skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both companies have their strong and weak points... including some in critical strategic areas. For instance, if Jobs wants to live up to his reputation as a dictatorial advocate for quality and engineering, why doesn't he force-choke the program manager for iTunes?
I use Moose combined with non Moose OO libraries all the time and only run into troubles when they are doing some really funky stuff on the inside (The Glib wrappers were hard to tackle, but they have to be funky, since they're a C OO to Perl interface). Most of this is thanks to MooseX-NonMoose which takes care of most common things.
I'll grant you that xAuth is a little convoluted. With that said, Twitter deserves credit for being unprecedentedly accommodating and transparent during the transition away from basic auth. It is obviously in their best interest not to break applications, but this hasn't stopped other social networks cough from yanking the rug from underneath scores of apps with little to no warning.
Nothing specific. Just that I've been listening to music more and more on my Nexus One lately, even when I'm sitting in front of Macbook. It just sort of subconsciously works. The default Android music player does have some annoying quirks.
NES?
The WTF here is how anybody drew a conclusion without performing a simple statistical test for significance.
Well, I just say: go know your potential customers. I still think that designing a worthy new language + IDE would be really hard work. However, don't take my words!

Have you considered developing tools or plugin to easy their work? For instance, I'm using WholeTomato's Visual Assist and it really rocks.

> The problem with this is that I have zero ideas in that space...that said it's definitely an interesting space. Making some of the things you can do by programming available to a non-technical audience seems very hard though.

Just don't go overboard. I urge you to go out and meet people, and look for ways to easy their pain. For instance, you will be shocked at how small-business owners struggle to accomplish simple tasks. At how big-companies employee struggle with outdated software.

Good luck!
My experience and of those around me is quite different. Maybe Silicon Valley is different. It's quite easy to liberate IP from a worthless company.
> I was expecting HNers to be a little more innovative.

I was expecting them to be less insulting, but you still get upvoted.
It's being attacked by the incumbents because it's drop-dead awesome. Especially now that they have a good mobile strategy in place, a Grooveshark subscription pretty much completely eliminates any need to buy music.
$170k for a bachelor's in photography?!?
The bizarre part is that most of the store actually is a website (CSS/HTML), and iTunes renders it with Webkit, but it can only be viewed from within iTunes...
It's interesting that they chose to use a region-locked game. Alone it's all well and good to have an event like this in SF, but at least use a more open medium. (I mean, even a weakly open medium like Age of Empires III or something.)

I feel like there's a clear line where 'closed' is bad for everyone, and though I'm not sure if the SF startup community has crossed it, StarCraft II clearly has. It sends a bad message, as I see it.
Let's be honest. The online classroom is never going to be able to offer keg parties and college co-eds. And that's just what the physical campus might be reduced to if they can't compete with the quality and cost of the online education. That and high end science research institutes.
I think that the major point here is that you consider Duke Nukem 3D to be a "standard FPS". You have to understand the 1996 context in which it was released. Prior to that, the "best and most advanced" FPS was Doom. There was no "real 3D", whole maps where flat. You could never stack monsters and players and items over a Z axis.

Duke Nukem 3D brought the 3D into FPS. Because of this 3D, aiming with the mouse became the standard for generations of games. A few months later ID Software published Quake, which was also mind bending. I don't feel like FPS have evolved at all since that time. Better story lines, more guns and spells, more details in the physics engines, but the 3D is still the same for the vast majority of large studio productions.

This is why Duke Nukem is so mythical (and Quake 1), it set the foundation for modern FPS games. Over the time, people forgot about their 1996 experience but where kept on the bandwagon by "Duke Nukem Forever in the following year".

Now I'll agree that the probability that this game lives up its expectations tends toward zero but hey, its like a software game soap opera going on!
Utah seems to be one of those great places to start a tech company outside of the Bay Area. Great to see a full-fledged program like BoomStartup there.
You are the first person I've encountered that thinks ill of the fact that Python reads like pseudo code.

In my mind, it does it in a way that remains succinct and strict, thus avoiding the abomination of "enlishy" code (AppleScript, SQL to some extent, etc.)
You might like Moose (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose/lib/Moose.pm). It's built on top of--and is compatible with--plain Perl OO, but provides a whole lot more and has grown a nice, big community. There's more information (presentations, articles and stuff) on http://moose.perl.org/
There are all sorts of proprietary systems running on old machines with Windows 3.11 at the university I used to work at, from the scoreboard in the football stadium to extremely expensive scanning electron microscopes.

Also, there's a 7-year-old Solaris machine which hosts the entire administrative database, with no fallback.
great post. It was more of examples of how to use closures in JS rather than the pros/cons of it.
Some of you already mentioned it in their posts, but for those who didn't: Who did it when you were in your 30s? 40s?

Striking out on your own is a lot easier when you're leaving your first or second job. When you've got family and/or are on your way up the "corporate ladder", the incentives for swallowing your ambitions and sticking to your current job seem bigger.

Which is kinda sad, as by then you should have a bigger appreciation of time, and what it means to waste it.

So, as someone who has his first 10 years of corporate work under his belt and doesn't want another 10 of working for someone else: Who's a late starter, too?
Isn't YouTube the "YouTube of Audio?"
Hospital To Lay Off Workers, Hiring New Robots
Are you saying someone should play an RTS other than SC2?
Trump is awesome. His stream is live right now at http://www.trumpsclive.com/ if you want to get a sense of him... (when it ceases being live it will no longer have a big red rectangle saying "live")
I hope you realize how insulting that is to any developer (or anyone, really) that enjoys playing games (or doing anything aside from work).
One VC's list of the types of companies/apps they're looking to invest in...
FYI apt-get update does not update any packages. It just downloads the current list of packages and their versions from the repository.
I agree with you about Perl, but what language do you use to replace C++, as someone who knows better? I haven't quite found anything that can replace it.
The magic of compound interest...

Seriously, though, in most schools tuition is the same regardless of the major. I hear it's $40K+/year for tuition alone at many private schools.
Parody alien-Mayan Duke Nukem ... didn't Serious Sam already do that?
It's now also on CPAN by the way at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Games-FrozenBubble/

I'm not really a game developer or have any idea about SDL, but from the Perl feeds I read (I think this instance was from Planet Iron Man) I gather that the SDL development was recently revitalized. They have their website at http://sdl.perl.org/ and since the Latest News entry at this time is from the end of August, it seems up-to-date.
I'm a little interested, do you have a URL with more info?
Well that explains it perfectly. Thanks.
Ask HN: Does anyone enjoy working with Facebook's Graph API?
I've worked with Facebook's platform and APIs on and off since they launched them in 2007. It's always been the same - meaning nails on the chalkboard horrible.

The Graph API got a lot of great "reviews" but I don't know if anyone actually used it first before giving it praise. On one hand it's great in theory, but on the other hand it's horribly broken and poorly documented.

As a developer this is how things usually go.

1) Something isn't working as I expect so I look at the docs.

2) Realize the behavior isn't documented and search on Google.

3) Click on numerous results linking to Facebook's forum to read about lots of others having the same question - Facebook rarely replies or clarifies.

4) Implement a hacky work around because I'll never know if it was on my end or theirs.

Am I the only one with this workflow?

*
Cmd+? We have the technology.
TRS-80 Model 100 laptop (with an RS-232 connection) for our security panel.

I might as well claim my trophy now. Where is it?

Edit: We also have several SPARC Classics running some pre-2.5.1 version that are doing phone switch stuff.
I'll vote you down for calling me he. ;)
Good to know. Should I ever feel masochistic enough to look back at Perl, I'll undoubtedly check it out.

And this reply alone is proof Perl isn't dead.
Mitch Joel: The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth
Averages can be skewed by outliers. I imagine there are quite a few outliers in San Francisco using Mint.
Then organize a competing tournament with a more "open" game.
Instead of downvoting, can someone explain why I'd even consider paying money for music I can stream anywhere, anytime via Grooveshark?
Its not just password security. A big part of oath is to control the API better. Twitter can now shut down misbehaving apps/sites by revoking their key.

Sure, you might just be able to create a new user and key if you get banned but this still gives them one more tool and a better picture of who is sending what over their network.
I build and run a very successful startup and I'm at the top of diamond :-)
Yeah, there are times when it's easy to be frustrated at the roundabout way you have to do certain things in Python compared to Perl; I also found the latter to be true on other occasions so it's swings and roundabouts.

My side point was really just that if you know Perl, you don't have to do much to learn Python. Another commenter in this thread says Ruby's easy to a Perl-head, but I didn't find that to be the case personally.
You haven't tried to make the hat!
My point was directed more at the _intellectually curious_ laypersons (which is, I believe, a superset of HN's readership). It's practically impossible, in this age of extremely specialized science, for outsiders to understand exactly how various scientific conclusions are arrived at. Fortunately, the task of verification is much easier, and with a small amount of self-training it is possible, I believe, to judge whether or not a certain set of scientists consistently make verifiable predictions that come true.

An excellent point. I would further add that this means there's a great societal benefit to educating a large number of people up to the level of general mathematical and logical understanding and there's concomitant societal cost for failing to have such an educated public. When enough people are willing to believe nonsense, even those who don't believe it suffer.
I went from python to perl, I'm just imagining based on what I know of each.
Student Loans, Gateway Drug To Debt Slavery
First fully virtual k-12 school in Massachusetts opens
Technologically it looked very well for its time, but mostly it stand out as a game with "character" (art design, levels, weapons, sound effects, voice acting, writing).

It was so cheesy and over the top that it became masterpiece (like Tarantino / Rodriguez movies, or recent Old Spice commercials).

id soft may have had technologically superior games (Quake is about the same age and had full 3d models instead of just sprites) but they were incomparably bland compared to Duke Nukem.

Also, gameplay was really fun. There were some very inspired gameplay elements: shrink and freeze guns, laser traps, remote triggered pipe-bombs, jetpacks. I still fondly remember multiplayer Duke sessions late in the night at lab in my university.
Any word if George Broussard is involved at all (or any other ex-3dr people)?
Definitely a good idea. We've gotten him to agree to cast the finals of an internal Google SC2 tourney that's going on right now. (I'm an intern)
My favorite iTunes feature insanity: When you listen to a song in the "Music" section of iTunes, you have a "pause" button; when you are listening and browsing iTunes store, the "pause" button inexplicably and detrimentally becomes "stop", so you have to re-navigate to "music" just to pause a song. Never mind that "stop" functionality is essentially pointless in digital music players anyway, if you are unfortunate enough to accidentally stop the song/podcast, you have to re-navigate to the Music section and manually restart the file and navigate to the right portion, only if you happen to know where that is.

* Yes I know you can right click on the song area and pause there. This is about UI design, not whether or not I can figure out how to pause a song.
Currently it only captures known input widgets, i.e. no global key strokes.
Don't try this at home; You can't build a new Silicon Valley just anywhere.
Alternatively you could use an application like Secrets that exposes a bunch of the settings in a friendly GUI sort of way. Already been updated for iTunes 10:

http://secrets.blacktree.com/
Yeah, well... so is Facebook, so is Twitter, so is Windows, so is pretty much everything. Who cares.
You want secrets.prefpane :) (if you are a mac)

Edit: http://secrets.blacktree.com/
Insights into the performance of Microsoft's big clusters
A rotating frame is defined in reference to an inertial frame of reference. Consider a beach ball spinning in my hand. which way is it spinning? If we judge it by comparison to me, it might be spinning, say, clockwise around the axis perpendicular to my hand. I'd we judge it in comparison to the sun, that answer changes.

I still think I'm right here, but welcome attempts to fix my faded memories of physics.
The whole language is all One Way To Do It-ified. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, I just always feel a lot more like I'm part of a creative process when I'm working with perl, like it's this magic goop I can mush around and throw at anything and it'll do everything I can think of. With python, it feels more like I'm trying to fit my program into the python world, which is very nice and square and proper and everything works perfectly fine, except if I happen to want to do it the other way just for kicks, I can't. Or, worse, I can and the performance is crap for no obvious reason (or a very good obvious reason that should've been fixed ages ago by relaxing things just a little bit).

I used to be a real big python fan, now it just seems like too much training wheels. I like perl's weirdness: its global variables, implicit returns, gotos and loop labels, weird calling conventions that, while unexpected, are perfectly well documented and reliable, and _boy_ do I love its string support.
The other day, I visited a lawyer, he was still using the first computer he ever bought. I think it's MS-Dos 5 or 4. His application runs when MS-Dos open and he still using it. He have a modern notebook, though. But only for browsing the net.
It should clearly be announced here:

Hawking is doing a really bad job to atheists here: he's becoming as anti-scientific as one can get...

Science has its very defined principles, as they are: they don't have to contradict all of: philosophy, mathematics, physics, (and so on...).

This is a really sad story: he simply seems to be a really sad and angry person (personally, I would be worse, in his actual state...), and this seems to influence all of his excogitations...
Is Digital Eavesdropping Evil? Depends Which Country Is Doing It
The bubble - as some like to call it - in education comes from declining government support per student. At least at state institutions. We are now in a system where people take out large loans for the hope of attaining a higher paying job. When you lose this lottery you pay real big. There are long term negative consequences to this.

As long as society at large is unwilling to properly fund education then we'll all lose in the long run. The 'ever person for themself' makes us all losers in the long run.
Well in general, if you're a polyglot programmer (which all Perl programmers should be because honestly, nobody in their right mind is going to let you program only in Perl all day), you don't have to do much to learn either one.

These three though, have more in common. They all have roughly C-like syntax, passable functions, simple I/O, and good vector and dictionary support by default. To me, they're all the same language in different suits (well, pant-suits in ruby's case ;-).
Anyone have any info on using Node.js server code to talk to SOAP services?
Completely inaccurate, at least for where I live. If it were true, the world would be a much less sad place. But reality cares not for cute kittens.

Here in the northeast US, feral cats (or even indoor cats with a comfy life) will never have two litters in a year. You are guaranteed one per year though. Maybe in Florida things are different.

Most kittens will never survive. We "had" one very feral cat. She would not even touch food we left out, until she was 20 years old and had cataracts in both eyes. Her secret to a long life? Dump all the kittens. Don't even let them nurse if you can help it. She had a dozen litters over the years. Most all died within two months, the lucky few lasted six. We buried all the ones we could find. Only one kitten of all her litters made it past a year.

The half life of a feral kitten is around three months. With a typical litter of five (including the runt who will get abandoned at a few weeks), maybe one will make it past a year. If no one starts feeding the extra cat, it won't even make it that long.

Edit: One final note. The life span and litter size of cats is very close to that of squirrels. True, squirrels have less environmental impact, being herbivores. (But this just means an environment could support an even larger number of squirrels.) The world is not drowning in squirrels (except for maybe Cornell) despite no one ever fixing the squirrels on their property.
Why America Is Addicted to Olive Garden
Seriously, though, in most schools tuition is the same regardless of the major.

I don't think GP's surprise was based on the idea that a bachelor's degree in such a major would typically be cheaper than others. I think GP was surprised that someone would be willing to take on so much debt for a degree in that major.
The Price of Paid Vacation
"looks bad" :-)

But it's a bad habit to get into. Or better yet, it's better to think in idempotent operations when doing systems work.
The direction of rotation is relative, but the fact that it is rotating is not. That is, an observer in the Sun's reference frame can, indeed, determine that the Sun is rotating. (The Coriolis effect is one example.)
Yeah, because they're probably spending some of their time working on their product.
A functioning craftaholic.
This is why I argue against liberal arts degrees. There are so, SO few people who will ever be able to bring the sort of value required by a degree in the liberal arts based on the skills such a degree would provide that it is completely economically irresponsible, especially now that just having a Bachelor's degree says about as much as having a High School diploma did about 30 years ago.
I'm on the unlimited data-only plan.
Yeah, I sensed it was just a little dated when he mentioned migrating from CVS to Subversion.
I generally only use the USB tether, which lasts forever. =)
So Windows 7 was his idea!

Mystery solved.
Both. IIRC, the only alternative FPS to play was Doom 2 or Quake, which had very little character and focused on the action.

The Duke Nukem engine was (from my point of view) on par with Doom's engine, but their level design made playing the game a lot of fun. From seeing yourself in the mirror, to kicking toilets and fire hydrants, the world seemed much more alive than any other game at the time.

The game had a fun boy-ish "I'm gonna kick ass" vibe to it that isn't really seen today. Most FPS action games nowadays, while fun and entertaining, seem to take themselves too seriously. Musclebound Marcus Fenix is too brooding, and Roach too focused on terrorist plots to really portray the giddiness that was found in kicking a pig in the face with your manly boot.
AoE3 is the best RTS I've ever played. The problems were; a fairly small online community, and some balance issues.

But the "home city/shipment" dynamic broke new ground.
We are! You can contact kevin 'at' justin.tv to find out how to help.
This looks awesome! While I will always prefer a command-line interface over a GUI for tools like this, it's SO important to have really elegant GUI tools for everybody else.

Git is great. The git command-line tools allow you do do all sorts of SCM gymanstics, but are hard to use if you're a designer just trying to commit the latest CSS file and push it out to your integration server.

It would be really awesome if it were possible to have the app call out to shell scripts to perform certain gestures. Many development teams have custom scripts for their workflow, and it would be great if this GUI could easily let folks use that workflow without touching the command-line.
When I started out, I think I somehow was under the impression that .emacs.d was some sort of cache, and not for end-users to mess with. Actually, I feel like when I first started out on Red Hat 5 it wasn't there, but I probably just wasn't being very observant.

At some point I set up auto-insert for a variety of files, and the howto I found used the directory .autoinsert, and at the moment that's actually where my elisp that isn't in my .emacs lives. It's a little hacked together and ad hoc, but not worth my time to fix. Nowadays I've customized everything I want to, and mostly am installing thirdparty packages.
Maybe you could write a paper about that, for the dailyWtf ? I'm sure it will be very interesting ! Please try it :)
Java was designed as an embedded language for a set-top box.
Well, BQP and FBQP are very different concepts, but I doubt anyone who hasn't actively studied complexity theory in the last few years could explain the difference. Same goes for NP-complete and Entscheidungsproblem; if you don't use it, you lose it.

I mean, anybody with a CS degree should know that the halting problem has something to do with predicting whether a given Turing machine will ever stop; but that's not "explain it to your grandmother" level.
I don't _hate_ Python, I just dislike it. I religiously indent my code in every language, but the significant whitespace bothers me. You can't have multiline lambdas. "There should be only one way to do it" bothers me. I always miss blocks. Reddit's blatant, blind hatred of Ruby and intense love of Python really turns me off. Guido's lack of understanding of TCO is embarassing. (though I've seen worse...)

All of these things are not dealbreakers, and I'd rather code in Python than several other languages. But I never actively want to develop in it.
There are still a lot of bands on Myspace for which it is only a matter of time before they make a switch because Myspace doesn't connect them with their fans anymore. Given this it makes a lot of sense for Apple to at least attempt this.

Really though I don't see why Facebook couldn't give better support for bands so they could go where the fans are more easily.
> And I don't know any developer who would dismiss Visual Studio.

You are new around here, right? Make yourself comfortable and you will know droves of them in no time. ;)