skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a difference between the level of programming required to build a proof of concept, and the level required to make it do anything off the beaten path.

I think it's well established that it's never been easier to get a web application off the ground, and UX+design in this space definitely is a differentiator, and probably more important for those initial first impressions than the programming.

It's a function of market saturation though, creating your average web application or site is a pretty established problem, with a huge number of options when you need to go about building it.

Where engineers are not a commodity? Any company that needs things to be delivered yesterday, in a space where you need cross-disciplinary, out-of-the-box thinking, with the ability to play multiple roles (sysadmin, support, customer service, programmer).

These types of engineers are quite hard to find, and satisfaction with the average "commoditized" engineer will be extremely low.

Let's say, making an HTML5 iPad app talk to a proprietary hardware device using a proprietary application protocol over TCP to make for a rocking walking salesman appliance.

Yeah, good luck making that sing in a sufficient timeframe if you don't know what you're doing.
The GPU is increasingly more important (accelerating the UI, the browser, Flash, supporting higher resolutions, gaming, etc)

Don't forget offloading computation from the CPU like voice/face/gesture recognition and number crunching (there must be some use for that in a cellphone). And OpenCL is already providing a hardware-independent abstraction layer for that.
Ask HN: Lightweight Employee Training Software
I'm looking for a service (or a piece of software) that will allow me to train our clients' employees on how to use our product. Basically, I just want the employees to view a slide show with audio (or a screencast) and then take a quiz at the end. The results of the quiz should be saved and emailed to an administrator.

That's all I need. Does anybody know of anything like this that isn't too pricey?

Thanks!
The technical advantages of ARM aren't that great.

Don't forget we are talking about CPUs that are getting close to Pentium 3 class performance. Intel proved back in the Pentium vs PowerPC days that x86 can compete well against superior architectures. In this fight they have a lot more performance to work with.

I do agree with your CPU-becoming-commoditized point, but Intel is very aware of that (cite: how they keep Atom performance just enough higher than ARM, but a lot slower than their more profitable higher end chips). It's a difficult area, but Intel is aware of the balancing act they have to do. I think their strategy is to increase performance of non-CPU components of their chipsets (ie, make sure Atom kills ARM on I/O) in order to keep their lead in the datacenter.
Dragon Spacecraft headed to the national mall
2010 Spring Christian Shoes sale, wholesale CL shoes
On an afterthought, I wonder how much patent protection clang/llvm's license provide for downstream users.
Any details on this at all? A hint?

I like Panos have been doing this for more than 4 years, and I've seen no silver bullets. I'd like to think we're (CastingWords) doing it better than anyone else, and I don't even know what a silver bullet would look like at this point. Though I have to say that Panos's list is a good start.
FWIW, every innovation in PL research coming out in the last 40 years can be considered anti-Forth, including binary security, strong-typing, platform independent code, modules, streams, exception handling and what have you.

I just went through Ertl's dissertation for the third time in as many years, and my impression is that Forth stands somewhere beside formal theories of programming languages, not within. His dissertation provides 3 implementations of forth, just as Dybvig provides 3 for scheme. The two papers are nearly identical in scope; showing different implementation techniques for a tiny kernel language. However, the Forth paper is entirely in C and assembly, without the slightest hint of formal semantics or any other mathematical reasoning. It's a hack upon glorious hack. You can't reason about Forth code without FULL abstract execution, to wit, implementing a full Forth VM with side-effects, or emitting 3-address-code, or some other linear tuple IR, and using traditional techniques from register-based languages with variable assignment.

Having said that, I can see why Forth might be fun, as a soul-cleansing language for a programmer who has spent too long in abstraction. Haskellers should use it to bring themselves down a notch [grumble, mumble mumble, something rude, under my breath]

[Edit:

Oh fuck, I forgot about Factor!

I pre-accept defeat, and retract my possibly under-informed arguments if and when Slava shows up to this discussion :-)

If his opinion differs, I don't think I am qualified to disagree with the sharpest dude hacking on a language implementation today, and Forth domain expert to boot]
well, humor aside, there are different grades of lazyness.

I'm a geek, I feel pleasure to do stuff on computers.

Tell me to print something, ehm find some paper somewhere without coffee stains, connect the printer, print it, sign it, put it somewhere on the desk so next day (it's night now) I can send it via snail mail, buy stamps etc etc

aaaargh, no simply no, not for a 5 lines fix in the contrib lib.

This 5 line fix, might have been another 10 lines tomorrow, then perhaps something more in future, but for now they are 5 lines and this procedure is actually blocking my gradual involvement in the whole thing.

It would be different if I had a real interest, if I had project I wrote and I would like to integrate, then perhaps I would find the whole operation slightly less useless. But for a quick bug fix ....
Three of your four points are ways that his idea wasn't good enough, yet you conclude that it's not about a great idea.
Google may be working on their own Python VM as he would be a great hire for that job, especially given his involvement with Jython. Let's hope that :)
You're right - I should be more clear what I mean. "Oh shit" moments caused by a change you made due to pushing a new piece of code should never last more than a minute or two, between the time you realize something went wrong and the time you run the command that reverts things back to the known good state. At Shopkick, this usually means running a command which flips a symlink that points at the current code/config to use and restarts/reloads the server in question.
Launch day smaunch day, its not a launch until you get the publicity you want. When TC ignores you, have another launch day. Unless your startup is aimed at startups the TC crowd is mostly people who want to spectate your success, not use your product. There will be a bunch of sites that do cater to people who would be interested in what you do (ie lifehacker for productivity etc) focus on those. Have another launch day with those sites, with HN and reddit.

If that doesn't work iterate and launch again.
Arm-chair surmisingly best, may be. Scientifically, not.

In fact, healthier ecosystems promote prey more than predators.
As I noted elsewhere, I wonder what kind of patent protection if offers to downstream users of derived products. Since BSD-ish licenses don't mandate the passing of redistribution rights, I must assume the patent protection (like OpenJDK users enjoy - much to Oracle's non-enjoyment) isn't there.

I am not saying Apple wants to patent-troll downstream developers, but that's a risk that's worth noting.
I created an AWS account about 3 years ago, but only used it for the first time this week (to create a micro EC2 instance).

Guess I'll be opening a new account too.
Which factors exactly on ARM's side?

I can think of only two:

1) Power usage on low end chips. ARM will be ahead of x86 on platforms below the smartphone for the foreseeable future, and on smartphones for another generation (2-3 years)

2) Manufactures can customize ARM to build SOCs. I can't see Intel allowing complete customization like that, but I'd expect them to ship some competitive SOCs themselves.
Honestly, there are 2 types of folks who make it: the lucky ones, and the persistent ones.

Best entrepreneurial quote ever IMO.
I'll have a lot of users who'll be sad if they can't run my app http://www.auctionsieve.com/

I don't use any Mac specific APIs except for checking/setting some properties to do things like put the menus in the right place. The rest is straight Swing. So no great loss as long as Oracle provides a good implementation.
We (Quora) have been using PagerDuty for a few weeks and so far, it is working pretty well.
The person I was responding to talked about PHP being the best at getting set up quickly. I wasn't comparing PHP to Rails or Django, I was measly saying that for getting up to speed fast, I found PHP not as fast to get up to speed quickly. For political correctness though, I'll say this: I find most PHP frame works (CI I found lacking, Symphony I found easy but something just didn't click, Cake was ok amazingly, the others I haven't used) are not as good as Rails or Django for quickly bringing a project up to speed.
hah. well, I am making a living off of it.

the thing of it is, really, prices for this sort of thing should be falling with Moore's law, right?

Also, there seems to be enough cheap UNIX people to keep me busy... I've been selling out hardware about as fast as I can put it up. at this point the bottleneck is pretty solidly me.

Of course, I'm charging prices that would be pretty high margin if I was 'at scale' and, well, I'm not even close, at the moment, so I don't have as much wiggle room as I would have otherwise, but rest assured, it's profitable, at least when I don't screw it up. I've set a (I think realistic) goal to double in the next 6 months, which
Crowdflower's API is excellent in comparison. And the UI is much better to boot.

We find it restricts the kinds of work we like to do too much - but it also restricts it to the kinds of work that Crowdflower can reasonably return good results on. So that seems like a good trade off.

I recommend Crowdflower as a starting place to anyone thinking of using MTurk.
The technical advantages of ARM aren't _that_ great.

True - see also this:

http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/2010/08/x86-vs-arm-mobile-cp...

However, if x86 has neither a process or a compatibility advantage, then even a tiny technical disadvantage turns into a tiny extra cost, which can be important for high volume chips.
Do u have an API? I'd like to integrate your service with ours (http://sleep.fm)
Having seen nothing about the guts of how the study was done, I will suggest the following possible explanation for the difference in how much each group supposedly drank:

More intelligent, educated people are less likely to view alcohol as "sinful" and may have therefore been more honest and accurate when reporting how much they drank. Less intelligent or less educated individuals may have underreported alcohol consumed due to denial (since it is impossible to tell the truth to someone else and keep lying to yourself about something) or even simply not remembering it as accurately.

I'm not a big believer in the accuracy of studies of this sort.
It's probably just wishful thinking, but here's hoping they're working on bringing some kind of newer managed environment to OS X.
That's my point. It's free at the moment, but the fact that I can't compile and run my own code on my iPod Touch or so without paying the $99 is abhorrent. I don't know if a similar situation will take hold on the mac or not.
Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines.

I strongly second this. I recently tried Opera for the first time in ages on an old ThinkPad ca. 2001 and it's astonishing what it can do with as little as 128MB of RAM and a Pentium 3. Where Firefox and Chrome struggle with even one tab and no extensions, I routinely find myself with a dozen or more open in Opera without it becoming even slightly sluggish. Whatever its faults, I'm extremely impressed.
Just wondering, what really makes a good UX engineer? I'm studying HCI at a university other than stanford, and the course is total BS... I knew the principles we were supposed to learn were important, but having whole lectures spent on comparing command languages vs natural languages (i.e stuff like command languages are fast and good for experts and natural languages are good for novices... how to make prototypes out of postit notes... a low-fidelity prototype is a cheap prototype whilst a high fidelity prototype is expensive... Stuff I could tell you myself) makes it hard to spend my time focusing on the course. :(

The only useful thing I've learnt is that when you're doing a questionnaire with lickert scales, don't use mean because the distances between each point on the scale isn't equal...
I liked the article, but little bits don't add up. I'd say it's an entertaining read, but maybe not as solid on information as I'd expect for a frontpage HN article.
Apple hater or Apple lover, I don't think anyone can disagree about their laptops and their Mac Mini being masterpieces of engineering. Really amazing compactness.
Does anyone have any data that they can share on the following -- as a company, if I licensed the latest generation ARM processor (e.g., Cortex-A15) and then factored in any additional design and manufacturing costs (e.g., via a foundry), what would be the total cost advantage of using an ARM chip versus a comparable Intel chip (e.g., Atom)? Thanks!
I'm no marketing expert, but you don't need to get on TC for your company to get traction.

I've tried in the past like you to get on TC and I was unsuccessful. The truth is I tried sending emails to all the "big name" blogs and nada.

I learned a different approach very quickly. I found that if you approach the "small" blogs, they're much more open to covering you. Then using that small amount of coverage as leverage, you approach more well known blogs.

Doing that, I managed to go from not hearing from TC in one week, to having the top story on Yahoo UK's homepage for an entire day the next.

It wasn't easy, it was a shit ton of emails that I wrote, all carefully crafted and targeted to each individual blogger I approached.

In a month the site went from idea, to launch, to 440k uniques (racking up 2.6 million pageviews) to being sold off for quite a tidy profit given it had a very short shelf life.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1918270/traffic-08.png

Anyway, my advice would be to not to give up, just change tactics and approach the smaller guys first, build a solid foundation and work your way from there.

Also, take my advice with a grain of salt as I mentioned I'm no marketing genius.
PagerDuty works with email notifications but also offers an API, which makes it easy to integrate PagerDuty with other services.
It is correct to say that replacing the func with delegate and adding the semicolon makes it valid C# syntax. The correctness of that statement is completely independent of C# lambdas, which are neither a complete subset nor a complete superset of C# anonymous delegates.

And it is ugly. It's ugly because the argument list visually expands across more than one line, including whole statements. The "redundant" forms of "using" and "lock" are both more limited than the closure-passing approach, but their limitations haven't been pressing enough to overcome much of tthe ugliness of the closure-as-parameter approach for this specific case of passing a statement block.
At my employer, I would guess that 60-70% of the developers use Macs, all doing Java. I've seen similar numbers at other places I've worked.
I was kind of hoping that the times when the power and sleep buttons are put directly on the keyboard are long gone for good, so now I was very, very surprised to see the power button right above the delete key, looking just like the eject.
While our web applications get around-the-clock use during the business week, there is plenty of downtime on the weekends. Really disruptive stuff (generally hardware or OS-level changes) is done on the weekends, but normal deployments and updates are usually scheduled in the morning, for the same reasons outlined in the original post.
It's an anti-geek arms race that I have never liked. I worked at an authorized Nintendo shop almost 20 years ago. "Regular" Torx screwdrivers, the kind you can pick up for nothing today, were hard to come by back then. They cost something like $50 direct from Nintendo. Every new model required some special tool for no reason except to make it harder for Joe Blow to take things apart. I understand the many reasons for it, but it's still anti-geek, physical DRM.
we should have gotten you on email. we actually have about half the code to automate that, but we haven't finished integrating it with everything else, so we verify the email by hand, etc...
ReMade: The Rebirth of the Maker Movement
Berkely DB is NoSQL under some, let's say literal, definitions of NoSQL.

neo4j currently is also such a db, a non sql db, a NoSQL.

Normally, though, people expect something more from this NoSQL "movement".

People want "scaling", and elasticity.

We live in the world where today you have 2 users, tomorrow you have 2 million of users, the day after you have only 1000. We also live in a world were people are expecting everything to be working always, and are pretty pissed of if things doesn't respond in seconds (watch Luis C.K http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk)

It's not a surprise that all this hype about NoSQL came out when a number of db implementation were developed which handled replication, sharding, dynamic resizing (add remove nodes) etc

Now put a little bit aside the issue with the word "SQL" per se. Let's focus on the "partition tolerance" feature.

I was always frustrated with the fact that no matter how great my product could be, how perfect the implementations would be, how great my db would be; if my machine/rack/datacenter or section of datacenter wen't down, switches break, network connectivity goes down etc. the users of my application are not able to use it, for them it's down.

This kind of NoSQL, the one that handles partition tolerance, gives you the hope that eventually you will be able to make great software, resisting to this kind of events.

I'm not sure whether by these tools (cassandra, riak etc) I would be able to write an application that actually works better, even in the other cases. Stonebraker is right when he says that there are other more probable causes of errors, and that probably the compromises imposed by the partition tolerance will make your software development so complex you will probably make a lot of other errors and make the production unusable.

But at least there's hope that by using this tools you can make things that survive severe conditions. At least this is why I think people get's so excited about all this.
hey guys its up again, I didn't know that my webserver wouldn't be able to handle such an amount of traffic. I reconfigured the webserver, now it should be ok.
I'm going to add iPhone/iPad touchmove support for the canvas heatmap example in the next days. cheers, Patrick
Is this something that runs on top of MTurk or similar existing crowd-sourcing networks or a new crowd-sourcing network?
How to Choose a Search Engine Placement Service?
What Microsoft shipped was not a conforming JVM. It couldn't interoperate with servers using the native Java RPC protocol (RMI), it couldn't use the same native code (JNI) libraries that any JVM would, and it couldn't verify signed packages (JAR). It also added nonstandard methods to standard classes, and any code which called them without reflection wouldn't even load on a JVM.
It's still a social game if people can play it with their friends who also have it. You don't need 60% market penetration for that, you just need it to be sufficiently good that people say "Hey, this game is awesome, you should get it too!"
Hang in there! Don't stop now! So many startups fail because the founder(s) get burned out and quit early. Of the many success stories I have read, you always hear that they pushed through at the very end when they were feeling like it was a failure, and it became a success.

Sometimes success is just on the other side of the fail mountain.
Video of my upcoming DropZap 2 game
Good question! The answer is that the "If..." evaluates to false: ops (and by that I hope you mean something more than facilities staff) has a far simpler set of problems with which to deal when the software is designed, implemented, and tested in accordance with physical constraints. I, too, would like a gold-plated, unicorn pony that can fly faster than light, but in the mean time, I'm writing and using software that produces fewer operational and business headaches. Some of that includes eventually consistent databases.
(Lies, damn lies and benchmarks, but A8 gets ~2000 MIPS, A9 ~2500 MIPS and singlecore 1st gen Atom gets ~3300 MIPS)

Measured how, and at what frequencies? Also ARMs are really starved for bandwidth. Has that improved with the Cortex A9?
The complete story for that anecdote can be found on folklore.org: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=PC_Board_Esthetic...
I am numb with anger right now. I sell java based consumer app and good 50% of my sales are from macos. To be honest java prohibition in the appstore wasn't surprising, I had to sign new dev agreement in august that explicitly prohibited java based apps, but they let my app in anyway.

What I find so utterly surprising is that they are completely killing it on the os level.

html5 here I come.
Right now, they do. But as digital substitutes get better, the physical market is going to shrink. Books and comics are just data, there is no reason they won't go the same way as music and movies, by which I mean, better and easier to deal with in digital form than in the physical.

Honestly, beyond that little truth, I don't think that it makes too much sense to draw lots of parallels between these industries. Use patterns for books movies and music are very different, as are their creation. Each industry is going to have to sort out on it's own how to deal with the brave new future.
How serial #s on Nazi tanks gave the Allies a big strategic advantage
True, you can host your own repo with just `git init`!

But, Github really handles the social element of code well. I really like how they encourage forking & collaboration.

They also provide an issue tracker, wiki, and some webpage functionality. All easy to duplicate, but it's even more trivial to sign up for a github account.
It kind of depends on the scale you want to operate at. If you are Google level, UX tends to be VERY mathematically (statistically) driven. In which case I would focus on a degree in math.

Towards the lower end (read: almost everywhere else) of that scale, you're best bet is actually to look at a design degree, and learn the tech on your own.

Your best bet is experience in the field. Very few schools are teaching comp sci programs that are worth anything (Stanford, CMU a few others), and I have seen almost nothing of value in academia in terms of product/UX development (which is why I say focus on Math or pure Design). The web stuff you're really going to have to teach yourself, I think for at least another 3-4 years, maybe longer.

The author is somewhat right about the commoditization of the backend, but it's not to India, it's to frameworks like RoR. Larger companies that require serious, responsive scaling, sharding and cacheing are not, and will not be, outsourcing to these frameworks. But it's definitely not to India (data entry, sure).
I found it so badly written it hurts.

"There has to be solid knowledge of how it should be used properly (as opposed to way most UI Engineers use it today), and how to create great user experiences that use jQuery right and not just to use it." Sigh. That's not just really badly written, it's almost almost 100% fluff.
Any gripes? (Wondering why you qualified "well".)