skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So my takeaway is that he prefers using Visual Studio and C# to write mobile applications, followed by java/eclipse/emacs for the android and Xcode/ObjC bringing up the rear.

I think its a fair assessment, as someone who spends his daytime hours in VS2010 writing C#, the tools are first rate. I personally like objective C as a language(I think C# and .NET is growing at a rate that will tire of keeping up with before too long where objective C is lean and easy to learn), and feel that things could be better if XCode were better. That said, the iPhone simulator is at least 100 fold better than the WP7 emulator.
Quick aside: Look at how many hijackings occurred before 2001, especially in the 70s and 80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_aircraft_hijack...

Before 9/11, it was just another risk of flying. Now...
The Hyperspec's thoroughness is amazing. I wish more software went this far.
CUBRID a relational database optimized for Web Applications
What's so hard about objective-c? If you stay mostly-in-objc, it's not much different than ruby/python -- it's just method calls with named parameters. If you use any framework in ruby, you're probably already doing something similar since many method calls take in a hash where you pass in options.

Everything else after learning the syntax is just learning the api.
IMO the comparison between these platforms is only interesting when you take alternate languages into account. We know Java, C#, and Objective C are all way behind, so how do more advanced languages fare on these platforms?
In the first example, who cares that you are able to get 2-3 thousand users, eventually facebook comes out with it and launches to 500 million users simultaneously, you are unable to advance, and your 2-3k eventually go away.
I have developed for Android, and recently started developing WP7. So far, I prefer the development environment and tools for WP7. Silverlight + Blend studio allows for quick and beautiful apps, and XNA studio does much of the work necessary to get the frame updating and rendering working. So far I am impressed with WP7.
GOP Rep Bob Inglis: Chinese Will Eat Our Lunch on Clean Energy, Climate Change
Agreed, but it is useful/insightful to have the comments/discussion on hand.
I actually was just wishing c# had as terse of a null check syntax as ObjC. I love the fact that I can type

if(!object)

[[Do something]about it]

vs

if(object == null)

DoSomething.Aboutit

I know its a small thing, but my typenames are usually lengthy so in practice C# statements can get character heavy.
but it is for sharing information and i'd argue that information can come in the form of photos, video, documents, links etc..
I'm in for a meetup in Westport!
Hey at least your Swingline stapler is red. ... Uh... Where did your stapler go?
Deadtech: Kodachrome Goes the Way of the Great Auk
Amazing what a team of 14 can do!
Summary: The author is a long-time Windows developer and extremely familiar with Visual Studio. He likes the WP7 development environment best. He can deal with Eclipse for Android, but he finds iOS development with Xcode counterintuitive.

I'm not sure the author is really distinguishing between his personal tastes and the actual characteristics of each platform. But his personal tastes are shared by an enormous number of Windows developers, so based on his blog post, I imagine that WP7 will succeed with in-house corporate developers. Interesting.
Given that i have read this on just about every tech site, did it really go live, quietly?
I'm in Canada, but visiting the page through a paid US proxy I see them as available.
Light grey text on a white background scalds my eyes.
The beauty of data visualization
I don't think enough people bring up the advantage Expression Blend brings to the table. It's like being able to design your UI in Photoshop

(Say what you will about Microsoft the one thing you have to give them credit for is the amount of money they spend to create developer tools)

Things might change once Adobe gets Flash up to speed on Android but until then Blend is by far the most powerful UI environment available for any mobile device.
Yeah, I was impressed by Spotify's UX but not the value as a consumer.
I meant it doesn't complain when sending a message to a nil object though this is probably not what you intended and makes tracking down bugs harder... or maybe I just have C++ mindset.
If China "creates" its own skype and flogs it in the US, should the US block it? I know this would a very protectionist move but what is the way forward for foreign companies to be competitive in China when China's blocking of foreign services is accompanied by worries of "disrupting harmonious societies"?
Dining etiquette is goofy. But there are other places where it is useful. Like how to walk on a sidewalk or which goes first through a door. These are like traffic rules, and when followed it can improve everyone's efficiency.
Two more brilliant business plans: .om and .cm
This serves as a great reminder that great software is about a lot more than great code.

For the most part, this sounds like a large but basic CRUD app, which is basically a solved problem from a technical point of view. Most of the key decisions in the software development process are not necessarily made by programmers.
Now America gets to know how it feels to us Europeans when something cool comes out in the US that we can't use or watch ;-)

Seriously, though, Spotify is great and I've been a subscriber for a while. Its coverage isn't 100% but is close enough for anything within a wide gamut of "popular." 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?
Generally, you write an acceptance test, watch it fail, drop down into the unit tests that get your code going, pull back up into your acceptance test, move on to the next part...

Here, I wrote something about this: http://timeless.judofyr.net/bdd-with-rspec-and-steak

Most of these are not 'unit' tests in the traditional sense of the word. Unit tests are useful, but only as part of a larger testing strategy.
Don't you lose the formatting then? That's not really an optimal solution.
I guess you mean one successful attack? If the Detroit plane or Times Square car attacks had gone as planned, people would still be shitting bricks.
And the author's sideburns were pretty impressive as well. ;)
There is an OSX port of gedit that is similar in UI to TM and has lots of nice features.
and no congressman can be anti-TSA, because that's tantamount to being anti-security.

Ron Paul has been pretty vocal in his dislike for the TSA.
The true size of Africa
But his personal tastes are shared by an enormous number of Windows developers, so based on his blog post, I imagine that WP7 will succeed with in-house corporate developers. Interesting.

I'm not sure that's true. To answer that question you'd have to compare WP7 development to MonoTouch. There's no doubt the WP7 development system is more refined but MonoTouch allows you to use C# and a .net like environment while at the same time letting your staff keep the iPhones they already love.
Spotify is easy to use in the us, both free and paid accounts.

Free - use tor. You can specify specific exit nodes. Use this to both sign up, and login once every two weeks. Spotify allows for two weeks of "travel" before having to sign in from an ip based in your accounts home country. Just login for one second once every two weeks on tor, and enjoy free desktop streaming.
Paid - use a pay pal account based in a country that Spotify is allowed in, with a bank card. Since you will not be shipping anything, you can specify a billing address from some location in the country your signing up in.

I pay for an account, I love streaming in my car.
Hey Niels-
I'm a military doc too so I feel your pain on AHLTA. Fortunately, I only have to go to AHLTA to read notes, since in pathology we use a separate system for entering reports.

Pathology really needs a web-based system also. Our existing Lab IS's are all enterprise monstrosities.
you're so right. now that we have american idol nothing like that can ever happen again.
Except, um, you can use it in the States. Spin up a cheap VPS in one of their licensed countries, http://www.lowendbox.com/tag/uk/ share it with some friends, ssh -D, point Spotify at your proxy... not hard.
Jeez, think they have enough pictures of that dude in the article?
I always wondered the same. Especially when grooveshark (an amazing app by the way) essentially offers the same thing. Free streaming, huge library, etc. With the exception of the excellent free word of mouth advertising spotify has been getting.
Midwest Predicted To Be Fastest Growing Venture Market In 2011
High School Students Program Robots with Python
The article isn't written for people that know how to do that.
That's why, in many countries in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines), you eat your meal with a spoon and a fork; the spoon goes in the right hand and the fork goes in the left. You push food onto the spoon and shove it into your mouth. Try it sometime. It's the most efficient way to eat rice. I find it even more efficient than the East Asian way of picking up the bowl and using the chopsticks to move the rice into your mouth.

If you've ever eaten at a nice sit-down Thai restaurant, that's why they'll give you a spoon and a fork. I've had this confirmed by friends whose families were from Malaysia and Burma. If you're looking for the most efficient way to eat rice, this is it.
Looks like you fixed this. Thanks!
Does it have discovery features, or do you need to know what to listen to? Assuming you have no friends to get suggestions from.
O Canada World’s Most Web Connected Land
Surprised Tumblr didn't make this list after the incident in early December where they had more than 12 hours of downtime.
That's kind of a slippery slope though. Information is data and data is anything!
Eventually a bully may learn. A true sociopath will continue no matter how many times punished.
Art & Letters Daily still is a great source for interesting articles on art, literature, science.

http://aldaily.com
Clearing up the confusion around JavaScript references (with cats)
Here's an informative presentation about how HBase has (massively) sped up random access, as of version 0.20: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7493304/HBase-Goes-Realtime

I did benchmarks on a previous version, and the results were pretty miserable (600ms/lookup on a table with several million columns). It certainly sounds like they've improved.
I was working for a company that has every second Friday off, which was pretty good. However the work wasn't. So I started looking around, but was not finding any work I was interested in doing. Eventually an old client called (I'm a contract software dev) and asked if I'd be interested in coming back. I wasn't really excited about going back there, but I knew it would be better than where I currently was. So I figured I'd just throw out a question:

"Can I work 3 days a week?"

They accepted a week later, and I spent the entire summer working 3 days at this company, while spending more time with my wife and newborn son.

Sometime in September/October, I received another email from another old client who was desperate for developers. I told him that I could only spare 2 days a week, not expecting him to accept this. Only he did. Shit, now I have to work 5 days again! But this job is only a 15min commute, and I can work from home 1 of these days.

I guess the point of this story is that sometimes you will get what you ask for, especially if you have a good reputation. All you have to do is... ask for it.
I personally think "double taxation" does not exist.

Taxes/fees/whatever are taken out when money changes hands. Whether it moves from one individual to another, or between an individual and a company, or between two companies, etc. It doesn't matter. It's just "single" taxation. But there might be a series of them with N hops.

Consider this: consumer A pays out money to buy some good from company B. Out of that money, some is siphoned off in the form of sales taxes. The company gets the balance of that. Company pays some portion of their earnings in taxes. Company also pays some portion of their revenue to their employees. Out of the money paid by the company to their employee, some is taken out as tax. Employee gets the money. Out of that money, he uses some of it to buy some product. Out of that total purchase price he pays, some is taken out in sales taxes. And so on, and so on. Repeat with other sorts of transactions and money flows. Thus, there is no "double taxation" just taxation. If you argue there is double taxation, then, in reality, there is also triple taxation and quadruple taxation and infinity taxation.

Double taxation is code for "I just don't like that particular tax and want it reduced or eliminated". It is not a factually valid criticism in and of itself, by my reasoning.
Yes, most people don't even know that Expression Blend exists. The first time I used it to customize my UI in Silverlight, I was blown away how quick and painless it was. To simply change the look of a button in Android, I had to spend far too long creating .9png files or w/e they are called.
Ahh great call totally forgot about the DDoS attacks those 4-channers put on tumblr.

I guess the lesson learned from the tumblr downtime is don't piss off 4Chan
He's not "The Doctor" - he's "a doctor". The Doctor would have fixed the computer with his sonic screwdriver.
I personally like their innovative use of BOLD.
>These days it is starting to become more likely for obscure, independently-distributed music to be there than not to be there.

YMMV. I use Spotify a fair bit, despite having a fairly crappy UI (not that it's too bad, just annoying in places), but there's no way in hell I'd pay for it unless at least one of the following things were true:

1) The premium version cost just £5 a month - The £10 it actually costs would cover a new album each month, which is a permanent asset worth more to me than being able to listen to their selection for a limited period. There is a £5 a month subscription, but it doesn't have mobile or offline mode, so it's near useless. Ironically, I might not feel that way if the premium option simply didn't exist, but putting them side-by-side looks like naked profiteering.

2) I could search for something and expect at least an 85% chance of finding it. The current 50%-ish is nowhere near good enough to pay that much for. I listen to a fair bit of European techno/rock/metal/industrial and those seem to be particularly weak areas. If you can have a conversation with a random person in a pub about a band, there's a good chance they have it I guess, but even then there are a lot of surprising gaps. For a random example, my last search was for something (anything) by Arcade Fire, but no joy.

As you say, it is technically very well designed - very responsive, and even without offline mode it buffers well enough that the frequent dropouts in my crappy ADSL connection haven't caused any problems I can recall. I just feel that it's overpriced for such a limited selection.
TRADER & PASSION: "Una tazza col manico".. in AUTOSTRADA.
I would remove the word "Perceived" all together (I can attest to it now and Ive only been here a month!). The other thing you missed with the value of a programmer in a legacy enterprise IT dept - ability to handle beauracracy and politics (i suppose thats one part of getting things done).
Makes me feel good about picking Archos. I hope they do very well with their line of Android Tablets.

I'm looking forward to my Archos 70 that's on its way right now.
Interesting point.

But if that's true, then businesses almost never act in a manner we would call sociopathic. And my earlier comment (suitably modified) still stands.
I think because kids nowadays never learned C/C++ like us old timers. Manual memory management trips them up. Obj-C's "weird" object oriented syntax becomes a non-issue in 2 hrs of coding, so it has to be the manual memory management and API design that are the issue.

UIKit and Cocoa are, admittedly, pretty unorthodox compared to pretty much a lot of UI frameworks out there. That and Interface Builder being a separate app were the biggest obstacles for me learning iOS programming.
From these ref's, it's clear to see that the Federal tax code hardly put a damper on the average income of the top 1%, 5% and 10% - their average income rose (the "Top 1%" doubled!) from 1977 to 1995. Every household _not_ in the "Highest 20%" quintile, on the other hand, pretty much held steady (or decreased slightly).

Perhaps the reason that "fully half the taxpayers contribute almost nothing in individual income taxes" is that their incomes are so low. In any case, the percentage of "income tax burden" borne by the "Top" (1%/5%/10%) will of course rise as their incomes rise at a rate which outpaces everybody's below.
No it doesn't.

(Or if it does, then the UI needs fixing to make it discoverable)
It increases over time because as the userbase grows, there is karma inflation. It was just over 500 when I passed it a week or two ago.
http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://thenextweb.com/twitte...
I agree that dividends are a healthier and saner way to earn money from investments. The problem is that as a little guy I have no control over whether some company makes a dividend distribution, or even whether they make a profit or not. I can control whether I buy that stock in the first place, and control whether and when I sell that stock. Therefore to make money in this latter scenario, the stock price must change (usually up, but if you're shorting, down can work too) in order for me to make a profit. Thus it's in my best interests for a stock's price to fluctuate, regardless of whether that fluctuation has any relationship to the fundamental health or profitability of the company. It's weird. It's dumb. But that's the way it is.

And that's just the incentive for the little guy who's an outside investor. Imagine now you're a big guy with a lot of financial clout, and inside connections, especially as far inside as being on the board or one of the executives. You not only are incented to cause distortions to the stock price, regardless of merit, but you also have greater power over the "upstream" numbers (how to define profit, when to book profits/costs, etc.) and over the media presence and general public's perception of the company. Greater potential upside plus greater power to manipulate, is a recipe for bad things.
HN only goes back to 10/28?
grooveshark stream their music unlicensed (except for a small amount they have licensed, but it's a relatively small amount) and make money from it. Grooveshark is wrong and I'd personally love to see them shut down. As much as the music industry is fucked up, unless you have permission to profit from someones content you shouldn't but grooveshark do and abuse the DMCA safe harbors.

Sure if grooveshark wasn't for profit then maybe it'd be justifiable, but they profit off a product they don't own or have the permission to, it's lame and entirely immoral. It's limewire but with the content stored in one place... they must have some damn good lawyers.
Simple Physics - In reality my feather blew up into a tree
It has the "similar artists" metadata from http://allmusic.com embedded into the UI. They licensed it, along with the artist biographies.

This data is expert-compiled and fairly comprehensive, but there is no statistically compiled data a-la last.fm. I imagine they are working on this functionality.
"Mac iOS dev tools are beautiful and extremely slick"

And yet have features found in SlickEdit circa 1992.

Twenty fucking years later I'd expect my IDE to a bit smarter. It might look beautiful (to you) but its brain dead.
Humility is a good idea. Look what happened to gaming: in a world where gamers voted with their wallets against I-pay-you-money-you-give-me-ownership-of-game (they were fine with only the second part), publishers shifted investment from PC games to either consoles with fairly effective DRM or games-as-a-service where a) ownership of the game is a quaint notion only remembered by greybeards and b) spending on games goes through the roof due to "free to play" (a truly Orwellian coinage, that one).
It's designed as a mechanism to spot people of lower class, and some would argue it still works. Go dining with a seriously monied American and see what they do.
It's MG blowing smoke from his arse as usual.
2010 was a good web year
The same thing works in the Apple iBooks store ("CK-12 Foundation").
>current 50%-ish

I think the rave/electronica scene must be hotter than average on uploading their stuff to aggregators. It is starting to become standard for the artist-owned labels to be on there. I even see a good number of 'bedroom' producers without any record deal turning up now.
It has a radio mode, which while not praticularly smart, does let you do some discovery.

You can also use the last.fm integration to get recommendations off last.fm then listen to them on spotify I guess.

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.
Looking at the traffic in Alexa, it looks like stackoverflow is doing just fine. The UI is very similar on the two sites, except efreedom is much more slimmed down it seems. Hopefully this site is getting people answers better than if it didn't exist. I checked and stackoverflow does a a cc-wiki data dump in xml so I doubt this site is html scraping, it's probably using the xml data.
In fact they can, but it has never happened. The relevant text is here: http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Article5. The basic idea is that 2/3 of the state legislatures must call a Constitutional Convention, where the Amendment(s) will be proposed and sent to the states for ratification.
I wasn't sure who this man was, so some context to help others like me:

Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the
University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New
Zealand and founding editor of Arts & Letters
Daily, died of cancer on Tuesday.
"Who's to say what blatant nonsense is though a few hundred years ago it was blatantly obvious the world was flat."

It was blatantly obvious to any coastal civilization whose citizens had watched boats sail over the horizon that the world was round. The ancient Greeks knew it, as I'm sure did others.

"I don't see how it is harmful for someone to go see this guy even though it is complete nonsense."

The guy claims to treat major diseases like cancer. It's harmful for someone to go see this guy because he's a fraud, he takes their money, is incapable of offering actual help, and the patient dies.