skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I write Blackberry software as a major component of my day job. I was basically thrown into the position as part of my companies mobile division because nobody else wanted to work with the platform. After a few weeks of learning the platform I understand why.

The Blackberry OS was never designed with general consumers in mind. I'm assuming that RIM was under the impression that the Blackberry API would be used by programmers to develop in-house software. Why do I say this? Until OS 5.x, there's no built in way to determine how to get a Blackberry on the internet. In order to reliably get the device online, you have to sequentially attempt to connect using the six documented connection methods. Ironically, there's an undocumented seventh method that RIM will tell you about for $1,200. The details on how to access this without paying the RIM tax are readily available if you simply google "blackberry undocumented mds-public". The only rationale behind why they'd make this so difficult is that they didn't foresee the advent of 3rd party apps being written for the device, or alternatively, they just don't give a crap and think taxing people who develop for the platform is good business.

Forunately, as of 5.x, they finally provide a closed source class to get your device online; however, 90% or more of the phones on the market don't run 5.x, so you're still stuck figuring out how to do this yourself. This is discussed endlessly on the forums with each programmer posting his or her personal example of how to get their customers online and reading these posts has become pretty comical after a year of working on the platform.

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Additional pains of working with Blackberries include the following.

* Five minute reboots between tests for any sizeable app

* HTTP requests must be constrained to a max of 100k

* Code signing requires a 3rd party server that's down frequently

* The simulator is constrained to 10k/sec downloads

* The Java API and UI toolkit are unbearably ancient

All this considered, I think RIM will continue for a good while in the same way Microsoft will. They're heavily entrenched and a lot of suits could give a crap about aesthetics. That being said, if you're thinking about exploring the Blackberry platform, there are better ways to spend your time.
> Basically a disconnect between lifecycles: a good piece of chemistry equipment is supposed to last 20+ years, especially if it's doing something relatively routine and well-understood, whereas software seems not to usually be intended to stick around for 20 years.

This is a good observation, and would probably make a great topic for a much larger discussion/essay.
On the other hand, consider PowerBook--a strong brand since the early 90's that was still phased out.
Ruby 1.9.1 had some pretty serious threading issues, if I remember. 1.9.2 fixed them.

Don't know if that'd affect Jekyll, but I know it affected Rails.
It isn't about "agreements" - it's about a bunch of politicians and courtiers demonstrating how powerful they are.
I agree using a pub / sub event model can help to decouple a UI and allow developers to build components that can be dropped in pages. For example I use event models to notify widgets that new data is available. If someone changes their account information I publish an account changed message and any subscribers are get the new data and are responsible for updating their UI. Further the one I love to use it for is analytical. When you write widgets that you will use over and over again, I never know what analytical library that a company will be using so setting all my track-able events up as event publishes allows me to write a module that can subscribe to the events and publish the data to Omniture, Unica, Google or whoever. This decouples the two and allows the analytical to be layered on after the fact.
With Facebook Open Graph Search, Is Facebook SEO Next? | Daily Blog World
In my experience in and around startups: you minimize bureaucracy, and you eliminate politics where you find it. Fire. Fire. Political gaming in a tiny company will kill it.
Yeah, used yslow recently and its got a lot of good stuff. I'd never even heard of an etag before. Or Chrome's profiler, for that matter. Thanks!
C-Corp: Is it a good idea for a offshore web startup?
Hello.

I am from Chile. I want to start a company that receives money from Apple (selling apps worldwide) and pays a % of the sales to people worldwide (through PayPal). I receive a % of the sales.

I am considering to start a C-Corp in Delaware to do this. Reasons:

- To open a US bank/merchant account
- Closer to Apple (no bank transfer fees, currency exchanges, etc)
- I can raise VC money

I have been reading YC looking for answers, but now I have more questions! (that's a good sign)

(0) Is it a good idea to incorporate in the US/Delaware?

(1) Do I have to register in every state (I will sell apps and pay people in all the states)

(2) What taxes do I have to pay?

(3) Is it possible to manage a US corp from abroad?

(4) Is there any good book about web startups and taxes etc?

Thank you very much. Your answers will be extremely helpful.
Obviously he was trying to avoid that. It looks like the second the firefighters tried to convince him to not go to the ER, they were trying to pass off the situation as "no harm done" and siding with the lady. If he objected, he would be that dick who picks on an old lady. Society is moronic sometimes. Being good to senior citizens needn't override being just to them.
How to cook prawns
iPhone consultancy can be had for much cheaper, though.

I have worked with contractors from eastern europe that work an entire week for the amount he asks for an hour. And despite the cliches their performance was absolutely okay. Not mindblowing, but as solid as it gets within the constraints of the iPhone platform. It's not exactly rocket science.

I'm entirely okay with people charging what they're worth. But I don't believe someone can be worth an order of magnitude above average in iPhone-land.
Yeah, usually when my mind starts to wander, it's reflected in slouching. I don't know which (if either) comes first, though.

BTW, if you're getting hung up on having a perfect cushion, let it go. You can sit zazen on the corner of a couch cushion. Seiza (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiza) works, too, but I wouldn't unless you're already used to it.
I'm not all that bothered about establishing a presence outside of Earth, myself. That said, I love Buzz Aldrin.
The general client doesn't do search of any kind, not with IMAP at least. Pretty sad for the number one search company in the world.
Youtube vs. Viacom: crooks vs. jerks
If you are not prepared to have someone call it, then you are an out-and-out idiot to bluff in the first place.
Clean Generic Dispatch in Python
Previous Republican administration got their share of heat too (Bush was against stem-cell research).
Besides Republican administration was less hostile to the business, so it's only fair that Obama's administration is blamed for their excessive regulatory efforts.
EE is a huge field. One of my recently-graduated friends is going to grad school to be an analog engineer, and this kind of thing is his bread and butter. Other EE's not necessarily.
This seems like a serious shortcoming to me. I can't sell from Canada, for example. Presumably this will improve with time.

I'm also really scared of dealing with Google's customer service if anything goes wrong with my merchant account.
This isn't a major revelation, at least to me (trained as a CompE with EE tendencies), but I will agree that I've never heard a really good, intuitive explanation of how a bipolar junction transistor works, despite modeling and working with them as current-controlled current amplifiers, as the author mentions. This especially obvious in contrast with MOSFETs, which are IMO easy to understand intuitively.
Who says they that they are using Windows 95 and Matlab on the same machine?
I know a lot of good copy editors who are out of work.
I'll agree with the bucket of crabs comment, as we all tend to do this.

However, I'm not going to hire this guy not because he is too expensive, but because he has no problem branding himself as a douche.
you just scored high on the DeveloperTiming API.
In this case, he/she is probably referring to dealing with things before they have a chance to turn into big issues - remembering to buy toilet paper when you're almost out, picking out clothes the night before when you need to be up early, actually getting enough sleep / exercise, etc.

Uncomfortable and boring sometimes, but you can avoid a lot of stress by catching things before they turn into big issues. Of course, if you thrive on drama, then making a habit of ignoring things until they blow up in your face will feed the fire. (Know anybody like that?)

I think the people at my old Aikido dojo called this "zanshin".
No there really is a big difference in the culture, ecosystem and average programmer between the FOSS/Unix world and the Microsoft world. Individuals always vary sure. Exceptions to the rule, sure. But there is a very real difference between those two worlds. I'd say almost every programmer who has been around long enough, and exposed to both camps, realizes this. Do a survey of say the top 100 famous "elite" programmers in our industry and I bet the overwhelming majority would agree with this characterization. The evidence is out there.

And yes, Microsoft has been trying to get more and more Unixy over the years, and more and more Appley, and I'll bet they continue doing that in the future. Good for them.
The US population increased substantially over the time of that infographic. Using their figures and census estimates, biking trips per person doubled between 1990 and 1995, then stayed roughly the same since. Walking trips per person is weird though: it almost doubled between 1995 and 2000.

Here's the spreadsheet I made to do the math: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AllYoqUY9bu5dGEwTDlz...
Consistency is huge. It's amazing what some of those guys will get out of their equipment. I spent some time talking with a guy who builds data acquisition equipment. Most of his customers started using his sensors in the 80s and until the system either breaks beyond repair or the entire team of scientists has retired, they want to keep the exact same setup. Amazing dedication, but the benefits of testing with the same equipment over many years can lead to some great observations over the long term.
This whole farce is a blatant and indirect DoD psyops attack on Wikileaks and Assange.
So it's okay and even expected now for the US military to attack journalists and the grey-information-area of their domain? I thought only nations like "Communist" China did that. And here we all thought our civil liberties were worse off under Bush...

Remember the WL leaked secret DoD document containing the Pentagon's own plan to counter WL? Their plan was to cause a big enough PR incident to scare any future whistle-blowers into silence by creating the public perception that no matter who you are, if you leak extra-ordinary, critical national security information, then it's 100% guaranteed that you will be publically outed as a whistle-blower.

Isn't it remarkably convenient that the Pentagon's plan is exactly what is now occurring with Lamo's bizarrely out of place participation in this whole fiasco? There sure are a lot of false and scary headlines attacking the credibility of WL! I realize the other logical possibility is that the Pentagon plan to attack WL is itself a fake, and Lamo is doing all of this on purpose to stage an "attack on WL",
so that WL can turn around and say "see! the Pentagon is attacking us!" You can't get better PR than that if it really blew up.

But when your lead source is also your lead witness, you have a serious credibility issue and have to assume the entire story is fiction. We may never know the truth.

And much like when you owe Don Corleone a "favor", after you get arrested for the kinds of crimes they did, and then the Feds hook you up with a sweetheart deal with the prosecution, it's pretty obvious who is the master and who is the puppet. Also consider the history of Lamo and Poulsen, and especially go back to Poulsen's self-promoting NYTimes hit pieces on Mitnick in the 90's. Then ask "who is the most probable liar, these guys or WL?"

It's only a bonus that they can also create a media smokescreen around themselves to muddle an already subjective matter. From reading their writings and interviews over the past few years, they both come off as self-promoting fame whore types focused on selling an image of "hackers." Like drunken Hollywood starlets stumbling around a crowd of TMZ paps, their inserting of themselves into whatever issue they are "reporting" makes it impossible to take them seriously as journalists. (Only Hunter S. Thompson can be allowed to get away with that.)

I bet this makes them even more valuable as Federal snitches, since everyone will assume the reason Lamo and Poulsen even have anything to do with this incident is because they're promoting themselves. It's a fantastic cover that prevents the spot light from casting shadows off the puppet strings.
Data hidden in audio stream
Last year I worked for a company that runs a huge (hundred of thousands of lines) Ms Access 97 software.

The migration to Access 2003 needs lot of changes and (worse) they don't have a version control tool, schema of the application, any documentation... The code is a mess and written by bad programmers.

So what to do? Start programming for Office 2007 from scratch? This decision took them around 2 years after failing to integrate their access tables with Microsoft SQL (The speed is insanely slow for large corporations).
Webpage design - template, theme, logo - suggestions
Hi,

I am working on my own website. I am skilled web developer and I have decent CSS skills. However, you could tell and I no designer. I am no the budget and was wondering if someone could recommend good site with free templates, logo etc. Website is done in Django, all logic is done but I realized that it has to look better to bring some traffic.

Thanks, I appreciate any input, suggestions.

Tomas
This is a great trend. I don't just walk though. I climb mountains. It's a different kind of thing. Much, much more vigorous.
"I've noticed that you've said this a lot of times on here (and ruby-talk, if I recall) and you're right - it's just sad that you have to say it and that people still make the assumption you're trying to counter."

One, it bothers me that various good and smart projects (and the people behind them) get overlooked because they exist outside of some self-imposed scope of awareness. Among many Rubyists this means that if it isn't useful for Rails it doesn't exist, or doesn't matter. That people are spiting themselves with this myopia doesn't seem to make a difference. (My perhaps skewed impression is that many Rubyists are more likely to know about and appreciate ideas from non-Ruby projects, especially if the existing Ruby code is seen as a competitor to some favored app.)

I suppose, though, that if your particular community keeps repeating that it's the only community (e.g. Rails == Ruby), it just perpetuates.

Two, this diversity is equally true of many other communities. So far I don't see this sort of intra-tribalism among, say, Haskellites, and really hope that stays that way. There are many intriguing things happening in the worlds of Haskell, Clojure, and JavaScript[0], and a good part of this looks to be an openness to ideas and an appreciation of the diversity within their own ranks. And I want that to continue.

We have to remind each other to not get too comfy, to keep looking around, keep questioning things, and not get lazy and insular.

[0] And other places I'm sure, but these are where I've been trying to pay attention.
Yeah, but its a practical necessity to have at least one person on the team who really groks hadoop, and has experience with the "quirks and rough edges." I wonder how many of the companies calling you need that person, or are just looking to add more programmers.
He might still be a robot. :o)
Windows 95 is still used extensively in embedded programming due to the unparalleled direct hardware access that it provides. When you are developing code for devices that use 8086, or even older FPGA's, you don't need the latest OS. In fact, the newer versions of Windows have more security and device layers which block the operation of the older programs used for uploading code to those older microprocessors.

As a result, some of the old chipsets can only be programmed using old software which only works on 95. For a business that does embedded programming it isn't feasible to switch to a new chipset that would require a complete code rewrite just so that they can use a newer OS.

Interestingly embedded programming is also an extremely high paying job because there aren't that many people who can do it.
The first link doesn't look humorous at all.
The article is pretty serious.
How to Get Taxed 87% in America
Unfortunately when he said "30 years of carefully-optimised Windows C/C++ code" what he did not know at the time was that the phrase leaked through a wormhole into an alternate dimension and was then overheard just as the commanders of two massive battle fleets were making a last minute effort at diplomacy to forestall what would otherwise surely be an imminent major galactic war. More unfortunately, the sound of describing the underpinnings of .NET as being "30 years of carefully-optimized Windows C/C++ code" is almost exactly not quite entirely unlike the sound produced in the Ferhfxian language of the insult, "Your mother is very nice. And tasty." and so, unfortunately, a great galactic war broke out, that lasted for thousands and thousands of years, until nothing but two dead lifeless planets were left, and it was all clearly the fault of Microsoft, once again.

(with apologies to Zandorg and Douglas Adams)
I believe the title of his blog is (indirectly) explained in this post (as well as 'world's toughest programmer'):

http://www.atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2007/9/...
How to fix your iPhone 4 antenna for less than a dollar
This much I know: Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, it's just mental noise. Do you ever think you're hearing voices as you drift off to sleep, misread something you saw briefly as saying something very different, or mistake someone in a crowd for someone you knew?

Our brains constantly seek patterns in a sea of stimuli, and sometimes they create meaning out of noise. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia)

"We are all greater artists than we realize." -Nietzsche
An option for having submissions of selected users to float to my front page even with a score of 1 (and perhaps staying there longer than under normal circumstances).

Call it "tracking" or "following the user" if you will.
My sleep improved a lot once I started using a white noise generator. It takes about a week to get used to it. Highly recommended:

http://www.amazon.com/Marpac-Conditioner-SleepMate-580A-Mach...
Team Foundation Server vs. Subversion
> Back then the only games in town were C++, java or .net.

About what domain are you talking? Perl and PHP were also quite popular in web development as far as I can recall. And several others.
I was doing hand-optimizing of 6502 on the Apple ][+ back then. Well, a little bit, admittedly. The thing to do seemed to be a mix of BASIC and machine language. CALL-151 for the win!
He worked for Delicious Monster and Tapulous, well-known names in the Mac/iPhone dev community. Also, Apple hired him to build their Mobile Store app, which is pretty significant because I'm sure they have a lot of talented developers already.
BTW, there is no application of Objectivism to architure (at least not directly), and there is no "Objectivist architecture." Just like there is no "Existential architecure" and no "Marxist architecture".

I do not think this is true. Artistic and aesthetic judgments, in Objectivism, have philosophical meaning. Rand applied Objectivism to her novels in the same way Rand's characters would (explicitly or implicitly) apply Objectivism to their music or architecture or work.

To give an example (one Rand herself would likely be displeased with, but she is more than capable of being wrong about the consequences of her own philosophy), prog rock has a better philosophical foundation than punk rock. While punk rock is nihilistic and denies talent and beauty, prog rock exaults human talent. Punk rock is predicated on the idea that any idiot can thrash on a poorly-tuned guitar and make "music", and hence worships mediocrity; prog rock is predicated on taking rock seriously as a means of artistic expression and in pushing both form and effect to all conceivable limits, using the fullest of the musician's ability and creativity to do so. (If this reasoning is unconvincing to you, you're probably not much of an Objectivist. Or a prog rock snob, for that matter.)
I was an intern at RIM two years ago, and I was with a small team that was working on applications that used PIN messaging in some of the ways you're envisioning.

It never really launched in the way that it was being worked on at the time I was there, but little pieces did make it out in various other forms—I wrote the QR code syncing mechanism that was part of it, which I believe is now launched as a part of BBM.
It's because .NET has waaaay better support for TPS reports.
I was already to laugh about this when I saw the first ad was for a job in my home town!

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if there are jobs out there that require knowledge of DOS. It seems nothing ever truly dies.
I agree.

Though--be careful with the term "real programmer".
On the other hand, the state has to levy more taxes (or crowd out other investments in the capital market), if it spends.
What would make a good control group against meditation?

Sleeping? Sitting quietly? Playing cards? Deliberately "carrying on" doesn't suggest anything in particular. Tolkein is a funny choice, though.
A huge issue with the gmail client is that you cant send-mail-as. I have my school account hooked up to gmail using my schools SMTP server but I cant't send mail as that email address from the phone.

If any Google engineers are reading this. Please fix this. This is a huge issue.
Yeah, the government sucks! Why should companies selling dinners to hospitals have to clean the food prep tables? What a bunch of whiney bureaucrats! Let the market decide!
"LISP is a so-called functional programming language, in which all objects are lists, and all operations are performed by (nested) functions of the form (function arg1 arg2 ...). "

Reading this hurts.
i love python more than anything else in the world (well, almost), but i think that this example is quite superficial ... this line alone gives python its enormous 'readability edge' over other languages:

if word.endswith('ing')

of course, it's great standard library design to have a string method called endswith() rather than making people use a regexp ending in '$', since finding suffixes is a common operation. but such a simple operation is hardly indicative of hardcore NLP (which would mostly be hidden in special-purpose library code anyways)
You can't beat Mickey O'Neil in Snatch.
were you trying to make an argument as to how this compares to other languages? (sorry, i don't mean to sound trollish, i'm actually curious as to your intent)
I agree with the parent ...

More so,

If hn is worth anything, it somewhat reasonable dialog. This particular response just oozes dismissiveness and a willingness to toss out discussion.
You see, this is the intended use; in this context it makes sense.

In the context in which you are providing a summary you are saying "I read this, and for those of you who think "TL;DR" here is a summary..."