skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He should have gone further in his analysis.

"Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check"

Maybe at the onset at the war, but for the last year or two it was a pathetic lot of teenagers and the elderly after all the desirable soldiers had all been killed, captured or maimed.
'They both utilize the concept of visually displaying code segments as "building blocks" which fit together like puzzle pieces to give a visual representation of whether or not code will work.'

Sounds like Lego Mindstorms as well.
Ask HN: What app should I build using App Inventor?
I don't have access to App Inventor yet, but hopefully I'll get it soon. If I do, I'd like to try to use it to build an app that someone wants.

My only programming experience is
1. Intro to CS class in 2003
2. Currently learning Python using MIT OCW 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming

I'm interested in recommendations both from those who think App Inventor is a great idea and those who think it is unlikely to lead to anything of value. Thank you.
Ask HN: Who's hiring non-developer/designer positions?
There's always some people like me who love technology and work at start-ups, but have no programming or design skills.

thanks
yes it is. most users will end up not adjusting brightness thus hurting their eyes
I wrote 10MinuteMail.com in order to teach myself the JBoss Seam framework. I hadn't looked to see if there were other sites doing the same thing (there were), with more features (there were), etc... and never intended to make any money with it. It got pretty popular and I make a bit on Google Ads. Not enough to retire on or anything, but it makes low five figures annually.
I spent my free time on Digg during high school in 2006 and it led to a $1000 a month gig at Netscape.
I know a New York Times photographer that had an unhealthy love of hers. It was so old to be laughable...but it kept going and going.

It's cool to have a computer so tough you don't use a case. (and years later to be debating replacing it because new machines are faster, not because it's broken.)
Facebook to be UK gov's "primary channel" for communicating cuts to public
Apple still has a choice of doing 1 of 2 things:

1) Dither around like they're doing now. Blame AT & T, the software, etc.

2) Acknowledge the issue. Offer a free piece of plastic to all users who want one. Their cost no more than $5 per phone. Most people won't bother because they'll get their own case.

Which do you think in the long term will be more beneficial to the company? To their user's loyalty?
"Exercising a clause" is by definition NOT breaching the contract -- it IS part of the contract.

Home loans are based on collateral. You borrow money to take ownership of the collateral, and if you pay back the loan, you get to keep it. If you do NOT pay back the loan, the lending institution reclaims ownership of that collateral according to the contract.

This is mutual protection because things can change for the worse as well as for the better in the future.
App Store with 200k titles is a plus? Are you serious? How will your dad be able to find anything useful there?
Can you not just make the format of your default login different from that of the client?

W/o knowing more details, take this with a grain of salt. BUT, I would just have the standard user/pass login form, and let your backend do the heavy lifting (figure out the login type from the format, or from trying to login with one method first).

Don't put it on the user to choose. This should be simple enough to do with some backend magic.
Seek management jobs... Har. In order to work at a tech company, you should be as knowledgeable about tech as possible, otherwise you'll end up being another out of touch employee who can't pull their own weight in a desk job. If you have writing skills, you can seek employment as a tech writer or in administration.
Is it more profitable to work for people instead of continuing to build products?

I would do fairly decently for myself if I did consulting full time, or at any appreciable fraction of full time, but that isn't where I want to be in my life.

What do they hire you for - SEO expertise or programming ability?

Most frequently, to do my "how you can use engineering to market software" shtick. Sometimes that involves SEO, sometimes it involves me programming, sometimes it involves me being a human being who is capable of talking to engineers and marketers without either side being unduly offended. 90% of programmers think they're in the top 10% of the profession -- I have no such illusions, so I typically tell folks that using me to program is probably not the most efficient use of their dollars.

As to the last question, I don't know. My professional life is sort of a package deal. Some portion of it is BCC, some portion blogging, some portion knowing people from around, etc.
Finding the right idea
I read that in the exact opposite way.

Having whoever screwed up worst buy everyone else beer each week strikes me as a very good way to shame that person, and encourage people to try to avoid being that guy.

Yes, it is done in a joking manner, and it is accepted that everyone will be that guy some time. But I know how I'd react.
How do you make a blade last a month? Adamantium-infused skin? I use a new blade every 3 shaves. I can't imagine using a blade for over a week.
Ways To Start A Business With No Money
"A program by a nursing student at Indiana University enabled a phone to send an emergency message or make a call, if someone fell. It used the phone’s accelerometer to sense a fall. If the person did not get up in a short period or press an onscreen button, the program automatically texted or called the person designated to receive the alert."

This type of simple, yet useful app sounds great. This approach to letting 'laymen' design an app to scratch their own itch opens up a whole world of possibilities IMO. Certain apps, that could easily be developed by 'pro' app developers, inevitably won't get built because the developer would tell themselves "oh that's too trivial" or "no-one will use that".

By lowering the barriers to entry, Google is allowing app development to follow the process way nature discovers the best new idea: wasting a lot of one resource (e.g. dandelions scattering their seeds to the wind / allowing amateurs to create a lot of crappy apps) to find a few gems (the small % of dandelions seeds that find a suitable patch to grow / the amateur that has great insight into a useful app, but previous lacked the technical know-how to implement it). Just my 2c.
Or if Google was really clever, they would create a green bumper to go on the iPhone with the text, "iPhone Reception Problems Fixed by Android."
All of what you are talking about is majorly dependent on the field of development and the tools currently available. Python isn't available or practical for everything.

Try this:
http://quickfuseapps.com/app/edit

It's for building voice apps, and believe me, it's easier to learn than anything in the space (VoiceXML, random proprietary APIs, etc.)

Java isn't necessarily easy to learn, and that's all that Android has right now.
Apple's innovative design is a short-term competitive advantage. If they did not have anything else going for them, android competitors would tear them apart. The thing with apple is that they continue to innovate (and market) successfully time and time again. That's the secret that other's can't seem to figure out.
I do not get unbiased news. I get biased news and account for the bias.
Higher-Order Perl is available for free as a PDF
I wonder why they haven't just made a web client already, instead of bothering with fat native clients for every platform. The P2P stuff isn't really worth it given that bandwidth is so cheap, and they otherwise don't actually do anything with a native UI that a web based UI couldn't do.
Are you able to provide more detail? Digg -> X -> Netscape missed quite a bit at step X :)
[1] Reddit is run by four developers, who are not out of touch, who can't make enough revenue despite their enormous size.

[2] Management jobs =/= non-developer jobs.

[3] What do you mean knowledgeable about tech as possible? Code, trends, ideas...?

[4] How can an out of touch employee not pull their own weight in a desk job? Nick Denton, Heather Harde, Eric Hippeau..guess all of these "can't pull their own weight in a desk job"
The signup process is fixed now.
http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/ - KDE4's version of LOGO. One of the advantages is that you can select language of commands - English, German, Polish and so on, so if your kid doesn't speak english it doean't mean it can't program easily.
Obviously, at a tech startup, the primary street cred comes from being able to do something technical. This doesn't necessarily mean coding or sysadminning, but it DOES mean that you have to produce something in order to even get any credibility.

My biggest issue with non-technical people is so much of what they do doesn't produce deliverables. Sales/marketing? Might produce some brochures. Sure produces money. But they don't actually build anything, making it hard for my brain to properly evaluate their skills.

So if you're a non-technical person, what will you produce that can be evaluated? Soft deliverables, such as reports, sales figures, etc., are more difficult for a technical person to evaluate -- so we tend to discount them (rightly, or wrongly) because the underlying knowledge of "how much talent / time / effort did this require" isn't inherent in the work.
ACTA negotiators inform the EU Parliament in secret (from Pirate MEP)
From the jobs page: Justin.tv is looking for a Head of Communications - http://www.justin.tv/jobs#communications

[I don't work there, just remembered seeing it on the front-page a couple of days ago]
How to Nurture Data Scientists
Mobile Browser Cache Limits, Revisited
Do You Check In? The NW's Location-Based Search & Social Networking Mini Cluster
As far as production websites go, you are completely wrong.
So what do you do, exactly?

We've talked about contracting a professional writer to help get our blog and website into shape, ride us to blog about what we're doing, and help edit what we do write.
Intel Core i7 930, Archlinux + openbox,
13" Macbook
Insight, "Web Depression"
How to Play SNES on your iPad in Four Easy Steps
Based on Dru's post and the inspiration of http://whileyouwereonfacebook.com I launched http://rrsptaxadvisor.com. Thanks Dru.

(RRSPs for Canadians are like IRAs for Americans. Except when Canadians move across the border their RRSPs aren't treated as pensions for U.S. income tax purposes, so all of a sudden they have to pay income tax on the investment earnings inside their RRSPs.)

Extremely niche.

I'm not expecting to make a ton of money on this. It's just a proof of concept to see if I can get away from being a well-paid wage slave.

Total cost = two domain names at GoDaddy using the cjc689not code :-) plus WordPress (free) plus a theme (free) plus a bit of time last night (not free, but...) plus yet another domain hosted on Bluehost (free).

Anyway, thanks for the inspiration.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. JFDI. Right?

/Phil

EDIT: also inspired by seeing http://custdev.com and how easy it was to sell an ebook.
What would you buy today, a Macbook Pro 13" or 15" ? I ask because the processor is very different (Core 2 Duo vs I5/7)...

Also, can a 13" drive an 30" cinema display?
iPhone 4 owner as of day 1 and I haven't had an issue. I can't imagine that this is true.

EDIT: Wow, Ok I get it. It's a real problem. But I guess I meant to say that it certainly seems like the iPhone will be remembered in a much more positive light.
> I find it to be not significantly better than reading on a monitor.

Nielsen's tests very emphatically disagree

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html
Reminds me of my favourite Onion article - http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-...

Especially for the line "Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it."
Sure you can. It's called revenue dollars. Most positions, whether we like it or not, can be evaluated on a quantitative basis.

Sales/marketing ---> brochures? How about sales/marketing ---> money.

That's your problem that you tend to discount sales reports.
Works fine on Opera 10.60 on Windows 7.

That said, I'm getting really sick of this "dark grey on light grey" thing that fancy-schmancy designers seem to love. Give me some contrast in my text, people!
I accidentally made more money than I planned on when I created a website to sell those Chronotebooks by Muji (http://www.coolhunting.com/design/muji-chronotebo.php). When they were first offered, the company only sold them in their store or over the phone. I guessed that there would be people who preferred to buy over the internet (as it was pretty popular with blogs when it was launched), so I did the dirty work of ordering in bulk over the phone, and then selling individually through a website.

I didn't think it would be that popular, but it was around Christmas time when I started it and I used the profits to buy myself a motorcycle. The funny thing is sales dropped sharply after Christmas, so I shut down the site. It was really a fluke that it worked out.
[1] Reddit is run by four developers, who are not out of touch, who can't make enough revenue despite their enormous size.

Reddit is owned by Conde Nast. They don't have business people?
> Paul Krugman, the author of "The Conscience of a Liberal," is a noted conservative???

Sarcasm....
I'm not worried. Web designers are still doing fine, and WYSIWYG is everywhere.

At the end of the day MOST people don't want to create their own apps for their own needs, they want to pay $0.99 and be done with it.

Here's the difference:

Real programmers don't see programming as work. It's a hobby, it's fun, and spending 20 hours on a small app isn't a waste of time or money. It's worth every second. I stay up until the wee hours of the night writing my Android apps because I love it. Every programming problem is a puzzle, and when I'm done I feel accomplished and pleased.

Joe-non-programmer sees this 20 hours as time and money lost. They could have been playing with their kids, or working their real job making money. They could be watching a baseball game or playing video games, or spending time with friends. If something is out there for $0.99 then there is no way in hell they will spend any time making their own apps. It's as undesirable as fixing the leaky facet that's been leaking for 6 months.

It's for the guy who likes to tinker, or the student with a ton of time on their hands and they aren't worried about making money anyway.

If anything - there may be more crappy apps in the Market, but it will require real developers to step up their game to get noticed amidst the garbage.
In Fall 08, I wanted an iPhone app to track up-to-date poll results between Obama and McCain and...as it turned out, there wasn't an app for that. So I wrote one in a week and sold ~50,000 copies (http://structlab.com/iphone/polltracker/)
"
Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here's the thing: corporations aren't run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit's revenue isn't great. "

http://blog.reddit.com/
Neilsen tested only speed. It's eyestrain that bothers me and is why ebook readers typically use e-ink.
Henry was one of top Digg users who was hired by Jason Calacanis to grow the Netscape (now Propeller) social news site.
Home couch-hacking: Dell XPS M1530, T8300 (2*2.4 GHz), 4 GB ram, 15" 1920p screen, 7200 rpm disk, Vista 32-bit (so yea, only 3,5 GB ram..).

Work: HP with about the same specs but with external keyboard and 24" monitor and slower disk.
http://www.ThatHigh.com - started in college as a bit of a joke and now pays my rent in downtown San Francisco.
Explain Apple then.
As someone who also has a company built on Azure, this is great news. I'm happy to see Azure gain some serious traction.
That's more than enough.
I have a MacBook 13" in the office, and when I bring it home I plug it into a 26" Samsung display with mac keyboard and magic mouse, plus various external HDs.
Sure you can. It's called revenue dollars. Most positions, whether we like it or not, can be evaluated on a quantitative basis.

To who, exactly, do you ascribe those revenue dollars?

The UX designer that came up with the feature the critical customer wanted?

The developers who collaborated and created it?

The QA team that made sure it actually works?

The sales person that sold what was there?

The salesperson's value isn't particularly clear in this equation. Could we replace them with another sales person? What did they bring to the table that was actually unique to them and not easily replaced? Would we have made the sale anyway?

It's an incredible relative, subjective judgement to have to make.
45° Imagery on Google Maps
Doomsday Device? Really Techcrunch? Because all of those WYSIWYG sites were doomsday devices for the web, right?

It's not like the app store (on Android or iOS) is currently composed of nothing but spectacular apps. Most of the apps in both app stores are pretty crappy.

Recommendation is already a very important way that people find apps. I had an iPhone for a year, and I basically never blindly searched the app store. Maybe for a magic 8-ball app. But all the major apps I used were recommended to me by friends with iPhones, mentioned on some blog I read, etc.

And even people that I know that occasionally browse apps browse the "top" pages, which filters out the crap (more-or-less).

Also, it's Google that helped people sort through the crap on the web. If it really becomes a problem, I'm sure they have some people who could develop algorithms to make the good Android apps rise to the top of searches.
Two-Dimensional Analog Literals in Haskell
You're in England, yeah? Surely there's some music types around who would buy a used Mac Pro... here in Perth, Australia, I know a few Drum & Bass and Dubstep producers who are gagging for one, they're just more expensive here.
The Most Popular Retweets, Hashtags and Users in SA During The World Cup
PCLinuxOS 2010.07 KDE Screenshots
That quote has absolutely nothing to do with anything we were just discussing.

Reddit's revenue isn't great, and company's maintain distinct budgets for different properties, but exactly what does that actually have to do with Conde Nast having business people that should be paying attention to this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise

The technology was innovative, but the results were mixed. Almost half the aircrews died, and the main casualties of the resulting floods were forced laborers and POWs.
Loved 1 and 7.

You can copy a product's feature set but you can't copy its soul which are a combination of vision and team dynamic IMHO.
Isn't this exactly what Mindstorms uses as it's primary 'programming' tool?
Yes, I've bought an iPad for reading books. And I'm using it all the time as an e-book reader.
How are they establishing causation?
OSX is a compeditor to Linux. Why would Apple help a compeditor like that?
> One in which Chamberlain and Halifax are statesmen who might have been successful in avoiding armed conflict, but for the determined war party of Churchill.

No one disputes that it would have been possible to avoid armed conflict with Nazi Germany. The relevant question is "at what cost?" Given Hitler's ambitions, do you really think that he'd have stopped at the channel?

It is reasonable to suggest that Chamberlain bought some time for Britain to re-arm and that trying to defend the continent was a bad idea. But that's very different from suggesting that sustained peace was a reasonable possibility.
Diminishing returns says that as you increase a factor of production the output relative to that increase becomes smaller. In other worse return per unit investment gets smaller with each marginal investment. The author totally gets this concept wrong with the bowl of nuts analogy. If you are using one hand to look for pecans in a bowl of nuts and the pecans become harder to find over time, then this does not demonstrate diminishing returns because no factor of production was modified.
The fact that you've heard of an iPad makes it significantly more likely you would choose it over the competitors even in a Best Buy. There have been mp3 players that were better than the iPod throughout pretty much it's entire existence, and they sat right next to the iPods at Best Buy and Wal-mart. They didn't put a dent in iPod sales at all. The only one that was wildly successful was the Sandisk Sansa, and the price/feature differential was such that saying it competes with the iPod is like saying Kia competes with Ferrari.

It'll be the same with these two tablets. People may buy the $200 thing because it's cheaper. Some (maybe even myself) might buy it because it's hackable. But nobody who wants an iPad will buy this instead, therefore they don't really "compete" by any meaningful usage of the word.
The search box?
If it takes you weeks to recover from a burn-out you haven't burned out - yet.

Burn out is a serious issue and some people never fully recover from it. If you're working hard and you need a break after a few months of hard labour that's normal, but it's not the same as being burned out.

Otherwise a great piece and nice to get some insight in to what goes on behind the scenes of backtype.
I gotta agree. Particularly because if the ceramic of the rest of the case had extended to cover the antenna (or if it'd been covered by plastic, or really by anything) this wouldn't have happened.

IMHO, Apple got burned by two things here:
1) The got carried about by how cool using the Antenna as part of the case would look.
2) Their infamous obsession with secrecy meant that all the test phones were hidden in cases that masked the problem, thereby inadvertently tainting their test results and preventing them from discovering the problem.

I wonder if they could apply a thin laquer or clear plastic coating to the antenna on future iPhone4's to fix the problem?
Mythbusters had an episode about it http://mythbustersresults.com/alaska-special-2
awesome post. I love your customer focus and liked the part out burning out. Good luck!
There has, however, been advancements in satellites and probes. Some places are either too far or too inhospitable. The issue is user one, not hardware.
"I've been programming professionally for over a decade now, in at least as many languages, and I've only had this problem with ruby."

It's a trade off. Take away monkey patching and you get other problems. Just look at java projects. Once you make an interface and someone else uses it you can't change it anymore without breaking everyones code. Check out the eclipse code base for examples.
Ask HN: Good Java books for aspiring Clojurians?
I feel I would be much more effective in Clojure (and consequently, the Java ecosystem) if I spent some time with Java, or were at least more familiar with it. With the wealth of Java books, it is a bit intimidating to choose one...

So HN: What would be a good Java book for a Clojurian with a solid OO background, but no Java experience?
Also the Irish potato famine was likely caused by the British.
Has someone thought of asking Leica's thoughts on the matter?
Harvey Pekar, Who Chronicled Ordinary Lives in ‘American Splendor’ Comics, Dies
The 99p Challenge had a section like this ... might have to go re-listen to these now

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/99pchallenge/
This argument is getting lost in semantics. What does "compete" mean in this instance? Does Kia compete with Lexus? They both make cars, but I doubt anyone looking at an RX350 ever ended up in a Sportage.

I'd argue "compete" should mean that someone looking for an iPad might end up buying the competing device instead.