skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Of course not. That's how iTunes already works, and iTunes is already consistent.

What's consistent about arbitrarily removing 'pause' functionality when not necessary? That is not consistent, and it's poor usability.

> However, those things are contrary to your suggestion:

No. Browsing around non-playlist-determining sections of iTunes does not imply I want to change or stop a playlist/track. So why remove the pause function, if the only reason to do that is so you can start a new playlist?

>It's very easy: The playback controls "always" apply to the playlist you are viewing.

Which is of no use to anyone if they aren't viewing a play list at all. Really, this was established in my very first comment. It's the iTunes store. There is no playlist to play other than the one I selected to play in the first place. Why exactly prevent me from pausing, when there's just no reason that would be helpful. You still haven't answered this.

> It's very easy.

Multiple clicks/mouse positionings are never easier than just one. Never.

> Look, it's clear you haven't really thought things through. You just need to learn how iTunes works.

That's sort of pointless to claim. You haven't proven anything, so such grand pronouncements as to someones general comprehension of the issue are useless to everyone. I suggest you prove your point with a specific argument, instead of making unsupported assertions, basically that amounts to "You're just wrong." That's never really a help to a discussion.

>(You also need to learn how to reply to the correct comment)

And no, I already know which comment to reply to, but the link simply wasn't there. I suppose you think, as with the iTunes issue, that software always works perfectly.
Peoples expectations for 3D TV is a bit higher than some illusion produced by wearing some glasses staring directly at the correct angle at a flat screen.

I'll look at 3D TV when it is similar to a Star Wars 3D hologram. I don't think I'm alone. No one wants to pay extra for glasses and watch a faux 3D illusion.
On a related note, one of my projects is an effort to help ensure that more people can acquire the benefits of a college degree but without having to incur a large amount of cash debt or time debt. I'm sure I'll have more details to announce here if/when it's further along.
Could it be that Twitter is going the route of Apple? This raises the barrier to entry just enough to keep out developers who are just goofing around.

Otherwise, no, I don't see it. I know that I'm less inclined to write a little hack to work with Twitter without basic auth.
I do too. My friends always want to go to 3d movies and are confused when I refuse to go. It takes me about 5 - 10 minutes to explain that while they're seeing 3d, I'm seeing a 2d movie tinted red.
Ah, chalk it up to fuzzy nostalgia. I swore that the mirrors actually were functional, and you could damage stuff that was on the sidewalk with the boot-kick. Maybe I'm mixing it up with other FPS games of the time. It's been a while.
True, but that was oak (oak 0.2 langage spec is here https://duke.dev.java.net/green/OakSpec0.2.ps).

BTW this specs put some lights on some java behavior: http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/10686.
Technically, it is not a pony but a falabella horse which is a miniature horse originating from Latin America. I know that it is somewhat irrelevant :) But many people have them as pets.
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Probably a U.S. cultural thing. I find it weird talking to other parents' kids too (I'm a father of two), as you don't know how the other parents will handle it. I'd like to think there are places in this world that aren't so paranoid.
> For me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk

I remember being 10? (12? not sure) and having my Mum tell me we had not, in fact, landed humans on any other planets. "Only" the moon. Seemed pretty lame.
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Why God Did Not Create the Universe
Add 2 way treadmill and we can play 3d games!
I think if you were to plot it as a graph it has a curve though.

Sure adding that 2nd smart person, the 8th smart person, etc., can add benefit and yield a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual parts in isolation. But once you are in the organization size range where you're adding a 500th person, a 10,000th person, then the organization almost always takes on other qualities and conditions: bureaucracy, slowing down, middle management, rules, paperwork, gossip, insulation from consumers/competition, groupthink, aversion to risk, and so on. And these qualities dumb it down. The "group brain" becomes much dumber than a smart brain when left alone and unfettered as an individual.

Google is a bit of an exceptional case where despite having on the OOM of 20k employees they don't seem to have quite succumbed to Big Dumb Company-itis. Surely they have some aspects of it, but they've tried hard to fight it and stay like a smaller/younger org.

I once dealt with a startup that was around 12 people and already I could see symptoms of Big Dumb Company start to manifest themselves.
Game like it's 1999!
Those Astronomy Pictures of the Day are well worth exploring. Here is the Moon and Venus as you might not have not have seen them before (well, at least Venus): http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100516.html
Just like Apple TV, they will figure out how to make this (semi) right ... I hope.
> but it's us stinky hippies that bang on the loudest and for the longest about sustainable transport solutions, renewable energy and sustainable population.

Nope. Wasn't the "stinky hippies" the groups that consistently protested against nuclear power? Being anti-nuclear power in the 70ies and 80ies was the bandwagon for the far left (now it is global warming).
or by labels
An EC2 instance that's been running for 48 days :)
That's slightly less impressive when you remember that it takes about 1,000 lines of Cobol to write Hello, World.
Phone log software for the receptionists. They take down messages, message details and any questions. He calls back clients, or gives the phone operators response "scripts" to answer those questions themselves. Except the script is fed back into the app, a long with a meaningful phrasing of the question, and next time a similar question comes up they have a canned answer.

This was my first web app, circa 2002, IIRC. If I did it today I would make it into a full blown knowledge management system with keyword lookups.

The whole thing must have been a few hundred lines of lousy newbie CL.
> Same reason why tcsh and ksh didn't get traction, and they even have merit to them.

In the world of enterprise Unix, ksh is king. It is used even for "serious" applications, not only as the sysadmin's glue of choice (the company where I work at was using, in 2009, a HR payroll application written in ksh. Had they not outsourced accounting to a third party, they would probably still be using it today).

Granted, "legacy" Unices are being slowly obsoleted by Linux, but ksh lives on. It would be unthinkable for RHEL or SLES to deprecate ksh and leave it out of the distribution - enterprise customers would probably think this is some kind of a bad joke.
Craigslist loses $36M revenue source: Pressure shuts down adult section
With Thorium reactors you can generate so much electricity you can convert CO2 into hydrocarbons directly. If for whatever dumb reason thorium reactors don't happen, yeah Fischer-Tropsche Coal to Oil is the way to go. Al Gore will be upset though at all your non-carbon neutrality, for what it's worth but they'll sure as all heck do it in China. Problem is is that building an industrial scale Fischer-Tropsch plant is a big undertaking, on the scale of building a major oil refinery and you'd have NIMBYs up the wazoo anywhere you tried to build that in the U.S.
> People will die as a result of pretty much any peak oil scenario.

Not really. South Africa was a third world country under heavy sanctions.

Yet it created industries to produce petroleum from coal (and even today these companies produce 40%+ of SA's liquid fuel requirements).

If a crappy third world country can do it with 70ies technology (most of which they weren't even allowed to import legally), why can't first world country do this?
New Zealand Earthquake 2010
I also like how his tale shows a progression over time in startup ideas that almost kept getting simpler and easier with each new iteration. The core feature(s) of Twitter is pretty darn simple to build out -- scaling it up is harder, sure, but that's a Maserati problem and the kind you may never have the privilege of having anyway. But it was a neat idea, they executed it, nailed it well, and lots of other people loved it. The lesson here with them is you don't have to build something that's very big or hard or complicated, you just have to build something people want and ideally love and tell their friends about it so you don't have to advertise -- if people learn by word-of-mouth your cost-of-customer acquisition approaches zero.
It's rather ridiculous to me how they can shut-down the notion of the "coincidences" that make Earth so extremely unique to support life. The precise placement of the moon, the composition of our core to generate perfect magnetic fields, etc.

the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing

Really? I'm having as hard a time believing in that as many of you might have believing in creation.

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

Sounds like God to me.
I like that quote/notion too.

However, I don't think the time aspect of his success story is about an overnight success taking 10 years as much as it is about refining one's product & market acumen over time, combined with having the luck to put something on the market (micro-blogging service) at just the right timing when a lot of people are ready for it (traditional blogging had become mainstream, but also lots of bloggers had become dissatisfied with the ROI and/or blog readers were looking for smaller/easier things to read and/or with more frequent updates AND smart phones were taking off with full web access on the go).

Enter Twitter. They executed well, but I think they also had very lucky timing.
I did say, "I think most of us recognize that you can continue maintaining and updating software after it's done/finished/released."

Whether a software project is release-quality or not is a rather basic concept to everyone else. It can be intellectually tempting to try and deconstruct these basic concepts, but more often than not it's an exercise in evasion rather than illumination. Perl 6 (or Perl 6.0.0 for the pedantic) is a work in progress--at some point in the near future, the spec and implementations will be "done" to a point where everyone will agree that this is Perl 6.0.0, every implementation that matches the spec and passes the tests is Perl 6.0.0, and work will begin on Perl 6.1. Perl 5.0.0 reached that state in the past--16 years or so in the past to be precise. There's a distinction here that's dishonest to evade.

If the Perl 6 community is more interested in using linguistic evasion and deconstructing the concept of the finished release more than they're interested in actually making a finished release though, I'd best leave it to them. Maybe this is what Larry Wall meant about the postmodernism. Who knows? My mind is still blown by the observation that you have to doubletalk your way around the idea that Perl 6 hasn't reached 6.0.0 final yet.
The reasoning takes some thought to work through, but is fairly straightforward. The key is the concept of multiple universes, and how it changes the game by making a strong anthropic principle a weak one.

"The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints, not just on our environment, but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves."

It's understandable that we see "The Mind of God" in those laws. It give us comfort to put a label on them and see something other than quantum randomness in it all.
I like Orlov, find his writings to be a useful and interesting perspective, however there is much that is inaccurate or that remains unconsidered in this piece.

For instance, the issue of Iraq and Iran, both very undeveloped in terms of wells drilled and the modernity of the infrastructure that runs those wells.

Iraq, for all its recent investment, remains underdeveloped, and Iran has not had access to newer oil tech since 1979.

Further, there is the question of whether we are suffering from an "oil coming out of the ground" problem or "refine the crude oil into something we can actually use" problem.

The bottleneck at this point appears (from my admittedly limited, amateur research) to actually be in total refining capacity.
Python is still my GOTO language for Getting Things Done but the two new technologies that have gotten me most excited recently have been Clojure and Arduino. I'm a newb with respect to both I look for more excuses to use them everyday.
Yeah, srsly. Decent indie effort but check out the Epic Citadel iphone demo for what can be done on a small scale and ANY pc game made in the last year or so for what can be done by a real game developer for real customers who actually spend money on games (some of the time). Unix is not a gaming platform, and never will be. Ever.
I was going to suggest this. That novel is so epic. It's actually Jeejah(s).
Neal Stephenson Explains What's Wrong with Mobile Phones (2008)
I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers.

Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts.

From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future.

I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi handhelds to shame, and the iPhone 4 with FaceTime beats even the video communicator from Earth: Final Conflict. After playing with Epic Citadel and seeing the ridiculous graphical power in that tiny package, there's nothing left to thrill in me in the land of pocket computers. The depths of those childhood fantasies have been plumbed.

Ah well. We still have ocular implants with augmented reality HUD overlays and telescopic vision to look forward to!
The author mentions blurriness and ghosting; I must say, with the Sony and Panasonic demos in stores, I noticed no such problems. And it would be pretty nice for games. The glasses and lack of content are a real drawback, though.
The enthusiasm of the review is the story here. Read it twice. I just love how stoked this guy is about the game!
Narcissism In Modernity
Some 3D is admittedly bad. Some is terrible, such as when someone incorrectly swaps the L and R images. But when 3D is done right you aren't looking at a screen any more. For me at least, with 3D games, what I have instead is a window to another world, a window that things can come through. A window that makes me feel like a giant with little people playthings that jump at my command... plus playing a tomb raider game in 3D is just awesome.
This is about par for the course. I've integrated facebook into many an application, and found the same: Facebook's API is buggy, their developer support is nonexistent, and digging up current and relevant results from google is challenging.

I can think of quite a few things Facebook could do to improve the experience of developers using their services, but people are already doing so in droves, and their competition is withering, so I don't see much of a chance of this improving dramatically.

Expect incremental improvements as they reach out into the general web more and more. For example, as bad as the current API is, the old one was worse.
> What's consistent about arbitrarily removing 'pause' functionality

There is absolutely nothing arbitrary about it.

I've lost track of how many times this has been repeated: The main playback controls apply to the content in the main window. It only seems arbitrary because you don't understand how iTunes works. I've offered suggestions in good faith, but you clearly aren't willing to listen.
Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird way, BBSs were more exciting and futuristic to me, creating an ASCII-based virtual world out of beeps on a telephone line between my computer and some random sysop's computer, and with a cultural ethos that this was a new world we could define. Maybe I'm jaded, but now the internet just feels like an extension of irl.
Going angry-mob on someone for successfully achieving their objectives is just being a scrub.

No. In your framework, at least, this tactic is a move well within the "true extent of the rules".
Touche! Actually no I'm a word nut so it's all interesting to me.
More specifically, it seems you have to do basically the same project for 10 years too.
Your words remind me of a software called ChangePoint. Nightmares about it still haunt me.
No one wants to pay extra for glasses and watch a faux 3D illusion.

Really? Because I remember a lot of people here a few months ago saying that you were wasting your money if you didn't pay extra to see Avatar in 3D.

Personally, I agree with you. I hate 3D movies. I'll go out of my way to see the non-3D version. But, there's plenty of people willing to pony up the extra $4 for it.
Maybe yes, maybe no. I think it's impossible to predict what will happen and how far human resourcefulness will get us. People alive in developed countries today take technological progress as a historical given, and we all have a vested interest in the current system. To imagine every aspect of our lifestyle to be eradicated overnight is almost unfathomable, so it becomes a psychological necessity to believe we will somehow figure it out. Of course there are always those prophesizing doom, and they have so far been wrong and crazy (at least during modern times), but just because it hasn't happen yet doesn't mean it won't.

And frankly I don't put much creedence in economic theory here, because there's no historical model for such a huge and global economy. I'd be more interested in the behavioral biology perspective, because the social seams are going to start coming apart very quickly if the world economy ever hits truly insurmountable difficulties.
Thanks.
I do know search engines have problems indexing AJAX, but I ended up doing it anyways because this was going to be very specific to be used mostly within our college and others when technical festivals come around.
Social location-based porn gaming...app.
Yeah, perhaps the thing you took from what I'm guessing was a much more literary exploration of Scifi than my own was a sense of a new sort of place, driven by technology. A new way of conceiving of community.

And in many ways, though it was clunky by modern standards, BBS satisfies the conception of "cyberspace" much better than what we have today. I was a little past BBS when I was a kid, using Hotline instead, but it did feel like I was going somewhere when I connected to servers with decent communities. Everything was real-time, you could exchange data, there was just placeness to it.

So now we've got stuff like Second Life, which satisfies Stephenson-esque Metaverse fantasies, but it hasn't fundamentally changed anything. Everyone still meets up for drinks and fried chicken, goes to work in their cars. The internet ended up lacing around our lives instead of redefining them.

I could see you being, perhaps, underwhelmed with that in mind.
The idea was to make the currently selected look distinct from others since the URL reflects no changes.
So, do I remove the effect and keep the color change only?
I wonder if it's due in part to an acclimation to residential rent and car leases. I consider myself very financially disciplined, and would never lose sight of the outstanding principal and interest rate of a loan, but I have no idea how much I've paid the landlords of my current rental apartment over the past few years. Like the woman in the article, I don't really fancy thinking about it.
If anyone is located in the Santa Monica/Los Angeles area and can do some front end html/css some php on wordpress, email me. I got a couple of projects coming up that might need your services. If you have any links to your projects that will help me a lot to see your skillset.

Thanks
thanks. I liked minimalist designs on the web, and so designed this on the lines of those.
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PostgreSQL 9.0 Release Candidate 1 is available
I bet most of the people freaking out about CL's adult services haven't considered that censorship usually leads to an increased demand. They're doing an excellent job advertising to the world that you can easily buy sex online. If they really wanted to help people they'd be advocating a safe highly regulated adult services industry that satisfies the demand while eliminating most of the ugly side effects of prohibition. They completely reject this idea so it seems obvious to me their agenda is more about moral pontificating than helping people or they truly have no understanding of how the real world works.
Let's all hope that 3D television with expensive, goofy spectacles is to 2010 what Laserdisc was to the 80's.
It's much easier to shoot the messenger than solve the problem. It's all posturing.
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Oh yes, immutability is crucial. Generational GC already makes you pay for mutation with a write barrier, and in our parallel GC we omit the locking when copying immutable objects, accepting that a few might get copied twice. In the new GC mutable objects become even more expensive. I don't think local GC is viable at all in a language with ubiquitous mutation.
I'm an iOS developer in Atlanta, GA (although I'm telecommute friendly) who'd be very happy to pick up some contract work.

Since I never miss an opportunity for a plug and it basically serves as the most meaningful credential in this business, my company has one serious product in the store: http://ballisticpigeon.com/folio (it's on sale this weekend for $0.99 instead of $4.99). I've been doing iOS development since the day the SDK was released (personal projects while I finished up graduate school then proof-of-concept contract work for a startup).

Now I'm hoping to finance my little entrepreneurial endeavor with some interestingly hourly projects.
Note the double use of "somewhat". They'd need to put the form to be POSTed on a page of their control that the browser would GET after clinking a simple link in the form a a "like" button.