skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You mean (WAI-)ARIA?

HTML / browsers are entirely capable of handling websites easily for blind people / other needs. The problem is that nobody builds their pages to use the tools already in existence - even really high profile pages are generally atrocious.

Similarly, take a peek around the web (or at most applications) and consider if you couldn't tell the difference between red/green or yellow/blue. Most people just don't consider it if it isn't shown to be a problem, and yes, it does take more time to develop for those edge cases.
There's deep stuff there (look into coroutines and metatables), but Lua has been carefully designed so that it doesn't get in the way. If all you want from Lua is a (JSON-like) format for data dumps or config files, you can safely ignore the rest of the language. It's like the opposite of C++ that way. :)
Startup School 2010 Notes and main points
I don't have statistics handy, but I believe there's been a large increase in lung cancer incidence since the early 20th century, especially since the 1930s, even controlling for age, mostly due to lifestyle factors (smoking). And lung cancers are a big enough proportion of total cancers that it actually makes a noticeable impact on the overall numbers, so the 20th century had a higher cancer incidence than the 19th century even for people of a given age. I think lung cancer is unusual in that respect, though.
How To Resolve Cydia Downloading Problems | InfoMov.Com
now I am laughing tears... :D I'd love to give that one 10 votes...
Thank you for motivating me to check Wikipedia. According to it, Stallman was very actively involved in growing TECO to Emacs in seventies. Apparently he worked together with Guy Steele and Steele didn't remain in the project (I know that different reasons for that can be imagined). Gosling made proprietary Emacs for Unix in 1981, and Stallman makes GNU Emacs since 1984.

So what you mention can be summarized: Steele was also significant in early history (before Unix implementations) Gosling made the first Unix implementation (but proprietary one) and there were also Lisp Machine implementations.

But Stallman was not only involved in Emacs before Unix, he was the guy who managed to keep Emacs as widely usable as we know it today by creating the free license and the free (GNU) Emacs.

So I still don't understand what your "not any version of it" was supposed to mean.
Until overflow occurs. Xor is safer.
Mandelbrot changed much of my world view and how mathematics relates to it.

I see kids in schools being lauded for correctly identifying triangles, squares and circles and for saying "the moon is a circle". I've wondered whether teachers ever found it strange that true triangles, squares and cubes were hard to find in nature. Wondered whether we're teaching kids to look through the peep hole of classical geometry.

Then I think of Mandelbrot and take comfort in that this man who probably schooled that way too managed to break free, drop the peep hole, and mathematically see what we all see day in and day out, but are blind to. That gives me hope that we as a society are a capable lot.

It also gives me hope that fractals have been around in societies for much longer than we commonly know of .. presented beautifully by Ron Eglash at TED - http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals.html
Thanks for the feedback - the auto capitalization is a great idea, as is turning the default recipe name into an easily removed placeholder.

Definitely planning on adding a SousChef importer into a future release - please feel free to shoot me an email as I'm sure I'll need a few folks with existing recipe databases to help test against.
ugh ran in to that about a month ago when doing some fades on a header carousel, our solution was to swap all png's for 8 bit png's during the fade then swap back when done... fucking ridiculous and less then perfect to the discerning eye.

the depth and breadth of ie bugs is amazing, ive been doing this shit for years but big uglys like this still just keep popping up.

zoom: 1 wtf is that?
What don't you like about the BlackBerry platform?

Also, your app may become a hit faster if you offer a freemium version. It will be great exposure and promotion for ya!
Great article on two-sided markets!

Do you have more great suggested resources to read?
Rate my idea: 300 Second Phone Surveys
See my previous comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799531) about hookworm elsewhere in the thread.

I'm not a runner, but I'm an avid cyclist, and given how much broken glass (and metal shards, etc.) I've pulled out of my tires over the years, it gives me pause. Plus, I live in Michigan - it gets COLD here.
The letter T, upside down, used to mark center of gravity for when you lift it on a sling underneath a helicopter. (total weight in Kg is also written on the tape)
I have no idea how an operation the size of wikileaks can do any kind of verification on four hundred thousand documents.
Oh, I wouldn't call Mondrian the work of an infant.

The work of a bathroom tiler, maybe.
Why do you shoes need to have soles though, vs being something like a moccasin?
There's a small discussion here - http://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/dqbiu/scala_on_androi...

Apparently bu.mp's Android app is written in Scala.
How about we find ways to encourage people not to smash broken glass all over the place instead?
slnunicode hasn't changed or been updated, and has no forum posts or bugs since 2006 [http://luaforge.net/projects/sln/]

ICU4Lua hasn't been touched since April 2009, and is at 0.2B. [http://luaforge.net/projects/icu-lua/]

That sort of status just doesn't inspire confidence in a language. I understand you can use it for game programming, or that you can write your own libraries for it, but that sort of thing doesn't encourage adoption.
Species of Monkeys | Purpleslinky
Yes, once you have type inferencing, starting from "just a number" is more convenient and forcing everywhere, needed or not, the bigger number back to int is certainly problematic. Moreover the fastest conversion (on a typical hardware) of IEEE numbers to ints is not truncation but rounding. Excuse me for not knowing that but does JavaScript today manage not to truncate at the places (if they exist) where rounding would be acceptable?
Drupal Gardens, a free hosted Drupal installs service
1. That's what I said. Are you sure you read the whole post?

2. That's exactly what the underlying problem is; oversimplifications regarding interview processes, a complex enough human interaction as it is.
I spent this spring and summer walking about an hour a day, first in Vibram Five-fingers. I have a funny twist in my step on the left side which wore holes in a couple toes in the first 30 miles, so I switched to cheap Wal-Mart sneakers (it's hard to find ones with no arch-support), and eventually flip-flops. Once I got used to the flip-flops, I started taking them off on a smooth asphalt road that climbs a gentle hill near my house. I keep an eye out for obvious dirty spots, and figure several hours of Eastern Washington summer sun probably kills most of the really nasty stuff. Once my feet toughened up a bit, I added another stretch of asphalt that's quite a bit rougher.

My feet feel better than they have in years, and I now seem to have arches! Both feet were pretty flat, but I now have a nice arch on the right side, and some on the left.
Story behind the 'Do you use your real identity on Hacker News?' poll
ICU4Lua is a wrapper for an existing, stable library. Does (for example) the Python wrapper for sqlite get a lot of commits these days? And if not, does that make it dead and abandoned?
My Favorite Startup Lessons From Startup School
Thanks, that's useful to hear. It isn't on the wiki page: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUnicode (which hasn't been touched since Sep 2009).
That just seems like a bad idea. Aren't successful dropouts an edge-case?
It's good to be thinking about what the right thing to be working on is. It's bad to feel the emotion of fear as you're doing this, because fear triggers your evolved instinct to stop giving your cerebral cortex cognitive resources and get the hell away from whatever is making you afraid. (If there's a car or wildebeest coming at you contemplating it in depth is not going to help you survive and reproduce.)

Playing strategic computer games like Civilization is a good way to convince yourself that you can make decisions about complicated stuff without feeling the emotion of fear.
Is Unicode something that needs to be in the core of a language, or is it sufficient to leave it to libraries, if the language's design doesn't prevent it?

On this computer (OpenBSD/i386), icu has over 1 MB of libraries and a 15 MB data file. The whole Lua distribution fits in one 200k library. Bloating the core language with that seems impractical.
Why is it in beta? Why does the mailing list [http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/icu-lua-users/] have no activity on it?
The X Factor of Economics: People
I wouldn't have a problem with external unicode support if there was one "standard" recommended library that had a strong community behind it. My whole point is that that doesn't appear to exist.
Unless something is a major standalone project, discussion usually happens on the main Lua mailing list instead. About the beta label - I don't know. gmail was in beta for a long time, too, though.
Your notes should be in the next Hacker Monthly issue.
Speaking as a colorblind browser, as long as I don't try to play Flash games I really never have a problem.
> Don’t believe me? OK, I’ll prove it. I have the latest Beta 4 of IE9, in Microsoft speak that means the version before Release Candidate

The author is definitely a troll here.
This is just fantastic - I've never heard what a screen reader sounds like. I think I wouldn't make it five minutes trying to get sense out of that.
Startup School Sunday Open House SF Map
> The fact that there are a lot of units of hardware moving off shelves means little, IMHO, for the long-term success of the platform.

This is true for all mobile platforms. People change their phones often and have few true dependencies on the underlying OS. RIM might be the "dominant smartphone" at the moment but I doubt they're feeling super comfortable.
Foot problems are not common? It seems that we know a very different selection of old people!
Ron Conway Anecdotes about Early Days with Google, Napster, Facebook Founders
I've just launched LinkPeelr on App Engine: http://linkpeelr.appspot.com. It was seamless, quick and easy, and the app is getting a bit of traction already. I am estimating that with free quota I can support about 10,000 active users. LinkPeelr is a dead simple web, but this should give you some idea of how far you can scale without spending a cent.
I'm halfway through your notes and I felt I should pause to say a BIG THANK YOU for articulating your thoughts like this. Clearly, the best article I've read all year.

"Key takeaway: The quality of your dialogue with customers is directly proportional to the quality of the customers you will acquire. If you understand their needs better, you will close bigger deals with happier customers who consume less resources"

Those words, mate, are essentially gold dust. I wish I could pay/donate for this content. Seriously.

See my other comment about including it in Hacker Monthly. I do hope the curators include it in the next issue.
That is exactly how I introduced Lua in to one of our projects: as a very - little code way to handling a complex configuration situation. It grew in to full scriptability.
I like the implication of the first comment, that doing alpha channel stuff is at least older than Internet Explorer, and almost as old as Microsoft.
Sure. This is a real issue for new Lua users, though in the long run it's not a showstopper.

For roughly half the people using Lua, library choices have already been decided by the big C++ (or whatever) project they're adding Lua to, so the question never arises in the first place. That's the primary use case for Lua. It's a really nice standalone language, too, but it was designed for embedding. Many of its strengths (such as the small, orthogonal, clean design) come from that focus, but so do some quirks. If you use Lua as a standalone language, you'll occasionally need to do some digging for libraries, particularly if you're not comfortable with C. The situation has been improving significantly over the last year or two, though.

I don't have a specific Unicode library recommendation, but would suggest checking the mailing list archives (http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/).
Well its been a few years but the RIM Java framework was very messy and its J2ME support was average.

Last thing I built that had Blackberry support was this http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2008/11/01/mpass-is-live/

Blackberry devices had the most support issues :(
I love this one, Improve Code by Removing It:
http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Improv...

Looking at my git stats, I've deleted about 20% more code than I've ever written (in fact I've deleted more lines than all but one of our devs has contributed), and the site is certainly a lot faster now than when I started.
I had a similar experience as the guy who began to play tennis barefoot. In the 80's I was a long distance runner, had innumerable injuries running with best running shoes money could buy, and expensive orthotics.

Finally, i began to run barefoot and never had an injury again. Barefoot running also encourages you to land your feet softly on the ground, in addition to the major benefit of not weakening tendons and ligaments etc by supporting/raising them.
Map of Sunday's Y Combinator Distributed Open House
Tail Call Optimization
> Sorry for the lack of specific examples, but my way of dealing with the incessant irritations is to deliberately forget them.

Pity, as the rest of us then can't learn anything without the examples of the errors.

> I'm not talking about (heaven forbid) Flash apps. I'm saying that Flash could have become the standard runtime for web apps.

And how were they supposed to reach that when having only Flash which runs as it runs? How were they to make a whole browser that would be widely accepted? What do you think they should have done actually?
Successful founders are already edge cases, and these grants won't be handed out to the stereotypical "dropped out to play World of Warcraft" population. If someone is capable and driven enough to attract these sort of awards, I wouldn't expect their (dis)taste for formal education to have much effect on their odds of success.

I think the real point here is that they are making bets on the young and idealistic kids that haven't been tarnished by years of drudgery, beauracracy, and being told that they can't do things. So they do whatever wild ideas interest them, and if any one of those kids happened to be right about something that more 'educated' people would consider idiotic, it's a massive win. Kind of like the old DARPA approach or Google's 20% time. In that respect going after dropouts would make a lot of sense, since those are going to be the types that care less about following the establishment and will be more likely to execute genuinely novel ideas.
I could see this being a sort of shopping list companion for the iphone as well. You make a set list of recipes that you want to make for a week per say. You use the iphone to find the ingredients at the grocery store, and as you check them off on the ipad while making your dishes, the app is smart enough to keep track of what you have left, and what recipes you can still make. I bet food companies would love to have sponsored recipes with their branded food items as ingredients, and know how much of an ingredient a user has at a certain time for upselling through coupons.
It is paradigm shift.

Dominant model for mass use of computing was Wintel based desktop/laptop connected by the wire to the net.

It is changing now. There is a choice. Deskotop/laptop still exists. But affordable access to WiFi and GSM (CDMA in the US) net connectivity makes use of more mobile devices attractive. These devices are available in many factors and great price range.

The future is not so nice for developers and software firms. There was one target platform. Not any more.

But on the other hand there are completely new classes of needs which can be fulfilled by software. So we have new niches.
Really like this part:

"Because education seeks to impart past knowledge, when you are trying to create a technological breakthrough, you have to create new knowledge, and there is no way to teach that. There was no course at University of Arizona on ‘‘how to cure aging.' Hopefully, this program will allow others to work on ambitious projects themselves, before they've taken on a crippling amount of student debt,”
cargo culting
Impressive. I'm not the best tester and I haven't dug too far into each feature, but a couple of things I came across:

The toggle control doesn't want to switch back to ON fully. If you tap it from the ON position, it happily switches to OFF. Tapping it again, however, makes it act like a slider control and it refuses to switch back fully. Using it like a slider and dragging it back to ON just forces it back to OFF completely.

On the initial load of the slider control, I drug it to a position (say 78) and the clicked the text box to see if I could edit it directly. I was able too, but the number switched back to 0 instead of staying at 68. After entering a new number, playing with the slider again and going back to the text entry, it retained its value. Exiting the page and going back in to repeat the process produced a similar bug, but this time the textbox was empty and had a placeholder of "input".

On one occasion, I had a weird navigation experience: Form Elements > Clicked Slider > Went to Slider > Clicked Back > Went to Form Elements > Clicked on Checkboxes > Went to Checkboxes > Clicked Back > Went back to Slider??

On the FORM Example page that has all the different form elements on one page, clicking on nearly any element that brings up the soft keyboard causes the display to scroll, however it doesn't scroll into the right position and the element you're modifying is no longer visible. Exiting the soft keyboard doesn't consistently scroll your view back to the correct location.

This was all on an HTC (Droid) Incredible, Stock Android 2.2, Default Browser.

That's all I've got so far. Still really impressed and looking forward to playing with this some more!
Why we hate PowerPoints -- and how to fix them
Painting Picasso on the iPad
Personally, (visual and diagnosed ADD) it's very difficult for me to think through algorithms under pressure, or in environments with distractions. Stuff that takes me five minutes in a quiet, private, relaxed setting can take me an hour to think through in an environment with more people. Lab courses in college were particularly frustrating for me for this reason.
This is utter bullshit strawman trolling hyperbole.

I remember reading Joel's post alluding to this back in the day, then Jeff's a couple of years ago

Hmmm. The Raganwald post that Jeff's is based on says this at the top:

If you think that I just claimed that 199 out of 200 working programmers cannot code, stop immediately and either read my follow-up explaining the math, or read Joel’s article on why companies aren’t as picky as they think they are. Thank you.

Wait, so what did Joel's post say back in the day?

That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he's the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they're getting the top 0.5% when they're actually getting the top 99.9801%.

Ok, let's see how low you can go in your quest for faux controversy:

One question immediately springs to mind: Is that x out of y applicants, or x out of y working developers? There is a massive distinction.

O RLY?

All of a sudden the headline is: X out of Y Applicants for Positions Advertised By My Company Can't Program. That's a whole lot less impressive/sensational and whole lot closer to reality.

Actually, Joel's impressive/sensational headline was: News. I think you might be projecting.
Now, sorry to say, but that's just a stupid presumption. It amounts to either economic discrimination against people who can't afford a laptop (for a whole host of possible reasons other than "I guess they never had a job that paid well because they are crap programmers"), or at the very least, prejudice against people who work on desktops and don't like laptops. Not every programmer is a laptop-wielding RoR nomad who writes code wherever, whenever. Some people need their special cave and their fixed rig.

Don't assume everyone is like you.
Another challenge is the risk of alienating one market is always present. To use the eBay example, they've recently focused their efforts much more squarely on buyers by introducing new "top-rated seller" criteria and a fairly liberal Buyer Protection Program. Buyers have benefited greatly, often at the expense of sellers. I imagine in the next couple of years, the balance will have shifted back to appease the unhappy sellers.

To contrast, Amazon seems to have done a good job of growing out its base of satisfied external sellers (no personal experience, just anectodal). Perhaps aiding this is the fact that Amazon has an intimate understanding of how to succeed as a seller (they get fulfillment, pain points in the purchasing process, etc.). They worked to cultivate their main market (the buyers), while actively operating in their future market (as a seller).
Must I choose? May I choose the smarter, faster thinker with domain knowledge? :P

I do not think domain expertise should be marginalized, especially when the domain is deep. Someone who is smart and fast but who has only ever thought in Spring and Hibernate isn't going to be able to start collapsing strongly connected components in call graphs. There is far too much distance between a blank slate and being able to do that effectively.

And how can a person who is able to achieve mastery of a particularly difficult domain be unintelligent? Truly becoming a master at something is a rare trait. I read in _Coders at Work_ that Ken Thompson, the inventor of Unix, looks specifically for the ability to acquire mastery: He picks an item on the candidate's resume, whether or not he himself knows anything about it, and proceeds to grill the interviewee about it. He reasons that, if the candidate is unable to convincingly convey mastery to someone who is entirely uninitiated to the topic, then how can this person be an effective programmer and team mate (at Google)? On the other hand, if this very same tactic actually sets the candidate off -- that is, the candidate starts waxing romantic about the topic while deftly dispatching any technical concerns -- then not only will this person be effective but this is someone who will be a pleasure to work with.

BTW, I believe that knowing the terminology is of only secondary importance. Its purpose is to effectively verbalize fine distinctions to team mates and often serves as a marker for greater sophistication. (Note that plenty of people throws terms around _incorrectly_, often very much so; I am specifically not referring to these people.)