skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I implemented only the subset of the Date API I needed for the application. A fully-fledged Ruby Date would be a larger project.

+1 for duck typing, a custom non-Date object can look like a date for operations that only use a subset of the methods.
Sure, my guess is that Apple hasn't done so simply because they haven't got the time/resources/patience. It's not like Apple is making _any_ money from something like Stock!

But if you remove it from the phone then those people who are using it are going to get pissed. So in order for the improvement to be seamless to the user, it needs first to move Stock to the App store, then to remove Stocks (and other apps) from the OS, and then finally redownload the application... all in one system update. Not hard for someone with the money of Apple, but hardly worth the trouble (for now, I imagine once the pace of development slows down things may change).

Edit: minor grammatical changes
First time I've seen someone recommend a browser because things don't work in it! :)
In Melbourne, Australia, a similar concept was used to ease congestion entering freeways. We had a peak-hour problem where cars would flood the entry ramps, but struggle to merge with the existing freeway traffic - this caused people to brake/slow down which resulted in major jams.

To alleviate this issue "there are traffic lights at some freeway entrances to control the flow of vehicles onto the freeway when the traffic is heavy. When operating, the lights will change quickly, so that when the light is green only one vehicle in each lane will be able to enter the freeway." (taken from VicRoads website)

The lights basically cycle from red to green every 2 seconds. That's enough to regulate the flow onto the freeway and minmises jams on the entry ramp and at the merge point between the freeway and entry ramp.
It's also reminiscent of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier in WWII who was commanded to carry out guerrilla tactics in the Philippine jungle. Believing reports of the war's end to be an Allied deception, he continued to attack and raid the locals for thirty years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
Wow, that brings back painful memories. In high school I built a program called the B3D Tweak Utility, an editor for the Blitz3D file format (a RAD game tool). I sold maybe 30 or so copies for $20.

Encouraged that I could sell something online and see a return, I followed it up a crazy GUI build tool with Python scripting that supported a ton of extensions for eg building the demo and full versions of a product up to the install file. Completely scratching my own itch, and it took a few months of work.

I got zero sales. I posted on my usual dev forums with about two replies. The only email I ever got about it was asking whether I was planning a Mac version, which he'd absolutely need before he'd consider using it.

Thinking now about how much money I could make if I worked that hard on something for 2 months today makes me ill... but I'm not sure there are any short cuts around making those painful mistakes in the beginning. Experiencing the bottom (i.e. investing time with 0 return) has made me laser focused on market fit before I start any product today.
As he's now working for Google (http://achrissmith.blogspot.com/2010/05/one-month-in.html)
I wonder if he's still involved with F# (Google employees not being able to use Windows and all).

update: To answer my own question, I asked him, and he responded: http://twitter.com/aChrisSmith/status/21929022794

I love the internet.
Nicely done, z -

http://i37.tinypic.com/21llon6.jpg
It is sad, but what you are truly wishing for is to exist in a universe where conservation of energy doesn't exist. Of course, I would love a perpetual motion machine as it would solve all these pesky problems of energy, but the fact is that the way things are, right now in this universe, it simply isn't possible.

I firmly believe that radical life extension will be possible, but sooner or later you will have to die be it through freak accident, decay or by choice. You will die. I would love to spend entire lifetimes making things, but I can't and the sooner I realize that the better I can make do with what I have.

I respect Mr. Kurzweil like anything, but going his way is like buying a lottery ticket to fund your startup. You can make rational arguments about it and claim that it is indeed possible, but in all practicality it ain't gonna happen.

This is why I've decided to accept it and move on. I am going to die?

Fine.

I might as well make the most of what I have. You know as this has started to sink in I've realized just how petty most people are. They fight, they scream, they judge, they mock, they kill all in the hope of not seeing the emptiness. We fill ourselves with mindless chatter, some chatter is better than others, hoping to erase the fears, but the truth is that as long as we live in this state of being we are addicts and there is nothing we can do about it. It is only when you come to terms with your monsters can you conquer them.

Right now, my parents are spending time like they do everyday for hours at end watching a really, really bad Indian soap on TV. I can't judge them and neither should you, but can you imagine what a precious chance they have wasted and waste continuously everyday for 3-4 hours? Or, 30 hours+ a week? They spend most of their time afraid of judgement from society and they are too scared to be themselves in front of others. What existence is that?

I wish I could help them, but I can't as I am too small and they have "wisdom of years of experience". You see, if they realized and saw the world for what it was not how they wanted it to be, then they would have opened themselves to peace. They worship invisible beings in the sky in hope of securing favors, instead. I don't want to end up like them.

This is why I would rather stand and face my fears than hide.

I have decided to spend every moment I have loving other people, and making their lives richer. I've decided to make others smile and create beautiful things. I've decided to learn as much as I can about this amazingly beautiful world before I die. I've learnt that happiness is only real when shared. I can do this only if I am at peace and I accept that problems will always exist around me. Fretting about them doesn't solve much, does it?
"What's inside the AVC Edge? It has a 486 SLE processor and 32 MB of RAM—similar specs to a 20-year-old PC. The election software is stored on an internal CompactFlash memory card. Modifying it is as simple as removing the card and inserting it into a PC."

Seems to be a history of dubious competence for this machine and company:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:vVOdcOpBZ_EJ:w...

http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sequoia_AVC_Edge
In fact, here is a YouTube video of the lights in operation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFrEd8qSVCc
Perhaps, but in the context of the article, traffic jams only exist because of commuters. The interstate & highway systems were not designed for commuters and should not be used for them. While I think computer-driven cars will be a boon to the environment and economy, the capital investment needed is pretty fantastic, which is going to be some decades off.

In fact, a real solution to this problem that could be applied in the design of our current urban landscape would be a multi-pronged effort to spread out the commuter traffic. Alternating work and school hours could widen commuting hours and distribute load across all commuter infrastructure. Increased levels of telecommuting would also contribute to this. This would be a sort of supply-side fix to commuter congestion. Local or regional governments could create incentives to encourage these changes.
Yeah, and my understanding is that sadly he was right too. As are you that in Europe things are very different: the author acknowledges that too. Basically my understanding is that Europe is so far from the USA that the iPhone did a first step (but wasn't quite there yet) and the Nexus One did the second one.
Auto-Tune X-Factor Shocker
It's also working near perfectly in Opera 10.61. (There is a bug initially, when the lines should start in the middle of the chart, rather than on the left)
it's a trade off against programmer time. For the most part users have preferred more but slower features rather than fewer but faster features.

I happen to agree with your preference, but most people don't seem to.
Commit messages are important. You should convey what you did.

Commit messages are important. You should make them fun to read.
Bayesian experimental design? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bayesian_expe...
Simplistic mp3 search engine with style
If you're a fan of TD games you should check out the Protector series. Then you'll know what he's talking about.

http://protectorworld.com/
I used this trick the other day -- compute byte range partitions on a large file and use fseek when processing each. Is there a standard unix program that can output an arbitrary byte range from a seekable input? At first blush dd(1) looked like the ticket, but block-oriented operation means extra invocations to deal with a byte range that's not necessarily block-aligned.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, that's because iP[hone|ad] users aren't as interested in reading. Apple's niche has always been with the visual, not the verbal, crowd.
This should be followed by an overview of what should be in a readme, as well as examples of good and bad readmes.

Still, good stuff. Just leaves a few questions.
" was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves."

I really don't think this is true at all. Leo runs a media company and many people follow him to keep tabs on what he is doing. It is not a personal relationship. He doesn't answer a large percentage of his audience so there is no true conversation. Most people probably thought he was on vacation or something. They were probably listening to others or talking to the people they actually have real "engagement" (oh, how I hate that term) with. Dunbar's number seems to be in affect.

The funny part is that many people with high follower counts crowd source answers instead of doing research, but don't balance that with answering questions themselves.
This is why I play with FP all the time, and sometimes get real work done in it. I'm also currently exploring embedding nano-interpreters into existing languages.

But there are some cautionary tales, too. Here's one I submitted earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626130
Lesson #0: scalability is not a problem that can be solved exclusively in software.

Hire a sysadmin. And take his advice.
Super-fast Gmail Search
The intersection of the set of places that get traffic jams and the set of places in which public transit is impractical and uneconomic is very small.
Pragmatic Polyglot Persistence with Rails
How Hadoop is being used at Orbitz
A good readme is a lot like a good manpage: http://rtomayko.github.com/ronn/
Here is short presentation on how tubri protects user's social privacy:
http://www.slideshare.net/jeet232/how-tubri-protects-your-so...
It may be that they found limitations in the market size, not the pricing model.

When you get "$119 million of funding", having 35,000 paying customers is just not going to cut it.

Since its most likely a niche market, they might not have the network benefit of a larger market that freemium utilizes. Maximizing the revenue from each customer is much more important when the market is smaller.
a java ide?
One of his most absurd posts.

Writing code is not like taking dictation or even writing prose. In a split-second I can think up a sentence, one that's likely "good enough" to convey whatever point I'm trying to make. Further, there is almost no divergence between thinking of a sentence and its eventual form.

Perhaps I am dull-witted, but very often a split-second isn't sufficient to think about what function I need to write, much less also figure out what the implementation should be. I have to think far more deeply about what code I need to write, to the point that the time spent touching the keys is minimal; the situation becomes even more negligible the more terse the language. In terms of character length, an office secretary would be able to bang out a clojure library in a few minutes, one that took weeks to actually write.

P.S. I timed writing the above. 90% of the time was spent on thinking, editing, etc.; only 10% of the time accounted for actually banging out words.
It would be nice, if we dont consider the fact that nobody reads README at all.

"A perfect implementation of the wrong specification is worthless."

The point of BDD is exactly this: bring specification to the scene, give it a first class citizen status, it becomes a live entity in the system, more influential than before. I don't believe Readme or any other document can be as influential as a Cucumber feature, for instance.
Sorry, but this page is broken. I have no iTunes so I can't listen to the podcast (ah, wait, the player shows up on the feed page...). The feed subscription page is weird, and took me two (wait, three) attempts to figure out how to subscribe to the feed.

What happened to a MP3 download and a standard RSS link tag?!
Date.parse is really incredibly slow, because it tries all the format parsers until it get one that works. If the format you're trying to parse is low in that list, its going to be very slow.

If you know your format (iso8601, etc), you're better off just using the right parser instead of Date.parse.

Also the internal representation uses Rational, which can be pretty slow itself.

Date.parse: http://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/lib/date/format.rb#L1...

edit: correction to how parse works.
I'm not a C++ fan myself, but I think the complexity problem with Firefox is its various bits of internal infrastructure more than the language--- XUL, the rendering engine, custom string libraries, and a whole bunch of FooManagers and other custom interfaces intended to allow all the parts to be plugged together. The only thing I can think of offhand that a change of language might fix would be that a move to a garbage-collected language might allow for ripping out some of the FooManagers dedicated to allocating/tracking/freeing memory.
Nice explanation of "git rebase" for combining small commits into one large one.

edit: about funny commit messages :-D

> Newsflash: You’re not funny, you’re being an idiot.
:)
Request to critique my tech writing (and html5 canvas select-and-drag tutorial)
Most listed Twitter users
I have been trying to improve my writing skills and I just finished a tutorial for Making and Moving Selectable Shapes on an HTML5 Canvas.

I'm not necessarily looking for minute things such as grammatical errors, though I would appreciate them if you found them. More so I'm looking for feedback on the piece as a whole.

Did I give enough of an explanation? Was it clear? Did it feel like I jumped around, or was it logical to follow, section-by-section?

Is all the code's purpose clear to you? Should I have included more or fewer code snippets in the article?
From a "using stuff off of GitHub" perspective, the README file is front and center when you look at a project.
Sure, and when I have chosen a good algorithm, I want to implement it in a language/runtime that is suitable for algorithmic code, not in Ruby or Python or PHP. To be able to do that is something I expect of myself and everyone I work with.
They are making a killing, they just don't talk about it. I know several people who are doing this. Currency trading, predicting dog & horse races, options trading - all one man shows with a tiny little grasp that nobody else has. Each making a couple million a year trying to figure out the next little trick (all the straightforward tricks are owned by Goldman's super fast computers). More than once I have seen 1 second of lag cost them big, but overall they are maxing out the opportunities their little (< 20k loc, usually in vb of all things, sometimes in python or ruby) stats programs have found.

Furthermore, I work as a business intelligence quant for the online tech space. I've DRASTICALLY increased ROI rates for online ads, as well as conversion metrics, with my formulas and clustering models. There is so much low hanging fruit out there it is crazy.

If anyone wants to get into this field I'd be more than happy to point you in the right direction.
It seems like there is always an abundance of people wanting to be technical co-founders here so I haven't seen one yet that has been flooded with responses. Also, I don't live on the west coast so that seems to be another barrier for me...
Beautiful surroundings are a fine thing. But I've seen some good schooling done in pretty ugly buildings. In general I suspect the American propensity for applying capital solutions to labor-intensive problems.
No... You can put all sorts of shit on there, but give me an easy way to install my own ROM, and don't put on impossible to uninstall apps.
I don't think it's changed e-mail as much as it is changing mobile messaging (SMS). With notifications on mobile FB apps, you can easily bypass SMS to communicate with other friends either at their computer or on their phone.

There are still other e-mail features FB private messages don't offer: forwarding message threads, attachments, email subscriptions, etc.)
It has been very good so far. The visual studio support is excellent. You get code highlighting (of course), intellisense, you don't have to worry about building and compiling (just hit run), debugging, compilation is fast, execution is fast, there is an interactive repl. And last but not least: you get access to the whole suite of .NET libraries: http, gui libraries, parsers for various formats, access to databases, etc.

The most important annoyance is that you often need to explicitly upcast objects. For example if you have a String and a function that takes Object you need to upcast the String to Object.
Oh.. but we have:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
When I'm researching new tools/libraries, the first thing I read is the README. If it's worthless, then it's a fair bet the tool/library is, as well, and I won't be using it by choice. After that, I look at the official documentation. If all it has is auto-generated API documentation, that's another strike against it. Then I look at the API documentation. The tests are somewhere way in the back after all of this.
He wasn't trying to figure out the reason. He was directly refuting someone else's statement.
Surely it's only a matter of time before someone takes the concept of the iPhone keyboard or Swype and figures out a way to get improved input or error-correction rates by throwing out the legacy QWERTY layout.

It's only with the introduction of the iPad that you can even type with all your fingers anyway, and even then only in perfect conditions. Dvorak makes as little sense as Qwerty for one finger pecking on a tiny phone, it's just that people are used to using Qwerty in situations when it's non-optimal (i.e. anything but mechanical typewriters that are susceptible to bar jams if two nearby keys are hit quickly in succession).

Where's the one handed Dvorak keyboard for Android, or a chording keyboard that uses multitouch? I don't want Dvorak, I want the same kind of ingenuity and applied science as Dvorak used to create new solutions.
Apart from understanding how much time people spend in private browsing, here's a recent paper that talks about the technical details of private browsing mode of popular browsers (Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari).

http://www.usenix.org/events/sec10/tech/full_papers/Aggarwal...
They should have hacked it to play Pole Position, where the winner of the race was the candidate who gets the vote.
They must have just pushed this, because I was looking at it yesterday and it was the old tired and broken (by comparison) version of the page.

Has the edition changed? I'm a bit confused. I'm reading the O'Reilly eBook and it seems like what I'm reading is a draft. There are chapters seemingly missing (for instance, they described Map well enough but skipped reduce and went right into talking about Sofa without ever introducing Sofa)

However, I am reading it cover to cover and it is pretty thorough and not a bad book.

I just wonder which version I have and how it compares to the two on the new webpage.

Maybe we need a standard for book versions. Rather than just "Editions" something of a smaller increment. Like Edition/Revision.
I have a hard time thinking seriously about this, because all I can think of right now are those repos on GitHub that have nothing but a README file.
Can I ask to what you have broadened your podcast list? Sometimes twit gets boring, and that leaves an hour long void to fill during my commute. Searching for 'technology podcast' unsurprisingly returns a lot of terrible podcasts.
"The rich stay rich by keeping their money"

Maybe old-rich, but most rich people generally get richer by investing. I seems to remember a bible story talking about this (25:14-30). Take a look at the stories of the luxury taxes in the US and their affect on yacht builders (labor intensive, good paying jobs).
IRC.NET: A modern, robust IRC library in .NET 4.0, samples included.
I also get a hint of "open for me but not for thee" here: we're supposed to believe the Android's openness (which began as an asset) is now a liability because carriers shouldn't be allowed to modify it.

So who is to be the judge of who gets to modify Android? Google? Jason Hiner?

He also mischaracterizes a lot of the modifications that have happened to Android: sure, the uninstallable NASCAR app on the EVO was decidedly crapware, but to simply lump the Sense interface in with it is a deliberate mischaracterization. (Especially after many reviewers noted that they believed Sense improved on stock on Android-- an opinion I don't share, but a debate worth having).

So my question is thus: does Jason Hiner think Google should rescind its open-source license for most of Android? Does he think that such a move would honestly be more "open" than it is now?

Because it certainly appears that he does.
I looked at Ning some time ago for players of the small RPG I made. The service seemed redundant with the site, storefront, email accounts, and forum I already have, which are very cheap.

I think Ning is enterprise software of a social sort. As a result, they might fall into a narrow slice of the market: not too small, but not too big.

EDIT: The title should read ...are things starting to look up at Ning?