skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Living in a very sanitary environment like the US can (potentially) weaken your immune system."

There are lots of vague hypotheses like this floating about, but IMHO[1] they're pretty flimsy. The fact that you don't have immunity to various foreign bugs doesn't imply (at all) that your immune system is "weak".

There's better evidence that sanitary conditions could increase allergy, which is an overactive immune system, not a weakened one.

Pollution, which you mention later in your comment, has nothing at all to do with immunity.

All that aside: boil it, peel it, cook it, or forget it!

[1] - Also not a doctor, but I am an epidemiologist.
Linus Torvalds and/or Larry Wall. Take your pick.
ARMv7a architecture gets 40-bit addressing and virtualization support
Thanks for the input, we began a reading plan with The Pragmatic Programmer ans then we will move on to Don't Make Me think
So what do you do?
Has anybody gotten any Steve Jobs reply?
How about direct cell phone numbers?
Really? I use Windows most of the time, but I didn't have any trouble installing applications on the Mac. All I did was load the disk and dragged the application to the Applications folder. One step. Granted, Windows installers aren't exactly rocket science either, but the process of installing software isn't difficult at all on the Macintosh.

Given that, I agree with you in thinking that the majority of Macs haven't had any applications installed on them since they left the factory. Why? Macs come with a much wider range of applications than Windows boxes. As long as its not common for consumer PCs to ship with Office and Firefox pre-installed, there'll be more software installation on Windows than on PCs.
If you are building a tech company, and you plan on remaining 'non technical' it is almost quite literally a non starter.

You don't have to be an engineer, but you have to curate that part of your brain at least some. Google "Victoria Ransom" and her mixergy interview to see someone who is good at being 'non technical' and get things done.

Steve Jobs, the often used example of a 'non technical' person, may not be a classically trained engineer, but the guy takes a huge interest in the core technology used. Listen to him talk about object oriented programming in the 90s for an example. Henry Ford cared about engines. Larry Ellison cares about databases.
You sure it wasn't just his auto responder? ;)
Wow, that's more personal!!
IPhoning My Way to Retirement $.70 at a Time (Eugene Lin)
I also wondered about the future of Cappuccino. The current version is LGPL licensed, but they may rerelease future versions under a different license.
Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, and original author of emacs and gcc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman, http://stallman.org/)
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the tag line "no frills dating" will appeal to women. I get what you're going for, but I would try to reword that.

I would also suggest to try a different design for the page as it looks like a template for a dating affiliate site, not an original project.
Crunchbase isn't only startups (my employer is there, and we're not a startup) and not all startups raise money (we were once a startup, but were bootstrapped).

I would characterize the companies in Crunchbase as just tech companies.
I thought it was a concise was of stating that constricting environmental factors have a way damaging one's self-esteem to the point of preventing him from clearly thinking to improve his circumstances.
Tandy TRS-80. Basic.
If this is true, why does it take so long to hire good programmers? Even startups with technical founders, who have an entire network to draw on, spend spend a lot time searching for and evaluating programmers.

>but if you know someone is very smart, and is also in a technical field, there is a reasonable chance they will be good technically

Why do you think this? Certainly you have to be smart to graduate from good University, but it's not secret that many programmers out of the University can't code their way out of a paper bag. Unfortunately, I've worked with a fair amount of intelligent people in a technical field who just weren't good at producing high quality software.
you've got a good domain, and it speaks directly to your description of being available at a certain day/time.

Why isn't that description on your website anywhere?

Particularly in the very popular dating space, you need to set youself apart. you say 'no frills dating' which has absolutely no meaning.

If I've got what you are doing correctly you are doing a 'who else has a free night and wants to go on a date'?
that has value. But you have to tell people.

From a design perspective, your orange highlighted items look like links, but they are just highlights, so I'd look into fixing that, and I think you should move the sign-up to another page to give yourself more room to explain why your site is better than the rest.

Also, the problem (if I understand it right) is that most dating sites when they are just starting out don't have enough people on them, so I think you need to make sure you have people looking for dates, or good ways to invite people.
You need to make it look like the site has activity and that people are getting dates or looking at the available slots.

Also, that image of the perv grabbing that girl is really bad. I've always been surprised that dating sites use real people in the image rather than a silhouette where the person viewing the page can kinda see themselves in it.

Just my cents.
Sure, giving and receiving advice is always tricky, maintaining an open mind while filtering out the crap is difficult. This is always worth bearing in mind as the giver.

Honestly, I think we're picturing totally different conversations and circumstances.
Wow that was fast! Congrats guys. I expected Apple to snatch Atlas for Objective-J and it would make sense for iOS Objective-C devs to jump ship easily.

But, man this is a great deal for Motorola. These guys did two startups worth of work atleast and 280 Slides alone is a startup itself :)
Microsoft says analytics, BI among hottest tech majors
If you've down-voted me, why not articulate why you disagree?
What do you mean are we? Objective-j does run on Android (aka, Droids as people are beginning to refer to them thanks to Verizon's marketing)... it runs on anything. It lives inside of the web browser. The "j" in Objective-J stands for JavaScript :)

Any half-decent browser will run Objective-J applications. Motorola's move has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the people. As someone commented earlier, Motorola just gained one hell of a web team.
That's correct, but you run the risk of someone else patenting the idea first. So it's risky - but could pay off if you invent something far ahead of its time.
Apple IIc
I've forwarded email from one of my accounts to another one of my accounts.
I think your video goes WAY too slow. You need to get more energy and enthusiasm in it!
i've been on a race track with him and his lamborghini, but i was too busy to exchange an email at the time.
That's awesome! 80x return is pretty sweet ...
Also one of the few people who can be known simply by his initials. The only other two I can think of off the top of my head are ESR and GvR (Eric S. Raymond and Guido van Rossen, for those not in the know).
Then again you run the risk of someone else beating you to the patent. I love those stories about how the famous creator/inventor of [some idea or device] published the discovery an hour/day/week before someone else.
Ask HN: Should I compete with an Interpreter?
There are a very unique set of programming languages that are dated. The set of languages I am referring to is "Business Basic". You can get more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Basic

Most of the larger players are either non-existent, or have been bought out. There are only a few major players left, http://pvx.com and http://pvxplus.com, http://www.thoroughbredsoftware.com/ and http://www.basis.com/

I was wondering, if I should create an interpreted business basic to complete, however make it like PHP (allow cgi sessions off of an apache server). There is currently nothing like this now. The majority of people using this, are pretty old (or ignorant), and wouldn't switch to Python, etc.

My biggest concern, is that there are really only about 3-5 million end users of programs that are created in Business Basic, guessing that there are probably 50,000 developers using these languages at most. Should I enter a dieing but specialized market, or should I go back to the drawing board?
Ask HN: Submission time question
Hello all,

Do you happen to know if there is a limit as to how many questions or links can one submit?

Yesterday I came up with a message "You are submitting too fast. Slow down please. Thanks". I waited a few minutes but it persisted. In the end I tried after an hour, two, before I went to bed and finally I posted today.

I tried posting this message around midday (an hour after my last post) and could not - the same message kept on appearing. I tried different computers, cleared cache etc. nothing. Finally 6 hours after my last submission I managed to post it (hopefully I am not the only one seeing it :))

So the question is, what is the limit on submissions. How many per hour and what is the time in between?

Is it just me or others experience the same?

Thank you for your help in advance.
We have a nice round number: #400! http://www.inc.com/inc5000/profile/elc-technologies
Bruce Campbell wrote me back. Hail to the king, baby.
Must be an HN'er.
pierre omidyar
Poynt Blackberry
I got a response from Peter Norvig a few months back. I've also gotten responses from the some Danish members of parlaiment which you've probably never heard of.

John Graham Cumming (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgrahamc) beats me by many lengths though: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.html
Don't be too worried. I'm pretty sure they are still going to work on Cappuccino, and the community is still very active and helpful.
And yet another point for Aldous Huxley, who clearly saw as early as 70 years ago that

"...it is upon fashion, cars, and gadgets, upon news and the advertising for which news exists, that our present industrial and economic system depends for its proper functioning. For, as ex-President Hoover pointed out not long ago, this system cannot work unless the demand for non-necessaries is not merely kept up, but continually expanded; and of course it cannot be kept up and expanded except by incessant appeals to greed, competitiveness, and love of aimless stimulation. Men have always been prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevancies, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system. Recollectedness, or the overcoming of distractions, has never been more necessary than now; it has also, we may guess, never been more difficult."
How Much Is Left? The Limits of Earth's Resources, Made Interactive
Ask HN: Work abroad or telecommute?
I want to travel and learn new languages, however I also have to support myself. I have the opportunity to work for a startup abroad. I'm also considering simply living abroad and finding a telecommute job to support my travels.

So, which would HN recommend? Finding a telecommute position to support life abroad or taking a job abroad?
Wow, super cool! I don't know much about entropy, etc. This is opening my eyes all over again. Thanks!
Can we get a new Internet-Meme-Law like Godwin's, to say the moment anyone invokes ad hominem without specifying what the personal insult was, they automatically lose the argument?
There will be competitors. I can assure you of that.
Actually let me be even more clear. I originally said these "founders" were like land owners looking for share croppers. What I am really trying to describe is these are "owners" with out land still thinking they are entitled to ownership of the work done by those who they coerce. I think there is no more transparent example of exploitation. It makes usury look like an equitable situation.

What land? What bricks?
That doesn't matter if the technology is very unlikely to be commercialized within the lifetime of a patent, does it? Even if the other party takes the time and expense to file the patent, you both still end up with zero.
"We never really intended to build a web framework" <-- I find that it's usually a sign of a great product. Instead of designing a framework to design a framework, something is created to fix a real problem.. and only then, a framework is built around it.
I've been working with Java since '98. I worked for Sun Micro, then Netscape, then the Sun-Netscape alliance, then iPlanet. I also worked for Oracle before I joined Sun and would have lost a lot of money on the wager that Oracle would buy Sun one day.

Java is not dying. The enterprise footprint alone will sustain the community (and developers) for years. And there is still plenty of innovation rolling out (SpringMVC is a good example) and I see some great angles for VMWare.

That said, I finally broke down and started learning Ruby last week (after the Oracle litigation announcement). All I can say is...wow. In less than a week, I was pretty comfortable with RoR (OO and MVC felt right at home). Over the weekend, I built an app that I'm actually proud of and planning to share with the HN community for feedback this week. The community is friendly and I'm blown away by the ecosystem (Heroku is ridiculously great).

Bottom-line: I built my home and fed my family with Java over the past decade and feel almost a sense of loyalty. I thought I was pretty fast in Java, but my productivity is up in RoR, even with the learning curve. I've loved every minute and have decided to build subsequent projects using RoR unless I run into some type of crazy roadblock along the way.

The early adopters that embraced Java and pushed it before it was proven (.97b anyone?) are the same people that love trying new things now. That other options are so enjoyable is a bigger threat to Java than Oracle. Oracle might have just provided the nudge people needed to see for themselves.
"Developers we’ve spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make applications with little programming knowledge."

Surely they mean "little web programming knowledge" and a lot of Objective-C knowledge. I don't really understand this page either:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/04/cappuccino-brings-cocoa-lik...

"There are other advantages to basing things in Objective-J as well: advancements in the Cappuccino frameworks don’t wait for the slow emergence of new standards, developers only deal with one language, and Cappuccino comes with useful language features simply not available in JavaScript."

Isn't that backwards? New features come out in Javascript and I have to wait until they're incorporated into Objective-J to use them?
Greg Graffin from Bad Religion, Shepard Fairey (the Obama painting guy who, at the time, was the Andre the Giant guy). Ah, high school.
Hmm. Probably Theo de Raadt. I use OpenBSD so he's important enough to me. ^.^
What new feature has been released in JavaScript in any widely usable way in the last decade?
A HN'er willing to help.
Thank God all my CCs are already jacked all the way up to 28% interest rates, so they can't ass fuck me anymore than I already am being ass fucked. (Before the Republican Randroid's come out of the wood work to tell me it's my own fault—it is, I know, but like a lot of Americans, in the past couple years we've had no choice but to use CC's for necessary living expenses.)

My top goal right now is to live cheap, pay off all debt, and never again take on any debt. Ever. Debt is a fool's game, like any well-designed casino, "the house always wins." Hopefully an enormous number of Americans will learn this lesson and do likewise, and utterly punish the banks where it counts—on their bottom line. It wasn't too long ago that American's were amongst the most frugal and biggest savers in the world, which laid the foundation for a great cultural-Puritan work ethic.
Pre-Crime Technology To Be Used In Washington D.C.
Works very smooth for me (Win 7, Firefox 3.6.8).

<rant>

As a sidenote, this difference of experience highlights a big problem with rich web applications.

You get so high variance in performance depending on a particular combination of hardware, OS and browser that you are virtually predestined to fail hard for some non-negligible part of your userbase (unless your application is so trivial that even on the worst possible platform it would still work ok).

I know, this problem existed with classical games all the time. But there, gamers pretty much came to terms with "hardware requirements" (needed to play the game at all).

With web, expectations are for some reason different. It used to be quite expected and acceptable to buy new GPU/CPU/RAM to play a particular desktop game, yet it seems like too much work just to fire a different browser and copy & paste URL. I know I'm guilty of this myself, despite being developer and regularly working simultaneously with multiple browsers.

And it's just going to get worse as performance spread will widen, both on low-end (more people accessing web through mobile devices) and on high-end (as HW acceleration slowly comes to new generation of browsers).

</rant>
I don't think breaking TRC would mean taking development rights from you. All you had to do is fix them, and resubmit (each submit to the manifacturer costs some money).

Violations are usually user interface problems - not handling correctly if a game controller was pulled, or Disk I/O error happened, or network was disconnected. Some are strict (for example you should have something on the screen no less than N seconds once the disc is put in), some are suggestions for better integration with the system.

You should also display how big your save games would be :) (Not sure if this is still requirment everywhere), but it used to be for PS1/PS2.

As for RAM - well I guess when the console was first produced, RAM costs were really high. I'm not a hardware guy, but eventually the manifacturers are squeezing that expensive console to produce to something very cheap, and having less memory makes it easier. Just a guess. Not much knowledge in this area.

But having only 256MB of RAM is not that bad - we often don't use malloc/free new/delete, or have them working on specific memory blocks (for example to keep recent cache of collisions), and usually allocated with the same sizes.

Not having much RAM means you have to be more inventive - you can find savings different ways - streaming, layering, or other techniques. ID's recent tech is just awesome in that respect.

Although I've told you that we have different compile options, the HW stays the same :) This is both good & bad - good that you can become really expert in it, bad because by the time you are - next console arrives.

Usually that's why the first game suck, and games released 2nd or 3rd year are just awesome, and the last ones released might be better than first ones released for the next generation - God Of War for PS2 was such example. There was nothing that good on the PS3 at that time from the same genre.

Metal Gear Solid for PS1 also shaked up the graphics quality. It's still an awesome looking game even for PS1. And this was on 2MB of memory, 512kb video (or was it less or little more), and I can't remmember now well 256kb or 512kb audio.

I worked on the port of MGS to PC (mgspc.com), and was amazed of how good the japanese coders were, and the way the music was composed - it was midi/mod like but really really well done (we lied on the PC and released it as .wav file - no mixing).

What I'm saying here, is that if you have little digital samples and some notes/tracks you can compose music pieces that otherwise would take you megabytes of memory (APDCM compression was just 1:4 with low quality, unlike 1:10 or more for mp3 and others).
There are plenty of other awesome tools out there. The valley has a tendency to idolize certain people unnecessarily, this leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Worst of all the attention that one development tool or team gets, reduces the attention that other teams get. As a competitor (former competitor?), I sincerely congratulate 280North, but to suggest that they're the only ones building awesome tools is the furthest from the truth.

Edit: No reason to down-vote this. No animosity should be read here. I was just saying there are other cool development tools. I congratulate 280North.
Very nice clean design, though I was confused as to if the banner at the top was an ad for another company, or if that was explaining your service, as it of course was listing for Lydia.com with the tagline 'what do you want to learn today'.

I suggest that a big banner add there won't do as much for you as describing your service.

That brings me to the second point. You've got all the tutorials nicely lined up at the top of the page, but no real navigation with the exception of the search box. No description of your service until below the fold.

Personally, for a start-up, I'd like to see a description at the top of the page.

Your description says 'Think Tutorial is a database of simple...'.

I wouldn't use the word database as that is a technical description of how you're built. You want to give the user the reason for why you exist, not what you are.

Having the bebo stuff on the front-page doesn't make much sense to most people unless you are in an area where bebo is popular (I have no idea where that is) based on your tag cloud, I think you would be better off with microsoft excel or some tutorials like that.

I think the microsoft office icons are more recognizable than the bebo.
I seem to miss such contests most of the time and only hear about them when they ended. I would love to attend to some, just for the fun (because I don't know if I would have any chance to actually win).

Where would be a good source for such competitions?

Another fun competition I read about was the Super Mario AI competition in 2009 where the winner has succeeded with an A* algorithm which he presented in a nice video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8

The 2010 Mario AI championship also seems to be over already.

Another fun competition I have heard about is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. However, while reading this is very interesting and quite fun, I am not sure if I would have fun to do this myself. (Somehow I am more focused on the output/result of the code and I like to have clean, elegant and intelligent code, as less obfuscated as possible. :))
Mapping entrepreneurial density around U.S.
I'm in the same boat. The thing that makes SimpleNote indispensable for me is that it syncs with Notational Velocity. So much better than the default Notes app and its awful syncing.
Google checkout? See also: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/08/reddit-gold-now-takes-google-...
And that's why us programmers have jobs. We're professionals at telling computers what to do.

Which reminds me of a good xkcd comic about the question "what do you do?":
http://xkcd.com/722/