skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is total shallow flaimbait.

As a C#/Ruby developer I embarked on the somewhat painful journey of learning Objective-C a few weeks ago. I got my first personal app written to control my Denon 3808 remote.

Admittedly it would have taken me a fraction of the time in either C# or Java ... square bracket central is something that is hard to get used to.

However, I find the whole experience of developing on iOS very well documented ... this is not COM development with MFC, it is much more approachable. It is a pleasure to have a language that has its roots in Smalltalk and having a fairly comprehensive yet-not-gigantic set of support classes is great. Objective C delegates are nice, the evented style it offers is nice. Auto release pools take away a lot of the pain of memory management. I am sure that after a few months of development in Objective C I would be quite productive. However I still prefer C#. Also, I prefer Ruby over C#.

When I first learned WPF a few years ago I could not believe the bloat of the base library, it took weeks to really understand how all the XAML stuff works, building custom controls was tricky business.

Today, Silverlight (which has its roots in WPF) is much more polished. As far as I can see if you use the toolkit and controls that ship with WP7 development is quite seamless. However, my understanding is that the iOS set of APIs are more comprehensive due to the huge first to market advantage they have.

There are lots of very subtle advantages to each of these platforms that only and expert in all 3 could point out. That is an article I would love to read.
I took one look at the sideburns and thought this can't possibly be real. It had to be a well done (and amusing) hoax.

I was about 60% sure someone got access to a preserved data center that's now a museum, raided the Mad Men wardrobe and took a bunch of pictures, but then I saw the personal page of the guy and it's an older version of him:

http://www.luckham.org/LHL_Index.html

The Internet has made me such a cynic. But still... someone should take my idea of faking old timey things for a different theme and set of pic ;)
It sounds like your system should be light years beyond the problems that are being discussed in the article and in this thread.
Sorry about that, I was incautious and didn't double-check.

In my (slight) defense, I've been up a very long time, but I messed that one up, and I apologize.

PeggerMegger sounds like a neat company name, though.
What we're missing are similar arricles that go into disadvantages and implications on deployment.

Eg I have found out that deploying Tokyo Tyrant in a Rails project requires you to write some sčripts to ensure that things run properly. Also the db size has to be set in configuration in advance.

MongoDB OTOH is not designed for a single server environment, has a very small max document size, easily gets corrupted if process is stopped etc.
For Sushi Chain, Conveyor Belts Carry Profit
Yes. I added it a bit late. Same for Dribbble.
Not sure about the logo, and the colors behind the logo. Liked the Dribble addition. Maybe the photos and designs make the site shine.
You can downvote, your you can try to argue how -- even though my comment was cursory -- I am incorrect. But I don't think you will, because you know I'm right.
Super Mario Bros 3 Level Design Lessons
A tour of Super Mario Bros. 3 and its various lessons in 2D level design.
On a side note, I remember growing up in the early 80ies, travelling by plane with my Dad who worked for IBM and he would sometimes bring these giant tape spools with him in his luggage. I guess flying across the country with them was faster than uploading the data across the Net ;)

Either that, or he was committing corporate espionage. In which case, I wasn't getting nearly enough presents, Dad!
Python/webpy
An Introduction to Signal Processing and FFT
Oh, yeah, of course. You ARE going to need it. You're different. Mod me down for my lack of understanding how awesome you are.
Summary: The author is a long-time Windows developer and extremely familiar with Visual Studio.

I don't understand where you got your summary. Looking at his CV - http://home.pacbell.net/eevans2/resume.html - it seems he has a range of experience.
In 2011 Q1 for the company, Server and Tools was $3.9 billion. For comparison, in the same quarter Windows was $4.7 billion. So it's a business segment largely created in the past 10 years that is 82% of the size of Windows (one of the most profitable business franchises in the history of mankind).

In the past 10 years the company has tripled revenues and is now the 3rd most profitable company in the Fortune 500 behind just Exxon and Chevron.

I hope my startup should be so fortunate as to make that kind of money. I'd gladly put up with all the ridicule Microsoft gets in the tech community, as I laugh all the way to the bank.
Wealth does not grant vision
Skype Now Illegal in China: This Week in Online Tyranny
China makes Skype illegal
Not really. Seeing as how I have a terminal that's newer than 1985, Emacs displays the same colors with -nw as it does with the windowed version.
No it doesn't? I'm not taking the side of the banks here, just trying to understand why the author took the approach he did. It's a shame that at times the HN community is one of single-mindedness where opposite views are met with immediate down-votes.
Ask HN: Registered Agent for an Emory College Dorm Startup?
I am an American citizen but my family currently lives in Israel. So I have no permanent address here in the US other than my university PO box.

I want to get an LLC but I need a registered agent. Not sure what to do. Any advice?
The Best Tech Writing of 2010
Thanks, I seriously had no idea.
'On the negative side, Spotify has caused me to hardly buy any music in the last year and is saving me a ton of money... which isn't going to the artists whose music I'd have bought. Could that model survive long-term?'

On the positive side, Spotify has caused me to not pirate any music in the last year and introduced me to lot of bands who I have went on to see live.
This is exactly what my wife struggled for this very moment. It was so hard for her to use Twitpic or Tweetdeck when all she wanted to post a photo from Twitter site. They should really just add their own photo sharing service or integrate seamlessly to other service from their current web site. Their iPhone app is quite good, wish they can bring that experience on their web site.
www.registeredagent.com

(I have no affiliation.. I just googled registered agent)
More and more menial jobs being eliminated by technology. Clearly our current social order is not sustainable.
It depends what you mean by "regret". Some reflection on the mistakes you made is necessary to correct your course and move in the right direction.
Bruce Schneier's got a pithy hard-to-argue with summary: "Cargo that is loaded on to passenger planes should be subjected to the same level of security as passenger luggage. Cargo that is loaded onto cargo planes should be treated no differently from cargo loaded into ships, trains, trucks, and the trunks of cars."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/cargo_security...
Thus far my alternative to Spotify in the US has been Grooveshark. Since I've never used Spotify I don't know if it's as good but it seems close (feature-parity-wise).
Link to original letter - oh boy this is a good read: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/ukca.pdf
> ... because it documented a well-known flaw in the chip-and-PIN system...

The author of the article at least believes that it is a well-known flaw so responsible disclosure isn't really applicable.
"Third, Omar’s thesis does not contain any new information on the No-PIN vulnerability. That was discovered by Steven Murdoch, Saar Drimer and me in 2009, disclosed responsibly to the industry, and published in February this year. It is not expected that an MPhil thesis contain novel scientific work."

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/ukca.pdf
>It has a radio mode, which while not praticularly smart, does let you do some discovery.

Oh right. That's not available in the free version or listed in the quick version comparison (though it is listed in the full comparison) which is why I'd not heard of it.

>Smart recommendations, however, are not the experience they're looking for. Spotify seem to be aiming for actual human recommendations. They're focusing much more on the social stuff, both in marketing and engineering hours, than they are on trying to tell you what music to listen to.

If I want that stuff, I don't get it using a computer; I talk to people.

I'm coming to the conclusion that here - as with damn near everything - I'm "Not The Target Market(TM)" :'(. However it does seem that their target market is vast, so good luck to them.
IMHO, you have an odd notion of what the purpose of an e-book is.

I don't buy or use ebooks because of how convenient it is to copy them and give the copies to other people. I use them because they're more convenient for me.
Strange that I've seen no-one actually side with the small businesses here.

It's true: small business are lagging behind in web presence, though it's mostly our fault.

When such business took a sneak-peak in the web, 10 years ago, there was actually no strong reason to be on the web. The people behind the business themselves didn't use the web as a resource-for-everything as we see it today. They considered (and rightly so) a web presence just as a business facade.

Moreover, that presence cost them a fortune, for mostly what today we consider as a flash nightmare.

I'm sure that now people realize what they would like to see in their website, because that's the way they expect websites to be: an actual, useful service for the people that come to their business.

That means more money to be spent however, and if you want a nice, decently done website, probably with some sort of customized service behind it, and considering eventual maintenance costs, it probably means spending the same amount you spent 10 years ago, plus a yearly figure which is certainly larger that what you're spending now.

Of course, it also means expanding your business on the web, for the first time, really. I think that many people realize that, and with time (read: money) they will move on. I don't buy the fact that people don't know what web means anymore.

However, I'm quite confident that whatever new website they're building now, it
will require a complete re-do in another 5 years time due to changing trends and technologies (which in customer's minds reads as "no real reason"). And that's exactly the reason I agree with them. You really need to have a strong business return in exchange for such a waste of time an money.
Effective chicken based camera stabilization
Awesome. Probabilistic descriptions of reality are highly useful for computer scientists these days.

If you are in college and you have not taken a probability or statistics course, I highly recommend you give it a shot. I use it all the time.
Amazing 3d Potographs
Take a look at these stereo photographs.
In the UK (on amazon.co.uk) the items are available but 75p each: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3D...
> We know Java, C#, and Objective C are all way behind (...)

Behind what?
Of course. But it was posted here, and most of the people here know how to do that.

My real message, which was obfuscated by the snark in my original post, was that it's worth checking out for the user experience alone -- in an age where we're all out building web apps, it's pretty cool to see a new thick desktop client that is just so good.
"eBooks are massively cheaper to distribute, yet we see a minimal discount. "

Because distribution is a small amount of the cost of production.
I'm not concerned with Justin Bieber or Oatmeal specifically. Personally I'm interested in, and disappointed by, the phenomenon of people with no musical talent being successful musicians, and humorists with no discernible wit or drawing skill being successful comic artists. The problem is not the people who are successful - the problem is with the audience. To each their own, but you don't really like something like Justin Bieber as a musical taste. People think you like it because they have too little experience with real music, and it is marketed very heavily.
HowStuffWorks "How Charles Darwin Worked"
I have mixed feelings about it. It does take some money to run the site, but there are some very ambitious folks there who want to make it more of a big-time NGO, so much of the fundraising is not really aimed at servers+code, but at some of the big-dream initiatives, like fixing education in Africa or something. There are also increasing numbers of "overhead" employees: full-time donor-relations and PR/marketing/outreach folks (not just one or two of them, but more like 10-15). They have picked up technical hiring, though; for a while, all the new hires were of the other sort.

I used to be really involved in Wikimedia meta-stuff from 2003-2006 or so, until more of that started happening. I personally favor a grassroots-community plus minimal legal infrastruture model, like Debian has with its "parent" foundation Software in the Public Interest, which basically pays the bills and otherwise mostly stays out of the way. Other people, especially those with previous experience in the "nonprofit sector", have in mind a much more professionalized nonprofit organization, along the lines of the Sierra Club or one of the big NGOs. I'm skeptical of those organizations, especially when it comes to community-driven initiatives, though I think they do sometimes do good work. But imagine a Debian where the Release Manager position was actually a full-time, professional position, hired by SPI. There are some pros to that (a full-time employee being paid to do the job can devote more time), but I think it runs a lot of risks as well.

Some of one's views on that might also depends on what you think the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation should be. I tend to favor a more limited scope, where they focus on shepherding the production of content (by volunteers), and then making it available for free under an open-content license. Other people favor a more comprehensive mission of being a content producer+publisher+distributor. There is much more that can be done with the content once it exists, in terms of repackaging, distributing it to various parts of the world, remixing it into useful subsets, producing new interfaces to it, etc.

But I'd rather see third parties do that: part of the whole point of making something open content is that anyone can do those things, not only the Wikimedia Foundation, and you don't even need its permission to do them (though friendly coordination is always good). I think the whole ecosystem would be healthier if there were more interesting things being done with the Wikipedia content by organizations and people other than the Wikimedia Foundation. Instead of doing those things itself, I'd rather it focused on figuring out why not that many third parties are doing interesting things with the content (one potential point of improvement: what kinds of database dumps Wikimedia provides, and how regularly it provides them).
I wish the article provided some insight into HOW he turned it into a 'booming brand.'
Frustrating problems with taking your own product pictures
I would have whole-heartedly agreed with you right up until a couple weeks ago. Since then I've taken note of the wave of activity happening and really dug in. There are a lot of issues still with Javascript and it's history, but there are some compelling things happening and I think we need to start paying attention and keep an open mind.

I suspect that next fashionable thing will be Go btw...
Could be - it would make sense for them as it's a good way to increase their exposure. I wonder if there might also be some correlation with whether or not Spotify is available in the artist's country.
I think when many people hear about ObjC's nil semantics, they use it as a pretext for dropping all their null checks. This is a mistake, and you're right, it will make debugging exceptionally difficult when nils start falling through five levels of functions and propagated through ivars.

The trick is to use null checks almost like you're writing C++, but drop them when they are unnecessary and inelegant. Convince yourself that a null check is unnecessary before removing it. This way you're reducing the chance of bugs and making them easier to pinpoint.

For example, you can do:

if ([someArray count])

rather than

if (someArray && [someArray count])

On the other hand, you may be asking for trouble if you do

[[someArray lastObject] dance];

without checking [someArray lastObject] for nil, since if someArray is empty, then nothing will dance and you won't know about it.

tl;dr: Messaging nil is not idiot-proof but it makes code read better.
Tibetan monks turn to USA to train minds in science
Calculus and Algebra have bad reviews.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0042XA2Y0/antoniocan...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0042XA344/antoniocan...
Do you have some implementable ideas?
"we did that on purpose" is engineering's exact reasoning behind every single bug we've discovered in our system's architecture. This is not an atypical response, this is a standard experience. I personally have discovered bugs that can shut down parts of our system, and these bugs are there "by design."
Greener than a Prius!
How do you peel of the cruft? I've been using it for a while, if I can get rid of the extraneous stuff I'd be even happier.
High I.P.O. Fees Weigh on U.S. Firms, Study Finds
Popularity among corporate developers fits the analysis that WM's main success will be in replacing Blackberries as work-issued phones. Corporations would surely like to have a phone OS that their sysadmins and programmers understand, so they can integrate it well with Exchange and write in-house apps easily.
Has Clojure development stalled?
> Many of them contain two binaries -- one for PPC and one for Intel

Actually, most of them nowadays would contain i386 and x86_64 code, but for most big software the major contribution to size is (as with games) assets rather than binaries.

For instance, Acorn has a dual-arch binary weighting 5.5MB, or about 15% of its total. A single-arch binary file would shave about 7% off the application. Not exactly significant.

For Address Book, the dual-arch binary is 319K (out of 20MB), Adium packs two architectures in a 3.9MB binary (about 5% of the total package size), …

> Stuff on OS X just takes a _lot_ more disk space. Arch Linux's package for emacs (http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/emacs/) is 89.7MB installed, whereas your post indicates that on OS X emacs consumes 133MB.

Not all of the difference comes from the binary by a long shot: the binary itself is 33MB and triple-architecture, even single-arch the package would be around 110MB. The Arch Linux package might not contain compiled elisp files for instance.
Worst Gear of 2010
>If I want that stuff, I don't get it using a computer; I talk to people.

The idea that Young(TM) people who post a lot of stuff on each others facebook profiles and the like don't talk to each other is a myth.

They post the link, then next time they see the person in real life they have a conversation about the link. Having both given the link their full attention independently. When you're talking to someone IRL there is unlikely to be a suitable computer to hand, especially if the link points to some music.
That's a myth, the US continues to be manufacture ~ 20% of the world's output (this has held since at least 1982). The real story is that manufacturing jobs have eroded though.
(Pineapple guava aka Feijoa, just starting to fruit on the tree outside my window, yum!)
I've always felt lucky for being left handed when it comes to utensil etiquette. I'd be almost incapable of using a fork in my right hand so I've always felt some sympathy for all those right handers who have to use their cutlery the wrong way round for etiquette reasons :).
>Green peas, alas, escape even the most practised forking, regardless of which method - balancing on the back or stab-them-to-death - one chooses.

Personally I choose not to eat peas at all unless furnished with a spoon :P.

(And what other colours of peas do you get where you come from?)
Absolutely, I see this all over. So many people want a web site, but they have absolutely no idea what to do. So many small businesses have websites, but they're very poor quality. Many have sites from about 2004 which are in serious need of updating. And, there's still a lot of businesses who think they don't need a website or it wouldn't be useful, and they'll be changing their minds within the next 5 years.
got a suggestion?
the idea is
left=past=hot
right=now=cool
hot stuff that becomes cool
I think you're parsing the sentence incorrectly. It is not "The 12th century is the only thing the 21st century will resemble." It's "There is nothing that the 21st century will resemble more than the 12th century." It doesn't entail "exactly the same."
WordPress warns of critical flaw
I imagine Groupon will account for a big chunk of this uptick. Looks like about 500 million of the recent discolosure will end up in 2011.
Here's an awesome theme: http://blog.nozav.org/post/2010/07/12/Updated-tangotango-ema...
Roughly 25% of tweets have links in them
But wait, if you are of the lower class, then you can use your fork however you want without any social repercussions? Excellent.
Well I think you hit the nail on the head, that the disclosure isn't responsible. I'm all for bringing the flaws in chip-and-pin to the public attention, however I find it distasteful that a leading university publishing the schematics of a device that can be used to commit fraud, receives so much applause for this community.

I get the impression that this has captured the public mood of "sticking it to the bankers", when really Cambridge have gone about this one the wrong way.
Though it may seem that way Grooveshark actually has a system compensating labels per time song is played. The unethical part is that its an opt-in system. In other words, they steal first and pay back later if asked nicely. On a plus, they do promote independent bands and offer compensation for such. So, I wouldn't go as far as saying they're like Limewire.
But the thing is, biological systems are incredibly complex and poorly understood. So in a biological system, you can't say "we can do X so it should be an easy step to do Y".

If one was reasoning about a computer in the way you have to reason about a biological system, there wouldn't be any reason to think that since you can create with a browser unlimited character field it, you can create a medical transcription system with an unlimited character field.
The app was an acquisition (and a good one) ... my guess is that none of the current services are good/polished enough to do what they want.
> If you're a programmer, you can read software patents.

Here I can bring in a different definition of "can". I could if I wanted browse different software patents, but that just puts me or my company in more legal trouble especially if sometime later I happen to develop something similar enough to a patent I've previously read that I get sued over it. It's not a good idea to just read patents blindly if you have any interest in building stuff that might get popular.

Though I suppose it's probably safe to read the Linked List patent, which is one of the clearest and silliest I've ever seen: http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szh4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...