skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it's easier to make a simple thing more complex than it is to make a complex thing more simple

Ha, yes, sort-of. That seems immediately right, but when you consider it, it doesn't quite make sense, in those words.

To make something more complex you must create new things. But to make something simpler you can just destroy a chunk of it. It is certainly easier to delete code than write it.

What I think is the point is: it is easy to make something better by just accumulating features; it is hard to make something better by removing features.
I think the hard part about working off of intuition is communicating it to others. I often find myself working backwards to justify out my intuition, and I think it comes across as me just making stuff up.
> HTC is a relatively new smartphone company.

Wrong. HTC is a relatively new smartphone brand, they've been making smartphones since 2000. They created the first Windows Mobile smartphone, the first 3G Windows Mobile smartphone, the Palm Treo 650, the iPaq and the first Android smartphone. They were probably the major WiMo smartphone builder in WiMo's heydays (and they might very well still be).

HTC is a relatively new smartphone company? By that metric, RIM is just getting started building communication devices.
You get my up-vote considering I copied that exact line to point it out until I saw you already did. This guy's Twitter handle is AndroidPower, I couldn't even take him serious writing about Jobs. Leave it to CW to get the best of the bunch!
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-...
Umm... First of all, I know about how your government violates civil rights. But I am Indian so I don't think FBI will track me. And seriously, even FBI can't think that this could happen.
Maybe he considers emacs part of 'modern tools'?
When I was 15, I was working on my first video game. It was an utter failure. Nonetheless, I keep trying anyway.

That become my career path.
I'm impressed with the product and it's a great idea. But I find it hard to believe that privacy issues on social networks are so difficult to solve. Upon sign-up with Kik, your contact address list is mined and those contacts are then e-mailed. C'mon developers, I know the idea is to make it as easy as possible for monetization with advertisers later but how about putting some more effort into respecting my wishes not to get me into hot water with the real people I know.

You help me and I'll help you but leave it up to me to tell my friends about it.

I'm sure I read the following on HN just a few days ago talking about similar privacy concerns with social platforms:

"If your privacy practices aren't transparent, then you introduce doubt. Doubt leads to lower usage."
How would Apple have known about them?
Haskell is great! And there's OCaml and F# too...
Not really. Remember Sun's stock during the dotcom boom.

Sun failed because of poor execution. They blew the cloud computing opportunity. Their sales people did not chase orders like the HP guys did (this is for a personal experience ). Their Java application server sucked when compared to Websphere and Weblogic. They could not deliver a good story with MySQL acquisition. They let Linux get ahead of Solaris , at least in mind share.
> I use vi on a daily basis but just for very small text files, you can be so much more productive with more modern tools these days.

If there was ever a sentence more finely crafted to stoke a religious editor war, I sure haven't seen it!
Hi All,

Ted from Kik. Just wanted to jump in and answer a few questions:

On October 21, 2010 we launched a completely new service. The only thing that was the same between new Kik and old Kik was the name and the app store accounts. Users from the old system (about 55K active in the last week before the hard switch over) were notified that the new service was available and that the old one would soon be shut down. About 23K did get the upgrade, but almost all of them dropped it immediately due to losing all of their contacts from the old system, and the now lack of built in SMS texting. You can see this in the graphs - a brief peak, followed by a multi day flat line. I really apologize if this is misleading, it was not intentional.

The numbers. They are real. We can hardly believe it ourselves. The app is built to be incredibly viral (more on that later), but we never spam any of your contacts. All that happens is on registration, we do a quick one time, secure scan to let you know who on Kik you might know. That's it. Nothing is ever stored or shared, and nobody outside Kik will ever hear even a peep that you have joined Kik (unless, of course, you tell them, which a lot of people seem to be doing!) From there, people keep using it because they really like it. It is a bit hard to understand or explain (well, not as hard as Twitter I guess, but still) so it is probably best to just use the app for a bit. You will see why people like it.

We are moving as fast as possible to scale the servers, and add features. As noted below, we've been working on our vision for almost two years now, and this is just the first step. Expect some pretty cool things to come, and until then, thank you for letting us share in this incredible ride.

Ted
If market share was all they cared about, they could drop the price of the iphone by $200.

If they dropped the price by $200, it would have a negligible impact on sales. If there was an advantage to hitting a lower price point in the subsidized device market, they would already have an iPhone4 LE or something out.

In the unsubsidized market they do have such a thing out -- it's called the iPod Touch. Which factors heavily into iOS propaganda.

Though they learned with the iPhone 3GS -- when they kept the 3G around for the people who apparently couldn't pull together $150 -- that ever burger flippers ponied up for the big boy.

Consumers, especially in North America (but to a degree worldwide) are addicted to subsidized phones. From my wireless company I can pick up an iPhone 4 for $159, or a Samsung Galaxy S -- the hottest selling Android device -- for $179, the contracts for both cost the same.

The iPad, as others have pointed out, is one of the cheapest decent tablets you can buy. For the media player market Apple has the entire market covered, hitting as discount of a market as exists.

Of course you're playing to the "iPhone is a luxury brand" misnomer that is utterly ridiculous. The hottest selling Android devices all have a post-subsidization price virtually equivalent to the iPhone product, and most of them require the user to then go out and pick up their own high capacity SD card.

That asymco piece, by the way, is horrendous on so many levels. It's a pandering piece of the worst kind.
Benchmarking in the 80s with a stop watch
No. Grandparent has picked out a few pathological examples out of many good ones.

Here is a uniform, random sample of documents:

faststretch details
honourable judge
oriental museum http
london wc 1n 3 bg pdsg seminar
1857-8 indian mutiny
vera bell
katherine r.b
rare books collection
novy arbat street
universitys case

The data set is unique terms that occur in a crawl of .uk.
Here is how I constructed the data set:

I took the UKWAC web-as-corpus crawl (2 bil­lion words, crawled in 2008), ran it through the splitta sen­tence split­ter, removed all funny char­ac­ters, ran the Penn tree­bank word tok­enizer, and per­form term extrac­tion with topia.termextract, dis­card­ing terms that will sin­gle words.
I then low­er­cased the terms, sorted them, and uniqued them, to give the dataset.
It Isn't Junk DNA: God Just Commented Out a Lot of Crappy Code
Yes, it will be the same random subset for all participants. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Why Products Suck (And How To Make Them Suck Less)
> it would take a pretty intense website to start bogging down
> most people's machines I imagine.

Not necessarily. On an internal website we found that IE8 took 8 seconds (!) to run a jQuery/jQueryUI command to style all of the buttons on a page. Granted there where more than a couple of buttons, but the point is that DOM manipulation can be a time sink if you don't manage it right. (By contrast the same command took ~1s in Chrome and Firefox, which still isn't insignificant).
I think your example shows that we need to start giving our kids more free time so they can explore first hand what they love to do.
Bypassing Firewalls Using ICMP Tunnel
ICMP tunneling works by injecting arbitrary data into an echo packet sent to a remote computer. The remote computer replies in the same manner, injecting an answer into another ICMP packet. sending it back as a result client performs all communication using ICMP echo request packets...
And that may be a fair criticism of C++ specifically, I don't know I don't really use it.
As mentioned below, there's no "leaving" involved. The pylons code-base has been maintained for several years with little in the way of new features, just bug fixes, some minor clean-ups, and security fixes. That isn't changing... so there's nothing 'different' for the pylons code-base involved.

I'm confused where this notion of leaving pylons comes from, when nothing is changing with it.
Can you please forward us an email one of your contacts received, and post it up here? We'd be interested to see what it says :)
I use Windows on a daily basis because I work in a place that insists I do, like most large organisations. 90% usage, if true, doesn't indicate Windows is better or worse.

(Given the choice I would do my day to day job on a Mac.)
Transcript of Revolution Systems "office hours" Q&A session yesterday.
It always surprises me when someone mistakes this kind of smarminess for wit, especially if they appear to have learned to bathe and not make messes in the house otherwise. There were a couple of points in there that might have been pleasant to read under other circumstances.
Extracting Exif Data, or Where's she at bro?
I bet that the next time I go on Amazon, the pages I visit will still consist mostly of what are essentially advertisements whose main effect is to distract me from my reason for going on the site, and I bet that information I consider very relevant, like the year of of the publication of a book, will still be very hard to find amidst the visual clutter.
Disclaimer: I am a long-time New Yorker reader.

In case you aren't familiar with the New Yorker, let me bore you. We're talking about an old (1925), well-established and iconic print publication. I don't know if the writers have a word count to meet, but I think pride over the generally very high quality writing is a big part of the New Yorker's culture. I don't think that anyone is being rewarded for filling whitespace in this case. From the New Yorker's reputation and my experience reading it, I imagine the editors have a very different metric for quality.

Personally, I find the depth and breadth of writing in the New Yorker one of the most valuable things about it.

For what it's worth, the New Yorker does have a "Talk of the Town" section which probably DOES use succinctness as a standard - the pieces are very very short. Also, James Surowiecki writes an economics/business column which is only a page long, and usually brilliant and concise.
Dump Excel, it's useless for this kind of analysis.

A TRUE multi-dimensional spreadsheet was Lotus Improv (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv). Brilliant software, easy to use, but killed by corporate stupidity - Lotus was afraid that it might interfere with their sales of 1-2-3...

Quantrix Modeler (http://www.quantrix.com/) is the modern replacement, definitely deserves wider recognition.

Incidentally, Improv came with a demonstration animation explaining its concept and advantages; you get one of those rare 'aha!' moments while watching it! It really was a revolutionary, next-generation product.

Contact me if you're not sure where to obtain Improv... ;-)
above all I'd wait to hear both sides of the story before passing any judgement.

Definitely. Actually, even the story we have already is open for multiple interpretations. If this became a case and I were his lawyer I would certainly point out that a) she admits to having been drinking and b) she states: I may have been less eloquent, but I don’t think I was less clear. If she doesn't know, how can a judge? To me, in the absence of other evidence, I do not see how he could lose a libel case, or how she could win a sexual harassment case. And yes, in general (and quite possibly in this case, too) it is unfortunate (I would use a stronger term, but cannot think of one that doesn't have four letters) that such cases often do not lead to an outcome that people would feel to be just. However, the only way to fix that I know involves Big Brother-like changes to society (e.g: require everybody to record their entire lives, let the government keep the tapes for a couple of years)
I think the talking past each other is largely because the argument was polarized before it begun:

Women - Think men don't understand the seriousness of sexual assault, know women who've been victims

Men - Think there are women who cry wolf on sexual assault, know men who've been victims of that

...and so we inevitably reach this cross-talk where men are saying "where's the proof?" or "innocent until proven guilty" (which is largely what I saw from HN), and women are responding with "why aren't you treating this seriously?"

Drunken louts are not just a feature of tech conferences, they're everywhere. It is only coincidental that the last time I told a guy to "shut the fuck up and leave. Now." was at an academic conference after he made some particularly offensive comments to a married woman. I think most men are aware of thing like this, and do what we can.

HN attracts a more thoughtful/passive/insensitive (depending on point of view) approach to most things, so the "innocent until proven guilty" line seemed to be the general vibe I got from the commentary. I think that's the most even-handed such an issue can get.
Yet, 90% of developers use Windows on a daily basis.

Citation needed.

My primary operating system has been Linux for the last decade. I don't think that I'm that unusual.
Good catch it seems. Mea culpa.
Fascinating! Twins, being genetically identical and raised in the same environment, already seem uncannily similar sometimes. Imagine what they will be like, with they ability to share each other's sensory experiences...
Dan Garcia 61C lectures
This isn't just about rape, it's about ANY physical contact.
>HTC is a relatively new smartphone brand

Yes, that's quite clearly the point. If Foxconn -- the makers of the iPhone -- came out with a smartphone, they would be a new smartphone company, witty caustic replies notwithstanding.
Definitely my fave of the series so far.
I don't own an Xbox, but if I can connect Kinect to my linux box, I'll buy one.
Android vs iPhone - an Apples (no pun intended) to Oranges comparison
As you can tell by reading this post, I was just tired of hearing the Android vs iPhone debate. i hope we can hash out our arguments here and move on to other things on my favorite news aggregators :)
Keep in mind that gmail accounts have a 500 message per day sending limit (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...). You can get around this by creating multiple accounts and cycling between them. Gmail will also disable your account if you have too many undeliverable messages, so be sure that you verify all email addresses before adding them to your list.
What's the difference between programmers.stackexchange.com and stackoverflow.com? Aren't they pretty much the same?
20 Free iPhone Apps For Parents | Technorox
That's not a very good argument. Horse-drawn buggies worked for well over 30 years.
I suspect that builds, or big IDEs, are the biggest performance sinks for devs. If I'm doing non-.NET stack development, I'm pretty sure I could get by with 1 GB of RAM, and probably less if I don't need to have a database instance running on my workstation.
Code icebergs
It's definitely impressive, but the numbers are still not "real" as is portrayed, just because accounts weren't carried over that doesn't mean old users didn't re-sign up based on the old product.

Anyway not trying to criticise this is incredible either way, but it's definitely different to going from 0 to 1m users.
"Use Windows" might to be the key here. I mean, my main development machine is a MacBook Pro, and I use headless Linux machines heavily. But I've always got a Windows machine booted up, and I've got Parallels running Windows on my MBP about half of the time.
I really wonder 5 years from now what will be the impact of all this. It seems that Oracle's strategy is to squeeze out every bit of penny from the assets acquired from Sun, which is fine I guess, but I think they are taking it too far.

I am starting not to trust Java,MySQL and all other products, they really give me the impression that these will all be commercial-only.
If I never have to see an app with Motif widgets again, I would be a pretty happy guy.
We have plenty of free time, but not enough encouragement.
We are on the brink of a double-dip recession though, and also face rising unemployment.
Hulu Plus announced for Sony TV platform
I live in a house with 4 other computer science students, which should answer your question pretty well.

About a year ago we designed a system/protocol called 'SHET' (https://github.com/18sg/SHET) which consists of a central server that links many clients together. Each client can present many properties (get/set), actions (like methods, that can be called), and events (that other clients can listen for). This was implemented by me in python/twisted and makes controlling/monitoring computers around the house really easy.

About a month ago, someone wrote a system called SHETSource (https://github.com/18sg/SHETSource) which allows us to easily connect arduinos onto SHET. Since we don't all leave our computers on all the time, we have one arduino connected to the 'server' (old macbook) near the switch, which arduinos in our rooms connect to via the spare wires in the ethernet (if you only want 100Mbps, two of the wires are spare).

In my room at least, I have a pir, 3 hacked light controllers, a servo and two switches connected via SHETSource, which allows me to write all the logic in python.

Basically, we've written a hacking framework.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'll rephrase.

That is so not true. Don't extrapolate your own pitiful lack of morality onto others. If you have to explicitly remind yourself not to sexually assault people, it doesn't mean everyone else does too.

Is that better?
Clojurize the Data, Not the Database
How open are these solutions in terms of getting access to the raw data stream? TED seems to require proprietary Windows software and I didn't see mention of an API. The usage data is nice, but it'd be nicer to correlate with other data streams.
I'm reading it now, so I can procrastinate cleaning up my apartment.
How do students from India, China and US compare?
Of course. But I never grew up in the days of ttys or 80x25. By the time I started using unix, Linux and FreeBSD had framebuffers and even on the console I had something like 132x43.

I did edit some HTML with edit.com in DOS but I switched to notepad after a couple of months.
I don't understand.
Am I not supposed to say that I found this article pointless and everyone is upvoting it just because it has "Paul Graham" in the title?
Sometimes HN really surprises me.
yeah, he motivated me to get a thinkpad over a macbook at the time.

That said, i'm getting tired of my T500 already. I don't see myself really needing expresscard as much as I was bent on it.

Overall, I've learned that ergonomics matters at the end of the day no matter what machine you use - meaning I care less about laptop screen size and more about bang for the battery life. I can't convince myself to buy a desktop either, so I'm considering getting a 13-14 inch laptop with the fastest processor, ssd, and gobs of ram instead.
Decent article about genetics, DNA, evolution and science.

Nowhere is God mentioned in this article. Misleading title.

It is highly possible that god doesn't even exist. It is then almost certain that he does not code every living organism's genetic make-up.
Life decisions are super tough. Study logic and philosophy to think rationally, and listen to intuition from older dudes and veterans, I guess? :P
Why can't I create my own usesthis page? Who decides who's important or interesting enough to get "interviewed"?
>...as JVM is no longer seen as a viable and open platform.

With Apple dropping work on future major updates to the JVM for OS X, Oracle would be wise to speak up promptly indicating what support/development they'll provide for the platform. Apple has done a pretty good job integrating the JVM with OS X. If Oracle is able to continue from the code-base Apple has been using (and perhaps hire some from that Apple team?), announcing those things would certainly add to the believability of robust support actually coming. Apple isn't very likely to want to part with skilled developers though.

If Oracle doesn't get or (still?) have developers with heavy OS X experience, and perhaps some code to build on, one has to wonder if/when they could ever deliver a quality release for the platform.
On most systems for the past while 'vi' is just a link to/copy of vim in compatibility mode.
XSS-Track: Hijacking a whole website with a single XSS vulnerability.
WordPress is fool proof for non-tech people.
Intuition, for me, is just natural rationality that has been 'learned'.
Cheers for the link, the original design was semi-based on one from there. I've just switched to another from there, which I think looks nicer.
TextMate is pretty popular and very productive, and it basically goes w/ the vi model. You extend it using external scripts, i.e. a bunch of little helper programs.
I highly recommend that you check out: http://www.expressionengine.com as it might be what you are looking for. I hope that helps.
I believe that the author was implying that Steve Jobs carefully chose data to support an argument when other data would have better suited the comparison that he as making.

Which is likewise wrong. Jobs cites total iOS activations because Apple makes no distinction. It's reflective of how the company that he represents actually thinks, and he used the data that they actually pay attention to.

The author presumes that including iPads and iPods is somehow "cheating", but he's the one selectively picking only the market in which Android is succeeding. If you look at everything that runs either OS, Jobs is right. It's only if you selectively pick smartphones (and growth, specifically, as Apple's share is still greater) that Android looks good.
Agreed that OTP is the meat. After writing my first gen_server, Erlang finally clicked with me. This series of blog posts served as a great tutorial to all the OTP behaviours: http://spawnlink.com/articles/tag/otp-introduction/
> What about Generics is broken?

I'm going to be slightly handwavy, so forgive me: Generics are implemented by doing type erasure[1] rather than as 'real generics' through some other method. This causes issues with runtime reflection.

> would replicate their abilities through interfaces and anonymous classes,

This embodies exactly what I hate about Java: In other languages, where I simply 'do/end' or ' \ ->', I have to create a whole giant pile of boilerplate bullshit to pull off something that's supposed to be easy.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generics_in_Java#Type_erasure
What horrifies me is the complete lack of learning. It's been clear for so long now that they have a communication problem: they say the wrong thing, they don't keep people up-to-date, they change the specs as they go then not/mis-communicate that. And here we are again. And again. And again. Again with this post - they're getting peoples' hopes up. It's astounding.