skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but I've found out about a couple of devices I had no knowledge of before on Wolfram's. (anybot)

So it's clearly a knowledge sharing plus.

It happens to be based around pseudo-famous people, but this makes it more readable than just a sample of coders with variances
>>>What I dislike is seeing downvotes applied carelessly because of casual disagreement with a commment which is otherwise well thought out. I'd rather people actually reply expressing their dissent, which at least gives the chance for rebuttal and further debate. Downvoting is the easy way out, and tends to look rather insulting to me, because being at zero or sub-zero relegates serious commenters to the same class as trolls.<<<

You know what's the sad part? In this process the lowest common denominator always rises up. Further, I've noticed that this varies from thread to thread. If you pick up a technical thread then you find insightful things on the top, but if you pick up something general that everyone thinks they can take a stab at you will usually find the simplest concept up there.

The more complex thought out ones tend to stay at the bottom, because most people don't take the time to read through them and understand what the author is saying. It's this human tendency to get attracted to the simple bright lights instead of the beautiful kaleidoscopic pattern in the sky.

Further, much of the quality of discussion is influenced by the subtlety of the matter hand. It's like the audience for each thread is difference and there is a stark contrast between these HN groups.

It's for reasons like these that I have almost quit commenting on non-technical articles. Most people don't even refute my arguments they simply down vote the hell out of me as if I am spam, especially if I say something that goes against the party line of that particular thread (certain threads invite certain kinds of people which leads to group think). That is insulting.

However, I won't quit until I find a solution to this problem. So, that I can help Mr. Graham in fixing this instead of just sending a rant to him.
Here in Norway, and probably in most other parts of Europe, you can buy unlocked version of all phones, be it HTC, Samsung, iPhone (sold unlocked directly from http://apple.no).
croissant with apricot jam, muesli (with water, not milk) and coffee
Monstrous Discrepancies
"it's difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage"

Isn't collateral damage the entire problem with removing things from complex systems?
This brings back ugly flashbacks... Apple's WISPr implementation also breaks any apps that try to provide WISPr functionality since it gets in the middle of the handshake.

You can't disable that unless you get on some magic whitelist that Boingo got into but it's pretty much off-limits for the rest of the crowd.
Couture a la Nida Mahmood  
A lady of many facets, Nida Mahmood is not only a fashion designer, but also a painter, columnist, graphic artist and stylist. She may not be mainstream fashion, but till date, she has garnered enough attention and adulation to have
Jessica Mah of Indinero(YC S10) talks about YC and fundraising[Audio 86min]
Not really - only humans have been able to adapt from walking 7 miles an hour to flying faster than the speed of sound in less than 100 years.
Avoid over-abstraction (still working on this one myself).
Seems like we are a bit more lucky in the UK. You can buy virtualy any model android that is not carrier locked on pay as you go or just signup to a pay monthly plan with any of the 5 major carriers:
http://www.carphonewarehouse.com/mobiles/smartphones/android

In the US I can understand your points.... how is such a large market so controlled by the carriers? How is there not someone like carphone warehouse that sells all phones unlocked and carrier free? I mean here I bought even my iPhone from the Apple UK store unlocked and chose my own carrier, would do the same with an Android - no crapware any time.
Talk with Command prompt trick
I was talking about reliability, not stability. The activation Windows has used for a while makes the product unreliable. This may not be obvious at first. I had a client with a computer problem, which ended up needing some replacement hardware. The computer needed reactivation, and the owner asked me what assurance she had that it could be activated in another 3 years when some other part died. The computer was running a very expensive piece of vertical industry software that only ran on one version of Windows. I read everything I could find and talked to several senior Microsoft engineers. The answer is that nothing assures that I'll be able to activate Windows to keep a business critical process running. I get vague statements that the engineers can't see why Microsoft would stop the activations, but nothing I can tell someone to bet their business on. I can understand why most people don't see this problem. I did not see it, until prompted by a customer.
I did. Because by the time that I want to switch carriers, I'll be ready for a new phone anyhow. I might as well take the discount on the phone. If I don't take the discount, I still pay the same rates monthly anyhow.

What intelligent person would throw away money?
You don't want to scale vertically once you hit millions of users and most other web companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft have proven that horizontally scaling without big iron is the way to go. Currently the only way to scale a relational database such as MySQL or Postgre is by sharding and partitioning - these things ruin most good relational properties that your database structure may have.
I accidentally up voted you, but can you please tell me how this package-deal language works? Preferably with empirical evidence to prove just the same.

I couldn't sleep at night even if one child's future was destroyed through something I had created like this.
Do you have a predefined list of 'These are SEO sites which add no real value' sites which I can include by default?
It must be a Thursday.
I think you overestimate how well we can predict the effects of a sudden extinction. From the Nature article:

"Views differ on what would happen if that biomass [of mosquitoes in the Arctic tundra] vanished. Bruce Harrison... estimates that the number of migratory birds that nest in the tundra could drop by more than 50% without mosquitoes to eat. Other researchers disagree...."

We're seeing disagreement on a hypothetical mosquito extinction's effect on the number of nesting birds in a certain area. If the experts are unsure of this, then it's fair to say that the total, detailed ecological impact is not precisely understood.

Also from the Nature article:

"Without mosquitoes, thousands of plant species would lose a group of pollinators. Yet McAllister says that their pollination isn't crucial for crops on which humans depend. 'If there was a benefit to having them around, we would have found a way to exploit them,' she says."

So if mosquitoes disappeared, thousands of plant species could be threatened. The researcher says that's probably okay, because if humans aren't directly using those plants, they're probably not important to us. But what about indirect benefits of those plants? Would the effects on those plant species have significant ripple effects on other species? I don't know. The Nature article doesn't talk about that.

Does this seem like the rigor necessary to justify a sudden ecological change in an extremely complex system on which billions of human lives depend? I don't think you can call this a sure thing.
Understand the domain really well. You have to live and breathe it. Not just the specific problem you are trying to solve but the bigger picture. It will give you the freedom to make macro level decisions regarding your code that can have a high impact.
Yes, I know that. And, I have seen developers at a loss of what to do when some gui developer tool is not available. One problem is the use of the gui tool seems to put people too far from what is really going on. Most users probably need a gui to be productive. A gui may be productive for some developer tasks, but a developer should understand what is really happening and be able to work without one.

I work mostly in Python, and that affects my view, I am sure. But, even when I did mostly c/c++, I knew it was useful to be able to ssh to a foreign machine, edit a file and recompile and execute a program.

The view I expresses is one I also hear from other developers. I cannot help how you perceive it, but it is still true.
Web Design London
Camlab is London based innovative web development, web design, search engine Optimisation Company. We provide a striking visual and communicative platform that enables our clients to increases their brand recognition, attract quality customers and improve profitability
Well, I can't say that an 11 on the Joel Test is a strict criteria. :) I would say we started at a zero and are at a 2 right now. This "field trip" idea is just a way of trying to accelerate the developer's growth curve. Other ideas are welcome.
I moved from Blogger to Posterous some time back. The migration is pretty simple but there was one problem: my private/unpublished posts from Blogger became private in Posterous. I had to go through and manually set them back to private.

This was before Posterous started aggressively pushing for moves from other platforms to themselves though, so that issue may have been fixed.
... and only humans have managed to kill off hundreds of millions of our kind in the same amount of time via war and genocide.

The point is, evolution has only one measure for success: continued existence. Everything else is irrelevant.
>People think that if they emulate successful people they will be more successful themselves. So it's about a form of fashion.

That's true and there's really nothing wrong with that. Being a hobby guitarist I feel this is very similar to many guitarists and other musicians. A guitarist doesn't want a guitar that's just nice sounding and good quality, it has to look good. If you feel your instrument has a certain "mojo" it can help you get in an inspired mood more easily. If you have instrument you don't like you can't perform at your best. A jazz guitarist might not be happy about playing a guitar that looks like it's made for heavy metal no matter what it sounds like.

Sometimes when you're passionate about something, tools are not just tools. No one needs Armani suit to protect themselves from cold, no one needs a ferrari to get from one place to another and no one needs a Gibson Les Paul to play guitar.

If someone can be more productive because working on a Macbook Pro makes them feel more like a Rock Star Developer than working on a PC with Windows XP, I don't see anything wrong with that.
Rate my startup - GrexIt
Hello,

Would look forward to know what you guys think of our tool - http://grexit.com.

GrexIt allows Google apps users to add threads from their email inboxes to a shared online repository - essentially allowing them to create a knowledge base out of day-to-day email communication.

Thanks,
-Niraj
Don't care, wouldn't read it. (added in edit)
I work on what is most exciting to me and then switch when the excitement wears off, switching back again when the excitement comes back.

If nothing is exciting, if there's resistance (usually from lack of sleep, lack of exercise) then I focus on restoring my routine, and working on something easier like copywriting, email, invoice admin etc. until the excitement for something else wells up again. But I keep working. Often you need to just press on before the excitement comes back.

In the long term, I pick technologies I'm excited in, even if they bring short term costs. Connecting the dots, this process has lead to near-perfect strategy in hindsight.

This is counter-intuitive, but embracing NIH has actually made me a better programmer. It's the spirit of vertical integration. It's taught me how to do things and developed my understanding. Rather than using say an SMTP client, if I don't know how it works I dive in and write one myself. It costs the project in the short term, but in the long term the project at least has one more programmer who understands the nuances of another protocol.

Imagine a Google that outsourced their filesystem, data center, server racks, JS engine, browser, caching, proxying, map/reduce, machine learning, DNS, etc. Would they be as good as the Google of today? That's what separates IT from hackers. IT configure and use existing software. Hackers write their own. IT know how to "cobble together" things. Hackers understand things. Without the intimate understanding that comes from NIH, there is no room for the hack.

Being a better programmer is a long term motivation, and it's often the methods that pay off in the long term that contribute most towards this goal.
Corporations write the laws in the US. Politicians are just order-takers.
The new 15" 1680x1050 matte screen looks really gorgeous but at 129 PPI I fear the text of most web sites could be too tiny. And I hate to zoom web pages!

In fact the iMacs 21/27 have a 102/109 PPI resolution, but then you keep the display of a desktop computer at a higher distance compared to the screen of a notebook, so the higher PPI on the MBP HR could be appropriate.
My guess is that it is either one of two things:

1. Just link spam-testing or mixing legitimate-looking spam with illegitimate.

2. The plan is to use a delayed URL redirection change technique.

For example, in blogs, etc. you can change the link that your profile goes to after the fact, so at first that "Nice post. Thanks!" comment and a link to someone's legitimate blog via the poster's username seems innocuous. Later after you ignore it, they change it to point at their spam site. Hoping you don't notice. They can even change the link that their profile goes to only at certain times of day if they wish and then back later, hoping you won't notice and hoping that Google will pick up their spam link vs. the innocuous-looking fake spam link.

By the same token, a URL shortener that could support changing the URL that the shortened URL goes to could be used in exactly the same way. Even if bl.inc.gs seems legit, there may be a backdoor (known or unknown) letting them to change the URL that the shortened URL goes to.
Google Instant aint' Here
It does work, you just need to mask as Firefox: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/09/08/google-instant
I'm a little bit curious about the setup that really productive developers (Linus Torvalds, for instance) use - if someone goes to find out, fine by me. I don't think Jason Fried is really a developer though - or is he?
Let me fix that for you:

[1]: http://zachinglis.com/2010/why-tumblr-sucks/
"What feels like 70% uptime"
The problem with Zope is that it's not scale down to simple tasks. Repoze.BFG can do that, but it's Django-time now, sadly...
This is very close to a previous article blaming Google for turning us back into the days of strong carrier control. (can't remember the link, but it was here on HN).

And I agree, though I don't think Google did it on purpose. Their main aim---I think---was just to avoid Apple (or Blackberry) becoming too powerful. They wanted to commoditise the smartphone market. And they have succeeded.

And to me it doesn't look like the hardware manufacturers got a great deal either. It's turning into a cut-throat market, where all phones are pretty much identical (and interchangeable), and your revenues come from economy of scale. Basically like the PC market.

Normally (e.g PC market) this would mean that the customer can shop for the best deal, which is great. However the "customer" here are the carriers: they buy from the manufacturers and resell to the real customer. And indeed they got all the power: they can ask this or that company to lock or modify the phone under threat of taking their business elsewhere.

The real customer, however, is only dealing with the carriers, and Google hasn't commoditise these. If anything we are getting even more market concentration.

So yeah, it seems to me to be pretty much what economics theory would suggest.

The only alternative would to get an unlocked phone but then the manufacturer would lose the massive subsidise and most users seem to prefer those to the hassle of getting a closed system from their carriers.
Do you really have used Zope and Django if you say that the former is monolithic and the latter allows easy swap out its components?
-1

The article answers this line of thought (see below)... and instead you offer no arguments.

"And before all of you pros storm the comments with how great it is to root your Android phones, consider the average consumers here. They are the ones being screwed by this exploitation of “open.” Anyone with the desire to do so can fairly easily hack an iPhone too."
Interview with Pat Maddox: "Seaside is a fascinating and fun technology..."
MG Siegler - I just got trolled again.
It's artifacts of sloppy work. I regularly hit the inseam problem, I have to push for a 28" inseam, when in tailored pants I'm a 32". However I noticed waist size can frequently vary by as much as 4" as well, but sometimes I get a pair that fit perfect again. I did notice that costco's Kirkland pants are regularly 2" narrower in the waist than Old Navy (for anyone who cares).

I think the problem is that pants are being labelled as a 36x36 when they're actually more a 40" waste, causing the inseam to be made closer to a 40" too.
I doubt that they did this for a short term (weeks of gravy) gain.

I also don't think that it's a case of increasing impressions. I do however think that it allows them to display more ads, and therefore increases the chances of an ad being relevant, and as a result more clicks.

Because you're now getting accustomed to the results changing as you type, having different ads appear as you complete your query is not more obtrusive than the core function.

As an example, searching for employment tribunal brought up about 5-6 different ads (just in the main results area, not counting the sidebar) whereas without instant, their inventory is limited to three.

I would say that where there are multiple options to a character sequence it gives them better value per ad as well as they can pick the ads that are worth more, until of course the character sequence excludes them.

So in the end, you've got increased inventory and better value per ad for Google, increased speed and responses to users. Win-win

Though there are more than two parties in the search ecosystem, the tail-optimised sites are going to be left out in the cold, not necessarily the small ones, but anything that relies on 2nd page or below the fold traffic.

This may or may not be a good thing for the internet, but it's going to hurt a lot of companies.

By the way, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it's got a definite sense of history enabled as well, with subsequent queries for the same terms being much quicker to latch onto the directions chose in previous instances.
The Education Bubble
I used to do the delicious toread thing as well, until (via a link on HN, natch) I discovered the wonders of InstaPaper - it's a wee bookmarklet that creates a to-read list for you, strips out a lot of the ugly formatting, can send you batches of stuff to read when you're bored, exports to e-reader formats...

And for bonus points, they'll take either a username or email for signup - and that's it.
it's not just the carriers. It's the manufacturers too - I know of no phone (aside of the Google developer phones) that would allow you to freely install your own build of the OS or even just remove "value added" software that has been installed for "your" "convenience".

Unless you exploit security holes in the vendors crappy security systems. The fact that they don't even invest enough resources into a quality security framework (which helps increasing their revenue) speaks volumes of the quality of the other "improvements" they make to stock android.
Thoughts on women in tech
Being allergic to mosquito bites (they can come up the size of a dime) I hope they do exterminate the little monsters.
That site needs a filter to only read the setups that don't include a MBP.
There are some good articles on there - Andrew "bunnie" Huang[1] shows us how he can be handed a next-day plane ticket and not miss any work time, Jason Rohrer develops games on a seven-year-old laptop[2], Mark Pilgrim explains haw his writing setup isn't actually that important[3].

However, about half of the interviews on there are some variation on "Apple laptop, Apple monitor, standard Apple suite of applications + some others", which does wear thin after a while.

[1] http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/

[2] http://jason.rohrer.usesthis.com/

[3] http://mark.pilgrim.usesthis.com/
The real interest is in seeing what the downstream value added services do with this.

For example, I'm interested to see what changes this makes to the Heroku offering. It seems to be a perfect fit for their product.
Heavy caffeine usage and liberal alcohol usage on occasion.

Avoid both of those.

When I have a a problem I do one of two things: 1) I work on trivial things like code cleanup and reorganizing things, or 2) I get my head completely out of the computer. Go for a walk. Sit outside and just look around for a few minutes.

The anti-pattern here is popping off to look at your email, FB, or HN. It keeps the brain active in context-switching mode, instead of settling into one context and having it work on the problem behind-the-scenes.
VLC for iPad Submitted to Apple, Now We Just Have to Hope
"Is unavailable an entire day."*

The irony isn't lost on me.
For example something like the NYPD Most Wanted list: http://a056-crimestoppers.nyc.gov/crimestoppers/public/publi... which contains maybe 1 white person(^) out of dozens of suspects, and that there might be more to it than just bad luck in life.

But at least I got some discussion going.

(^) Can't really tell.
Portal and MS Flight Sim being played on Microsoft Surface
Facebook Bug Invades Your Privacy... Again
Local memory is precious in these days of mid-range machines with 6gb+ ram (win xp in a VM doesn't take that much ram)?
The real customer, however, is only dealing with the carriers, and Google hasn't commoditise these. If anything we are getting even more market concentration.

Not yet, anyway. But the carriers have to be the next target. The huge capital requirements to build a network is their main barrier to entry, but that's unlikely to stop Google.

I wonder if they realize this (they probably do), and if so, what they are going to about it.
in mission critical applications. I really hope there is some good competition for google.

I have to stress again on what the first parent commenter. I am a more genuine SEO person myself and sometimes it is just so annoying that google doesn't even invest in cutting down all the spam on first page result.

Almost seems like they are focusing just on the technical scale & adwords impressions. Given the talent at Google it shouldn't be hard to put in checks for gamers without anything useful on the site.

PS: disagree but down vote somehow doesn't make sense. There is nothing offensive or irrelevant in my comment.
Serious question (I couldn't find the answer anywhere) - do unlocked phones get OTA updates? From who?
OK, this makes sense to me, thanks. The original link looks innocuous and so is not marked as spam. After a period the URL redirect is changed to point at a spam site but because the bl.inc.gs URL was flagged as OK it's now more likely fly under the radar of Twitter's spam detection algorithm.