skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java was a safe bet for enterprise software companies - it had wide vendor support: Sun, IBM, WebLogic, Oracle, Apple.

It also had a strong community: Apache, JBoss, etc.

However WebLogic and Sun are now part of Oracle. Apple has backed off on involvement. This leaves Oracle and IBM. IBM are masters of maintaining technology, so we know Java will be maintained. But the ecosystem is being eroded.

If the community is being eroded too, Java advocates everywhere will look somewhere else. Just look at the thread here!

COBOL was too big to fail too. This will not be acceptable to many forward looking enterprise software companies. Expect to see an increasing number of "app servers" appear for Python et al.
Meme variable names
From a view source of a youtube page, SRSLY_GTFO.

yt.setMsg({
'BAD_RESPONSE': "Bad response from server.",
'UNABLE_TO_CONTACT_SERVER': "Oops! Unable to contact server."
});

yt.setMsg({
'ERROR_WHILE_PROCESSING': "Error while processing your request.",
'UNKNOWN_ERROR': "An error occured while performing this operation.",
'POSTING_COMMENT': "Adding comment...",
'CONFIRM_NAVIGATE_AWAY': "Are you sure you wish to continue?",
'CONFIRM_UNSAVED_CHANGES': "You have unsaved changes. If you continue, your changes will not be saved.",
'FLAG_DEFAULT': "Select a Reason",
'SRSLY_GTFO': "This will remove the selected user. Are you sure you wish to continue?",
'THEME_LIMIT': "You have reached your channel customization limit.",
'CONFIRM_UNSAVED_CHANGES_ARRANGER': "You have unsaved changes. Are you sure you wish to continue?"
});
Matt_Cutts is technically a web spam expert, but he is also a generally high profile public facing Googler who knows such things. Maybe he doesn't follow android, or maybe it would be inappropriate to answer this; but it doesn't seem crazy that he'd know.
Now, if the purpose of HS is to fight terrorism, shouldn't they be making people feel <i>less</i> afraid?

Absolutely not. If we felt safe, we'd start asking intelligent questions about why we're groping children in airports and spending billions of dollars on DHS. Disturbingly, both terrorists and governments share the goal of making you afraid.
Linux kernel root-level exploit leveraging three previous vulnerabilities
It's interesting because it's been a major gripe on Github (at least in my circle), and now that they finally have it, we're all happy.

Relax, dude.
It says that I spend less time on the web than most people, which is weird, because I live surrounded by web developers and I am online WAY more often than they are...
Hi Paul,

Comforting to hear I'm not alone here. Maybe if enough of us let Braintree know there is demand for their services in the UK/EU, they might prioritise it. Naïve I know but worth a shot? How hard would it be for them to liaise with another MSP, e.g. Barclaycard, Streamline, etc for the merchant account bit?

info@getbraintree.com

p.s. Geckoboard is awesome!
For people using windows, an excellent free Forth is win32forth.sourceforge.net. One can even write graphical apps with it.
And if you want to hire someone?
If that was the case, then why doesn't he have balls to admit it?
Web-based "Emacs": http://www.ymacs.org/
Think of it this way: Giving positive feedback costs you nothing and makes someone happy!

I had a principal investigator running my lab who felt that she only had to encourage the Grad students & undergrad volunteers, since they were working for none/less money. Post-docs and Lab techs got paid, so that should be all the encouragement they need. As a lab tech, I was not happy there.
"So if you live in the United States" ... yet the address country box had Egypt.

désolé
I totally agree with his arguments. Learning Android development has been a breeze with the great documentation and ease of deployment developers. You just have to put up with all the other non-technical aspects of things (fragmentation, uglier UI, etc).
I don't think they use Mac OS X Server that widely. We were told their deployment platform was Oracle Linux, which is a rebranded version of RHEL.
Megaupload is file sharing site like Rapidshare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload

Until very recently, it required non-subscribers (or all?) to type in a 4 character rather easy Captcha (characters were tilted and therefore overlapped a bit), then you had to wait 45 seconds.

They've now dropped the Captcha step.
That has not been announced yet.
It will also be interesting to see if this improves performance of long running Node.js scripts.
I don't think the point is risking life is bad in all cases. It depends on the possible gain. A simple example is a lot of people consider freedom something worth dying for.

But what is the gain here of climbing Everest after it has been climbed hundreds of times? Astronauts clearly benefit humanity with more than just great stories. I can't see much marginal benefit for society for each additional Everest climber.

I'm not saying it's wrong or selfish to continue to climb Everest. For the climber him/herself I imagine the benefits are enormous and perhaps worth the risk of life. But I just can't see much benefit for anyone else.
Hmm, a move towards a pure big-phat-server:thin-client architecture? Not pretty.

"Best practice" moved away from that because our databases were struggling with stored procedures on top of their regular work.
looks great. there is an option to mark threads as read. looks and functions somewhat like Google Reader.
Jones Forth is awesome because it isn't just a great way to learn Forth but also a great way to learn assembly programming. A couple years ago I did a rather crude, hurried, and unoptimized port of Jones Forth to the Cell processor's vector units. Initially I intended it to be an April Fool's gag for my group at work but I came away with a much better knowledge of the underlying architecture.
When I saw the video, I thought it was 'speeded' up. But the repo browser is as fast as what they show in video.

Try jQuery Mobile repo:

https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile

[Obviously, you will need Chrome/Firefox 4/Safari.]
>the only reward being a spectacular view.

But that's precisely not the main reward. You can get a better view from an airplane, and who cares? Climbing isn't about the view any more than a solo circumnavigation in a small sailboat -- sure, you see amazing things and they're breathtakingly beautiful, but that's not why you do it.

I'm not a mountaineer and probably never will be, but I can definitely see the draw. It's the challenge itself, and the fact that the so much rests on your ability to focus and make rational decisions in the face of extreme danger.
Ditch the "clever" text mouse over stuff.

Also, you're wrecking your information hierarchy by putting your right bar vertically level with your big intro blur on the top left. Let that intro blurb sit on its own with nothing to the right of it.

Good luck.
Here's more info on how the 'installable apps' work:
http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/

"Many installable web apps are hosted apps—normal websites with a bit of extra metadata. You can build and deploy hosted apps exactly as you would build and deploy any web app, using any server-side or client-side technologies you like. The only difference is that you must provide a small manifest file that describes the app.

If you want your app to work especially well offline or to be tightly integrated with the Google Chrome browser, you can create a packaged app. A packaged app is just a web app that the user downloads. Packaged apps have the option of using the Google Chrome Extension APIs, allowing packaged apps to change the way Chrome behaves or looks."
Except that NASA has two a's -- which I would normally type with my left pinky.
// That being said -- I instinctively type it exactly as you describe.
The trickiest part of enterprise software is requirement gathering. You basically have a situation where no single individual has a detailed enough picture of operations in order to distill requirements down to the essentials.

The 37signals philosophy could certainly be applied to some extent if the key people had the right training and the appreciation for the complexity costs of software, but the particular challenges of doing this in the enterprise, and fraught with obstacles which 37signals wisely chooses to avoid by their very business model. And what percentage of stakeholders in a large enterprise have anything approaching the usability or complexity sense of the average 37signals employee? Certainly everyone creating software should be aware of what 37signals has to say, but they don't actually offer any insight on the truly hard problems of enterprise software. They choose not to solve those problems, but it doesn't mean they aren't real.
I totally agree with some of the points: iOS should really receive the same garbage collector that OS X has had for years, and the provisioning certificate nonsense is, well, nonsense. iOS really does need a side loading mechanism. That you need a Mac to develop on is, I suppose, a negative - you can get going with Android on almost anything.

However, I can't say I've ever had any problem with Apple's documentation: It's clear, well written, generally entirely correct. I must confess, I've never spent "weeks devising and performing increasingly peculiar experiments to figure out how to get iOS to do what [I] want", any more than on any platform. If he's complaining that iOS has private APIs then, well, I'm quite sure Android does as well - private just means "not guaranteed to exist in the same form on an upcoming release". If he's claiming that Android's "openness" allows him to see deep inside the OS to make design decisions, rather than relying on the documentation, then I'd suggest that's a mad development strategy (unless one likes rewriting when new OS releases come out).

The point about the simulator seems to be that Android's is so bad, you have to use the phone. I can't really see that as a plus, as one could do exactly the same thing on iPhone, except that iOS has a working simulation environment for when you want it.

The remaining points, about the initial user experience and development environment are entirely subjective, so one can't really comment either way. His point that developing for Android seems to be "easier" than iPhone runs contrary to my experiences, but what one man finds easy, another might find hard.
Actually it will run, you can switch to console mode and install any app you want.
These guys look good - http://eta.devpayments.com/

Don't know if they can help non-US merchants though.

Edit: Looks like they noticed this post and turned off access. They haven't launched fully yet.
How exactly will that help me with the whole finding out where I am and where I have to go problem?
I don't see any iOS projects on your portfolio site.

If you could email me what apps you have worked on at the email in my profile, I might have work for you.
The shoddy state of the simulator really irks me on Android - it's really necessary that it works well, because there are so many different models of phone.

The Android version of my app apparently has a crash-on-startup bug on a single type of Android phone (Droid X), shows up as windowed in others, and works just great on the Nexus/Droid I've tried it on. I can't test on all that physical hardware, though, and the emulator is slow enough that it's nearly useless - various background services on the virtual machine complain about timing out when starting it up.

The fragmentation of that market doesn't seem worth dealing with for the amount of activity on the marketplace.
Now that's how a real Prime Minister talks. We definitely don't have a PM of that intellectual caliber today.
I see these apps more as browser extensions than as standalone, downloaded applications.

I want Firebug installed locally in Firefox (or better yet integrated directly into the browser like Chrome does). I don't want to download a bunch of Javascript every time.

Here's the developer guide for more on how it works under the covers: http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index.html
Great! I've been looking forward to this feature for a long time.
Here's the paper for those who are interested: http://www.scribd.com/doc/44864540/The-Relationship-between-...
Looks true from my experience. During the period of transition from Soviet Union to Russia, whenever people were anticipating any news from the government, salt, sugar, coffee, matches disappeared from the shops very quickly. Every family had a stash of canned foods for the so-called "black day" (hard times).
Also note that most non-aesthetic mouseover interactions are pretty broken in modern usability models.
> The author is not arguing against making small, logical commits. He's arguing against making a ton of changes in your working directory, then running `git add file1, file2... ; git commit` a bunch of times in a row to record a series of commits.
> The problem with this is exactly the one he mentioned: almost no one ever goes back and makes sure each commit actually builds and passes tests.

Right. For git, IMO the right way to do this is:

$ git add -p # stage the first bunch of changes you want to commit
$ git stash save -k # push all the unstaged changes to the stash
$ # build your code, run tests, whatever
$ # repeat until it builds clean
$ git commit # record the clean (possibly fixed) commit
$ git stash pop # get your other original changes back

Repeat as needed until all your stuff is committed. If you can't make a subset of your changes build clean, then it's not independent and should not be committed standalone.
Right.

Founders are very highly compensated in equity, so asking that they take a lower salary is a reasonable argument, but may not be practically possible. (People with mortgages shouldn't start up? etc)

The main issue is that strong talent can get better prices elsewhere, so you either have to give them a huge chunk of equity, or reasonable salaries.

I think people here are talking about startups that 1) can be bootstrapped in a year 2) by two or three college kids 3) with little significant technology other than RoR and mySQL or whatever. I avoid investing in startups like this because honestly I don't think they have great chances of having exits.
Hmm, no. [http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/ignorance.html]

Had he argued that his points were valid simply because they hadn't been disproven, then it would have been an argument from ignorance.

Just because someone makes an assertion without attaching footnotes does not make it a fallacy.
Benefits as shown by whom? If readers are still expected to do their own research, then what purpose does this grossly oversimplified list serve?
I would argue that if climbing Everest is not reckless thrill-seeking then nothing else is.
Interesting how the questions are framed, which sites are mentioned in the drill down sections, and in what order. (They mentioned weather underground, which I thought was interesting, since that's a very old school web 1.0 kind of site)

Also interesting how it graded me below average, even when I massively exaggerated how much I use web apps. It's almost as if Google has a vested interest in promoting the use of web apps, or something.
Eh, one could argue that the sum of the empty subsequence is undefined.
I'm surprised about threading being hard. I thought it was just a matter of imitating a state-of-the-art GC. And it's not like it has to play nicely with JIT compilation. Now I agree Ocaml has little chance to catch up, given their apparent interest in the matter.

You're strongly suggesting that a Java replacement has to compile on some standardize byte-code… Might be a prerequisite for proprietary software, but otherwise looks unnecessary. Besides, what do you mean by "lives on UNIX"? Ocaml runs on Windows too…

As far as I know, F# is currently unsuitable: that would be escaping the claws of Oracle to fall in the jaws of Microsoft. Now if Microsoft fully frees .NET, or at least abandons all patent claims regarding it, F# might do.
I recall in about grade 1 or so, my school bought a few TRS-80 model 3's. Each one had a name "FRED" "BERT" (I can't remember the real names)

Interestingly, many years later when graduating from university, a load of old computer gear from the school district was dumped off by truck - and among the antiquated stuff were what looked like old TRS80-IIIs. I picked them up, dusted them off, and found the sticker on the side with the name on them - they were the actual computers from back when I was 6, from my old school.

The university was nice enough to let me take one home - where it still sits, silent, waiting for the day when I clean it up and actually do something with it (it still works - missing a key or two from years of abuse)
Election Results on the iPad
> 50k ($40k after taxes in California filing single) is $20k after the median single bedroom apartment rent in Santa Clara county

$20k/year for rent? (When I was renting, I never paid median.)

$20k/year more than a $300k/30 year mortgage plus insurance. (Property tax adds another $4k or so in SJ.)

And yes, a $300k mortgage is possible in SV - older founders could have bought a while back and I suspect that some folks are paying about that now.
Printer manufactures make the majority of their money on ink, not hardware. I expect that the roll out of this will be relatively gradual, as with any hardware.
When I lived in NYC you could have a nice, inexpensive apartment in Astoria or Williamsburg for much less than that.

When I did delicious, one of my employees could get to our office in manhattan from wburg faster than I could from the Upper West Side, too...
Cr-48 Packaging
WebSockets Disabled by default for Firefox 4
Four Startups in Four Weeks - Suicide by MVP
In response to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945340
Node.js updated for V8 Crankshaft
Wikileaks Roundup
I'd also appreciate them restoring the Files section/functionality of Groups, which they recently announced were going to be mass-deleted in a few months.
Did you read the fine print under the photo? "Property of the TSA" =)
Ask HN: What's the minimum amount of money you'd consider to be FU money?
I think we all agree that getting "fuck you money" is ONE of the main reasons we work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Then there's passion, legacy, love and world peace of course but let's talk about the money for a while.

What's the minimum amount of money you'd need to have to consider yourself having "fuck you money", thus allowing you to tick off that box on your list?
Awesome! Why don't you post your amazing UI for us to critique instead of complaining that not every single link that anyone likes is revolutionary?
Looks like this Node patch includes Crankshaft:
https://github.com/ry/node/commit/c30f1137121315b0d3641af6dc...
Don't forget the bastard Google TV OS (it's Android, but not as we know it).
Agree. This page is unreadable with NoScript.
And then killed.
Either you are feigning ignorance or you haven't been reading the news for a while.

Politicians aren't just exercising free speech. They're exercising political influence to impose censorship, a blatant run-around of first amendment rights. They're also introducing obviously unconstitutional legislation and calling for assassination from their office.
The 's doesn't count as a word. "it's" is one word, but it has the same meaning as "it is".
An interesting perspective. It really seems like from the programmer's point of view, Android has found a nice sweet spot in productivity - a nice, comfortable, garbage collected but CPU-slow programming environment to do all of your 'OnClick' programming, and then the NDK and C/C++ for when CPU time matters.

iOS puts you in the C/C++/ObjC world for just about everything, unless you want to slog through Javascript. It's been rumoured that Apple is working on a version of MacRuby for iOS - this can't come fast enough.
The inception link was just a bit of fun :)

Thanks for your comments, and the typo in that first sentence was pretty bad. Sorry about that. I've ceded the grammatical highground for the foreseeable future with that gaffe.
It could be worse...

"Netscape will soon reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers." — Marc Andreessen (1995)
Clarification: We don't use any private API's on iOS, James' comments were with respect to what we do with location and networking.

Apple's documentation is great for most visual elements, but CLLocation* in particular has quite flawed documentation.
"In a dual model, all external contributors are required to re-assign their copyrights (and sometimes all of their IP rights) to the open source company."

If it's GPL as usual - you are free to fork the project and do whatever you want with it (within the terms of the license)

If you want to contribute to my project, that I started, however, and want it in my source tree, then I might want copyright assigned to me for a variety of reasons. Whether or not other developers will care about this depends on the project, their level of interest, and the relative contribution they perceive themselves as making to the overall product.

Unfair and debilitating? I don't think so - but people absolutely should be aware of the licensing commitments they are making.
> The death rate for car travel is around 1 per 100 million miles travelled. It's safer than just about anything besides riding in a commercial airliner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

Automobile travel is one of the most likely voluntary activities to kill you, and the most likely direct cause of death (as opposed to things like smoking which kill you indirectly over time).
I actually have a pretty massive patch for QEMU sitting in a computer somewhere (with a pretty massive bug) so I know QEMU pretty well. QEMU is actually very fast if used correctly. Android is not using QEMU correctly. I'm not really sure what they're doing wrong but if I can virtualize a VMM which then virtualizes another OS and the interaction is essentially real-time, basic ARM and Java should not be out of the performance target.

P.S. If you think QEMU is slow, don't even think about Bochs.
I always believed the goal of a portfolio should be to show first, tell later.

IMO you have too much text. I think if you just showed me real examples of your work, it would be more powerful. We are lucky as designers/devs that we can communicate so much just through screenshots of our work. I'd do that! That gives you a shot at explaining everything else about yourself once your screenshots have impressed someone.

<shameless (hopefully helpful) self-promo>
You should list yourself on Tekbob.com :)
Garbage collection on OS X appeared in Leopard with Objective-C 2.0—later than iPhone, but before iPhone SDK.
Older models are still around and even iPad has less memory than iPhone 4 so it is not unreasonable to treat it as resource too precious to be left ar the mercy of GC.
On the other hand, manual management is not that complicated and does not add much overhead in programming except the initial phase of getting used to it.
It's a fair criticism. If the OS is a web browser, why use tabs? They just steal valuable screen real estate. Replace them with a windowing system where each page/app gets its own resizeable window, and you can reclaim some of the virtues of a desktop metaphor.
It's on the page. Here's the link: http://www.threewiki.com

Thanks.
Andy Stitzer: You know what? I respect women! I love women! I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405422/quotes
This type of thing comes almost directly out of George Orwell's 1984. It's been years since I've read it, what did they call the kids that were instructed to turn in traitors, even if those traitors were their parents?

The most frightening thing about this is what it implies:

"Well, if there are all these warnings and advisories and soforth, there must be an active threat! People in my town must be terrorists! I'll go find them!"

It's insane.
Not meaning to be obnoxious but do you, or anyone else, have any suggested reading material on this and similar topics as they apply to web development?

Thanks.