incubated. However, the appropriate splits are hard to determine in advance, especially since we don't know how much I'll actually contribute to each of these new apps.

He wants me to sign an Independent Contractor Agreement, but it contains a bunch of clauses that state that anything I contribute in the performance of my contract, he owns.

Is there a way to craft this ICA so that if I give him some of my ideas for apps, he doesn't just own them outright? I was thinking of just modifying the standard ICA so that instead of granting him ownership, it grants him an irrevocable, non-exclusive license to anything I contribute. And that if we get serious about these ideas, and I get involved, that then we'd negotiate, on a per-app basis, what the splits should be. (And I'd confer exclusivity at that point).
No, but (s)he does seem to be of the opinion that they shouldn't be trying to solve this one:

"I just wish people stop thinking that journalism is a technology problem.It doesn't matter how good your platform is."

Maybe that's true. Maybe the Newslab guys were doomed to fail from the beginning. However, who's to say they shouldn't have tried? There's nothing wrong with trying out an idea no matter how slim its chance of success might seem to be.
I like Lisp but ridiculous statements like this:
Using such inferior languages is like asking a chef who could have done wonders with any kind of raw materials, to use a dirty kitchen, a broken refrigerator with food that is about to die a second time, broken tools, and brownish tap water that tasted of swamp land.

just fly in the face of all the available evidence. When I was new to Lisp I took bullshit like this at face value. This is a poisonous line of thinking I'd encourage all new programmers to avoid. Naggum was worse than Xah. As another poster in this thread pointed out, his shockingly intolerant vindictiveness and cruelty were disgusting. If you're looking for "wisdom" then keep walking.

Lisp has had the misfortune of attracting bright but nutty people like Naggum all along. It's held the language back quite a bit.
I would trust an unaffiliated speed test app or website server-side analysis much, much more than any count of signal-bars.

My point is that people are putting a lot of stock in signal-bars, assuming if there are 4-5 bars local service is good (and conversely that drops in signal-bar count mean bad service). That's not my experience in SF at all; the correlation used to exist, but in the last year, it broke. I can have usable calls at 0-2 bars; I can be unable to initiate or hold a call at 4-5 bars. It's some other capacity issue that's not measured with signal-bars that's AT&Ts giant problem.
You know nothing about what you speak.

Well, not in the '80s at MIT, at least.
Ask HN: Does the newest Financial Regulation bill hurt startups?
Independent programmers and consultants dodged a bullet last week when the "Tax Extenders" bill fell to a filibuster by only two votes. It contained a 15% tax increase on S corporations that many consultants use.

But now we have a new version of the Financial Regulation bill out of the conference committee. This week with the death of Senator Byrd (D-VA) and doubts from Senators Collins (R-ME), Snowe (R-ME), and Brown (R-MA!) this bill may go down to a similarly narrow filibuster with 41 or 42 senators against it.

The previous versions of the Financial Regulation bill included six month waiting periods to raise angel funds, multiplied disclosure requirements, authorization for duplicate and burdensome state re-regulation on top of federal regulations, increased minimum income limits for angels and venture capital investors, and other stabs at startups.

News outlets are still deciphering the new bill so I haven't seen much about the new version. Does it still try to stymie startups?
Pivot Before Product/Market Fit, Optimize After
I don't think I saw any part that indicated some sort of death, death of a site usually being when nobody uses it anymore or the site shuts down.

If the excess of penis is its "death", then I'm pretty sure that isn't something recent.
For more on this sort of thing, check out 538's incredibly comprehensive takedown of Strategic Vision last September:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/strategic-vision-poll...

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/comparison-study-unus...
BTW, I installed it and it runs with Aquamacs or the latest GNU emacs distribution, but not for the command line emacs that ships with OS X. Fun stuff.
This would be all kinds of awesome, but I think it's probably a dream. To leap from ObjC to Ruby would be a absolutely massive undertaking for them.

That said, they've pulled off crazier shit before.
That’s a rather serious accusation. Do you have any evidence which would point you that way?
I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.

There's nothing wrong with expecting results.
What actually bugs me somewhat more about this case is that it seems they were only caught (if indeed it was faked) because they faked it badly. But what if a pollster fakes their polls more intelligently, such that they look legit to at least most basic statistical tests? In well-polled areas, especially (e.g. presidential races), it seems like it would be difficult to distinguish between a real pollster, and a fake pollster who took a bunch of other polls and ran them through a "generate random-looking result roughly similar to these other polls" function. As long as your distribution looks right, and your absolute numbers are roughly in line with the pack, it seems like it'd be hard to prove that you didn't actually robocall anyone.
Programmable Matter Folding Like Origami
Apple is sponsoring the development of MacRuby. It's not sponsoring pypy or Haskell LLVM backends.
And Gruber doesn’t, does he?
What? Every single one of those is Apple-related -- one is a low-level review of differences in 10.4, and all the rest were originally written as itch-scratching extensions for BBEdit, which is an ancient Mac-only commercial text editor, and his last day job was for the company that produced it as some sort of tech-support / help-writer.
The contradiction is in praising them for their attention to detail in how that made a feature and then pointing out a problem with the very same feature that can best be described as a lack of attention to detail.
I'm just saying that controlling X10 devices with this device would be a nice hack.
A less serious accusation is that Gruber now knows that his core readership consists of, essentially, the Apple faithful. He knows to pander to that crowd and that is how he gets paid. It's iPhone fans who feel that every Gruber observation about the iPhone is so critically important that it needs to be voted up on HN.
It is interesting to note that Khan Academy even has playlists interesting for startups: http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy#p/c/CADCB4565CFACEBF

It covers the more financial part of it (equity, dilution, and things like that).
The thing that drove me out was uninteresting questions. I wanted an advanced search that filtered questions by minimum asker reputation, but the only operator available filters by maximum asker reputation (i.e. to find newbies).

I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.
used to work for free?
Wellesley and BU, my friend.
There is a world of difference between getting acceptable manufacturing yields on a 300ppi+ iPhone-sized screen and a similarly-dense iPad-sized screen.
I think FourSquare has a unique concept. A lot of people find it attractive enough to use it regularly. Add to that a good team, and I think Andreessen Horowitz's investment is going to pay off quite well for them.
You and your cohorts will be among the first put up against the wall when the HCI revolution comes, especially the assholes that baked that behavior into the device firmware of some trackpads, forcing you to twiddle bits in the driver to ignore the taps (like on the OLPC XO-1).

"tap-to-click" is an abomination I wish to abolish from the face of the earth. I find it incredibly frustrating myself, but the older folks I know that already have problems with instinctively double-clicking everything are debilitated by it.
I am sure there is,but can it be done? If it is possible, then its inevitable future design iteration, and worth the wait, because i suspect it will come soon, or am I wrong?
I probably agree with this view of it more than the other side (I'm From The Internet, after all), but the view from the other side is that the online-advertising ethos is too short-term-focused, so misses the forest for the trees: it's all about whether this $0.15 click is going to sell measurably more $8 widgets on the landing page, and doesn't measure whether the ad campaign raises brand awareness / brand loyalty / positive associations in a way that will improve average sales/profitability over the longer term (say, a year or two).

Of course, you could argue that those vague branding goals aren't particularly important, but I think in a lot of areas they are: the reason someone like Corona or Budweiser sells as much beer as they do is largely because of those brand ads that don't necessarily directly lead to sales, but build an image around the brand that lets them sell more beer for more money than they'd be able to do if they were unknown Brand X.
My favorite line:

"No other company gives a shit about things like this."

...pretty much sums up the major difference between Apple and every other electronics company, perhaps with the exception of litl.
Apple defines beauty. Accept that as the baseline and you'll realize how exactly what was maligned before is now the new benchmark.
Among people who know they exist, fast-forwarding DVR and Bittorrent are much more popular than watching TV with ads. It seems pretty clear to me at least that people do not like ads very much. So it's perplexing to see the networks take a fundamentally good product that people might be willing to pay for and intentionally include something that people really don't want. Why would you consciously choose to make your paid product worse than the free competition?
It has no palm support because you're not supposed to put your palm on it -- it's meant to be held by the thumb and pinkie at the sides (like the pilloried hockey-puck mouse).

If it was shaped to rest your palm on it, you wouldn't be able to use any of the multitouch features without fully removing your hand first.
I don't dislike it (I don't participate in it either), but I agree that these types of services have a long ways to go before they are adopted by the masses rather than just the tech community.

But hey, it is a huge market. Once it appeals to the non-tech crowd it could be big.
Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers
Agreed. The first time I heard of FaceTime coming in iPhone 4, I immediately thought of making a ChatRoulette-like app.

However, I assumed lots and lots of others would think the same, and I was VERY wary of Apple pulling some kind of censorship rejection BS with it.... So I abandoned the idea within seconds.
Yeah, I got that. I was kind of implying that if you know two you should know twenty...
Every tool is an extension of the human mind. Play an instrument, drive a car, swing a bat... Sure you're using your fingers, legs, and arms, but once your mind adapts, you're thinking and reacting more directly about the new inputs and outputs the tool gives you. There are some neurological studies on musicians and their brain maps that demonstrate this.

Think of other types of tools like hearing aids and artificial limbs. Over time, the brain adapts to use them much like the real thing. Some tools are just "upgrades" far removed from what the human body is naturally capable of.

The tools we use definitely shape the way we think.

Marshall McLuhan: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."
Are you aware that the Amazon app for Android / iPhone already does the product lookup / barcode scanning ("by humans") for you?
They just took a big hit in the nerd press for banning twenty years' progress in programming language design. I think they want an iOS development process painful enough that only committed specialists (who double as evangelists) can manage to ship, because everyone else would tend to write portable code that runs on competing platforms.
Farmville bug prompts Firefox update
I think there's sort of a sub-field within image recognition which just focuses on the techniques to automatically detect nudity.

Can you imagine having something on your resume like: "Awarded patent for the 1st algorithm to reliably detect penis."
In the context of org-mode, that's actually quite useful. Did anyone ever hack some kind of canvas for emacs? Would probably work either by hackishly including changed images in the buffer or by embedding another X window.
Ok, but I've never had to scan them - it's been literally years since I haven't been able to find a manual online.

We all have our quirks. I just hate paper/clutter. More than I love books, which means my book collection is in limbo...
These polls are inaccurate even if the data is not faked. If you are doing the poll for Fox News you ask "Are you pleased with they way Obama is completing ALL of his campaign promises?" if you are doing the poll for MSNBC you ask "Given the state of the country Obama inherited are you pleased with his progress so far?"
An AI researcher (Patrick Henry Winston) once mentioned that psychologists and AI researchers kept finding that intelligence was buried in two places: our visual and linguistics systems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXQtoAyCGA&feature=PlayL...
Not sure why it matters so much to you, but for the record, most managers in google are also software engineers. John's earned that title, let him use it.
I think the OPs point is that if this had been an issue with an Android phone Gruber would have jumped all over it as an example of how the phone manufacturer doesn't pay attention to detail and gets the simple things wrong.

I tend to agree on that criticism of Gruber but it isn't really worth pointing out. Everyone here already knows he is very biased and it is reflected in his writing.
I've heard people suggest this before, but Apple doesn't seem to feel the same way. Ruby (even MacRuby) is banned on the iPhone along with every other language that isn't C or Javascript. Apple plays things close to the chest, but banning a language that you intend to base the whole platform around just doesn't make sense.

Syracusa isn't wrong that Objective-C is getting long in the tooth, but Apple has shown more interest in incrementally improving Objective-C than replacing it.
Completely agree. Not to belabor the point (this topic comes up on HN very often), but college was such an eye opening experience for me, that I feel like our world would be a better and more enlightened place if everyone had the chance to go. It's not just about learning to program (which you can do on your own and on the job), but about challenging your "beliefs" and opinions (which you might find are simply wrong).

Maybe you can learn all of this outside of class, but being forced to challenge your world view is a powerful thing.

Ignorance is one of the biggest problems in this world.
I != the other person. It was a simple, obvious observation. In the same way that a writer for the right wing press isn't going to suddenly question conservative values.
I didn't mean to imply that they shouldn't have tried.

I'm just concerned about some VCs think that one of the main criteria is having technical founders.

Historically, this hasn't worked in journalism.

TechCrunch, HuffPo, Drudge, Business Insider...none of these were started by technical founders.
Ask HN: What is your favorite Javascript code snippet? 
Any useful gems or ways to overcome common hurdles? Would love to see and compare insights. Preferably framework/library agnostic if possible.
Reviews: Christian Louboutin Patent Leather Platform Sandals Pink
The collab limits aren't soft, they're just not strictly enforced right now. We may start enforcing them at any time.
More on the iPhone 4 signal issue
>Concerns about patents and licensing have prevented some browsers from supporting H.264; this in turn has prevented the HTML5 spec from requiring support for a standard format.

I thought this was an odd statement since the original "standard format" was not H.264 but Theora. It seems you could equally rephrase that as "Concerns about profits and licensing have prevented some browsers from supporting Theora".
Traditional CS is a liberal art to many people, just like Mathematics is.