skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say, "At least those problems are mostly in the past now", whereas you cannot say the same thing about China.

Infact, I must admit, China isn't a country I would even feel comfortable about visiting. I am a very vocal proponent of democracies and a critic of how China treats not only its citizens, but journalists both native and foreign and how it uses its economic might to get away with things that other country get sanctioned for.

Tiananmen Square was less than 20 years ago and not that much has changed, I feel.
Great job by Marco of Tumblr
Well... as a Symbian exec, what else is he supposed to say?

Here's my take on the Android situation:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2008/07/09/google-androi...

What really bugs me is that their lines of communication completely shut down for some reason, which is just bizarre.
And PCs used to cost $3000. Now they cost $500 (other than Macs). Operating systems used to require consultants and were priced for enterprises, until Windows came along and completely changed the market.

There's lot of instances where a dramatic cut in price opened a new market for products, and it sure seems like this is the case here.

I also find the whole "site licensing" of PDFs (which obviously means DRM) kind of obnoxious.

Finally I find that the useit.com approach of putting up short parts of reports, followed by a link to the paid report, to be borderline sleazy.

Perhaps I'm influenced by the "free" culture that is so pervasive these days.
The Flash IDE is very important on setting up graphics properly. There is a lot of functionality to be gained from the timeline. Program in whatever you want: Flex, FlashDevelop, Eclipse + FDT plugin etc, but you still want your symbols in the library to be able to be accessed and updated/edited easily.

Flash developers know quite a few tricks to get stuff to act as intended, so I would highly recommend a book on flash game design. I read one a few years back and it helped a lot with the intricacies.
Plurk Update: the quiet achiever
apologies. the rest of the feedback we've got (and doing it ourselves) suggested it takes around 5 mins. I appreciate your time.
Online advertising during a recession: 5 key trends for ad-based startups
Apple sells 1 million iPhone 3Gs over the weekend, 10 million apps downloaded
Working on the assumption that making small changes to the largest number of offenders has a bigger impact than making a huge change to a few devices, we're working on making virtualization easier and more manageable. Millions of computers in data centers are sitting idle right now, and they're burning power at 30-80% the rate of a computer doing real work. So, let's get the jobs they're doing consolidated down to a few virtual machines that spin up when they're needed (or run all the time, but when they're idle, other virtual machines on the same physical device can be doing work).

Halving the number of machines in a data center, even if the number and size of disks spinning and amount of memory stays the same (and we're assuming that CPUs aren't working full-time, and just need to be fast enough and plentiful enough to answer all queries quickly), will dramatically reduce power and cooling requirements for that data center. So, it's sort of a CFL model. A virtual machine is a drop in replacement for a dedicated server, but burns remarkably less power for the same amount of usage.
Switched a very short while ago from the Windows to the Unix eco system but I can't confirm that it's the platform itself that makes or breaks the fun in developing.
Well, the web was originally designed for documents, not applications. So I'm not sure where the irony lies.
Microsoft's E3 Demo LIVE
I don't know C#, but in most languages I know, this string.left(n) method is just equivalent to string.substring(0, n).
Marc Raibert on Good Writing
Both Thomas Ptacek and Dino Dai Zovi say they were wrong in thinking it was not a big thing.

Yes, I know. I was part of the pre-notified group.

To clarify: Ptacek and Dai Zovi were wrong in thinking that this attack is not a big thing, and changed their mind when they heard more details. Having those details, I agree that this is big -- just not as big as Kaminsky is making it sound.
This may be a silly question, but how does flagging happen? I've been reading for a few months - wondering if there's a karma threshold before one can flag?
Dallas startup drinks on July 24th (with GeekMeet happy hour)
That isn't necessarily true. You are mixing up defunkt's reading about something he may not care about with the prerequisite that the author care about the subject to write well about a subject.
Children are naturally prone to be empathetic and moral
If I get the idea correctly, Amazon isn't investing in EY; Amazon is investing in development of general Ruby technology that benefits everyone in the Ruby/Rails communities, including Amazon and EY.
Really good post.
http://jbq.livejournal.com/151129.html

Basically, Google is trying to ship a phone first, and then worry about the SDK and developers.
Their API and software stack is changing a lot while developing for real devices, therefore anything they relesead now, would be obsolete.

So, Developers are going to get a SDK only when google is about to ship real devices.
The real issue is that they are taking forever to release a a real device,

and:

1. Their API sucks ass (so many hooplas to do even simple things, very kludgy).

2.Their UI is really not that great, especially compared to iPhone. Sure, it might be better than Symbian or Winmo, or Blackberry, but when it comes out, it will be nothing that exiting.
because managing a stateful client is nasty and costly if users cannot or are not allowed to do it themselves.
Bill Gates’ web experience: Byzantine, idiotic logic
Please critique my idea: Prior Art
I'm tired of ridiculous patents. I propose a site called PriorArt (or something similar) in which visitors are encouraged to submit every idea that they can think of so that those ideas are never patentable. This could be done as a forum, or a simple database. I'd love to get the community's thoughts on the effectiveness / legality of this concept, as I'm no patent lawyer. And, of course, feel free to use my idea. :)
All I know is that Startup Girlfriend is going to be in the title of my next product.
err, that doesn't square very well with the usual chorus of "java is dead" that prevails on sites like this.

disagreeing by downmodding is the death of reddit-like sites, by the way.
Do you think that continuations are the right model for web applications (does this model still offer enough advantages if you have to make sure that you don't have too many closures)?
The article is about developing for a jailbroken iPod, though; I assume that developing for the AppStore using the official SDK is where the money is right now.
"And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical."

Jaysus! Hasn't a bleedin' notion what he's bleating on about there; we're not like that at all, like. A right lula.
But were you told the details and you still think it's no big deal?
Why programmers should play Go
The Karmann Ghia and VW (classic) Beetles and Rabbits, that is, if you live in the NW or SW. Otherwise, you'll have to just deal with the heavier cars.

They are not optimal, but more optimal than using gasoline.
anyone know how many version 1 iphones sold opening weekend last june? i only find analyst guestimates of 250-500k, making 3G look like a huge success.
I think he makes the point pretty clearly that heads down data entry simply comes with different requirements than web surfing. Try to order not one but 200 books a day from amazon and then let's talk UIs afterwards ;-)
Yes, I was told the details. I don't think it's "no big deal" -- I think it's not as big of a deal as Kaminsky makes it sound.
Building great components that are well defined and contained is not very different from building a great framework, and both approaches can get you in trouble.
Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops
New Radiohead Video done with Live Data - Google Code
The electricity used to refine a gallon of gasoline can propel an automobile between 10 and 30 miles. I'm sorry I can't come up with a link at this moment, but see this one to notice a strong dependency of refiners on electricity:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/special/california/june...

In addition, electric cars are 10x more efficient from their "fuel", 3x more efficient if the source is dinosaur juice. 33kwh/gallon of gasoline, 30mpg is 3kwh/mile. Converted, that car would use 0.3kwh/mile of electricity.
I had a windows phone and I had to reboot it half a dozen times per day. It reminded me of my parent's windows machine (yes, I'll get around to buying them a Mac soon enough). IMHO having a stable platform with solid tools can make development fun.
Should Social Media Be Used During Emergencies? | My Philly Network
I usually end up using

function tfind {
find . -name "*.$1" | xargs egrep -n "$2"
}

tfind extension searchpattern
Death Threat To Blogger
With great anticipation did I click through to read this article ready to gather evidence to blast 37signals once again for their tired "we did it, so can you, it's simple" philosophy. Instead, what I found was a very useful blog post outlining effective guerrilla techniques to get noticed. Nice post and it shows you that it's not always about who you know.
You're right, little reason to sort by name. I can use search to locate an app if I know the name, and when I'm just browsing sorting by popularity or reviews would be more helpful.

On the other hand when I see "!! asdfasdf" and "AAAasdfasdf" I know it's likely a terrible app so I don't even have to bother checking it out.
thanks. i was going to skip the article until I saw your comment.
Boost Your Brainstorming Session with MindMeister
Yes, there is a karma threshold. I'm not sure what it is, but I'd guess it's somewhere between 20 and 100:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226400
go is much more interesting than chess. chess is a battle to the death, in go you can have entire games without a single capture, and win by a point or two.
The two benefits mentioned sound like they have nothing to do with Erlang.
For your first sentence, look up Hawaiian Sovereignty or slavery retribution or head out to any Native American reservation. Or ask yourself why it is that there are more black youths in jail than in college (hint: slavery & discrimination). But I took the bait, these things aren't what I want to discuss because however you define "righteous" (I guess in your world, it's got something to do with x amount of elapsed time), we can banter back and forth with stats and be here all night.

Middle paragraph - I agree with your criticisms. But if you're interested in more than just criticizing from the sidelines, you need to go to China and try to get a feel for the place. At some point, you need to try to fully understand what it is that you're criticizing.

Tiananmen Square - lots has changed since that time. Again, you need to go see to believe.
In Germany everybody knows Jamba, but everybody hates them.

Also, every network operator has tried to create their own platform (O2, T-Mobile, e-plus, Vodafone) - not so different from Apple after all? But nobody trusts the network operators (rightfully so), and awareness for mobile applications was not very big. I guess iPhone has an advantage because apps are a key marketing ingredient.
I've been on this wagon for years. Quality of life is improving across the board in almost every country.
But governments are doing their best to fuck it up.
We will see, but I suspect the market is very different? I have never used iTunes to browse music. Do people actually discover music on iTunes, or do they just go there for music they already know they want?
Stop Using FTP
I didn't take him to task for that. In fact I would agree. Point being, if that is such a requirement, and the web is so bad at it, why the heck are you trying to build a web app in the first place?

Either you learn how to make it work in the environment, or you change the environment.
I think they're like using lists to represent stuff. They're good for exploratory programming because they're extremely clean and flexible. When your focus switches to efficiency, you can switch to other representations.

It's hard to beat closures for elegance. You say: generate a link, and if the user clicks on it, run the following code. There's so much less to think about. In a closure, state is implicit: if you refer to a variable defined outside its scope, its value stays around. When you switch to putting state in urls, you have to explicitly encode and decode each bit of state you'll need. You also have to worry about bad things someone might do by sending requests with different arguments. It's sort of like the difference between dynamic memory allocation and explicit malloc, times 10.
I use winmobile and have regretted it pretty much ever since. The interface is just not intuitive as a phone interface. Not that most phone interfaces are, but winmobile 5 at least is about as bad as it gets.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Software development is all about compromise.
passing the turing test doesn't count if the subject is a moron.
I'm pretty sure you have to actually build/use the idea in order to claim prior art.
I doubt that making an idea public online will make it unpatentable, but regardless, an idea sharing and discussion community would be cool.

There is an idea sharing subreddit that's fairly popular:
http://www.reddit.com/r/idea/
As always, it's about asking the right questions. Asking a customer what they want, and you'll come to the conclusion that they don't know what they want.

Customers know what they want to do. In your Henry Ford example, they know that they want to get from point A to point B faster.

Customers don't know the right way of implementing it. That's why they hired you to implement it for them. They don't know that there are better alternatives to "a faster horse" out there, or better alternatives to an access-based exchange-and-IIS-powered monster out there.

In the end, you have to find the right questions to ask to find out what the customer wants -- this takes skill, and it takes digging, and extracting the essence of their responses. It's part of your job to find out when a customer is telling you what they want, and when they tell you what they think they want, but are really describing the way they think something should be implemented.

Figuring out the difference is the hard part.
Java is an excellent language for writing the kinds of programs that were traditionally written in C but where the performance of Java is adequate (and as the performance of well-written Java programs seems to be asymptotically approaching the performance of well-written C programs this set is larger all the time). In fact, treating Java as a garbage-collected C is often a very reasonable thing to do.

People who bitch about how 'Java is dead' are referring (whether they know it or not) to the practice of attempting to write change-prone business logic and other glue in it. This practice was always a bad idea, something that even Sun now seems willing to admit. If the Rails/Django discussion is at the center of someone's programming universe then it is likely that to him or her that this is the only kind of code in the world, and thus Java is of no consequence to those sorts of people.

However, if your project is ambitious enough you'll find that you will need both glue and infrastructure, in which case having a language like Java underneath your dynamic language (people who use JRuby for example, or like me, Rhino) will be a godsend when you need performance or the occasional static-typing guarantee.

If you'll allow me to make the obligatory pg/Viaweb reference then I'll point out that Viaweb contained non-trivial amounts of both C and Perl, in spite of the obvious advantages of using Common Lisp for the store editor proper.
In today's China when the government wants to make a statement, authorities round up a bunch of suspected criminals, put them on trial, and execute them. There is an appeal process. Later that day their appeals are rejected, they are taken to a trailer out back immediately, put on their knees and shot in the back of the head.
Unlocked Nokia 1650 (Unlocked) Triband GSM World Phone On Sale Buy
I think this article is somewhat misleading, because "make something people want" is said in the context of a product business, not a service business.

Of course your freelance business customers know what they want - otherwise they wouldn't pay you to build it. But product customers are an entirely different breed. They do have some idea what they want, so it's certainly still correct to go back to your customers to get feedback about your product, but it's misleading to equate these to service customers. With product customers, they won't tell you what they want until you spend much energy eliciting that feedback. It's not "simply a matter of translating business needs into technical jargon".
Thanks for telling me about this.
Is IBM Becoming A ISP? | My Philly Network
Would it be fair to say that the issue wasn't with closures and the web as much as it was with the specific implementation of closures in news.YC?

[edited for grammar / clarity]
it has been noticed and discussed on these sites that the submitters of the majority of these links are employees of the newpapers.
http://www.reddit.com/info/6pqph/comments/
In our in-house web framework (which I promise we will open-source at some point) you have access to both straightforward closures and a more sophisticated primitive which is one or more closures backed by a continuation. So I can say: let value = linkToContinuation(blah blah, ..., function(F) { }), and when one of the closures returns I wake up with 'value' populated and go about my business.

I find that both are extremely useful.
Brain Books
Well, I'd gladly switch to sftp, but dumb-ass OSX and Windows don't understand it out of the box and most users are unaware of more powerful (and easier to use) alternative OS, which leaves us stuck with this commercialized mediocrity.

Why wouldn't we also stop using Apple Finder, FAT, IE6, non-UTF encodings and bunch of other legacy crap? Ohh-ho-ho... so many topics to blog about...
Bit.ly: The TinyURL of the Future
Actually, string.Substring(0, n) is also the C# idiom. The orignial blogger is essentially creating a method alias Left(n) => Substring(0, n), which IMO is not a good use for extension methods.
Just a question: How is 37Signals' "we did it, so can you, it's simple" any different than pg's "we did it, so can you, it's simple" approach?

Is pg's approach tired as well? Actually curious because the only difference in my mind between the two in this respect is that they have slightly different definitions of "it".
Ning's backend data store is also in Java.
I notice this story features Jean-Baptiste Queru. I worked with him at Be. Even back in those days, he had a reputation as being "outspoken." I guess it's still true!
Printer dots raise privacy concerns
One thing that I like to do is use opaque representations of a data structure (like base64-encoded JSON) in URLs in situations where I've been compelled to optimize away one of my closures or continuations. The amount of code increases and it is certainly less elegant, but I only write a little more code by hand (the encoded data structure acts like the 'scope') and I keep the script kids from messing with the GET arguments.
Apple Sells One Million iPhone 3Gs in First Weekend
How old is the blogger? You've got to be 11 holding "Python in 21 days" to claim that multi-dimensional map is an "alternative" to RDBMS.

Besides, how reliable is that infrastructure? There is only one customer in the world who's running it - Google themselves. And judging by how often google maps falls apart and properly loads only about 80% of regions, and by gmail that loses my labels (and takes up to 20 seconds to send a message sometimes), it makes me scared to think that airline reservations, banking translations, stock exchange or social security system may be ran by one of these dudes when they grow up.

Before one starts drooling over words like "distributed", "transactional" and "multi-dimensional", he should ask himself: "How many terabytes of data am I going to store?" Sometimes this simple question makes one to rethink his definition of "everything" and flat text files may instantly gain an ability to to change "it".
Trackvia Raises Series A for Point-And-Click Databases
Dropbox (YC Summer 07) seeking designer 
Web Designer/Developer at Dropbox (San Francisco, CA):

Dropbox (http://getdropbox.com) is looking for a talented web designer and developer to join us on our mission to solve sync and sharing for the world.

Our product's been twittered about, featured on blogs like Techcrunch and Lifehacker, has hit the top of both Digg and Reddit and we're still in private beta!

We're a scrappy startup funded originally by YCombinator and staffed almost completely with MIT grads and dropouts. In three words, we're young ('the old one' is 25), small (we roll eight deep), and engineering-heavy (seven coders). And we're pretty convinced we're on the right track to bringing "it just works" simplicity and "how does it work?" technical solidness to the world of online file storage.

We're looking for one more, someone who can bring some strong design skills to the table to make Dropbox even better.

​

What we're offering:

- a fast-paced, self-directed environment that will challenge even the best (that's you!)
- the opportunity to work on a pre-public launch product and shape how the world perceives it
- awesome location in the heart of downtown San Francisco, near plenty of food, shopping, transportation, and other startups
- flexible hours, though not neccesarily short. We're trying to get to public launch, here...
- an actual salary, plus equity in the form of stock options
- health coverage, including dental
- a relocation bonus
- an iphone
- and, of course, the joy of hanging out with some of the coolest geeks this side of Boston

Who we're looking for:

- experienced web designer/developer; desktop client UI work in addition gives you bonus points
- has a pixel-perfect eye and won't stop until every detail is ironed out
- awesome design sense: able to keep things simple yet functional and appealing
- awesome user sense: able to make any process feel intuitive and easy, even when it's not
- expresses strong opinions about both design and code
- willing to fill in on all sorts of unassigned roles within our startup
- able to work out of our San Francisco office

Your responsibilities might include:

- graphic design: photoshopping up buttons, icons, and sundry other visual elements
- interface/experience design: page layouts and user flows, from mockup to implementation
- frontend dev: css, html, javascript (we use prototype/scriptaculous), python (we use pylons)
- copy writing: conversational text for the web interface, desktop client, emails, etc.

If you'd like to apply, shoot an email to jobs@getdropbox.com, detailing your experience and linking to examples of your previous work.
OS X does support sftp out of the box. Also, it can act as an sftp host if you enable Remote Login (ssh).
The actual reason I gave in the OP was easy distribution. This is huge.

I think also that my OP could have been stronger pointing out that the job is completely doable (in fact I've done it), with a sort of "here are the problems you will face" feel.
Demolition by (seemingly) melting the building into the ground
This isn't really new, it's been around/known for several years now. I haven't kept up with the yellow-dots, but this quote in the article piqued my interest:

"The Secret Service is the only U.S. body that has the ability to decode the information,"

Last time I read about this in depth, the yellow dots were basically a printed "braille", and decoding the information they represented was trivially simple.