skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a recent item on an Apple blog called TUAW, entitled "If I couldn't use an iPhone...":

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/24/if-i-couldnt-use-an-iphone/

Apparently most of their writing staff, if they were hypothetically barred from iPhones, would either get a cheap cell or go without phones altogether. Only if they further hypothesised that you had to choose a competing "smart" phone would anyone consider an Anroid device.

I thought this video was a strange parody, with the customer's point blank refusal to consider purchasing or really even acknowledge anything but an iPhone, but maybe it's not so far out there after all.
on my android my favorite way to follow news is twitter feed. That is where I would like this as I can quickly link to the discussion (which has a link to the article).

I dont find myself using rss as much. twitter nicely encasulates divergent interests - cycling, tech, eff, economist, local blogs, etc

I could approximate it with rss feeds but twitter has been good for this
USV has a General Manager for their Network
He's announcing that he's retiring. He had some health issues in 2006 so I really hope it's not related to that. Of course his consciousness will be uploaded to a positronic brain so he'll be around for a while yet.
Best blogs of 2010
Ten to twenty minutes of quiet meditation is a nice stress reliever but an hour or longer is just wasted time.
NY hotels trying to outlaw short-term home sublets (i.e. AirBnB)
isn't that what the eye-fi card thingy does?

I just don't want extra addon-service crap in my camera.
I can see your point here, but since time is fundamentally an external datum provided by the system, in my view there's no reason to screw with Haskell's internals when you can just produce the necessary simulated environment in which your runtime lives. Moreover, by doing it this way you can use exactly the same code in testing as in production, reducing the risk of something going wrong when you change from the former to the latter codebase.
I'm not sure C++ coders are hiding. They are in plain site in many industries.

Yes, compared to today's scripting, languages, C++ is hard (but not impossible) to use. There are no soft, rounded edges to protect rash programmers who make incorrect assumptions. Basically, C++ makes us stop and really think about what we are asking the computer to do. It makes us evaluate data structures, types and how we use those things.

Ruby and Python hide those details to a large degree (I use and like them both) and there are times when that is OK, but we also need the rigor and requirements found in C++.

If I could only have two languages, I would choose Python and C++. If only one, then C++.

EDIT: Management sometimes want quick and dirty and out the door apps yesterday! I would not suggest C++ for that unless you have an expert team, but one of today's scripting languages would be fine for that sort of environment. I may also note that environments such as that will not keep expert development teams for long.
Publishing != uploading.

Uploading can get images to durable storage, so they can't be lost. Uploading can also make images available to co-workers.

Yes, the shooter can do the upload after the fact, or interrupt, but automatic/loose-real-time means that it happens reliabily and in a timely fashion. The alternative is an assistant.
I think the biggest difference is that Google has aligned its interests more in line with users (as their best long-term strategy). Facebook seems willing to exploit users any way they can.

It's wise to be cautious sharing your data with any large company, but not all of them are created equal.
When I was in high school, I travelled by city bus while holding two different ultra-low-end programming jobs. I think you are underrepresenting the advantages of having a car.

If I expected to be earning and living on less than perhaps $12 an hour for an extended period of time, I would probably choose to go without a car, likely by moving someplace like Dallas TX (where I live now, and where the local wages vs. cost of living seem reasonably favorable) and renting an apartment very close to a bus line on a major suburban business artery. Judging from my high school experience, from many observations of foreigners living off their science grad school stipends, and from everything I've noticed in my years in Dallas, that'd work reasonably well. But doing without a car would constrain my life in important ways (including job options, education options, and general time efficiency) and I'd be very motivated to find economical ways to reduce the problem, e.g. sharing a car, or getting (and probably learning to maintain) an economical motorcycle.
I think that playing the piano provides some variety in your life, and -- from my experience -- variety helps me to be effective. I play the piano too (I have a diploma) and I find that it helps to relax my mind a bit because running a startup is really intense. You probably need some dose of escapism.
Do you know what you call herbal medicine that's been proved to work?
Java (being rife with academic shitheadery itself) may not have been the best choice if you're trying to suggest the author doesn't have a point.
"As far as I know, there's no way to reliably get a pure, known dose illegally."

http://www.ecstasydata.org/send_sample.php

http://www.dancesafe.org/shop/?page=shop/browse&category...

If you don't want to pay $120 for molly or $40 for pills to have your stuff analyzed at the lab using mass spectrometer, then the next best option is the complete kit from DanceSafe for $50. If I ever tried MDMA I would probably just do both, but then again my anxiety is why I don't partake in the first place.
If I said on this thread "oh yeah, I'm a pro at functional programming -I use LINQ alllllll the time" how many heads would explode?
IPhone 3G vs. Solar Death Ray
The future of programming is when both my mum and my little brother can write small code that does some particular task for them. Neither of them will ever understand functional programming. That's basically the answer to what paradigm will win.
Intercepting system calls via LD_PRELOAD is a hugely useful approach for many situations. Got a binary-only piece of code that's creating ghost temp files you want to poke at? Intercept unlink(). Need to quickly (and dirtily) hack an executable that isn't designed for concurrency into sharing a file with other instances of itself? Intercept open().

On the flipside, when trying to do things as securely as possible, never blindly trust dynamic linkage into library functions: attackers can and will use such techniques against you. Reflections on Trusting Trust[1] becomes scarier when you start thinking about all the venues you open with dynamic library linkage.

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
I disagree. I've been on retreats (not Buddhist ones but close enough.) One thing that a retreat will do that regular practice won't, is give you a taste of the mindset and attitude you are attempting to get. The author doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would have easily adopted a meditation regime. After this retreat, it seems like he might be more capable or at least motivated to integrate one.
We have a B2B product focused on small businesses.
Just in case you didn't know, the Safari Bookshelf mobile website is quite good. Most of the books I use are deemed "mobile friendly" and the experience is good enough that at times I will choose to read on my iPhone rather than on my desktop.
We could just crash it, it's in Union Square (SF). :)
The ironic thing is that in the HPC space, where they've done large scale message passing for decades -- the holy grail has always been large scale shared memory!

Now admittedly the programming models in HPC were ugly (MPI), but nevertheless the lack of shared state and the use of message passing certainly didn't make it easy to write high performance parallel apps.

I think the problem is fundamentally hard. And when a problem is fundamentally hard the solution to it often is "that other thing we haven't really tried yet". Until you've really tried it.
I think there's a difference between 100% committed and spending 100% of your time on your startup.

For example, would you say that 100% committed means 100% being awake? Probably not, given that you need sleep.

I think the same applies here. You probably need time away from your startup to allow your mind to work its own interior miracles. If I were you I'd play that piano, I bet it'll be a net benefit to your startup.
I've been doing the "Create Your Own Real-World MBA" thing for ~6 years: it's called the Personal MBA. My approach is different - instead of assuming you have $100k+ and are an accredited investor, I recommend a set of great books to read. Once you master the essential concepts, you're prepared to start making a difference immediately, without mortgaging your life for an MBA.

Based on my research, these books are the best for business self-education: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

Here's an essay about the project: http://personalmba.com/manifesto/

My first book (titled The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume) comes out December 30th: http://personalmba.com/book/

In the meantime, I'm creating summaries of all of the books on the PMBA reading list: http://personalmba.com/category/book-summaries/. (David Allen just jumped in on my GTD summary.)

Not sure why Ferriss didn't point people to the Personal MBA in his post (I know he knows about it), but that's not in my locus of control. At any rate, if this type of approach appeals to you, feel free to AMA - I've been at it for quite a while, and I love helping people learn business without taking on crippling debt.
You would think after a while he couldn't get the same feeling anymore.
Water is said to be active when the effect on basophile cells was positive. Basophile cells are actors in the immune system and Benveniste was studying mechanism of allergy when he discovered this effect. Water remained active even with repeated dilution and shaking. When water was heated above 80°C and cooled back again it became inactive, which means it had no more effect on basophile cells.

Benveniste also detected the presence of a low frequency (~500Hz) EM emission of active water, which is not present with inactive water. The source of this low frequency EM emission is a problem in itself because it is not compatible with the water molecule oscillation frequency.

Recording the EM emission and replaying it back on inactive water rendered the water active on the basophile cells. These are the experimental evidences reported by Benveniste that remains to be explained.

Things fall in place when we assume the presence of stable water molecule aggregation with charge movement through them, a growth mechanism by polarization affinity and fragmentation by shaking.

BTW it is not true that the editor was willing to publish the "guy's" article. Benveniste was before it a well known and respected scientists and he had to insist and debate for his article to be published. It was published because the editor had nothing to oppose to it and justify a rejection.

When he came to check the experience with Randi, probably under pressure of the scientific community, they found nothing that could explain the observations which where reproduced at will in front of them in increasingly twisted ways. Randi and the editor went nearly nuts for not finding any trick or error.

The result is that they justify the mismatch between their beliefs and the data by undetermined experimental errors. How convenient, but that is not science.

Note that I am not talking about homeapathy here and claiming anything about it. I currently have no clue and no beliefs about it. What I say about it is I don't know. And this is the best that we can objectively say a priori without error about it.

Back to the Benveniste discovery, the normal scientific process should be to try to elaborate a theory that explains the observations; not to debunk it at any cost. Once a theory is proposed and proved to be coherent and valid with current scientific knowledge and understanding, it should then be tested. My father proposed such a theory, but it has not been tested yet. From what he told me, it should be easy. If the water molecule aggregates are present they should change the electric property of water. Simple direct measurement with conventional EM measurement devices should do it. No need of hard to control basophile cells reaction test. According to Benveniste observation, EM signal could induce formation of these aggregates and thus, according to the theory, alter the EM property of water. If the aggregates are stable, the change if EM emission of water would be persistent and measurable. it would be removed after heating the water which dissolves the aggregate structures. How hard would this be to test and explore ?
This is true but I find actually having to speak the words out loud forces me to reveal implicit assumptions I was making behind my own back. Drawing pictures doesn't always tease this out.

Often the eureka moment occurs when I realise that my hidden assumption just makes no sense at all and I feel stupid but elated at the same time.

Personally I do need someone to be there otherwise my mind carries on hiding things behind my back.

I don't think my mind and me are on the same team sometimes :)
Stack Overflow Fatigue
And safari does this already
Can you imagine what life would be like to this guy when he is "feeling his version of normal"?
I think you need some balance. Most likely, you are going to be working 7 days a week on this anyway -- you will need to do a few 'normal' things to keep yourself sane.
For me personally, there was a stretch from 2004 to 2008 when it was really easy to get remote work. This allowed me to travel and work at the same time, which I loved. Businesses were desperate for people with good web development skills, at that time.

Then the recession hit, and everything changed, at least for me. The remote work vanished. I can still find good paying work in New York City, but its all the kind of work where you have to go into the office everyday.

My guess is that the kind of work that can be done remotely has moved to countries that have very low wages. The kind of work that remains is the kind of work that can not be done remotely (or so the client feels, due to considerations of security or firewalls or the need for cross-functional team integration, or for the need of internal training of other workers who are suppose to learn skills from you).
Thanks for taking the screenshot. I honestly didn't even know there was a browse called Epiphany. I'll see if I can tweak that.
American Professor to Chinese PhD Student: Go Make Money instead
I would have loved this if the blog post contained more technical details and some code snippets about the tradeoffs involved.
Functional languages cover a broad spectrum. There are often multiple concepts being explored in a language, then there is the issue of cultural heritage of the respective communities, and the fact that FP languages have traditionally had multiple implementations with different tradeoffs.
as an example -> lisp and scheme are functional without being immutable. scheme favors a small spec while lisp includes large number of inbuilt primitives. Clojure introduces persistent datastructures and interesting new concepts like agents and integration with the jvm. I know too little about haskell and ML to make any informed comments about them but they appear espouse static typing unlike lisp / scheme. So if you have a particular beef about a functional language, look further and you will find one that doesnt share those traits.
I'll speak to the languages I know here.

Haskell is a research language. It has become usable for practical purposes, but at heart its still a research language. Haskell focuses on isolating side effects over practicality or ease of use. For certain classes of problems, that turns out to be the most practical thing. Want to be sure certain parts of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles? Haskell is your language. Is your app mainly centered around a complex GUI? Maybe you should look elsewhere.

I notice no mentions of Clojure in the article aside from including it in a list of functional languages. Clojure is a practical language designed for getting stuff done. It offers the most comprehensive solution for managing shared state I've seen in any language and does its best to get out of your way.
Yet he has a bias and it shows in his comments on Scala:

And if you're working in a hybrid language, what assurances do you have, really, that your system is really thread safe? Indeed, the risk compentation effect might give you a false sense of security, giving you a system that actually had more concurrency problems that one written in a "dangerous" language.

The phrase "hybrid language" in the original text is a hyperlink to Scala. By author's own admission, the languages he has tried were Erlang and Haskell. He hasn't mentioned either trying or not trying Scala, but the article seems to imply the latter.

The problem with what he said is that he seems to be dismissing "hybrid" languages like Scala as equally overrated or worse than pure functional languages like Haskell. Just like Jerf pointed out, it's the paradigm that matters more than the language. A language like Scala is designed to make FP paradigm easy to do, without being a pure functional language. As far as I know, it's not designed to make your programs "thread safe". I believe that the author wouldn't have made his claim about "risk compensation" if he had actually studied Scala and tried it out.
Has it become more acceptable to conflate the two languages in recent years?

Either that, or people use it as a shortcut for "the C family of programming languages" which would include mostly C and C++ as well as special-purpose dialects.
Must be an EU thing. In Ireland every worker is entitled to a written declaration of their job, pay, conditions etc.
If you need design/front-end coding hit me up at davide {at} 39inc.com

(as a company we actually do more than just design, but the design part is what i'm personally taking care of)
Canada Needs Entrepreneurs
I suspect the majority of C++ programmers is older (44 myself), has gotten ranting and raving out of their system and are now quietly doing their jobs. I remember heated discussions about dynamic vs. static typing or templates vs. avoiding code bloat on Usenet but now I feel too complacent to pick any more fights.

I think part of it also has to do with the availability of free alternatives for all different paradigms. Back when a decent C++ compiler (Zortech!) would set you back hundreds of dollars it was easier to get defensive about your choice of programming tools and speak up.

When the job requires it I still use C++ but not as much as I did 10 years ago; 15 years ago I was using only C++. C++ has survived Java, seems to be on friendly terms with C# and will be still around when the functional bubble has popped.
Nanoscale Random Number Circuit to Secure Future Chips
Herbal medicine.
If you have been playing for years, then keep playing. Actually this hobby of yours may do your startup a lot of good. Think about it, sometimes you get stuck and you just can't find a solution. You take a break, go to sleep, work out or whatever and the solution always comes to you in those moments.

What you do need is a schedule of goals to accomplish daily. If you have accomplish your goal, then you can spend time having fun as a reward.
New Rules for Data Models and Security Architectures
Nope. If they hired you as CTO before you had it then I don't see why it should be a factor in your technicalness or ability to do your work.
Sweet - this can only get more free publicity for AirBnB & similar services.
I'd contend if you don't keep up some semblance of a life (hobbies, friends, etc) while doing any work, you're going to burn out.

You can work * a lot * as long as you keep your life together via social and personal development activities (as well as exercise, don't forget that one).
Error handling is one thing you want to have handled consistently across all code, including third party libraries. I may be able to enforce a convention in my own code but the typical app uses a dozen or more libraries.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3077866/large-scale-desig...
Ideally, you would find a regular meditation group that has one or two weekly sessions of maybe 30 minutes and some members with experience who can give you hints. That gives you a commitment to regular practice and a supportive group of peers without being too invasive. Skipping a week isn't a big deal, either.
Consumerization of IT: How It Will Impact Enterprise Applications
In the best case your startup must be your hobbies, wife, girlfriend and lover too... but you still need a life.
Good point. Our mobile support is brand new so once we see how users react to it we'll probably refactor our plans.
I like relearning. I don't have much use for re-learning... I'd rather learn to do something new. The "to accomplish the same things, only on Windows instead" is the crucial qualifier. I'd rather spend my time, I don't know - learning to configure nginx or doing Haskell tutorials than learn someone's proprietary shell, given that shells aren't particularly exciting and I already know enough about the shells that every other platform offers to be satisifed.
The idea is that you continue to meditate regularly after the retreat. It will be much less practice, but it will build on the experience and monumentum you got during the retreat.
Java Forever: "Dad, why do we always use .Net?"
Strategies to Counter Acute Leukemia | Cancer 24h
Crazy in that he would do that, but not crazy in the sense of catatonic depression.
For a company that seems to have so many internal problems, the tools Yahoo gives away are really fantastic. YUI, PageSpeed, Pipes... all great stuff.
Just like Turing did: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/05/talking-to-porgy.html
This article closely describes how it works with me many times..after being stuck in some problem for a certain amount of time I feel the need to get another perspective on tackling it..and then just midway while explaining or after explaining to someone else the answer seems so obvious that I feel dumb for not being able to get it sooner. Now I know its not just me.
Not really, but do note that it is spectacularly faster.
The thing about this story at is hard to believe is that the more you use ecstasy, the less it makes you happy. You burn out those neurons. Takes years before it will effect you again. Can't imagine he was getting anything but speediness off most of at stuff, would have been pure dependence, not a high.
Why do you think they are bound to get it right? Is MS bound to get search right? Is IBM bound to get desktop computing right?
The problem with what he said is that he seems to be dismissing "hybrid" languages like Scala as equally overrated or worse than pure functional languages like Haskell

His point is that concurrency is something you still have to consider carefully and design in from the ground up and that no language is a silver bullet for this essentially hard problem. I think he's also probably right to worry that people will think that because they're using Scala and actors, for example, that they have automatically created a correct, performant concurrent application.

That doesn't mean though that languages like Scala don't give you better tools to deal with these issues than Java.