skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yet Apple is doing everything they can to make themselves independent of GCC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang
What do you think about all of those other IDEs? Did you learn anything from using them? I'm sure you found things you liked and other things that you hated. The key is, did you take something away from the experience that you can apply to future coding work?

I can't convince you to learn Emacs or Vim, but I can convince you that you'll learn. If you stick with one of them for a while, you'll learn a lot, and maybe in time you'll be as productive as (or more than) you were in the other editors. There's reasons why people swear by these old editors... are you curious enough to learn why?
Not sure about science or engineering, but surely much advanced math knowledge can come from studying books at home, or even free off the web. Maybe you need to pay for Matlab.
This doesn't do anything for twitpic other than make them look fearful and weak.
Get your facts straight Posterous
If you "mostly [do] web development", it may never matter. Using Emacs or Vim because they're cool is not likely to last. If you want to look cool, use something shiny, not a goddamned text editor designed by bearded people in the seventies.

Do they have substance? Yes. Will that substance ever matter to you? Hard to tell. If you're in the business of making things happen with structured text, though, they're proven tools.

Personally, I appreciate the mouselessness and sheer integration of Emacs, though vi's terse/modal approach also has major advantages. If you're as curious and patient as I am, I'd suggest learning both. (And then Acme/Wily.) You gotta be in it for the long haul, though - learning vi is a hassle upfront, and Emacs's design trade-offs are predicated on it being your workbench for years to come.
shimon wrote "agent" meaning "real estate agent", as the article did.

ehnus' comment is a pun that uses "agent" as in "spy".
</joke_explainer>
I wonder if any American agents were recently captured in Russia. Even with a hostile power, most spies end up in prisoner exchanges.
As a interviewer I always give candidates a choice: white board, paper, or text editor. The majority choose paper.
While it's relatively immature in terms of widgets available, I like yui3 (NOT 2) for building application type sites. It has a strong component model and the attributes/events system and widget base are excellent and I believe it's the only one that's really serious about progressive enhancement.
give them some credit. Even their users' data is forkable.
You use vi/emacs when you care enough to not want to learn yet another editor.
Facebook developed the Thrift API to facilitate cross-language services: http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/

I imagine they could use anything as long as it consumes Thrift. The extent to which they do that is a question.
Yes, but vi's UI is ancient and weird for the same reason APL's is - because it gets the job done.
"How did we do" should allow for comments. I rated a response "ok" but would have preferred to be able to explain that it was good that the source of the image was identified, but bad that the associated product was not.
Understanding the global financial crisis with basic accounting identities
How To Watch Satellite TV Online For Free
How to watch satellite TV online for free? When you are searching for this question, it means that you know it is possible to watch Satellite TV online for free. That is true, given today's internet technology...and more in my site
There are some good slides about this:

http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBayAreaErlangFact...
link to a tumblr with 2 entries. both anti-posterous. posted to hacker news by an account created 12 minutes ago.

i smell astroturfing.
What's so fundamentally wrong with waiting a year or two to establish a family because you want to get a company started?
From people on the inside.

Its written in PHP mainly. It has Java, C++, C, Haskell, Erlang, Python, Perl, OCaml and some others littered throughout the site.
Why Votive Candles
Or, you know, just keep your vitamin D and calcium intake high and not worry too much about it.
Anyone notice that the content of this tumblr is two anti-posterous posts both of which have been posted to hacker news by 2 news accounts, 'techtruth' and 'techfact'?

Smells like astroturfing to me.
Just because they "sponsor" MacRuby doesn't mean they favor ruby as a replacement for Objective-C. Until ruby is as fast as Objective-C, I see no reason they would make such a change. Low performance languages have never gained serious adoption on embedded platforms, which includes everything that has made Apple, Inc (not Computer) successful.

Maybe I'm a non-believer, but I also don't see any benefit to Apple supporting ruby specifically. If they were to have a higher-than-objc level API, I expect it to be an LLVM API which would be compatible with languages with an LLVM backend.
Start-Up Stories: Max Levchin
Indeed. What Zed demonstrates by writing stuff in C is that he is good at cutting off his nose to spite his face. The reason mongrel2 works so well is because it has made good design decisions, not because it's written in C. I've played with similarly-designed servers written in Perl (Coro/EV), and they are so fast that the disk is the limiting factor for file serving (and use so few resources on top of your web app that you don't even know you have a server). Good design, not language choice, is what makes for good software.

(In other words, the conclusion "C is fast and good for apps" is not what you should reach from watching the mongrel2 development. "You can use any language if you have good design and a clue," is.)

I would have picked Haskell. Then I could drop to C when needed, but probably not ever need to. But then what would there have been to blog about? :)
Hard to produce financial statement of the startup?
Hi,

Hoping to draw from the wealth of experience from hacker news again.

I requested for the previous financial records and the current financial states of a startup before joining as a partner and the founder seem to be hesitating and taking a long time to produce it. When I became firm that I need to see it before getting to work, it took him a week to tell me that it'll take another week to get an 'official' version.

I personally feel pretty sketch about this since his accountant should keep track of where the money is anyway and he just has to take it from his cabinet and give it to me but am I mistaken here? Is it in fact a complicated document to compile? I'm in Canada and tax day is ... today. Shouldn't it be pretty easy to come up with the numbers?

Thanks guys!
Diamonds and the holy grail of quantum computing
No, that's probably wrong. With MacRuby, bridging is toll-free, and, as others have noted already, there is a much lower impedance mismatch between ruby and objective c than there was between java and objective c. Apple has improved the support for scripting languages over the years with the introduction of the scriptingbridge framework. These days, you can easily write an app on the mac in either ruby or python, the only constraint is that things become a mess if ever raw c structs are exposed by the cocoa api (and yes, there are still a few places where this is the case), or worse still when there is no cocoa api for a particular framework. Still, even in these cases there us some support in the scripting bridge framework, although my personal preference for this type of problem is just to wrap the c code in an objective c wrapper class before using the wrapper class from within MacRuby. Works like a charm!
I don't think you have any clue what really went wrong. This was doomed the moment you decided to switch to Ruby on Rails. Yeah, I remember that thing you (or maybe your co-founder) wrote about that on here. When I read that idiocy, I instantly knew that this company would fold. Any startup with a founder so completely clueless as to make that type of decision is doomed to failure. And this has nothing to do with Rails or Django or whatever. It has everything to do with your line of reasoning for making that switch. That type of thinking is indicative of a far greater a problem. It shows you lack the basic ability to look at situations and interpret them correctly.
I am sure he wouldn't have downplayed the 'signal' issue if it was an issue with an Android phone.

Considering that similar issues were reported with the Nexus One, why don't you go find the 10,000-word "LOL DROID SUXORS" rant that Gruber -- as just another Apple fanboy, aiming to make the competition look bad whenever possible -- undoubtedly wrote about it? Then you can link it here and use it as justification for your post.
One has to read Gruber's review and Ars Technica's review of the iPhone 4 to see the difference between a fan boy and a level-headed writer.

Before I clicked the link I bet myself I would not see a single criticism and Gruber was predictable in his praise. The iPhone 4 is perfect, like every other piece of anything Apple puts out. yawn
You need to set extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0b=false
Become an ACM member. Membership includes access to a subset of Safari Books and Books 24x7.
It's easier to find PHP devs.

Facebook is written in PHP. They crossed the point where switching made any sense a long time ago.

This has absolutely nothing to with what you should use.
Gruber and Apple has perfected the sandwich method.

For Apple, anything negative results in this type of response: positive, negative, positive.

For anything not-Apple, response is: negative, negative, negative.
If you'll forgive a little nazism... please be careful with "your" and "you're". It gets distracting.
The Greatest Brands Live In Our Hearts
I think it's more like both sites have passionate users. Good for everyone.
Scott Adams has a few fun ideas on how we should move forward with our new exobrains: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/dilbert_pocket/
All reviews are subjective. If the person doesn't have the same tastes as you, then don't take their opinion.
>> Sure, one can learn how to solve various technical problems on ones own, but where will one get the skills to actually define problems in the first place?

There hasn't always been colleges, some people along the way have obviously developed these skills independently. I don't see why I couldn't do the same if I wanted.
If Apple cared about having a more friendly API language, they wouldn't have deprecated the Java bridge: [http://cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000024.php]

The only languages Apple has ever expressed a preference for are Pascal, C, Objective-C, C++, and JavaScript. Why would they add ruby when they already have JavaScript?
Magnets? Who knew they could make things float? I thought they were just for sticking messages to the fridge. It seems the next step is to make all roads and sidewalks out of magnets and we'd be there - what an age we live in!
better yet, why isn't Quora using PostgreSQL? :)
MS Open Source Strategy is Upside Down
The TOMS Shoe Model: Meaning or Marketing? Diary of a Social Venture Start-up
Why facts are called as astroturfing? I don't get it. If i write a glowing post about posterous then will i become anti Tumblr.Don't you agree that Posterous has more supporters here in HN? Is it not a bias?
"That said, they've pulled off crazier shit before."

Java/Cocoa? Java/WebObjects? Heck, we still have the "NS" prefix…

While I think that MacRuby will definitely gain some traction, I don't think they'll completely replace it any time soon.
It's ancient and wierd because it gets the job done even if all you have is a teletype. It's very rare nowadays that you need something that can work in that sort of situation.
Yes! This is so obvious to me. Why would they even bother with MacRuby if this wasn't the future of iOS development? What would bring more developers to iOS than a rapidly growing language that you can learn and apply to multiple platforms, and also to arguably the best web development environment out there? Objective C's message-passing is extremely compatible with Ruby. A high-performance, pre-installed, officially-supported Ruby implementation would be a huge edge over the drudgery of Java on the Android platform!

Yes, I am aware of Ruboto, but there is going to have to be some serious wrapping of the very extensive Android APIs to make them palatable to Ruby developers.
Tesla shares pop 40% on IPO, first automaker IPO since Ford in 1956
It's the company going public that is offering the shares so the IB doesn't suffer as much if the price is lower. The shortfall is the company's while the kickback goes to the IB.
Yeah,

Also, it seems a bit ironic for whoever is developing MacRuby. You're donating labor to a company that gives nothing away for free or even cheap. Then they ban you. Makes you think ... perhaps you should target Ubuntu next time...
For those tuning in recently, the original title of this post was "Posterous Hypocrisy".
You went about it the right way. If you had studied theory first and then written solutions to some toy problems to demonstrate part of some "theory" then you would have been turned off by the whole ordeal.
Yes, it was publicly known that the IPO was today.
No, it's not glass vs. plastic he's talking about (and yes Samsung Super-AMOLED screens are glass anyway). The original poster is correct, Gruber believes this reduction in layers above the screen was pioneered by Apple because they made it seem like they did in their introductory videos and thinks it unique because he neither knows nor cares about things happening outside the sphere of Apple. He doesn't even just say that it doesn't exist (which is of course not true), he says it couldn't exist outside Apple because no-one else cares.
Sounds like pre-mature optimization, a bad idea which hackers need to be constantly reminded of.
MacRuby is a fork of the language, albeit a friendly one. Just as Rubinius, JRuby, IronRuby, and others are all forks.

I can see Apple replacing Applescript with Ruby, but just based on the fact that MacRuby uses the ObjectiveC runtime, I doubt it's really going anywhere.
I believe MacRuby is developed primarily by Apple employees.
I'd have to agree with michael_dorfman here, a honeymoon that lasts 'most of May' doesn't sound like the responsible thing to do in the midst of launching a startup.
Ellen Weiss says books project "isn't happening any longer"
I agree, same experience. Two thoughts:

1) Karma-seeking individuals are likely going to try find a way to get as much of the good stuff with the least effort. Easier questions will get snapped up.

2) You can still use the system, just offer a karma reward for a good answer.
Looks like they still have the large plan in the system, just not listed. https://github.com/signup/large
I guess that's an explanation...
yes that's exactly what it was.

it was outsourced to a vendor that pretty much took advantage of the contracting startup's lack of DB knowledge. so they got the kitchen sink and a fat invoice.

of course it's easy for the vendor to defend this - "what, we want you to be scalable!".
It's easy to make money in the stock market if you can predict the future.
Some really competitive users do want to get used to new raid encounters, but a lot of users just do it because they are anxious to try out new content.
Google Nexus One hits Australia on Vodafone tomorrow
I'm not sure because the picture is a bit blurry, but whoever owns that dog should consider reducing the amount he feeds it. It looks rather over-weight.
Define "fully"
A few people have claimed round here that paying attention solely to metrics can push you in strange directions e.g. Google ending up with inconsistent designs that annoy aesthetes because their stats show that people "prefer" them in some measurable manner.

I think it's quite likely that by paying even subliminal attention to his traffic stats Gruber has turned into the anti-Dvorak, someone who makes inflammatory and (crucially) factually incorrect statements about tech rivals because that is exactly the kind of thing that riles up nerds. Just being wrong or acting superior isn't enough, you have to really press people's buttons to troll effectively.

(Dvorak's a bit old-school so for those who aren't aware, he's a tech journalist that made a career out of trolling Apple fans and later admitted to doing exactly that because it drove page-views.)
You're right, it doesn't matter too much what language you do a piece of software in, it's more the design. BUT! When the language tries to make sockets way more complicated than needed, screws with memory management to the point of uselessness, or cram its little version of "stateless" false dogma down your throat, it sure doesn't make it easy.

Alright then, if you'd do it in Haskell, why haven't you? I spent about 2-3 weeks so far on Mongrel2 and it already does quite a lot. I figure, hey, Haskell's supposedly so much more bad ass, let's see you get it done. In fact, I'll be you don't even use any of these Haskell web servers as your main web server:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_Web_Server

Thus my point. Language fetishists become distracted by the hype and dogma of their favorite language tribe and then become blind to the evidence. Evidence so far says C makes good web servers. Web servers in other languages tend to need to use C. Lots of great software powers the world and is written in C. Using C does not cause the death of the universe. It isn't hard, or scary, it's actually pretty simple.

After a while, you have to start wondering, is it true that the language is so dangerous, or is it just more marketing?
It seems like you have to have a particular mindset to practice meditation.

For some reason, the concept of meditation is intuitive to me.. an analogy I feel like making is that it's similar to "reading between the lines." Yet at the same time, I understand the author's frustrations and I can't think of a way to make meditation work for him.

Maybe meditation isn't for everyone.
Even better quote:

dude, what did you expect? You specifically target companies who respond to the flashy one, not the talented one. If you try to side-step meritocracies, you can’t complain when you end up working someplace with no meritocracy.
Now that you have made it clear that humans will see each message get ready for a torrent of penis photos. Some times I feel bad for the mechanical turkers.
It's a site with in the ballpark of 60k uniques per month. What they use is pretty irrelevant. Really all this reduces to is, "it's dumb to optimize for problems you don't have."

Assuming 100 requests per user per month, 60k uniques is 2 requests per second. They could run the whole site on one Linode unless they've got a particularly bad architecture.
It's pre-mature scalability, where noob web developers are fond of, thinking they are in the big league with tons of traffic.
> No other company gives a shit about things like this.

There was a time where I really liked John's articles. Now he's sounding like just another fanboy...
Ask HN: Any way to do "add-in" for google spreadsheets?
Hi,

I guess simply put, does anyone know if Google lets us make add-ins for Google spreadsheets yet?

Just curious.
Because of this move, I will move from twitpic. They have the guts to tell me I have no right to do what I want with my pictures.

Twitpic made a blunder with their service, they decided not to innovate and did not build a community around their service. It may not be too late, but, am out!
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Which Carnegie book? I've read 2 of his; I liked How to Stop Worrying and Start Living better than the more widely known How to Win Friends and Influence People, but they are both somewhat useful.
Boehm's a very good garbage collector, given this:

> A precise generational collector would perform far better but wouldn't be so easy to drop into a C codebase.

It's that last part that's key. Without language support at even the basic level, you won't get much better.

As for this "precise generational collector", I doubt it. Like everything, saying you need a GC all the time to be safe is just more boogey man fear mongering. You don't need a GC. They're nice yeah. But if you know the application very well then memory management isn't too big a deal.
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Note: I am one of the people who have moved away from Paypal, I have become PCI compliant (which I did myself for 250 euros) but this I think would really cost 2k plus for any company. It took me a week to navigate. I ended up setting up a simple solution for others to help them efficiently with this http://www.pcicompliancesaq.com

However, the whole process was tedious, I went all the way through due diligence which took about 4 weeks with one merchant who then wanted a 5.25% rate plus about 500 month in fees.

I finally found a sensible merchant who offered me 3.5% and sensible rates, who I am extremely pleased with, their support is great and now I'm through the other side I am very pleased I have.

The payment gateway is much quicker and smother than sending clients to Paypal and then having them be returned to my site (which in a small % fails because clients interrupt the process needing me to manually configure).

But all in all it's easier to start your company with Paypal then move to a merchant account later when you have some trading history and the time and resources to invest.

But don't be under the impression that you will get going as simple as you did with Paypal.
So do I, it's hard to find good, impassioned writing on the web.
How to cook goat
Maybe you wouldn't worry if you were buying the product to develop it and were not planning on throwing it in the closet to wither. I think Dennis was under the impression that they would continue developing the project, not just paying for his talent.

The foursquare guys really do believe in the idea. If I had what I thought to be a great idea, and someone canned it and told me to do some other work, I would quit and start over too.
This is the right approach.

If an interview is like dating/flirting then you don't start by asking the prospective partner about their life philosophy you start by talking about the weather.

"Amazingly enough, some candidates have actually failed this..." - that is just sad.
Don't forget about Cassandra, which they developed just for scalability issues that they were having, and is now used at Digg and other sites (I think reddit uses it for something as well now) http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=24413138919
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Let the richest man in Babylon teach you how to achieve financial independence, become an expert money manager and control your life.
But he's right, can you name another tech firm that cares as much about these things?

I remember reading something a while back about how much time Apple spent on getting the angle (directon) of the mouse pointer right on the original Mac.
Scalable event analytics with Mongodb Ruby on Rails
As I see it it's not so much a 'conspiracy' as a set of misaligned incentives, which cause some parties to 'naturally collude' against the offering company, even if they (colluders) don't explicitly agree on this.
I have seen some videos with nudity on youtube - I guess they stayed there because they had like 200 views. I guess that as soon as the video gets big a human checks it and removes it if it is with nudity
Why the hate for firefox? I support firefox more, it started all the improvements in browsers, is done by a small company, and doesn't have so many fingers into my privacy pie.
What pretentious nonsense. Most of the best programmers are working on commercial or government code that they aren't allowed to share, or sometimes even discuss.