skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ignoring the gaping holes in the engineering side of the argument (because clearly there is you use the AJAX "language" to make calls to a magic blackbox that handles all of the data storage, notifications, business logic, etc), the UI/UX arguments aren't even fully baked.

For mobile applications he recommends developing a mobile website instead of a native app. The biggest downfall of mobile websites is that iphone and android have rather different vocabularies for user interactions (hardware buttons vs. all touch screen) and what makes sense on one platform often is confusing on the other. That's probably the biggest downfall I've seen to using a framework like PhoneGap. Yes, you can quickly mock things up to try (which is great for iterating on the UI/UX aspects) but there either end up being two versions (sharing some common code for logic/backend interface) with different UIs built on PhoneGap or you go ahead and build native apps to fully fit into the expected user experiences from both platforms.

Is it silly to ignore UI/UX, of course, but expecting the backend to just magically work (and work well) is just as unwise.
Incentive deductions are very different from loopholes. Loopholes are bugs in the law. Sometimes put their intentionally by people who don't agree with the spirit of the law, sometimes there accidentally. But either way, they go against the spirit of law and are the equivalent of a software bug.

Incentives were put there intentionally and using them is following the spirit of the law.
Top 5 Tips and Strategies for Improving Your Exercise Plan
25 is young. Many 25 year olds dont have much work experience. Just make sure when you do go for the PhD, you finish it and dont end up spending 4 years and no degree. 25 + PhD in CS = very employable.
Link to the actual interview (this article looks like just a rehash): http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566
The future of the MacBook is the MacBook Air
ok great will do. I was on iphone when i wrote question, yet now looking via old fashion computer Im not easily seeing it on your site.
Also Forrst.
I thought this was a much better and more informative article:

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-cars.html
When I went to Columbia College, the GS students tended to be the best students. They were more prepared, more motivated, and had much more poise. If anything the GS degree would look better to me.

I know the snob factor goes down, but the GS degree should mean something to people who care more about education than branding or signaling.
I'm not about the "unless proven innocent" part in Adsense. It seems to me that when they think you're guily, that's it.
So Intel (INTC) lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them … [but] we went with IBM and Motorola (MOT) with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. So we totally missed the boat. Intel would spend $11 billion and evolve the Intel processor to do graphics … and it was a terrible technical decision. I wasn't technically qualified, unfortunately, so I went along with the recommendation.

I'm not confident he's correct. It certainly wasn't the wrong technical decision -- it may have been the wrong business decision.
Michael Stonebraker: Clarifications on the CAP Theorem and Data-Related Errors
As an experienced Frontend Developer thats worked for a number of startups, this article is not well written. I prefer Developer rather than Engineer. It does seem like really good frontend developers are becoming more rare because it takes a unique blend of technical skill (mainly javascript), understanding Usability/UX and having aesthetic tendencies. More and more companies are looking for Frontend developers that can also write Framework template code (Rails, Django) which requires even more skill or exp. Its kinda a specialized niche.
FYI, I am currently looking for a new job if anyone has an opening.....
Tell us where to sign up to be notified of beta.
Email from Steve Jobs re: Java and OS X
I just got a response from Steve Jobs re: Java and OS X. Here it is.
You reinvented Nagios?
Chris Conley, a member of this community and a well known Philly developer, has been building a powerful API for developers to use to interact with Mechanical Turk (it started with his own frustrations using theirs). You can check it out here: http://houdinihq.com/.

If you're looking for a solution to some of the problems addressed in this article, his API (and the corresponding Rails gem) are a good place to start.
My story is that I have software that works, how's that? :)

They definitely had connections, what with Eben Moglen of the EFF backing them, and them getting an article in the New York Times, that kind of thing doesn't happen without some kind of connections. A lot of that was probably just a result of being NYU students. I was working as a pizza delivery driver in Baltimore City (home of The Wire) when I started Appleseed, so I'm sure they have me one-upped in the social capital department.

At some point, a story may matter, but right now, I'm focusing on building the software out, and accomplishing what people are looking for. Appleseed has more features completed than they even have in their roadmap, it's way easier to install, it's extensible (a framework, not just an app), and I've got design documents and specs for the next year of development and beyond, including a mobile API, client-side apps, and distributed search (the holy grail of open social networking).

The great thing about open source is that the press can come later, I can take the time to focus on building the software first, and there isn't the same first-to-market requirement that startups have. I'm not necessarily trying to get users to sign up, I'm trying to get administrators to install it. And that requires a certain level of polish and feature-set.

Users don't have to care about Appleseed anymore than they care about what Joomla or Drupal is, so that's the advantage of being more mature than the competition.

Of course, at this point, I'm not really looking at Diaspora as my competition anyways, I'm looking towards Facebook.
I really like that. I do general consulting from time to time and would love a great tool for lead generation for small web based businesses.

Could really work well for connecting consultants with new clients they would otherwise never find.
I thought it was a troll account created only 12 hours ago, to give "Apple fans" a bad name.

To be fair to "WozRocks" though, I, personally, am kind of an Apple hater ;-) so his/her comments might not be without a context.
Folks have mentioned Eclipse as an IDE, but there's also Eclipse as a platform. I have three Eclipse RCP apps I use for visualization daily.

I also manage a lot of equipment that requires java webstart to load a configuration GUI to accomplish tasks that would be darn near impossible at a CLI or any other way.

I logged into Cisco TAC the other day. Requires Java for ticket management tasks.

I use some rf propagation tools for a hobby that are java apps.

I make frequent use of Deskzilla. Java app.

I could go for days. I won't.
Creative Suite is decently integrated (as long as you stay consistent within the version numbers, importing older projects into newer versions has a nasty tendency to make them no longer backwards compatible unless you specifically re-save as the old version) and there are already plugins that support converting Ai (Illustration) into Canvas (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mswanson/archive/2010/10/12/adobe-il...). From Adobe's perspective as long as they can keep a tight grip on the authoring tools market (where they actually make money) they are better off hedging their bets.

Photoshop and Illustrator are still the gold standards within the web/design community and while not loved by everyone Flash/Flex is still a very popular platform for developing rich applications. The more Adobe can do to move Flash/Flex (the authoring tools) from being tied to the actual Flash plugin, the better it is for them in the long run.
I got worried while reading the headline because I'll be 30 when I get my master's in CS. The supportive comments in this thread at least alleviated my concerns.
Incorrect. The Cray T3E used Alpha processors in big-endian mode.
thanks. I'm getting there; things are finally starting to come together, which is nice to see.

if you ever read this comment (it's been a few days now since your reply) could you please email me as I wouldn't mind getting some feedback from you.
Golden Rectangles in Web Design
You obviously know your business :-)

As far as I am concerned, I would just like to know you're living comfortably, that's all. If you're happy, so am I.
Milestones, Risk, Engineering & Pancakes
I missed some context there. I thought "yes, I need medicine after night work". Why did I completely miss the mark? Swing shifts all week.
It's also not even clear Google cares a lot about GAE profitability. When it first came out, there was only the free version, and the limits were there just to keep usage reasonable. As with many Google things, it seems like it was basically something they built internally for internal use, and then decided to make available to the internet for free.

Only after much clamoring by people who actually wanted to pay Google money for more usage did they offer a way to pay for higher quotas, almost a year after the initial rollout.
> People say he killed the Newton- your pet project- out of revenge. Do you think he did it for revenge?

> Probably. He won't talk to me, so I don't know.

They still don't talk? After all these years?
Not really. It doesn't do any monitoring, it just turns an e-mail into a phone call, and decides who to call based on a schedule you maintain in the web app.

The fact that it doesn't do monitoring is pretty much my only major gripe with PagerDuty. I've been a customer for a few months.
Do you really have to have a Django developer specifically? In my mind, a good programmer is a good programmer and understands a thing or two about this stuff. I think you want a good programmer first, regardless of whether they have a great deal of experience in whatever the obscure framework du jour is or what have you. But other than that I do tend to agree with you.
Great community and service, terrible and confusing interface. I wonder maybe their UI is so bad as they only want to attract a certain demographic, though it seems their demographic(turkers) runs beyond just computer nerds.
Paying customer number one is what makes it a product.

True. But on this net....

"as long as you can't put the relevant link into the place where people go -- then you can't even begin to
compete."
"Build it and it will come."
That was my strategy. I had no career and a degree in Philosophy that was taking me nowhere. Out of the blue I jumped into Web development and started building websites for anybody that needed them, for free. Once I had a portfolio of 10 or so I got a few part time position doing web development at a university. This gave me more experience and at the same time I started hacking on more technical aspects like OO PHP, Mysql, Ruby on Rails etc. I hacked on a few things and had some examples to show. This led to one fulltime job doing mostly PHP. I then hacked a bit more with Ruby and landed another job doing that fulltime. Now I am hacking on IOS and Macruby hoping to make a jump into the fields.

See the pattern? Get a development job doing whatever you can. Hack on stuff, build it, then try to move up.

Key is, Web Based software, IMO, is a show and tell type profession. Like carpentry the emphasis is on what you can do, what projects you have built, rather then degrees, age etc ...hope that helps...
Apple didn't pay Adobe or Microsoft to port any of their apps from PowerPC to x86, and yet it happened. So I don't see why they would pay them to port from x86 to ARM.

They'd either port and retain a large part of their market, or don't and leave an opening for competitors to take their customers.
Maybe we need a new word in the vocabulary for this employment category.

It's hard to explain to people who ask me, "What do you do?" Well, I don't have a job exactly. I quit that in order to work full-time on something that I hope will make money someday. There is no legally incorporated business... yet. So it's not really a startup, but it's not what you think of as unemployment either. If I tell people, "I'm doing a tech startup," they go, "Oh! That's cool." And I count that as a successful social encounter.
Alan Kay and Steve Jobs go way back...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

That said, Smalltalk is overrated.
For RoR, you can override to_param on the model in question, something like:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
def to_param
self.login
end
...
end

Assuming self.login is reliably unique. Although I've found this can still have some follow on effects that could need to be handled in a situation similar to the above. There are also some heavier weight, more feature filled options of course.
Benefits and Limitations of Database Abstraction Layers
Could've been any number of sympathetic bloggers/writers on here who'd take this guy's project on as a story.
Text:

"Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it"

--------------------------------

In reply to:

"Mr. Jobs:

I am the CTO and founder of a Software company based in Philadelphia. We create and sell Enterprise software into the health care space.

Our software is Java based, and runs on both the server and desktop. We have been in business for over 12 years now, and are a healthy growing company with about 180 employees.

I am a big Apple customer, as is my company. We love developing and testing Java based software on OS X.

Today in the news were stories like this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/21/apple_threatens_to_k...

and here's another example: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20020338-260.html

I am hoping you would consider commenting either to me or via your PR channels what are the future plans for the Java programming language and platform on OS X?

One last note - a growing trend over the last few years at all the software conferences I attend is the popularity of the Macbook laptops. Go to any non-Microsoft focused developers conference and the rooms are typically dominated by Mac laptops. One major reason for this is that OS X is a great platform for Java developers.

thanks

Scott Fraser
CTO, Portico Systems
http://www.porticosys.com
They generally don't let people audit courses (ie, non-credit) for free. Maybe if you're an employee of the institution, or have a connection, but if you go through the registration process you'll have to pay.

I audited a course at Harvard Extension, and the professor said she wouldn't grade the work of auditing students. You could do the assignments, and attend the lectures, but you'd get no feedback.
Aligning the Java release schedules for OS X and basically all other platforms would be fantastic. Rather than some kind of deprecation, this actually makes OS X a first-class citizen in the Java ecosystem.
From Netflix's own site they currently have around 15 million subscribers and from the world bank, there are about 230 million people with internet in the US so about 6% of the internet users are taking up 20% of the peak bandwidth (assuming that all 15 million actually use the streaming service which is probably a gross over estimation). It'd be very interesting to see how the YouTube/Hulu numbers compare. I can see why Netflix would be such a high consumer (longer content and now a lot more HD content) but even still 20% seems very high when you factor in things like YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon and file sharing like Bit Torrent.
It would be nice to get a commitment from Oracle saying that they would support a Mac version BEFORE Apple drops support...
Big problem with Step 5 - people couldn't run Windows on their Macbooks except under emulation. That would be a deal breaker for a lot of potential customers (pretty much all the gamers for example) and Apple knows it.

Personally, I don't think the transition to ARM on the Mac will happen any time soon. Apple will just try to convince more people to buy iOS devices instead.
Right, and it was also mentioned in the article.

Alan Kay's essay by the same title is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.uni...

Some other similarities off the top of my head: Alan Kay also often speaks about "building systems", and both this article and Steve himself talked about Apple's advantage being "good system integration". Objective-C, inspired directly from one of Alan's brain-children, was at the core of the value of NeXT, which Steve started, and is still at the core of all of Apple's developer platforms.

I don't know if the two have ever met, but I think they certainly hang out hang out with similar-minded folk... ;)
OS X supported OS9 apps until long after people were puking at the mere sight of OS9 apps.

And when they converted to Intel, they also provided Rosetta, a completely ridiculous binary translation system to make PPC apps work.

Those are bad examples.
Market it to students ... many teachers and parents would be thrilled if their kids/students actually increased their vocabulary from using the computer. If it automatically finds definitions, could quiz you, and maybe include some game-style incentives to get kids to actually really memorize the words and correct spellings, you could find a real market IMO. Make it simple and cheap ... well less than the price of a Flickr Pro subscription ... and I think it could do good.

Then, though, you'd have to publish lists of how often kids used it to look up internet slang and abbreviations. Share that part with HN =D
Hi everyone, I added the text as a comment to the image so you can read/copy it more easily.
1995: The best deal I could find was $1500 a month for 1mbit, (I was spending (in 1995 dollars)) $4500 for 3mbit, and I spent 5k or so building the server for what would become planetquake.com

What is happening now in both available (and free!) cloud computing resources and the entire lean startup mentality is so far beyond my comprehension I don't even know how to compare the two startup worlds of 1995 and 2010.

Lordy!
It's great to hear that this was a practical consideration on Apple's part.

I hope that they ensure a smooth transition of the responsibility to Oracle and perhaps even hand over some of the existing work, if licensing permits it.
Piracy certainly affects sales, but as this episode has show, it doesn't have to.

This is my major problem with the riaa/mpaa/etc. They're trying to criminalize normal human behaviour (not paying for something), in the hopes that that will alleviate their piracy woes. Now, there are two parts to that last sentence. We may argue over the moral value of piracy, but that's not the point. The idea that, by criminalizing sharing, they will somehow prevent it, is ludicrous. If they had taken the tens of millions of dollars they've spent on lawyers and instead put it towards market research, if they had hired people to build them a workable economic model, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I can moan and complain all I want about the fact that people are copying my work without giving me money, but at the end of the day I'd be much more productive were I to spend that time and energy finding a way to entice them to pay for it.

The reason this hasn't happened is simple: The big money in recording is the production houses, and they're fast becoming irrelevant. They know as well as any of us do that a digital age economic model that sees content creators fairly compensated for their works will necessarily cut them out of the loop. So, instead of addressing the problem, they lobby and sue and try to cling to some semblance of relevance. Look at what Valve has done with Steam: It's no longer necessary for a game company to sign with the likes of EA or Activision in order to sell their games. The next step, of course, is to find a way to market independent titles effectively. The system isn't perfect, but it's improving, and it provides a model for content creators in other forms of media to emulate.
Developer reactions to the Mac App Store
usabilitycounts.com, your site is down. Seriously usability counts.
Notorious malaria mosquito strains evolving into two separate strains
If you get a PhD doing research in machine learning, I'd be absolutely shocked if Google doesn't offer you a Research Scientist position.
If the universe is pixelated, we'll need to consider Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis seriously. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
Apple always had a strange, conflicting working dynamic with Sun, a company whose purpose became more aligned to developing technology for the sake of developing technology. Larry Ellison has always had a close, personal relationship with Jobs (and I've always believed that Larry wants to be the Apple of the Enterprise world), so maybe this is a sign that the new boss of Java is handling things differently here, or rather Jobs's personal relationship at work here.
Backup Methodologies
That's great! http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/hunch-taste-graph-business-... is another alternative. Maybe you could try tweaking your algo continuously and comparing with how well hunch recommends stuff. The advantage of the hunch api is that it is able to use a lot more info about the visitor to make more awesome predictions. Just curious to see how far it goes!!! http://hunch.com/developers/v1/
OnlinePaidLook - A Single Guide for All Online Intellect
I think its probably more fair to say that after many years of being massively underrated and overlooked the lip service which computer science pays to Smalltalk is way higher than the actual amount of work put into the ecosystem around the language.
Shucks, I did the transcript too above, at 4x zoom :-/

That will be $0.10, Sir!
Thought that, too: good thing he's not CEO anymore, I could just imagine him in a meeting "Why does A4 run RISC? We got burned by that already, we're sticking with CISC this time!"
OK, a bit late to the party but here's what I look at:

1) Calculate cash flow (EBITD)
2) Calculate total market value of the company (equity + debt - net cash)
3) Calculate price/cash flow.
4) Look at consensus growth rates for earnings/cash flow for the next 5-10 years.
5) Multiply by 100
6) Calculate Price/cashflow divided by 5 above.
7) My buy targets are values of 6) above of 0.7 or less. Sell target is above 1.0.