skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple explicitly promotes HTML applications. Applications that cost money to use. Jobs promotes them, Apple promotes them, and Apple takes explicit steps to make those applications easier to build.

I see what you're saying: that if someone builds an application that provides a market-style umbrella over these applications, Apple might freak out.

I concede that it is possible that Apple might freak out.

I object strongly to the idea that they probably will freak out. I think it's very improbable that they will freak out, and that there's no evidence other than tea leaves of how they manage their own app store to suggest that they will.
I hope not. The surliness is part of the charm. It's sort of the "just get it done, ya meathead!" construction foreman method to learning on the job.
Odd sort of graph at the top, comparing data to number of transistors in completely different units and without any scale...

Does anyone have more detail about what they mean by "data is growing faster than processing power"? Which data?
Funeral Industry Social Network (I'm Dying to Join)
The crappy thing about Python closures is that you have to define the function above where you call it. I think this kind of puts the cart before the horse and messes of readability.

JavaScript, on the other hand, allows you to define the inner function anywhere in the local scope and makes closures much more attractive, IMO.

Changing this may mean big changes to the interpreter and so may not be worth it. I wonder if lambda created closures are any different...probably not.
Look at all these comments! Clearly the answer is "nope, nobody uses IRC anymore" ;)
I encourage clients to show it around. That's free user/focus testing.
You mean IP addresses of people downloading torrents? It's peer to peer man, if I start to DL the torrent I'll make a connection to you (assuming you set up your client to accept) and I'll see that you're sharing the data.

The "hacked wireless modem" (the term by the way makes me assume you're not hardcore) defence is good, but they don't care about that. By the time you hire a lawyer and get your shit together they'll have met their goal: stopping you from pirating their IP.
"I disagree with his anti-engineering and anti-research points. Attacking pseudo-technical degrees like undergraduate business, sure. Attacking humanities research, sure"

I think you're missing the point.

At Johns Hopkins I had a mix of good teachers and bad; most of the professors there did a lot of research, but that didn't have any bearing on whether or not they were any good at teaching.

Personally, I have no problem with professors doing research AND teaching, provided that they do a good job when it comes to teaching.

The problem arises when universities, and this included Johns Hopkins (which is why I refuse to give any money to the alumni fund when they all me), is that it was clear that so long as the professors were doing research and publishing papers, what they did in the classroom was inconsequential.

I had professors who clearly had no idea as to what they were teaching -- they were regurgitating what was in the text book. (It showed on exam questions like "Calculate the rate of this reaction at equilibrium".)

On the flip side of this, I audited a course on parallel computing taught by a professor who had worked with and IIRC helped develop IBM's Scalable Power 2. She was an excellent professor, and I ended up learning a lot from her. In the end, my only disappointment is that it was an audit, and therefore didn't affect my GPA.
If you want any more evidence to show that Apple are heavily in favour or HTML applications, just look at Dashcode. It's essentially an iPhone webapp IDE, providing a framework to make 'native' feeling apps.

People set their level of expectations according to the distribution channel. If you go to some web page, you're not surprised if it doesn't work well or has obnoxious adverts, and everyone knows that the web is full of porn.

An App Store experience is expected to be better. People hold Apple responsible for curating the App Store, so it can't be as open as the web. People demanded that curated experience because closed/curated is simpler and easier to work with.

Ultimately, I don't see Apple caring how your app is distributed - through their closed platform or the open HTML platform - as long as people keep buying their phones.

It's easy to apply FSF-style ideology to Apple's decisions, but ultimately, they're really only interested in selling stuff. (Which means making stuff people want to buy.)
Well, my point was that many - if not most - problems people have are "standard" problems that people just have because they're people and they all work in the same way.

For example, being lonely causes depression, bad parents cause a huge variety of problems, and so on. Human nature, our insecurities, our egos, our selfishness & greed, and so on - they're the same for everyone.

If you've got a problem, you can be pretty sure you're not the first one to have it, and that the way to treat you is no different from the way all the others with the same problem were treated.

So, I wouldn't think of it in terms of neurons, but in terms of humans.
I think you mean the DC-3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-3
Added to the Recall List - Millions of Frozen Mice
"I do not know where Clojure or Scala have a generic cross-process messaging ability, and I'm not saying it's impossible by any means, but it's much easier if you start from scratch with that in mind."

I don't understand how. The only difference I see is whether the interprocess communication parts are coded into the language itself or whether they're coded into a library. It could theoretically make the problem more difficult to put it in the language itself. Instead of only affecting the programs that use that library, now your concurrency features could potentially affect any program written in your language.

Could you give me an example of a concurrency feature that really, truly benefits from being in the language and not the standard library? I simply can't think of any examples.
Or for talking to employees remotely, Skype + webcam is a much cheaper and less creepy/invasive way to talk remotely.
I too would be conservative about what they will do, I think it's hard to guess how a company might react.

I do think that history provide a guide, when control over the means of anything communication, distribution, or production is threatened the controller usually put's up a fight.
That's a cropped image. The actual patent image is here: http://aiw1.uspto.gov:80/.DImg?Docid=20100190510&PageNum... (Open it in something that supports TIFF if your browser doesn't display it. Photoshop worked for me.)

In the un-cropped version you can see that the image is labeled #602. Here's the only part of the patent body where 602 is referenced:

For example, an interface such as interface 602 can be provided on
a user's electronic device. Through interface 602, a user can
search for and view information on the various airport services
available in the airport.

It might not have been proper for Apple to copy another company's work for illustration in their patent, but the copied UI is for illustration of one possible UI for the described app. IANAL, but it doesn't read to me like they're trying to claim invention of the UI.
You really don't know what segment registers on x386 are and how they are used, do you?

For someone who failed reading comprehension repeatedly, you make a bad troll.
Why can't marketers be quantified?
Designers also are typically not around to feel the repercussions of their designs, so they may think they are designing for other people when they are really going off of their own intuition. And let's face it, even those with the best design/marketing/usability/branding etc. intuition are often wrong (eg Steve Jobs/The Cube).

I tell my clients that results-oriented design is the way to go. Interfaces are never "done," and it pays to pay a designer to stick around and iterate after real-world testing is completed. Casual focus groups are a great way to start this process, often ensuring that you don't launch with a poor design out of the gate.
Lessons Learned as a New York Times Food Critic
You can build message passing code that suffers from race conditions. In practice, though, it's almost always obvious if you're about to do something dangerous.

On p.173 Joe writes:

When we say things such as this:
Pid = register(...),
on_exit(Pid, fun(X) -> ..),
there is a possibility the process dies in the gap between these two statements.

Regarding process death, we allow multiple inter-process relationships to be specified at spawn time. Hence any number of processes may be configured to observe a newly-spawned process before it has even started. Additionally, all children are linked to (die with) their parent, which both eliminates the risk of orphaned processes and has other benefits.

So in Spin you wouldn't be tempted to write something like above (probably not Erlang either?).
My point was that if someone created a distribution channel to rival how good the App Store is, not what we have now. There is not App Store "killer" out there right now, but they only way to get an app store killer is to start making an alternative.

If it because a good competitor, then it could put developers in a position where they would need to make a decision. This one, or that one. At that point if you had a store that was more open, then the App Store, I think you could break the control of the App Store.

Again, I don't think we have that right now, but you have to start somewhere.
Where do you work? That's awesome.

I've always thought IRC would be a great platform for internal communication.

How many times do we open up our typically single person-to-person IM clients to figure out where to eat lunch?

How distracting is your IM client compared to IRC?

I suspect some of the younger companies with money to burn use Campfire to fill these kinds of needs.
The skill in these cases is knowing when to add exceptions and when to invest in re-factoring your code to work for the general case. I'm getting better at it, but I've generalised too early in some instances and left exceptions which soon became messy in others.
LinkUp: Job Content, API Access & Search Tools for Developers
Its not that developers want to deal with central marketing and distribution. They don't. But customers do.
I've hosted my own email for 6+ years now. It's a useful skill to learn if you ever want to incorporate email features into your app. It's easy to get started and it's rather inexpensive thanks to budget VPS providers.

Webmail: http://roundcube.net/

Push email: http://z-push.sourceforge.net/soswp/

Console: http://www.mutt.org/

MTA: http://www.postfix.org/
How are you with the rest of the LAMP stack? We are not hiring at the moment but may have need for someone like you in the near future.
FBI seeks new power to secretly get personal data from Net providers
I am always idle on IRC, still love it
I was really skeptical on reading this article. I mean, what's the point if everyone going to be working remotely one day then why have space and robots? But the comments here are changing my view. What if I could have a generic robot in the house that my doctor could log into? It still seams far fetch but for 5K why not? Even the gov ( I live in canada) could provide these to people in need. A robotic nurse is going to be really useful one day. With less commute home care could scale better.

Of course if the robot could also be used by a plumber(auto sanitizing feature ;p) car mechanic... I don't have to go out of my house. Which is a scary idea ;p

Aside from security and privacy issues (pull the plug?) I think that's not such a bad idea.
Or I guess you could just do it yourself and save all that time, money and frustration... And make your designer that much happier.
What if I want to change what the buttons do? On my microwave, you have to type in the power setting before the time, what if I always want to default to 100% power unless I hit a specific button first? What if I want to hook a smoke detector up to the microwave so it will automatically shut off if its burning something?
Isn't Pigz a parallel implementation of gzip which is itself based upon LZ77?

http://www.zlib.net/pigz/

Hasn't there been a few parallel implementations of bzip2?

http://compression.ca/pbzip2/

http://bzip2smp.sourceforge.net/

I understand that parallelism isn't suited for a lot of algorithms but from what I can tell, there's been heaps of successful work in compression. Could you give us some more information?

It would really help me out - I'm doing an undergraduate class where I have to manually make an open-source project parallel. I've been looking into compression algorithms because I thought they were well suited. Please help me out if I'm going down the wrong path!
no, but I never thought microsoft word was good at that to begin with.
Could they could arrange it so that your purpose was X, and that you preferred that your purpose was not X? I'm not sure if that's actually consistently possible. It's certainly possible for humans to want X and not want to want X, but something with a specified highest goal might not actually be able to hold both.
No. Is it a pre-requisite that I know who he is in order to appreciate his TED talk? Because what I saw didn't stand very well on its own merit.
Maybe, but what we were looking for in this post was to get a feel for what the general experience was like for people who have been through it. We aren't seeking legal advice at all. If we were, I agree that HN is certainly not the place we'd turn to.
Why Project Management Tools Fail with Programmers
My roommate (http://thejoshwolfe.blogspot.com/) pointed out the flaw:

The failure of the "var" idea is this code:

def getDataFile():
"returns the string 'data/data.dat'"
var name = "data.dat"
dir = "data"
return os.path.join(dir, name)

now you've clobbered the global function "dir" without realizing.
Not long ago they said Cannonical was 200 employees, with about half of them in Taiwan working on netbooks and other embedded devices

They probably only have a couple of dozen programmers. Although they are growing all the time.
Coming up with a 'just-so' story is not defense. They have evidence that links you to the crime when the standard is merely 'preponderance of the evidence'. Unless you have evidence that rebuts theirs, you're 'maybe a hacker did it' will be up there with 'maybe my sister did it'.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/songs-of-inn... highlights some other confused responses.
I recommend running http://www.bitlbee.org/ and using irssi not only for IRC but for IM as well. For IRC I get a lot out of #pocoo on Freenode and use a private company ircd.
Not at all true. I've sat through professional usability tests of things I have designed and have been amazed at the things people trip on that you wouldn't expect. There's great value in usability testing to find the flaws in your design (yes, your design can almost always be improved upon) as well as ammunition to defend the decisions you made against stupid requests from management.
I had a toshiba laptop for a while where the windows key was at the top right of the keyboard, probably why I prefer stumpwm/ratpoison.
"He believed that geniuses are made, not born"
That's an idea I haven't thought about.

My opinion is that the index page goal, when not logged in, is to maximize sign ups.

I'll think about it and probably do a test.

Thanks!
Wouldn't that be sweet? : Mutating Ads
I doubt they'll take it to trial unless it was a particularly egregious violation. The idea with these is to settle out of court for a few thousand bucks, which is pure profit for these guys. They are like debt collectors. They threaten but have no teeth when it comes down to it. Lawyers cost money for them too.
Porting D-Bus to XCB: story of a failure
I just added Rapportive to my google apps account. Looks promising, especially with Bantam Live integration (which I've been testing recently also).

Feedback: the sidebar is sticky (moves with the scrollbar), which can be cool, but also interferes if I have anything else in that sidebar.

Question: what makes Rapportive different/better than Etacts? I really like the Send+Remind feature that Etacts has, for instance.
Yes, we play Quake III Arena these days. We're also starting Team Fortress 2, now that Steam was released for Mac.
There's are careful balance between not letting technology pass you by and jumping on the latest fad.

You never want to be out of touch but you can't invest your time in a dead end.

It's an obsolescence bell-curve
The grandmaster experiment
Show HN: my weekend project, Upcoming Events 
Hi Everyone,

First of all, let me tell you, most of you really impress me. I don't really remember how I discovered you, but every-day I love reading you ! Very very smart people here, and Yes I feel like shit when reading you...

I had a little idea some time ago, and because it's the weekend I decided to make it. Very simple, very fast, (thanks Drupal).

The thing, if you may participate (great !) is just a calendar where everyone can participate. Why a calendar ?

The issue : because I am addicted to news, it happens a lot to read that something weird or magical is going to happen, in the future. It could be from the release of a new Eve extension, to the launch of the next Mars rover.. Do you know when it is exactly? I don't !

To remember such things, this calendar could help all of you who is facing the same issue. Just add the event to the calendar, subscribe to it with google calendar, (iCal file is available) and receive your SMS when it's going to happen so that you don't miss the thing !

I really thank you in advance to have a look at it, if you are interested. Please don't be rude on my English. Oh, and on the website.. I did it in 6 hours, and just finished. Depending on the success, many features could come, just ask ! Please report any problem you may face, I'll be up a couple of hours again !

http://socialmkt.net (it's an old domain I have, unused)

thanks again
Riton
I'm using the Registered Users Only plugin, and it's great so far: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/registered-users-only/
Frankly I'm not so sure I would settle or even hire a lawyer if I were to face a situation like this. First, I have no assets. I guess they could garnish my wages. Isn't bankruptcy for this. I can get sued for a trillion dollars and it wouldn't matter. Am I being naive?
Why do people expect Apple to play by different rules? If they are developing these applications to be released in 8 months they're potentially in a bad spot if someone else patents them 2 months from now. What they choose to do after they are granted the patent is a separate issue. Patent reform in general is yet another issue. It's like complaining that the away team hits a technical free throw in a basketball. That's just how the game is played these days.
The plan is to open source the agent in the near future.
Trolling must be the only explanation, because

a) Doing data mining research and exploratory programming in a small company is probably the best use case for a Lisp. When you're Google you can afford to write this in C++ or Java (with layers of libraries taking the boiler plate out) as well waste research/prototype time on compile/link cycle (rather being able to program interactively). When you're Google, you can also afford to only hire machine learning people who know how to write production quality C++ (very rare combination of skills). Clojure is a more acceptable language: despite of what fanboys say, FP is not a black art reserved for 99.9th percentile programmers; the more C++ I write, the more convinced I get that C++ is.

b) Clojure interop with Java makes it easy to use this sort of system with Hadoop, Mahout, Colt, etc... Sure there are more effective libraries available in C++, but they either proprietary to Google (MapReduce + GFS), not designed for fault tolerance (MPI) or more time consuming to use (LINPACK, LAPACK)

c) Python is going to be 10-20 times slower, (perhaps 5x when you're using C interop).
Dave McClure raises fund, says traditional VCs should ‘die already'
How is that a farce? The distribution model of the App store has been clear from the start... It's take it or leave it - but depending on jailbreaking for a mass market app is clearly not going to work.
Sony had a better chance than Microsoft being in that space longer and also being a content producer. If Sony had come up with an iTunes service at the same time as Apple and incorporated it into the Walkman, Sony TVs, Sony / Erickson cellphones, and the PS/2 then Apple would have had some real competition. But, it didn't happen much like Barnes & Noble didn't build a competitor to Amazon until it was too late.

Microsoft's biggest problem is that the Windows franchise was not directly translatable into MP3 players or phones. This made their normal "me-too" strategy very hard. Also, all of the lock-in that Microsoft got from their Windows line was actually in Apple's favor with the iTunes ecosystem. "Me too" doesn't work if the switching cost is too high.

Microsoft Home Server is great for geeks and knowledgable users, but it is too expensive (PC cost / maintenance cost) for normal people. I believe Courier would have been a great product, but it, by design, would not have had the depth of ecosystem that the iPad has. It would have been an amazing device for business though.
In active service in the armed forces, or private/commercial?
Questions about your most recent purchases are common security questions when contacting the major card issuers. It might be that this data is a very juicy target.
I like the line about "These are your future customers!"

Everyone dies eventually.
Interesting. I don't have money, business experience or much programming expertise (still learning) so I'm not sure I'd bring much to the table. However I hope it goes well and they bring it back next year.
Heh, in Ontario it is legal for parents to have beer and wine at home (or any other private dwelling) when the child is only 14. By 18 we take a trip to Quebec to have our first drunken stupor at a bar (but that happened long before then at house parties) and sooner or later voila, you are 19 and drinking. The funniest was when I went to the states and ordered a beer nonchalantly at a pub when I was 20. When I was ordering my second beer the waitress asked if she had checked my ID yet. "No you haven't, but don't worry I'm 20." "Uhhh, the legal limit is 21" "Oh yeahhh, America..." "Ah don't worry, I'll bring you a second one anyways." Small town USA waitresses are awesome.
This directly addresses an internal struggle I have been having as of late. Pursue an MBA or not?

The way I see it is that business is a fluid process and while learning the basic framework of it is beneficial, it in no way corresponds to success. Any of the classes in an MBA can be learned through books. What you are paying for is the experience and the network that you can gain at a low risk, while firmly rooting a foundation of fundamentals.
OK, but I wonder if it's not easier to just block access to /etc/passwd from the compiler while it is compiling user-submitted code. AppArmor or SELinux could be used to do this.

A decoy /etc/passwd is a bit less plausible to me.
I've asked the GMail team repeatedly for a way to tag messages while I'm composing them. It saves many clicks after sending -> go to sent mail, select the message, apply a label, go back to inbox. It seems like a great value-add for the zealous label-users.