skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is so true. I've done some minor iPad consulting recently, but been asked for comments on several projects. I've found it only fair to prefix my replies with "I can't give you any guarantee that, having spent this money, you'll get anything. Apple uses a hidden list of rejection reasons, and enforces it capriciously". I rarely find companies going ahead with their developments.

Apple may be keeping some garbage out, but they're losing many good apps that probably would have been accepted, if the client had a hard and fast guidelines list to check against. They're also losing developer mindset. They are, in effect, FUDing their own developer base. It's a remarkable strategy, and I can't see how it's anything other than highly damaging.

I'm going through the App Review gauntlet now. My concerns at the end of the development, when doing the last checks against the few official things Apple will say regarding review (and against the web horror stories) were not "What would make a better app". They were:

- Will I get rejected for this icon? I think it's clear, but Apple might squint then claim it's too similar to their XYZ icon. I better change it to this other one, which is less good but at least entirely different

- As I fetch data from the Internet, and someone might post an offensive image before the moderators nuke it, I best set the Age Rating to 17+ (even though I've see an offensive image once in the system, and it lasted 5 minutes).

- I did say "Open in Safari" in my browser invoking popups, which my iPhone addicted users will find clearest. However, Apple randomly reject you for using their trademarks, so I better make it the less clear "Open in Browser"

and a dozen other quality reducing changes that are forced on me by the huge uncertainly about what's "allowed" and what will be understood by their team. In the three days it took me to change my "high quality" app (well, I think so :), I don't doubt the App Store admitted another 10 flashlights and 5 Fart apps.

I love the iPhone and iPad as a consumer. I like the technology as a developer (though I would prefer not to be 100% tied to Objective C). The "business" person and ethnical geek in me hates it with a passion. It's creating a horrible cognitive dissonance that I'm currently tempted to correct by going Android as soon as they have an a decent iPad clone.
Creating it or breaking it? :)
the same occurred to me as well thats why i qualified by saying that education divided itself into secular and religious education - as i read in this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school
--currently the church operates the worlds largest non-governmental school system-- so it would be very hard to separate catholic church and education
Hey, that's my apt building on the pic! These guys are actually my neighbors.

I saw them few months ago, move in on an empty apt and coding their way the last two-three months. I hope they make it.
I really have a problem with the label "Greatest Generation". The greatest generation should be the next one. I sometimes wonder if it was a backhanded way to say America's best years were behind it.
For most domestic animals, that is a possibility, but not for dogs.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Origin_of_the...

"Archaeology has placed the earliest known domestication at potentially 30,000 BC, and with certainty at 7,000 BC....Perhaps the earliest clear evidence for this domestication is the first dog found buried together with human [sic] from 12,000 years ago in Israel."

And dogs came with many groups of hunter-gatherers in their intercontinental migrations.
Getting in touch with the world and drive business using rankings
Just out of curiosity, the article derides the fact that his job search begins and ends in the morning- when I read that, I thought "well, you could certainly use the rest of the day for self-improvement- fitness, projects relevant to the job you want, volunteer work..."

Is that a bad strategy, or when job hunting should you be pounding the pavement 24/7?
I have a little bit of experience with London, and I can second this. London actually gives me the willies after meeting the business culture there. If you ever want to make an argument for the actual existence of shape shifting reptiles (ala nutjob David Icke) then just hang around London's business scene for a while.

America is superficially conservative and deeply liberal. Europe is superficially liberal and deeply conservative.
So...what do we do about it?

How about a standard algorithm/mapping table for grouping unicode chars to known languages and flagging when a unicode string pulls chars from more than one language? (possibly only flagging if a change occurs within a 'word').

A standard way of rendering unicode strings could then be too highlight flagged chars (perhaps with a different colour). More sensitive areas (such as the browser url bar) could fire additional alerts if any chars were flagged.

Feels like a nice minor RFC to me - anyone see a problem with it?
Creating your own Digg/Facebook/Tweetmeme button
Ironically in Boston, you only need a car if you work in the tech industry as most of the startup's are located on 128 which is in the outskirts of the Boston suburban sprawl. But if you work in finance or allied health, everything is conveniently located downtown.

Also, I don't agree that Boston is a civilized city. IMO, Boston is a lot like Providence or Bridgeport, plus a few more ivory tower enclaves and lots more inebriated college kids.
I don't think your portrayal of the argument is entirely correct. Here's the one I've usually seen:

- Apple claims that the language restriction is intended to increase the quality
of apps in the App Store.
- But the App Store is full of crap.
- Apple knows this but still repeats their quality defense.
- Therefore, Apple is being disingenuous and in fact has another motive for their
restrictions on developers.

I've yet to see a plausible ulterior motive, so I take a skeptical view of the whole thing.
Knowing why the American Dream is out of reach is out of reach too. ("Not Found: The requested URL /2010/08/this_is_why_the_american_dream.htm was not found on this server.")

Please add an 'l' to the link: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/this_is_why_the_ameri...
They are plenty representative of the Brooklyn of the last 10 years - that of steady gentrification and rise of cost of living, but still cheaper than Manahattan. Though not much. Much more housing stock, though.

Can we just assume that anyone commenting about Brooklyn on this post is implying South Brooklyn[1] or Williamsburg? If you aren't, please note. Something like "Come to East New York, Brooklyn" would work, so asnyder doesn't get confused.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Brooklyn
Arch Linux allows for ports-style package management with their Arch Build Service. It's more similar to the BSDs, in my experience, than Gentoo.
Microsoft just unleashed thousands of entrepreneurs into the wild
Including, embarassingly, the magazine of SIGCSE (the ACM SIG for CS education). I was going to submit something a year or two ago, couldn't find the LaTeX stylesheet, and sent an email to the editor---who breezily responded that Word was required, and that their authors didn't really complain about this. Self-fulfilling: I decided it was more trouble than it was worth and published it elsewhere, so although I have complained, I'm not one of their authors!

It does explain why the typesetting is so bad, though. Figures are especially atrocious, and there are pixellation issues and routine font problems throughout.
Yes.

This isn't reddit. Please provide some rationale for your namecalling, but preferably please just stay at home.
Could you elaborate more on what you feel is "female-friendly?"

I thought the commenter went on to explain herself on that point (by discussing downvoting of sexist comments).

One could define female-unfriendly as a place where the conversation takes place as if no females are present (or could possibly be present). Think male-locker-room.

But: There are many guys who detest that kind of thing also, and judging from the downvoting of crap comments that goes on in HN, they are making their voices heard.

It's worth noting that I know more men who self-identify as feminist than women.
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Any advice on finding housing in Brooklyn beyond Craigslist?
Ask HN : Best framework for Node.js
I want to start working with Node.js and I want to know which is the "best" framework (most complete/most used/most interesting).
But that's just exploitative unprofessionalism. You can get from any profession; from the mechanic who says you really need the new transmission right now to the programmer who writes code that looks like it has been put through an obfuscator.
if you grep the internet, you'll find I'm nowhere near the first or only one to use it.
They don't pay us enough to be nice. We're allowed to be bitter. :)
I did something similar to that once -- a program that compiled GUI descriptions into a runable Python class, which could then be subclassed to provide functionality. The syntax looked like this:

window @MyBigWindow "My Big Window" {
menuBar {
menu "File" {
menuItem @New "New"
menuItem @Open "Open..."
menuItem @Save "Save"
menuItem @Exit "Exit"
}
menu "Edit" {
menuItem @Copy "Copy"
menuItem @Cut "Cut"
menuItem @Paste "Paste"
}
}
rowLayout {
button "Button 1"
button "Button 2"
button "Button 3"
}
}

Laying out GUI components was done with the rowLayout, colLayout and table containers. The subclass would contain code to be executed for @New, @Open, @Save, etc.
Have an iphone app that needs review/ratings love? the iPhone Mafia can help...
I bet you have some tremendous selection bias going on.

I bet they only looked at the english majors who still had a job in the field after many years. If you include all the english majors, including the failed ones who work in a different field then the numbers might make more sense.
The greater "tech scene" (if you can call it that) in Brooklyn is in and around Dumbo and Downtown.
I think the argument he makes about trusting the marketplace is laughable. I think we can all see that consumers don't always pick the 'best' solution (no this isn't a free market argument although it could be), and relying on them to decide the winner isn't Apple's strategy. In fact I'd argue it's the opposite. Apple does things their way and regardless people swoon over their products. If Apple started listening to it's customers they'd be producing garbage like Netbooks and not innovating (iPad).
Yeah, I only mentioned that in passing but it is a serious issue. All the more pressing because a lot of the promise of IA64 hinged on smart compilers. It was a dramatic change of course for CPU architectures since the previous trend had been to make the hardware smart enough to figure out how to take advantage of ILP on the fly, even with unmodified code (thus the superscalar architecture of the P5, the out of order & branch prediction strategies of P6, etc.)
It's entirely possible that you have servers that are at 80-90% ATR all the time

I'd be curious if you have any evidence that this occurs in practice. Even a busy server with clients of uniform + low latency, intuitively I'd expect fairly low ATRs.

I think what's more important in what I'm finding is that you really need both.

I'm not sure you do: the performance advantage of poll seems marginal at best. When ATR is high, you're presumably doing enough real work that the slight overhead of epoll vs. poll is probably not super important.
Your personal life is deeply entwined with your work. It's shortsighted to think otherwise.
It's actually a really simple concept what's "active" in poll vs. epoll. Your call to poll and epoll basically looks like this:

active_fds = poll(big_ass_array_of_fds, total_fds)

epoll is slightly different but same concept. You have a total number of FDs you're want to know about, and each call returns a number that have had activity.

And that's it. You then just do active_fds/total_fds and that gives the ATR. If this is < 0.6 after your call to poll, then that call to poll would have been better done with epoll. If the active_fd/total_fd is > 0.6 then it's better to stick with poll.

Of course, it's more complicated than that, but this gives you a simple metric of the break point where one is better than another.
This is both good and worrying. It'll be nifty to see how they implement it, and I'm sure it will increase the company's financial security, but I greatly worry about how it might impact their customer priorities. Before, the customers using Github to host their repositories were the only ones to cater to; will this create a conflict of interest in any way? They say "quality jobs", but really, how do they maintain this quality in any fashion, and do they really have any incentive to do so?
All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities.

The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...

State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge.

The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should private research universities focus on education instead of research? (I would give that a resounding no.) (2) Are the private research universities actually producing useful knowledge? (Here, I would be somewhat negative, but probably not for the trite reasons cited by the authors.)

Those are completely different questions, especially since one is empirical and one is normative. And it is a hallmark of poor editorializing to try to address both an empirical question and a normative question in the same small space.
StatusNet raises new round of funding led by FirstMark Capital
nowhere did the author claim they're the reason. they just don't help things.

besides, could you name "western country" not part of the "coalition of the willing" that has seen similar increase in terrorist attacks?
Keep in mind that 1974 was 36 years ago. I am working with a very different model of the world than you are I think. Capital controls exist in the world and some are quite harsh. However, no serious person is even close to advocating them (for wealth nations like the US). What problem do you imagine they would solve?
Currently doing an internship project for storing and aggregating site request logs with Riak. It was hard for me to get used to all the subtle gotchas with Map/Reduce but the people on their IRC channel are very helpful and extremely patient.
Land Speed Record-Seekers Revive Steam Power
I'm not sure he was referring to someone he was working with at the time.
http://jumppost.com/ && http://www.padmapper.com/

-- or --

What really works, although its very low tech, is just going to the neighborhood you want to live in and walking around. Go to delis, pizza places, hardware stores and you'll find signs for apartments.
Why the downvotes?

When I see the statement, "it was the additional supply of calories that made the difference - not some magical ingredient of meat", I want to see research.

And the phrase "diet Taliban" doesn't belong in this discussion.
I've seen several programmers working in cafes in Brooklyn. I don't really hang out in cafes in Manhattan that much (occasionally Subtletea back when I worked in the area) so I can't comment on the state of Manhattan cafes.
I come to Hacker News looking for intelligent discourse. There wasn't a _shred_ of nuance in this article. Nuanced thought is why this is a great place to be. Please don't post articles where the author is openly admitting that they are sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "lalala I can't hear you."

Is New York's tech scene as big as San Francisco's? No. However, this is akin to writing an article titled that "Africa will always be an industrial backwater, I don't care what the economists say."
Questions like "why did you say X?" usually reveal whether a person is actually familiar with what they claim to have written. It's imperfect, certainly, and I would never recommend punishing a student based entirely on an algorithm's result, but I think I can provide a tool to drastically cut down on this sort of academic fraud.

I intend to make it very clear to customers that they should not punish students based only on information provided by my software.
I'm not necessarily against this but I don't see anything here that couldn't be accomplished by one of the dozens of other job sites with the GitHub API.
I was entertained. If we measure success by getting a round, I guess the case is closed. But just because NYC startups don't solicit as much capital doesn't mean that they don't exist; they just develop viable business models a generate revenue. I know that unfashionable, but it's the way it goes...

There are a ton of tech startups, and, not surprisingly, a lot of them are in the finance space. You know what's hot, too? Mobile. And it's going to continue to be, because New York is the walking city.

The other thing about it is that New York startups tend to keep things a bit closer to the chest. You don't tend to see a writeup in TechCrunch about an embryonic startup in NYC. Better or worse, most NYC startups start making money before the press hits and the rounds start coming in. It's a very different philosophy.

New York's not for everyone. You're among the wealthiest and most powerful, so yes, you might get a little squeamish if you're sensitive. You won't be mollycoddled.

And what's the food got to do with startup culture? I don't think the food scene is the right platform to attack New York. SF is only a food town if you want a burrito. I like Argentinian beef, other people like some hippie's broccoli. I'll give up the wine: California has some good stuff, if you're in to alcohol levels. 15%? Damn, Napa.

As others have pointed out, there are welcoming cafes literally river-to-river through the villages, and on the LES you can set up shop practically anywhere.

Now is a terrific time to be involved in NYC startups. It might not be quite as prestigious as being in the the valley, but it comes with a salary, and options aren't coastal.
I've always found acquisitions go well when it's a big company augmenting their offerings with a new offering that they don't currently have. They can take the new offering and pump more resources into it to make it more successful. This thinking can keep the founders around.

Acquisitions almost always go poorly when it's just a play to grab a customer base. Unfortunately, in the Enterprise software space, this is usually the motivation for the acquisition and it's rarely a good thing for the customers. As the customers get pissed off, the founders lose motivation and leave, and generally the acquiring company slowly shuts down the product that they couldn't really support anyway.
This is a very entertaining and well-written rant. But if you're considering starting a company or joining a startup in NYC, don't take this too seriously.

I came from a similar background -- did finance in NYC, hung out with an ivy league crowd etc.. then I started a company in Silicon Valley, and am now continuing it here in NYC. I don't have time to respond to every point, but I think my background means something when I say this post is ridiculously far off base. It makes NYC sound like a scene from Gossip Girl meets American Psycho.

In 2010, working at a startup in NYC is awesome. There is an amazing community here and I've found that people are always very excited to find out that you are doing a startup. In 2010, NYC knows that startups are the future. The culture here has changed significantly in the last couple of years. And that is the most exciting thing about NYC.

Don't let the OP's bad experiences from 2008 convince you otherwise.
Considering they were born between 1901 and 1924, the Greatest Generation is mostly dead.
I agree. However, another route would be to take a sum equal to your 1st year college tuition, and use that to seed a bootstrapped startup. Take a year, $20-50k, and see what you can build. If you fail, you still have (ostensibly) three years of college funding left to go, and you can probably pay off that 4th year through hard work by the time you graduate. When you graduate, you have the degree and a really interesting line item on your resume.

Of course, this all presupposes that family or savings can fund that $50-200k in the first place. Unfortunately, many students are dependent on loans. Because the government backs student loans, bankers are willing to lend money for school where they won't do so for a startup.

If there was a provision that would allow you to get fully-backed "startup loans" that carry the same terms and guarantees as student loans, I firmly believe our economy would be stronger and default rates probably wouldn't be much higher than they are for student loans.
The article is not loading for me (server overload?), but if that's a quote from the article I'm glad I didn't read it.

New York is not the financial district, it's not Wall Street, it's not Williamsburg, it's not Astoria, it's not Coney Island - it's a combination of all those things and much more. Each neighborhood has its own unique personality, and the "scene" is completely different in each.

I live in the East Village and the wall street types/lawyer types are nowhere to be found. I work in an startup incubator office building, with dozens of other startups.

New York is a big place, but it's really is what you make of it.
if you use mailchimp to send emails, why would you also need ReturnPath for deliverability?
It's funny you should say that...
http://www.playlookit.com/how-to-play-lookit#j-mobileapps
There are a lot of startups in Cambridge and downtown and a few in Newton and other train-serviced places. But you're right about 128... but that's part of why 128 is a terrible place to locate a startup. I would pick Quincy over 128. Lots of good office space at affordable prices, good restaurants, and train serviced... but not very hip. :) I would even look at "Reveah" before 128. If it's off the train it's off the map.
building ICBMs has 0 correlation to wealth
I totally absolutely agree they should fix epoll, but the way they've designed I don't see it happening. Of course they could fix the call for doing the actual select and make it at least as fast as poll, but the fact that you have to do a syscall for every file descriptor is idiotic.
However, humans - male, female, and variant - often lust for the anatomical features of other humans, and the associated emotions often trump any rationality. And there is danger in not noticing this. And a surprising number of humans, here and elsewhere, don't seem to notice it.
Over the past decade I've used OS X's firewire migration option... (counts on fingers) five times for myself and friends. Four of those times the transfer was flawless and (surprisingly) painless. The one problematic time was because the new machine arrived with bad RAM; although it booted, the new box was for all practical purposes DOA. One warranted replacement later, the migration process worked every bit as well as I'd come to expect.

I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task.

FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.
in an obvious but interesting way that apple are continuing to influence us- note how much this product announcement reads like the sort of stuff apple have used to sell us the iPhone, iPad etc- i'm not sure how well it plays for webapps, but it is definitely compelling....
It makes NYC sound like a scene from Gossip Girl meets American Psycho.

Wow, that comment really nailed it.