skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To put my two cents in on the antenna issue, I believe that Gruber is just saying it how it is in this case. I have an iPhone 4, and nearly everyone that sees it asks me about reception issues. I've talked on it for a total of probably 4 hours now, in various locations with various signal strength and have had no issues with dropped calls or reduced reception of any sort. During many of the longer calls, I've tried holding the phone upside down, bridging all the metal gaps, left handed, right handed, etc... and it made no difference.

So call him "optimistic" in his analysis, but if his experience is anything like mine, he is right to be wary of all the reports of the "death grip" as much as I am.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=9633965856
There's probably a big market in the US for efficiently retraining college graduates who got the "right" degree (especially CS).
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On my keyboard (Belgian French) that makes daverecruit.sc2gmail.com ;)
I'm wondering why Foursquare as opposed to any of their other competitors? Other than numbers, how does a VC choose between Gowalla & Four Square (assuming they're give both as options)
Eventually one completely tires of meta key chaining and reaches a state of zen. This is a truly enlightened being. A master of vim.
The OpenMoko phone also had a higher number of pixels-per-inch than the iPhone 4. And this was years ago, by a no-name hardware company.

The reason other phones don't have a "retina display" is because it's expensive, and the other phones are trying to win market share by being cheap. Sadly, this works better than making a quality product.
I say most TwitPic users won't care about this at all.
One thing that has always bugged me is how can two polls give different results to effectively identical questions and both claim to have "plus or minus 3%" (or whatever) margin of error, when their results have substantially larger differences than that?
Considering how badly the stock market did today, that's pretty impressive!
It is far better for twitter to rate limit the API to a level they can handle, than to get themselves into an unstable situation with fail-whales. The header says what the rate limit is so applications can adjust.

They're also limiting their own apps so it's fair.

I guess I don't understand why the default was set higher than they could handle in the first place.
cam4.com is very NSFW for those of you like me who type in urls before their first coffee.
There. _Now_ it's a kitchen sink!
It's taken me a few days to 'get used' to the 4.

I love the thing, it has a Bang and Olufsen vibe to it.
That's a custom theme. Disable that and it should be fine.
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Nobody has yet mentioned one of the main reasons to use Emacs (or Vi; substitute below as necessary): it's easily extended. Find yourself doing the same thing to your code over and over? Want to use a language that doesn't have syntax highlighting yet? Need to communicate with an external process? Write it up in Emacs Lisp.

I don't (currently) write code for a living, and I have never spent much time using or learning an IDE. My untutored impression, however, is that even when they are extensible, it's more of an afterthought than a truly integrated part of the design.

Emacs, by contrast, is mostly written in Emacs Lisp. You have access to all the same features that the people who designed Emacs used to implement its vast capabilities. You aren't limited to the set of features that the IDE designer predicted you might need.
I don't even know exactly what they are making, except really expensive electric cars. Are they working on cheaper electric cars, too? What are they doing that other car makers can't do?
A library for handling strings ? LMAO.
The outsourcing trend
I was wondering, what is the current trend for outsourcing services in the US? Last I read, the overall market capitalization for the outsourcing industry in Europe was 12billion Euro if I remember correctly.

I'm based in South Africa and there is definitely a market for technical outsourcing with small- to medium- sized enterprises, especially with technical aspects. There is also a lot of work being outsourced internationally (Mostly to Europe due to our time zone alignment) due to the attractive exchange rate (SA's currency isn't the strongest in the world).

So, do you guys outsource? What do you outsource? How big do you think the market is?
> 2 requests per second

Your point is valid, but it doesn't work like that.
Source? I keep seeing this thrown around, and I really don't see how it follows. Do you really think people can't just be happy, that they need suffering in their lives, or knowledge of someone suffering? Perhaps we're operating under different definitions of 'suffering', but I'd be really interested to hear a good case study on this.
Do you care to elaborate?
New Online Toolkit Helps Veterans Start Their Own Businesses
To be fair, NeXTStep very publicly run on x86 before NeXT was bought by Apple -- it didn't just appear out of nowhere. And the actual processor is mostly abstracted away -- it's not difficult to simply recompile your apps for another CPU.
Or maybe they are just really good liars.
No prize for guessing that. Everybody "guessed" it correctly. :P
Ask HN: What were your naivetés in your twenties?
Oh the wise elders of Hack News,

I'd like to cheat in life and instead of learning my life lessons the hard way, I'd like to skip ahead and read the ending of the current chapter that I'm currently on.

When I was in middle school, my biggest worry was getting the latest Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants to fit in on the school hallway, whether this girl on my school bus liked me, and if the size of my gentalia was on par with my peers back then.

When I was in high school, my biggest worry was doing well in school so that I could get into an ivy league school; tacking on a bunch of AP courses and extracurricular activities, not necessarily because I enjoyed AP Chemistry or the track team, but I had to, to get into a ivy league school; and trying to look "cool," "edgy," & "artsy" while caring to stay within the boundaries of MTV's and my high school's social conventions.

When I was in college, my biggest worry was doing well in school so I could go onto a top graduate/medical school or grab a six-figure salary at an i-bank upon graduation. Befriended certain people, chased certain girls (and botched things up royally after the chasing phase is over), got involved in some unsavory debauchery not necessarily because I wanted to live out the lives that "burn, burn, burn" but rather out of my fear of missing out on the "college experience."

Of course, it didn't all seem that way when I was in the moment - and certainly I don't regret the things I did in the past (because I can't change the past) and I'll be certain to make lots of mistakes in the future too. And even if an older version of me, traveled back in time to my middle school, told me how stupid of me it was to spend $70 of my parents' money on a pair of Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants, I know that my middle school self would respond, "are you crazy, I need to get these pants to impress this chick on my school bus!"

I only beseech your wisdom about what mistakes/naivetes I'll incur in my twenties, oh the elders of the Hacker News, so that when I realize later how right you were after my twenties, I could slap myself silly and say to myself, in the place of your absence, "see? I told you so!"

Best,
noname123
App Engine: Entity life cycle webhooks in the Datastore admin interface
Tim Bray doesn't know operator precedence rules
Cisco Entering Tablet Market with Android-Based Device
> But if you know the application very well then memory management isn't too big a deal.

Agreed.

A related case is with Objective-C's memory management scheme which isn't a full GC, but lets you scope your memory allocations. It gets you a level of control that is somewhere between a GC and the kind that boost::shared_ptr does ... neither having the "wait for the trashman" problem that GC brings, nor overdoing the reference count touching like boost can get you into.
Nice to see someone preaching that old time religion.
> Schemas allow the data to persist in a typed manner across lots of new versions of the application as it's developed, they serve as documentation, and prevent a lot of bugs.

So, schemaless vs. schemaful is similar to static typed vs. dynamic typed? (or is it more like typed vs. untyped?)

> I think the "NoSQL" fad will end when someone finally implements a distributed relational database with relaxed semantics.

What does he mean by "relaxed semantics"?
The Stack Overflow goal is to build the "FM" in a search-friendly way that speaks directly to specific questions.

For myself, I like the site, and sometimes have problems it helps with, but too seldom for it to become a go-to resource. I think there are lots of people in situations for whom it can be indispensable in that way, though.
Without estimating the traffic of the author's site, I still find his argument valid.

I've employed many of the tactics he describes and have achieved >15 M/s of dynamic content through MySQL. Not Facebook, but it was fast and scalable for the market my app was geared towards.
Well, depending on how you look at it, Bebo was bought by AOL for $850m when it was still in it's startup stages (fairly late stages, mind you). Recently it was sold to Criterion Capital Partners LLC for a tiny $10m.

Sure it didn't fold, but this project was massively funded and ended up flopping. Definite fail.
Firefox 4 beta build 1 now available.
I work on systems over vsat on a regular basis. 750ms rtt at times. Vim is a godsend. I find myself wishing for a good fast 60's style teletype at times.
Cg_diff: a differential profiling tool
> Yeah, Posterous are playing a little bit rough

A bit rough? They're complete assholes about it.

> but Twitpic shouldn't respond to that by making it look like they want to make it difficult for users to export their data.

They're not, they haven't blocked anything (not even Posterous's IP block) and clearly said they don't plan on retiring the data export features.
Traditional advertising agencies are definitely behind the times and are still using outdated models. In fact, if you study marketing at a college/university, by the time you graduate a good lot of the information you've learned has changed significantly.

However, despite their laggard tendencies, most advertising (non-digital) is still being done this way. Brand and marketing managers are also partially to blame because they're acquiescent with the status quo.

I disagree with the comment about digital agencies not delivering analytical reporting. Not in South African at any rate. Here, the market is ruled by a handful of large agencies, all of which provide measurable results. I'm certain that all the worthwhile agencies in the US do the same.
Does "aimed at the enterprise" == overpriced ?
That script is in need of some serious optimization, it reduces load times for anything with CSS in it (read: any HTML page) to a 5-second plus wait.

Try it on a large HTML file.
That is not hate for Firefox, it's love for Chrome....
Traffic is bursty, not smooth.
> A related case is with Objective-C's memory management scheme which isn't a full GC, but lets you scope your memory allocations.

Obj-C 1 right? I believe Obj-C 2 (on OSX, not iOS) has an optional GC, at least for the objective part. Or would I be wrong?
Really? For me Linux takes days. Longer than Windows. Given that it's much more customizable than the other two I spend a lot of time setting up everything how I want.
Yes. Just remember, teeth are not bone.
click on the website listed in my profile, and then on my name on the site.
Taking daily pageviews and dividing it by 24 * 60 * 60 assumes your traffic curve isn't a curve at all - it's flat. For your average US-based consumer web app it's highly unlikely to have just as many people using your app at 3am as you do 3pm.

When scaling a web app, you need to prepare for peak usage, not average usage.

Here are a few first-hand examples. Friends for Sale, a social game, had ~10M daily pageviews (100 req/sec avg) but had peak load of > 200 req/sec. Ideeli, a "flash sale" designer shopping site, typically had peak load 5x-20x higher than median load.

Regardless of what Quora's traffic curve looks like, wheels' point still stand - it doesn't matter what backend you're using for 60k users on a web app.

--------------

http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-mil...
And most quacks are quite good at listening to their clients. Perhaps because that's all they can do.

Most physician are way too busy to spend much time with their patients.
This is certainly the case in some places, but I don't think it's like that everywhere nor has to be. If you don't want unions then the next option is to make the government protect the workers directly, but I don't see that as an option in the US. At least not today.
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> No, you don't understand packaging systems.

I know that the package manager keeps track of it. I did not express myself clear enough.

> The packaging system (RPM, deb) tracks files installed anywhere on the filesystem, including ones in /etc/bash.completion.d/, and will remove all of them when the application is uninstalled. "Symlink magic", whatever that is, won't help at all.

If all the files needed for a package / program are in one place, the job of the package manager gets easier.

You might want to have a look at GoboLinux. They are trying to make the file system the package manager. (Haven't used it, yet, though. Still using a Linux with a traditional package manager.)
I would love to see a pure Java version of Cappuccino as well.

In the meantime I use Google Closure. Certainly not the best library but it suits my needs (web applications for the Google Marketplace). Even though it looks ugly at first sight, it is actually an effective solution.

One drawback is the relative lack of support from Google regarding docs, tutorials.
Have you considered ed? I dimly recall trying a line editor over a slow-slow link and being pleasantly surprised at the difference it made...
And why not. I am all for using loopholes while they exist, too.

Just make sure you also campaign for closing loopholes.
At least most charities won't start wars with your money.
I'm 22, and perhaps I'm naive in my belief of this, but one of the biggest things I've learned is that theory and practice are rarely aligned. Reading about mistakes someone else has made generally only helps you see that you've made the same mistake in hindsight; when you're heading down that same path, you tend to justify it or are completely blind to the fact that it's a mistake.

All that said, I'm curious about what comes of this thread regardless of how useful it ends up being.
@geebee not sure where did you get this insight from, but I think you're spot on in pointing out this. Yes, I think PhD is a mechanism the US government has put up to sift through talented non-citizens. Scientific advancement is only a side-benefit.
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Dropbox is a good case in point. I use their service, and happily refer my friends to it-- the "affiliate fee" from Dropbox, in the form of extra storage) is a nice bonus. If my friends refer their friends, that's none of my concern-- and if Dropbox made it my concern (via some incentive), that would feel very uncomfortable for me. I don't want to be that involved in Dropbox's business, and I don't want to start thinking about who I can refer that can refer a lot of other people, or how I can push my friends to refer others, etc.

Similarly, if I have some books I want to recommend on a blog, I have no problem using an Amazon affiliate link. For me to put up a link trying to sign up more affiliates for Amazon, on the other hand, feels wrong-- I've crossed the line from "recommending" to "shilling."

I'm not saying that it is impossible to do multi-tier affiliate systems well; I'm sure there are people that are doing it properly, somewhere. But I'd certainly not make a blanket recommendation that everyone should attempt it, or even that it is appropriate in the majority of cases.
That girlfriend material is the same as wife material.
What with the number of people that get cavities, I'd hope it wouldn't be hard to make profitable.

I'd also hope it'll be cheap. Getting a tooth drilled requires all sorts of infrastructure, and hours of time on the part of a trained PhD. Slapping some goop on? All you have to do is make the goop cheaper, and costs plummet.
Measuring and comparing the "fastness" of a language is a tricky thing in general, but I think it is safe to say that for most intents an purposes we can consider MacRuby just as fast as Objective-C. The point you seem to be missing is that both run on top of the same runtime and both use the same foundational classes. So the same operation performed on a MacRuby String and Objective-C NSString should take exactly the same amount of time.

The only thing that prevents MacRuby from being fully compatible with Apple's "embedded platforms" is the lack of garbage collector on said platforms. By the time MacRuby is sufficiently stable and optimized Apple's portable devices will be capable of comfortably running memory managed code.

As for the "LLVM API", for one, I don't really understand how is that supposed to work - there is no "native" LLVM language and so on; for two, such an API will be lower-than-objc, not higher; and for three, reimplementing Cocoa and CocoaTouch as some new supposedly more abstract (whatever that's supposed to mean) API is going to be a monumental and almost certainly very disruptive task - and all of it for no good reason.

A lot of the comments, I'd say yours included, seem to be coming from the presumption that Apple's adoption of a higher level than Objective-C language is inevitably going to be a huge overnight change. But the beauty and genius of MacRuby is precisely that it does not require a huge overnight change. You can mix and match Ruby and Objective-C as you need or like. You can write high level, terse code using the HotCocoa wrapper or you can fall down to the nitty-gritty OS X C APIs, for a good number of which there are MacRuby bindings.
Buildings need to be maintained, have additions made, walls knocked down, be restructured; Writers often revise their work and release new editions; Directors release remastered films with new technologies, or their own cuts.

Buildings are often knocked down and built in a different manner; books and compositions scrapped; and "technically" the same could be said for films.

And you really think that anyone of the examples I've listed is objectively easy to evaluate the cost of doing them in advance? Buildings and films go over budget all the time, and Writers and Composers are just like software developers: they can be freelance or work on their own, just as easy or just as difficult to evaluate.

Software developers really need to stop thinking they're (we're) special. We're not.
One of the most important lesson I have learned is the importance of savings and living a frugal life. Even if you are independently wealthy, living a frugal life can give you a sense of introspection that is hard to understand for most when you are wealthy.

Save. Save. Save.

They say you learn your biggest life lesson as you stumble through your experiences in life. Poverty is something you would NOT want to experience in your life and there is no guarantee you will survive through it and when (or if) you do survive it might take a big chunk of your life you will never get back or recover from the process.
Leetleech
You may be right but I haven't noticed any delays. Large files load pretty much instantly for me.
I believe Obj-C will always be what Apple build their API frameworks. But it is possible that MacRuby will be an option in future for programming on iOS like it is on Mac OSX.

When I heard of MacRuby, I had this immediate crazy thought that Apple choose Ruby to piss off Google :-) You know Apple vs Google and Ruby vs Python, and Google is basically a Python house.
I recently asked a question that got a lot of responses along these lines. Hope you get even more!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366217
The developer who hasn't coded assembler in his yoth is crazy. The seasoned programmer coding assembler is also crazy.
MacRuby is not on the iPhone because there is no garbage collected Objective-C runtime on the iPhone, NOT because it is banned.
Being too cocky about the experience and depth of knowledge I had at the time. I was a big fish in a small pond, and I outperformed my peers, but on once you go up the professional ladder you realize how little you know.
No, you're wrong about Metalab - there are plenty of people in the Metalab scene who would respond to your ideas if you were to make the effort to present them .. metalab is a hotbed of new-startup activity and some of the hackers there are really trying to make money, rather than just get it from their parents, as so many "smart kids in Vienna" do these days ..

What you might be interpreting as disinterest in the subject of startups is more like to be a disinterest in the means by which you are preaching to the converted .. sure you're not just getting a negative personal response and broadly generalizing it to avoid discomfort?
Meritocracy : the reward would be function of merit.

What I've learned is that merit is a multivariate dimension with different weights on the variables. Weights varies heavily with time and context. The reward is also very relative because it has never bee what I would consider a legitimate reward.

The error was induced by school notes working model as well as by education process of parents with rewarding and praising. I assumed it would apply in "true life" everywhere with everybody that would have to judge or evaluate me.
Yes. Making the Roadster was, according to the founders, a move to compensate for the "weak" and inferior image electric cars currently have, before they start making them for mass market.
Most people like to reuse code, rather than rewrite, especially if they don't have any ideas for improvement. Hence the longevity of, say Apache.

Since C has been around 1972, it follows that a lot of software is going to be written in C.
Experience the excitement of slapping yourself silly now instead of later, because it will probably be much less enjoyable when you're older. Words of wisdom.
That things will usually turn out better than I expect. It's important to have realistic (read: deliberately-lowered) expectations in life. I always find that I am objectively better off when I don't burden myself with out-of-reach ambitions.

P.S.: I'm a college sophomore.
We've got it good, and by that I mean to include Eastern Europe.

"An Egyptian lower jaw, dated by experts from 2900 to 2750 BC, demonstrates two holes drilled through the bone, presumably to drain an abscessed tooth."

Other than that, as best I understand back in the day people simply had to live with it.

I'm not sure which choice is worse, but I'd certainly rather you get me drunk, knock me out and drill my tooth, than either of those.
It's naive of you to believe you can learn from our past naivety.

You will have to do your own mistakes and learn from them.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
-Oscar Wilde