skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both readers have their strengths and weaknesses, which is why I'm still playing with both. iBooks is certainly the younger of the two and I expect it to pass ahead, especially since the Stanza folks seem to be under the sway of Amazon, which has a vested interest in the fight. PDF capability will certainly be a big plus for iBooks when it comes to the iPad. I'm running the new version on my iPod Touch, but PDFs on such a small screen aren't that useful, at least to me.

Frankly, all the readers I've used fall short when it comes to library management. I want something like iTunes (only better!) both to manage my library and create and manage reading lists. Right now everything just goes into one big pile that takes _forever_ to scroll through (I've around 800 titles in iBooks and several hundred in Stanza). iBook on iPad actually has crashed (!) a couple of times as I've gone scrolling from the top of the alphabet to the bottom. I'll admit I'm pushing iBooks harder, but that's because I expect so much more from Apple ;)

The best desktop solution I've found for PDFs (and cbr/cbz comic files) is a comic book reading program called Comicbook Lover. I use it for PDF management (okay, I manage my digital comic book collection with it too...) It works very much like itunes. If they would add ePub support to it, and change the name, they could rule the world, at least for a while. Unfortunately their iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch app is woefully lacking in the very features that make it work so well on the desktop.

Edit: And I do a slow burn every time I go to add documents to my iPod Touch or iPad. Syncing through iTunes is just _stupid_. I understand this is a problem with _many_ apps on the iOS platform, and that there are political and commercials issues involved, but I don't care. Apple needs to work this out, post-haste...
You'll have to take that up with him; I'm afraid that my insight into the minds of complete strangers is rather circumscribed.
Porting software to a completely different culture isn't cheap and there's little incentive for volunteer open source projects to do it. If enough software that you want isn't available on Windows, it's probably cheaper for you to learn Unix.
Probably the one making consistent money off "the enterprise".

Mind you, I don't even know what the enterprise is. All I know is that I've shipped a lot of software, and really enjoy using Visual Studio.
To be fair, that was addressed in the letter.
Eh, its cool to be passionate about your own startup - I didn't realize rantfoil was the founder. :)
As I said, I think Posterous is a cool company and they're better than this. I didn't want to ruffle anyones feathers, just state my opinion on these kinds of messages to users. He was probably right about my comments on their theme policy, he certainly knows better than I do, I tried to clarify my post a bit. We should be glad we're having a discussion about this - maybe we all learn something :)
Did Team Oprah Rig a Contest Against Zach Anner? We Investigate (thoroughly)
This is especially common with slightly premature babies. My son was born a day shy of 36 weeks (normal is 40 weeks; 38 is considered "full term") and needed a lot of training.

He knew how to suck and he knew how to swallow, but couldn't put them together.
I wonder if a typical trait of successful founders is to be excited/determined enough to do good work (=results/time) while putting in obscene hours. Is this true?
That's precisely what Gruber is saying, and though I initially read that portion of the TOS with the "creepy" interpretation where Apple will track you constantly for some nefarious iAds-related purpose, I now think your reading is probably right.
Actually no. Mousers checkout page was just buggy (showed 0,00 as shipping costs), but after few emails the truth was revealed; they want 20 for shipping apparently
My view is everyone is built and wired a little differently. I love these behavioral management studies too, but certainly there exist people who can stay very productive at the 80 hour a week mark for a few years.

If the professor mentioned properly selects for such people out of his mountain of applicants and the group's culture thrives on it, then he's running a tight ship.
there is no more KGB, it was called FSK(federal service of counter-espionage) in 1993 and in 1995 they renamed it to FSB(federal service for security)
I write C# code in Visual Studio every day at work, and I've got some thoughts.

Microsoft writes nice tools, and they all work well together. It's a truly integrated environment up and down the stack. And for the simple cases, it's great. I hit F5, and my app runs, right out of the box.

But I find the tools difficult to extend, when it comes to it. They are mostly black boxes. This means I'm dependent on MS to add features before I can use them easily. It's possible to write plugins for VS, etc., but I don't get the sense that most people do that. I know I don't. It seems difficult and time-consuming; I'd rather just live with less than ideal behavior.

But I've been trying to branch out into other stuff in the past year or so and dabble in different things (app engine, some rails, some C code). What I've noticed is that low level tools like make are cool for a few reasons.

First, regardless of its syntax, make is pretty damn simple for the simple cases. Even as a novice, its easy for me to tweak a makefile to suit my needs. I think this simplicity is valuable. By the same token, the generated code for rails is all pretty easy to follow and tinker with. That's not always the case when you pull back the curtain from Visual Studio.

Second, make (and others) are orthogonal to the other tools I'm working with. It doesn't matter what editor or framework or languages I'm using. It's pretty easy to whip up a makefile to compile or deploy a dev build or whatever. This is true because steps in a makefile are expressed in terms of terminal commands. Simple and powerful.

Third, make is ubiquitous. I think it's pretty cool that I can use the same makefile to deploy my app engine site from Ubuntu or OSX.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that MS's powerful tool set feels oddly constraining to me. I feel much more in control with a set of simple and independent tools, even though I'm much less experienced with them.

Just my two cents.
HN has a general disdain towards anything which is detrimental to the online landscape (spam, bad pieces of legislation, etc).

No one really gives a crap about Jason or Mahalo, the consensus just seems to be that it operates in the gray areas of SEO with little value added to the content they vacuum in.

Feel free to correct the perception though.
I think the accessibility of any language nowadays has the potential to create many more dicks than microsoft ever did. I also think Microsoft go to more effort to teach good programming practices than they are given credit for. I also don't subscribe to the view that I have to learn everything in order to pick up new tricks. I learn the languages, platform and tools which enable me to ship my chosen products in my chosen markets. I think too many assumptions are being made about microsoft programmers.
One of them here.

I do have extensive experience with PHP, some personal projects in C++ and have written some very useful (for me) Lisp code.

Perl seems to be a Lisp without macros (lisp-macros) with C-ish syntax. Actually, with lots of ready to use macros, but without the easy possibility of adding your own macros. And it is faster than PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. So it has been good so far.

To write web pages I'm using Mason.
I don't know why people keep mentioning that website in the context of the location issue.

iAds/oo.apple.com are in a different section of the privacy policy entirely. They have nothing to do with location tracking.
As someone who recently began to write Fortran for a living, no. The minute you get away from FORmula TRANslation and move into simulation logic the weaknesses of the language become hugely apparent. The complacent "What do you know! Fortran actually is perfect! HIGH-FIVE" mentality in HPC is a little bit frustrating as someone new to the field.
WattOS R2 Screenshots
Boston

SocialSci is hiring two science minded RoR devs to help bring academic research online.

We save researchers time and money by bringing their scientific surveys (drag/drop, pdf upload, and visual response) online. We have developed a full suite of scientific tools and linked them to an anonymous, honest, and payable group of participants.

The team is currently 4 strong (2 dev, 1 biz/scientist, 1 academic sales), but we want to bump it up to 6.

Recently seed funded (we can pay you actual money / equity), graduated Tech Stars Boston, and now work out of Dog Patch Labs (Cambridge).

If interested, shoot me an email at leon@socialsci.com

Thanks.
Doesn't excuse being an horrible asshole.
I remember when these were deployed in Terminal G at O'Hare a few years back, with lots of signage hoopla in the bathroom about it. Then they disappeared with no public explanation. Interesting to hear the reason was pipe clogs.

Given that they did cause clogs, I'm not sure I think the plumbers' skepticism is as unreasonable or necessarily self-interested as the OP implies.
Apple Stealing All FaceTime Information, AT&T Locks Users via OTA Updates
> I find your willingness not to understand what you are doing quite amusing

Being condescending and rude isn't moving your point along any. In fact, I still don't know what you point is. You appear to think makefiles are inherently superior to VS solution/project files, but for no obvious reasons. The only reason you give seems to be that VS users don't understand their build system, whatever that means.
I'm a hacker, just like all of you. It's hard for me to avoid having an emotional response over something I've poured my soul into.

Mea culpa. Edw, you're right. Pclark, thanks for the feedback.
I'm so sorry :(.
Or if everyone just left their cars at work and took public transit/carpools the rest of the time.
Where did I say I didn't know Unix? The problem is that for some deployed solutions adding in Linux boxes simply because they host one piece of software isn't optimal, so "native" solutions are chosen instead. We aren't talking about a product that is tightly coupled with the OS (or at least it shouldn't be).
I understand that he never benefited that well, financially, despite Pac-Man's success. I wonder how much money he could sell those drawings to collectors for...
You can look at the HP garage:
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/garage/

It is here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Which, to be fair, only makes the guy seem more out of touch with reality.
I thought there was going to be a punchline about the CEO not realizing that they'd laid off 50% of staff.
I hear you on the email cleanup thing. We've put some measures in place to clean up markup, but there's much more to do here. If you have more feedback, I'd love to hear it -- my email is garry@posterous.com

We're a work in progress like any other. But we're iterating as fast as we can.
Of course you're right, but that's a pretty high standard to hold him to. You'd have to say the same thing about CEOs who behave in a way you support, too. ("Yeah, their stock improved after he started treating employees with respect, but how do you know they couldn't have done better without that change in behavior?")
Given that I've done this quiz before, it's surprisingly hard. I'm not sure though if this is supposed to tell me something about serial killers, or about programmers.
Was it helpbubble?
http://www.helpbubble.com/tryit
I'm inclined to believe this. Check out this question titled "Do your family members or friends criticize you for the amount of time you spend on Mahalo?"

http://www.mahalo.com/answers/do-your-family-members-or-frie...
It's not what he's saying that gives it the anti-Microsoft flavor; it's calling every Microsoft programmer a Dick. Hiding behind this moniker that is obviously insulting -- and the author proves he knows this when he says "short for Richard, of course" -- all the while pretending it's innocent is what does it.
Luckily my wife and I are both developers. We've always worked together from corporations to a number of startups that we were involved in.

I can't begin to imagine what it must be like for a spouse who has to put up with a significant other working in a startup... Crazy hours, the highs, the lows, lack of sleep, bad moods, wondering where cash is going to come from.

On the other hand, doing startups together has been an immensely rewarding experience. Through our shared experiences we've become closer than I could possibly have imagined. So, for us, it has all been worth it - at least emotionally.

I really feel for people who aren't able to spend enough time together, or are finding empathy for a partner hard to muster. I can hardly begin to imagine how bad it must have been for the poor EA wives - awful.
I had performance issues running on Leopard. Changing to Java 1.6 seemed to improve things.

I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard, and am eager to see if things (with Helios) have improved. I'll post an update later tonight.
As a startup it's in my interests to minimise costs. Therefore I was hoping to hold off spending money on legal advise until absolutely necessary. If you think that a lawyer and NDA agreement must go hand in hand then I'll start looking for the relevant lawyer. Thanks
Bricolage
Am also interested in seeing how this goes. If anything it looks like this is better way of finding that diamond in the rough on those sites.
Definitely varies by prof--- even in the US, which on average is less laid back, I know people who have to actively hunt down their professors if they ever want to see them. They could probably take a month off and nobody would notice. Seems especially common with fairly senior tenured profs who've moved into academic politics and PR type roles: when they're spending their days in strategic-direction meetings with deans, or giving invited talks at industry events or whatever, they can sometimes forget they have a research group and some students.
I worked with a forestry service guy who:

1) Would always miss when he clicked (single click). He'd line it up, eyebrows screwed up in concentration, raise his index finger up high, bit his tongue with intensity, and mash that finger downward. Unfortunately, all the full-body effort of mashing that finger down meant that he skewed the mouse a good few centimeters in a random direction, meaning the entire task started over again.

2) Absolutely did not understand that Wordstar (yeah, you read right) isn't a typewriter. He would laboriously space-space-space-space... manually center text. Hit enter at the end of every line. He would type sentences in -- while staring at the keyboard and using his index fingers -- only to finally glance up and notice an error three lines prior. He would then backspace-backspace-backspace... deleting all the characters until he reached the offending error.

Watching over his shoulder provided perhaps the most fascinating and educational experience I've ever had in user interfaces.
Ground floor in Toronto, the house shook. Although that may say more about the house than the quake...
There's a lot of them (dozens) at various office buildings where I work. They're good for an office setting, where people get used to the quirks, which are mainly: nothing but urine in the urinal (in particular, no saliva, which can clog the one-way-flow mechanism). At an airport, it would be asking for trouble.
Anyone has more information on why he visited the Twitter office?
Good suggestion - thanks. Do you think that should be within the actual screen shots? or underneath (where there is some description)?
San Francisco, CA

Metamoki.com

https://www.jobscore.com/jobs/metamoki/gamesoftwareengineer/...

We're hiring (one) generalist software engineer who loves to work on games.

We're self-funded (think Valve)... so no VCs or Boards to force the wrong incentives (like hire too many people too quickly or subsequent layoffs). We believe in work-life balance (leave at 5-6pm) yet our team accomplishes monumental projects[1] in short timespans (minimal overhead = maximal productivity). If you want to build fun projects without bureaucracy, this is the place to be.

We run lean, employ various Agile techniques, and utilize continuous deployment. No telecommuters please.

HNers can email me at van@metamoki.com for referral (and cut in line) or for more information.

[1] e.g.: Internal, real-time analytics; compilers; continuous deployment system; distributed genetic algos simulator; etc
Not arguing about the dubiousness of Mahalo. I agree with the assessment. But I don't see why we're lowering the bar for the quality of comments when it's re: a maligned entity. Sorry, it's still HN, when I read a thread about Mahalo I'm not looking for a me-too dogpile of jokes or zings. I want to read some real analysis.
Chicago City Hall and O’Hare International Airport have also removed their waterless urinals, citing clogged pipes.

Apparently that design calls for hot water to be dumped down the urinal when the cartridge is changed to control an oily substance that builds up in pipes. The speculation is that not all janitorial staffs embrace this extra task.
It's also a great way to start discriminating based on looks/gender/physical appearance (fitness, for example)
I'm in Western Québec, and was off today (tomorrow is also a provincial holiday). I was out biking, and had no idea what was happening. I got home, and my cats were hiding, and books were strewn everywhere, having fallen from the shelves. The only actual damage was a broke bulb from a fallen lamp.
It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity.

Measuring number of hours in the office is not a direct measurement of productivity, and these employees were meeting the metric, but only costing the company money, not making it any.

Incentive structures are tricky.
What does this have to do with DRM?
It's been a bad month for "The World's #1 Hacker"
To get the Verified Account badge?
YouTube wins case against Viacom
That works, but launching the application gives me a swirl that hangs forever.
"Any Man Who Can Drive Safely While Kissing A Pretty Girl Is Simply Not..."
Recommend they get a trackball; a big, beefy beast that can be slowed to a crawl. Better for the neck, better for double-clicking, and easier for positioning the cursor (especially if they have Parkinson's).

http://cil614.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/kensington_trackba...
We have them in the building I work in. People seem to fairly routinely continue to spit into them, which frankly, I don't understand at all. Maybe my physical makeup is just different, but I don't feel a pressing need to spit throughout the day, and if I did, it would almost certainly not occur to me to spit into a urinal, waterless or otherwise.
This is a small example, so yeah, you're right, when the absolute times are so small.

But say instead that it's a larger problem, and that #1 takes one day to build, #2 takes a week, and the "preferred" solution (call it #3) takes two days.

Then along comes your change request. It will take most of a day to rewrite #1 to do something never anticipated, but it can be slotted into #2 or #3 in about an hour.

Now you've broke even between #1 and #3, and that's only the first change request. Any real system is going to get many more.

These numbers are pulled out of thin air, of course, but they're pretty accurate according to my development experience.
That feels pretty strawman-ish. OP didn't imply that it is okay for everyone to know where he or she is, only that they don't care if a second (or more) benign entities do.

If you presented your motivations for asking their location and identity, and were considered suitably benign to their tastes, you might find out. Instead, it comes off as being glib (perhaps intentionally so, I don't know).
Or, to put it differently:

The arms race between unlockers/jailbreakers and Apple proceeds apace, and FaceTime lacks enterprise-level security features.

The hedline on this article is pure linkbait.
The message says:

"You have already purchased this but it isn't available for redownload. To purchase it again at full price, tap OK"

Given the exact phrasing of the parts I highlighted, I don't think it is a bug. I cannot see in the picture what book it is, but since this does not happen to you for your books, it could be something related to copyright/distribution.
Yeah, but most of the time, the name is going to give you strong clues about gender and ethnicity anyways. And education and job history probably give you good ideas about the applicant's age. People already have plenty of opportunity to discriminate even without the photo.
Enjoy Shopping for Party Favors
There's probably a good way to do this. The one time someone gave me a resume with a face on it, it came across as creepy and desperate, and I ditched it immediately.
Yes, but you didn't present evidence that he didn't hurt his company. You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.
Didn't feel anything.

Montreal.
More VC Bloggers Needed - from Clean Tech and Life Science
This is generally the style of most ignite talks.
I don't doubt that there are diamonds in the rough. However, when I search and see a random Mahalo page in Google I have no way to know if this is one of the diamonds, or one of the thousands of "rough". Why take that chance when I can go to a more reliable site that I trust more?
Comparing Sortfolio to elance is like apples to stale Runts candy
Healthcare: The 6 Trillion Dollar Industry
Or, if they bought a $500 lemon, left it taking up space in the company parking lot and kept commuting as usual. In that case, are the $500 tax-deductible?
Assuming this is true, good. Apple has been having it both ways by publicly prohibiting unlocking and jailbreaking while actually allowing it. Let them choke on the bad PR their tight control causes.

As for the FaceTime stuff, there are only so many ways it could work. There must be some kind of call setup signaling, and routing it all through some Apple server is a pretty obvious way to do it. The lack of encryption is a shame, though.
At Ontela, we thought that working virtually from home was awesome until we got office space. Then we realized that the office increased our productivity massively. It was a combination of no home distractions, less inclined to do pseudo-work things like checking HN, and being able to ask questions of and be inspired by folks around you.

The article is great... and I can't emphasize enough "short lease = good".
Experience WILL tell you that the best answer is ALWAYS #1. Don't make it complicated unless you absolutely have to. 99% of the time, you don't, and the architects are full of it, but if they ever admit that, then they lose their job security.

When in doubt, remember what Knuth said:
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1441997
Elena Kagan's  White House Emails
Felt it on the 13th floor in Cambridge, MA
Why people that suck don’t do startups
Some thoughts on why I haven't seen any people that suck in the early phase of a startup
By the way, isn't this what working for Apple is supposed to be like? Except that when you do get to go home, you can't even discuss what you were working on during the day.

Edit: downvote if you must, but info on the work/life balance at Apple is preferred.