skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's interesting. It suggests that your iphone is typically on a 2G GSM network, rather than a 3G UMTS/HSPA network. GSM is known for causing audio interference because the TDMA transmission window cycles at about 200Hz.

Does your 3GS say '3G' on the status bar while it's interfering with your speakers?
Damon

I like dividends for mature cash flowing businesses who cannot find a good use of their cash

Fred
Google deleted an app whose sole purpose for existing was misdirection (as described by the application's author), and which was already voluntarily withdrawn. The malware application has an attack vector that involves a remote site that wouldn't necessarily always be under the control of the original author.

I have a hard time feeling outraged about this; it seems like exactly the kind of reason why both Apple and Google added the ability to remotely remove applications to their marketplaces.

And, note that this kill-switch only applies to Market-supplied applications; if you install an APK yourself manually, they can't remove it. (In fact, installing or removing an app via the Market actually uses the intents for installing and removing applications that Google used here, rather than installing the APK directly.)
Costner cleanup device gets high marks from BP
You couldn't pick two or three or n browsers with 99% marketshare and make sure your website worked in them?

No, you couldn't. Back then, the web was split between two major browsers: IE and Netscape. However, the feature set of what was supported in JS was not only completely different among the two, but also completely different among different minor versions of the two. Things that worked on Netscape 6.x would be broken on 6.(x+1), and work again in 6.(x+2), although with a different calling convention. It was mind-numbingly frustrating, and I don't think it would have been humanly possible to write JS that supported all minor iterations of each browser and maintained any sort of complex functionality.

By contrast, in 2006, I wrote a JS library that worked on IE6, Firefox 1.0+, and some early version of Safari. It has worked ever since, among dozens of versions of those browsers. That's the difference.

(Edit: I'm struggling to remember what version Netscape was around 10 years ago; the version number above might be wrong.)
Doesn't requiring javascript start to tread on MVC? I would prefer the presentation(HTML) to be decoupled from the logic (javascript). I run NoScript and all the pages I visit load way faster.
A prayer to the programming fertility gods
I used to meditate but no longer do since I'm starting to trip (audial/visual hallucinations) very fast and the trip is usually not a good one. It is a very powerful natural psychedelic experience, comparable to third plateau of DXM at least... but controllable, unlike DXM.
So does surgery, but procrastination is usually the most costly decision of all.
Never play those two in Pictionary! You'll be sorry if you do.
The Dunning–Kruger effect at work.
I am sort of torn. Lets not be the bucket of crabs, who have to pull down anyone threatening to leave the bucket.

Engineers need to learn to be comfortable with business. Part of that is professionalism, which cuts against talking rates too loudly. Part of it is being uttetly unembarrassed to say that, yes, you are priced at what the market will bear and the market will bear an awful lot.
I'd be curious if he actually can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development. It sounds like it's deliberately less than his time-filling rate: he doesn't get fully booked weeks at that rate. In fact he seems to imply that his schedule is so empty that he's likely to be free on any given day to start working on a new project immediately. That's certainly a reasonable strategy, since sometimes the money-maximizing rate is not the same as the one that fills your schedule. But, how empty exactly is his schedule? Are we talking 10 hours/wk billed on average? Or are we talking no work most weeks, with the occasional job every few months?
When you pay serious money for your development tools, you tend to not give stuff away for free. And this is what Berin's article is all about: culture. The culture of free vs. pay. I did AMX (the automation company, not the credit company) development, and there was pretty much zero open source solutions out there, because the culture was, "We charge for writing code."
We tried using a stick-on whiteboard and had dismal results. The writing surface was not smooth, since the thin material was going over our (bumpy) painted wall. Also, the adhesive would come off after a while, making us tape the whole thing down. Replaced it with a more traditional whiteboard.
nginx does restart, but without taking the site down which is the most important aspect and the most important feature. Brining us to another point, I have deployed a lot of servers that use textual configurations and I can't really see what problem you are solving and I can't see how storing the configuration in a relational database will solve any problems.
I don't think the idea is to get hallucinations?
An equally valid interpretation is that Tolkien rots your brain. This is shoddy science, because their "control" experiment is little more than a fig leaf.
That definitely does not happen for me.
Do you close your eyes while meditating?
I've not read that particular link but Samsung have made that only 5% better claim comparing the Retina screen to their slighly lower DPI Super-AMOLED screens. While it seems common to compare it only to the previous iPhone screens, they were no longer state of the art even before the new iPhone.
Do you have the company name by any chance?
I told my story to somebody today who said that a feeling of overflowing love and compassion combined with complete obliviousness to the needs others was more likely the result of recreational drugs shared at a morning staff meeting than a reflection of Apple policy. So perhaps I rushed to judgment.
> So, you can get the time without fiddling with C time structs

You know it's not more a compliment to .NET than a harsh critique on the (utterly detestable) Win32 API.

> Whereas Java has underlying it more Java, .NET has underlying it 30 years of carefully-optimised Windows C/C++ code

Your faith in humanity impresses me.
Another way to search Hacker News
No, it's even better: he's the Brad Pitt and the Wolf (from Pulp Fiction) of iProgrammers. I always thought being the Wolf would be an interesting job; certainly stressful but never a dull moment.
Internet Kill Switch
Approach car dealerships, parts stores and detailers to do web work. My husband has done a lot of side work for these types of companies. They all need websites/ecommerce/cms and most of them have money to spend on it. Perhaps working in this domain that you are passionate enough combined with your skillset will be enough to interest you.
Do responsible customers actually cost the credit card companies money or do they just not bring in any revenue to speak of?
Yes but if I pay off the card every month then the bank is eating the cost of providing the credit. For example if I spend $500 over the month, by the time I get the statement and pay it by the due date I've probably had the use of the money - interest free - for lets say an average of 22 days. Additionally banks have to absorb the risk of deadbeat cardholders, etc. The card issuing bank also hast to pay visa/mastercard a fee every year. and finally the bank has to pays the company they outsource processing to (Total Systems/First Data/etc.). So the cost to the card issuing bank to provide credit is substantially greater than zero. In fact, if they are only making $100 in interchange fees they are probably losing money.

Also, I'm pretty sure the merchant bank gets a significant portion of the fee.
The "motherfucker" page doesn't load, maybe I can help him with some web development at only $1,000/hr
That's probably true. Read it yourselves over the weekend, and sit down with an attorney next week - call a few different ones to see who you feel comfortable with. This phase could go on for a while: don't take any contract provisions personally, as right now they're no more than an opening negotiation position.

Cautious congratulations, by the way - this must be an exciting time, even if it's a bit challenging.
Every piece of software you keep for yourself (or your company) has cost of maintenance attached. If it's not critical to your business and is not a competitive advantage - and the cost of keeping it is eclipsed by the usefulness of being the only one to have it - you should open it and let the world share the benefit of using and the burden of improving it.
It also sounds like he can convince you that if you don't go with him you are going to have problems and then you are going to have to hire him eventually anyway. Being able to convince people not to look around at other options is a very good way to drive your price up.

I'm surprised he didn't make that point in the article; it certainly is related to why he can charge so much...
Whoops, I Just Checked In To A Firing Squad
Nobody is Thinking About Your Product
The author is speaking to a mix of both which exists in the .NET community. Many of the really good IDE plugins like ReSharper, VisualSVN, and TestDriven.NET all cost $$$.

On the flip-side are a number of robust open source .NET components that are free like NUnit, SubSonic, NHibernate, RestSharp, and others. The most impressive is probably the Mono project, which attempts to port the entire CLR stack to POSIX platforms. IronRuby and IronPython are also impressive.
Read it. Take copious notes. Highlight areas of potential concern.

This should help keep your legal costs down, as the attorney can focus his or her time on the issues most important to you.

EDIT: My brother practices this area of law with offices in NY & NJ; if you want to keep costs down he could probably put a junior person on your case. You can reach me at my user name neuenhaus.org
Phineas Barnum was right.
The Apple Lisa also had a keyboard with 77 keys while a regular MacBook keyboard has 78 keys.

Going full circle, though, the iPhone 4 has 2.3 times as many pixels as the Apple Lisa, has a full color screen, you can fit it in a pocket, and you don't have to hunt for a wall outlet when you want to use it.
Real programmers sample platforms like items in antipasto. Revel in choice, don't reject it.
I've been watching and experimenting with Mono for a while ... Mono is not .NET ... it's a beast of its own, with its own ecosystem and culture.

Unfortunately it's missing a web stack; ASP.NET sucks on top of Mono.
I'm really glad that Blackberry finally came up on HN because there's something I've been interested to get feedback about on here.
I feel like a large section of the developer community doesn't understand the power of BBM. It's an application developed by RIM that allows for high speed conversations similar to texting except instead of sending messages over the SMS protocol, it uses the PIN message infrastructure that RIM developed so that it could push emails at a very high speed to phones.
BBM is RIM's secret sauce to their cell phones. It's amazing to me, but having a text-based conversation with someone over BBM is ENTIRELY different than even a threaded SMS conversation on two iPhones. Firstly, the messages are sent between the phones much quicker. It comes with complete outbound/read/delivery reports, and allows for a much greater level of complexity in the messages that are sent. Secondly, it uses a buddying system that changes the dynamic of conversation. You have your normal contact list, and then your 'bbm contacts'. I have 90 BBM contacts, (mind you those are all over people I know who also have Blackberrys and we have connected the two phones), but at school I knew people who had 250 or more. Thirdly, it allows for inline insertion of almost any content one wants. Be that sound notes, music, pictures, etc. It also allows for GROUP chatting. In a way that is simply impossible with SMS and the way SMS billing works with the American cell phone companies today.
I can't stress enough, there is a developer GOLDMINE here. The first group that writes an app which takes advantage of the inter-phone PIN messaging system that RIM has developed to do more than just BBM is going to be looking at a lot of money. I've had friends ask me multiple times why I didn't develop an app that would allow you to play chess or battleship against your BBM contacts (those are two simple ideas, the possibilities are immense), and after some research I got sort of turned off by the BBM api calls. There didn't seem to be enough of them, and the documentation was quite confusing. I feel like the next iteration of the Blackberry API will change this though, and I have a hunch that there is going to be a new wave of apps specially designed to take advantage of this system.
Keep in mind there's nothing like this on iPhone. There is no special code, (like the Bberry PIN) that I can give someone to specially link our two iPhones.
What is everyone's thoughts?
Musk Bets on $178 Million Tesla IPO to Fund Battery-Car Gambit
It does not matter what the purpose of the app was. What matters is the fact that they messed with users' phones without their explicit consent. A proper way of handling the situation would've been to warn the users and then prompt to remove the app, do you not agree?.
I want to agree with you, but then again Target got sued over this: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/29/target-settles-acc...
My wife heard a report on public radio in which a musician demonstrated that vuvuzelas can be very musical when played with proper wind instrument technique. To that, our oldest son replied that 20,000 violins would sound just as bad in the hands of fans at a football stadium.
I'm totally missing the point. Why?
"Rubinius, MacRuby, and JRuby match the spec."

What specs do they all match right now? The implementation teams are doing stunning work, but last I heard they were not all completely compatible and complete.

"And I raise my hand, I'm happily on 1.9 for over a year now."

Sure, but you're part of one those quiet Ruby communities that gets ignored by surveys such as Hampton's.
It's a coder's market, at least in my town... I wonder if it indicates any sort of general bounce back in the economy.
Mattheiu Ricard on Meditation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZwnXj0Ck1k
Working 10 hrs a week at 1k/hr would be awesome. Saving time is better than maximizing money.
Some of the Best National Geographic Photos
The best of National Geographic photos captured in the past few years.
I think in college you should broaden your mind instead of going after what you may have to learn anyway. In college, you have the luxury of time to experiment, something you rarely have later.

Try Haskell, Lisp, Forth, assembly (on bare metal - write your own kernel), Erlang and anything that's "too weird" for most "enteprisey" developers. Buy an old 8-bit computer at eBay just to get a hang of what is programming within 64K of memory. Make hardware for it. Play with non-relational databases.

Most important advice of all: play. You are not learning a job, you are becoming a craftsman (craftsperson?). If you don't enjoy it, you won't do it well.

You'll have time to learn Java, .NET and even Python and Ruby later.
Thank you for fixing both Wired's article and my units!

I still wonder about the variation due to weather though. I can say that flight times vary by at least 7%, so that would suggest that fuel use variation should also be over 7%.
If the best are 10x as productive as the mediocre, I don't see a problem with this. Of course, you might say that the $120 bulk of freelance programmers are already a notch above mediocre and maybe $500/hr is more reasonable, but whatever the market will bear.

It's a good argument to cut top marginal tax rate so that he has an incentive to take more work than he's willing to at $500/hr after taxes (assuming he's in the US).
The HTML-only version is a completely different app. I think the gp meant that sometimes it is not possible to code an application to degrade gracefully. If you want a no-js version you have to code that (almost) from scratch. And gmail is a perfect example for that.
that was so incredibly hard to watch. it was like an awkward hipster at a high school party
I'm guessing this is more of a flat fee structure, and he's optimistically expecting it to work out to $1k/hour.

You can write to my former coworkers in Apple’s
Developer Technical Support, and they will point you
toward a solution within three days. Or you can just
call me and have it ready to resubmit by morning.

. . . so what happens if it's not ready by morning?

Is there a scenario where I'm dinged for $24k in a day while he's mainlining coffee & trying to debug my app?
More chocolate anchovies, sir?
You wouldn't need anything like 4000x3000 for 'retinal indifference' using the article's number of 287ppi@12" use distance as a basis for that threshold. 4000x3000 pixels, assuming a 22" screen is about 227ppi. The threshold in the article, translated to a typical working distance for a laptop of 22" is about 156ppi. So a 22" diagonal screen (same aspect ratio as your 4kx3k) would only need 1850 pixels on the short side to hit the 'retinal indifference' number.

Oh, and some other smartphones crossed into retinal indifference at their typical use distance sometime late last year.
I have my "Bertha" on a textured wall. It works fine, although you can still feel a bit of the texture through it. (The texture is "damped," if you will.)

I don't think it would be a problem for anyone except the most OCD of users.
I think that the one thing MS can claim to have done better with .NET is the fact that you can usually update the framework and notbreak your app. I have used several java apps that would break because I updated my java runtime. I don't really worry about that with .NET
TL;DR If you are a great programmer, you will find a job regardless of how the economy is doing.
Coral cache: http://le.mu.rs.nyud.net/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2010/6/2...

Still takes forever to load, but you can speed up the process using Readability.
Yep.

Set data:
window.localStorage.setItem(key, value);

Get all data.
// (Given that you have the "key" be numeric)
/**
* var setData = ['trackingID', 'trackingURL', 'trackingTS'];
* for ( var i = 0; i < setData.length; i++) {
* window.localStorage.setItem(i, setData[i]);
* }
*/
var n = 0, items = [], count = window.localStorage.length;

while (n < count) {
items[n++] = window.localStorage.getItem(window.localStorage.key(n));
}

/* return items; */

-----

Or, you can just set the items with trivial keys (id, timestamp, url) and get the values with window.localStorage.getItem([id, timestamp...]).
it's 4 x 20 minutes, according to these articles about the paper:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414184220.ht... http://living-mindfullyblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/cognition-a...

This one claims to have the fulltext, but their webpage is broken for me: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/42975499_Mindfulness...
> Pretty impressive amount of stuff that didn't make it in.

Actually it's a pretty impressive amount of wishful thinking that never actually existed. Whether the producers knew it would never exist will be debated forever.
Sorry I shouldn't have capitalized random words. I was excited to post something that's been spinning around in my head for a while.
Don’t forget the iPod touch. I’m really annoyed whenever some app doesn’t check whether there is a camera and just displays a camera button, no matter what (prompting the standard “no camera” dialog).
Please please please, use paragraphs. Juts leave a blank line between them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkhJKAkau2A
Varnish does this with VCL; I think it's translated to C, compiled to a .so, and dynamically loaded. (Using Clang you wouldn't even have to write out the .so.)
I can say it's true that meditation does help with insomnia. In my case, it has made me sleep easily. Give it some time to relax and breathe, next thing you know you are feeling groggy. I know some serious meditators avoid falling asleep if they want to do these for hours, but it can be a challenge achieving that.
It could be the best language and framework in the world, but it's not worth the vendor lock-in.

I agree, C# is a better language than Java, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use it. There's more to choosing a language than the language itself. The environment is at least as important.
I'm sure they have a good reason, too.
There is a lot of fluff in this article. It comes down to guiding a child rather than pushing (or making decisions for) them.
Sure, but that's the part I'm wondering about. 10 hrs/wk at $1k/hr would be great (~$500k/yr for part-time work!), but, say, 1hr/wk on average wouldn't be too good, even at that rate. And I read his post as having an undercurrent of being more, "I'm trying to convince you paying me $1k/hr is a good idea" rather than "there are actually a lot of people already paying me $1k/hr". Has he gotten dozens of contracts at that rate? A few? One?
Flash and Acrobat were in the top 5, but I don't think Flash can take credit for a full 90%.
At the dozen or sites I'm aware of, only a couple are where I'd say are in "full operational mode" after 7-9 months. I've known a couple that have been in a protracted (even by that standard) deployment stage for >12 months. Every place I've seen has a 2-4 Palantir engineers working F/T there during the deployment phase and at least 1 or 2 FTEs to maintain the ontology as mission requirements change ("oh, now we need VIN numbers associated with vehicles!").

I'd imagine it's getting faster as staff gets trained and various little ETL tools are built to funnel data into the backend. But it's been a very frustrating process for most of the customers to drop the money on the deployment and not have an operational tool for the better part of their first year, and the maintenance tail has been reported to be some percentage higher than the original purchase (that may have changed, I've noticed the pricing structure has been changing quite a bit over the last year).

Of course, I also understand that when the customer says "pump data source X into Palantir" and data source X requires a 6 month approval process to hook up to, it can just take a while.
Microsoft has kept introducing major features in .NET every few years - generics, WCF, WWF, WPF, LINQ, EF, PE, Rx... So most of the millions .NET developers spent most of their learning time on those.
On the other hand since 1.2 the only major and widely used new feature in Java is generics. And the focus in the community has been on patterns like DI, AOP, DDD, TDD ...

IMHO .NET still has one huge advantage - developing UIs for enterprise apps. Very easy to learn drag'n'drop win/web forms + multiple control vendors. Real component oriented programming.
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