skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely:

http://blog.binaryfinery.com/monotouch-qa

This is written for potential clients, rather than hackers, but I do go a bit deeper into why ObjectiveC sucks near the bottom.

Basically, use good tools. What hacker would create a website without analytics these days? Yet Apple wants us to settle for an editor that is dumb as bricks, when tools like Resharper or Eclipse that can not only analyze our code but refactor it automatically. XCode has 6 refactorings, and all of them will fail to do what you want, or just flat out refuse. Resharper has, I think, 120?

Resharper analyzes my code as I type. I develop iPhone apps on my PC in C# and even before I compile it on the Mac, I know its going to compile because Resharper has been analyzing it the whole time.

There are basically two problems with XCode and Objc and neither of them are solvable:

1) Writing tools for languages that have header files that can be included multiple times, and which require a class to be declared all over the place, is hard.

2) There's a shit load more developers for java, C, C++ and C# than there are for Objective-C. This may change, enough to incentivize groups (companies/oss) to write better tools, but they'll still be years behind groups like jetbrains or eclipse.

Now, C and C++ may be 20+ years old, but they've been in constant use and development that whole time, and by a majority of programmers. Yet even these languages have poor tools (the whole header issue). Objective-C is 20 years old, but with, what, a 15 year hiatus.

So the solution is to say "Why the fuck am I using a 20 year old language that lacks 20 years of tool development" and move on to something thats either a) newer or b) well established. I recommend MonoTouch.
You might find this helpful: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?H...
I thought it might have been fixed by now.

Anyway, you still need a schema with Cassandra.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

All you need is one bad experience to start requiring a signed contract to start working. I would recommend that this should be the policy of all independent developers: it protects both parties and a clearly written, comprehensive contract can help to prevent tension between you and your clients.

As far as your liability question, as I am not a lawyer I have no idea if the document you signed puts you in legal jeopardy.

However, if you are concerned, you should talk to an insurance agent -- when I signed up for my personal umbrella policy, my agent mentioned that she could set me up with business insurance to cover me for work-related negligence lawsuits (or something like that). Might be worth looking into.

Finally, I always have some warranty/liability/damages boilerplate in my contracts. Feel free to use mine in the future (https://gist.github.com/8d1d43bd543e7d6b97de), but I can't attest to its legal durability as, of course, I'm not a lawyer.

Edits: made disclaimer more explicit.
There will be a .sx TLD (think: competition for .xxx)
This is great stuff. We should start a former-YC-company consulting arm :)
This is great, I didn't know about this. It's important to note that you're looking at a cost of $100+ when you factor in Amazon's fees and shipping.
My main concern with WP7 is that it can run only managed code (see http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7s... for example).

This means that existing non-.NET code has to be rewritten from scratch to be ported to WP7, while on iPhone and Android it is possible to link native code.

If a developer wants to write the same application on iPhone or Android and WP7, basically no code can be shared. Is it worth it?
Old school virus.

1) They infect boot sectors of floppy and hard disk, or
2) They infect partition tables of hard disk or,
3) They infect .COM (most commonly Command.com) and .EXE

Old school virus infects the executable files such that when the executable files are run, the virus stays resident in memory and infects all other executable files and floppy disks, hence the reason Command.com is the most popular target.

The file size of the executable might increase when the virus infects it. To minimise this and avoid detection based on file size, the virus need to small enough to hide in the slack space, hence the reason most of them are written in assembly.

To overcome boot sector virus on a floppt is easy. I made a clean copy of newly formatted MS-DOS disk and then kept a copy of Boot Sector 0 in a file which I then use to override the Boot Sector 0 in the infected floppy using Norton Diskedit. Same applies to partition tables.

Executables that are infected are a pain to clean, but knowing that Command.com is most often targetted, I alway keep a clean copy of Command.com renamed as abc.def (to avoid detection by the virus) on my system. Create an entry in autoexec.bat to do a file compare between command.com and abc.def and alert me of changes.

These are the problems I had cleaning old school virus.

New school virus are easy to handle, they don't infect executables. They create entries in Windows startup to run themselves. Find the right entries and remove them and the virus won't be problem when you next boot up.

The biggest threat I see is when some of the old school virus writers return and start infecting/corrupting executable files such as Command.com via drive-by download.

Actually I working on a side project to combat new school virus. If anyone is interested, just drop me a mail via my account.
I was truly shocked the first time I saw an American eat a meal and I'm Australian so that's saying a lot.
I've had more fragmentation problems with iOS/iPhone than with Android
Sure it's silly. But it'd be sillier to either

(a) invent a whole new etiquette system from scratch

or

(b) descend into thunderdome-level anything-goes anarchy

at the dinner table just to prove we're not silly.

Before you know it, people would be cracking open eggs at the big end.
A 5-seconds flash ad overlay on every single slide? Seriously?
Agreed.

I could never find an IDE for java I liked on OS X. Eclipse is ugly, buggy and crashes every few hours. NetBeans is better, but not by much.
One thing I always wonder when I see stuff like this: is it because development is actually stalled, or is the project just finished? At some point, it can be useful for things to stop changing except to the extent that it is require to prevent bit rot.
So, square brackets are the new parenthesis for language arguments.
If it really is the case that you can only let an acquaintance read the book once - for a total of 14 days - it's not lending; it's a friggin' coupon.

It reminds me of StarCraft 2's Guest Passes that let players have StarCraft 2 for x amount of days or play it y amount of hours, whichever is exhausted first. Except that there is a finite number of people you can give the passes.

They should really reframe the feature so it doesn't become a parody of lending. Think of all the jokes that are bound to follow from this.

Lending is one of the biggest advantages of owning physical media. This obviously does not solve that problem. Come to think of it, it almost exacerbates it. I had sort of forgot about the problem, but now it's out there, and I know Amazon is likely to be a bad place to get books from if I want to hang on to a sliver of hope that lending will be possible.

In my mind, they should have put the "lending" feature on ice and see if anything better came along; it makes them look bad and their competitors better by comparison. iBooks already supports highlighting and highlight sync, which is one of my most important features, believe it or not.

*

Added: I was just reminded of the time we had to use Adobe Flash in college. The university couldn't care less about the students, so we were just told to get it. This, to the righteous paragon that is yours truly, meant getting the trial. Unfortunately for my like-minded friends and I, the trial period barely lasted the entire duration of the course, and woe unto the good student who installed it early to test it out and play around with it. At the very least, it was going to expire before the oral exams.

In Amazon's case, this means that textbooks will be rendered completely useless in terms of lending. It would have been an interesting market, but I'm sure the textbook mafia doesn't mind. Used books is supposedly its biggest threat according to another Hacker News thread.

Should Apple manage to twist the arm of the publishers, I wonder how the synced highlighting would work, seeing that your copy is removed after the lending duration, should they use the same model. They obviously can't prevent you from lending textbooks and allow other book categories, so the road is fraught with challenges. None of these have been solved very well by Amazon, though.
The "original" headline is the one on TC, which is 'Google As A Carrier. It’s Not A Question Of "If They Will", But Rather "When They’ll Try"', whereas on HN it has been changed to 'Google: Your new phone carrier?'

Was a bit too lengthy for my taste.
What a crock. Among other things, the article completely omits what is the biggest hurdle for Google, or any new company, for entering the phone market - infrastructure.

A newcomer has no hope of competing in major metropolitan markets such as New York, SF, Boston etc, without the multi-year process of scouting, negotiating, and installing cell towers throughout the cities. Even in private buildings where planning permission is not needed, many of the prime locations have been snapped up by Verizon, AT&T etc on multi-year exclusive or limited compete leases. "Newer" companies such as Virgin Mobile lease their backbone from Sprint etc for exactly this reason.
Zultan headbutt has to be my favorite picture of the decade. The last one about the Chilean miners moved me to tears, it was a very moving picture.
My wife read this over my shoulder and said it is extremely accurate for teach for America. They not only make you love your employer, but feel like a terrible person for quitting.
It's cool they're using Android now. I had one of the Archos AV300 range devices when they first came out (6 or 7 years ago?), which used their own proprietary OS which was fairly rubbish. I r/e'd most of the hardware, firmware format, encryption etc which was a heap of fun.

The founder of Archos emailed me to say he'd be suing me unless I stopped. Good times, good times :)

FWIW, unless they've drastically changed I thought Archos hardware was fairly cheap and ill thought out. Didn't seem anywhere near the quality of say Samsung or Apple.
Don't compare languages, compare frameworks, and don't ask us, do the tutorials.
No. http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ

If anything Clojure development has been moving too quickly for the past year :) It's clear from the mailing list and the IRC channel that people are still trying to wrap their heads around all the new ideas in 1.2.0, I know I am.

That's not even taking into account newcomers to the language that need to digest the 1.0-1.1 feature set.

Even more importantly 1.3.0 alphas have been appearing regularly and they have significant changes that people need to account for, try out in existing code bases and tools (new rules for dynamic binding, new rules for arithmetic, primitive math support, unchecked math support).
This is why green peas should always be accompanied by a good thick gravy, to act as a binding agent.
I'm kind of ashamed to admit it (at the end of 2010!), but I did some Objective-C/iOS apps for the first time this year, and I was pretty amazed by how good the Apple dev tools and the iOS simulator actually are.

The other thing which impressed me is kvm, in contrast to Xen.
Backbone.js! Hits the sweetspot for a lightweight clientside MVC framework.
Wouldn't have worked, in the same way that emailing Facebook and others, instead of releasing Firesheep wouldn't have worked (since they haven't fixed it even after Firesheep has been released, it's unlikely they would have paid much attention to a letter or email).

given the letter says that this is a known vulnerability
Ask HN: What online games do you play to break the tension?
Especially for a new language where it takes time to build a base - time that would be well spent bringing the toolset, libraries, and frameworks up to level.
Lessons on startups from Duke Fightmaster's attempt to replace Conan O'brien
New to me: Numpy/Scipy. If you're using Matlab you should know there's a Free and worthy Python based alternative
Erlang - playing with serious functional code for the first time in a long while has done wonders for my day-to-day Java job.
I asked a similar question[1] of Arc many moons ago and received an interesting answer from pg[2] that I think applies:

A lot of people seem to feel that a language
isn't real unless the designer is talking to
them every day. But that's not the only way
languages happen. Nor possibly the best way.[3]
I feel like you get better ideas if you think
in units of occasional essays rather than a
stream of tweets. It seems likely the same
will be true with language design.

Rich and Stuart Halloway have indeed been silent in the public forums recently, but I seriously doubt that they have stalled one iota.

[1]: http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and-lolita...

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470254

[3]: Hammock-driven development http://clojure.blip.tv/file/4457042/
There is still no global culture today. Also there are so many more poeple today that the number of people who don't do _ (ex: "speak English", "have access to the internet", "know how to read") has dramatically increased.
Behind the state of the art in language design. Compare C# to F#, or Java to Scala. And that's not even taking into account languages like Haskell, Io, and Clojure that introduce more radical new concepts. (Not that the concepts themselves are new, but they appear radical to Java and C# devs.)
To be fair, I think it's only in the last couple of years that there's been a sea-change in the quality of web aesthetics. Before that, hardly any websites looked 'good.' They were either decent, or ugly. Nowadays I see a lot of genuinely beautiful sites, but lots of people are still catching up.
When did you last try Eclipse on OS X?

I personally prefer Netbeans over Eclipse and Ubuntu or even Windows over Mac OS X, but Eclipse on Mac has become very usable since about two years ago. (I think there are still some problems with keyboard shortcuts, but I'll blame them mostly on OS X, not Eclipse.)
I don't understand where you got your summary.

From this part of the article: I admit that I’ve spent many more years developing in Visual Studio than Eclipse or Xcode...

Based on my own years in Visual Studio, I assumed that this meant Windows development of one flavor or another.
There's a lot left to do. Huge upcoming projects:

* Pods
* Clojure-in-Clojure compiler
* High performance higher order operations
on persistent data structures filled with primitives

Projects that have been talked about but no-one's helmed:

* Predicate dispatch
* Datalog (fast enough for the above)

Community projects in development:

* design for asynchronous code (think Microsoft's Rx Extension)
* network REPL
* unification library
* exception/conditions design

I could go on, but you get the idea.
Redis. Fucking awesome database. Does exactly what it's advertised to do, with no unexpected surprises. Great documentation. Finally we can go beyond the simplistic key-value map/reduce datastores, for when you don't need all the guarantees that traditional SQL forces you to have.

http://redis.io/

(I still use postgres and sqlite for other database needs, but I'm strongly considering moving a few of those over to redis if I have time.)
Redis. It has ton of different data structures that make it an interesting alternative to the relational DB and memcache.
I originally learned web development through LAMP.
I boosted my proficiency when I learned to program in MVC via codeigniter and kohanaphp.

Then I learned Ruby on Rails.

Kohana and codeigniter set up an MVC environment much like Ruby on rails does. The biggest difference for me is that if you look at kohana, you see how much effort it takes to get PHP to act in a way that Ruby does natively.

Kohana sets up PHP so you have access to all sorts of nifty methods by accessing the system Kohana classes and helpers.
In ruby, everything is an object.

So long story short, I find DSL's in PHP try very hard to emulate how Ruby already behaves. So I prefer Ruby frameworks like sinatra and Rails.
The article mentions 27 registration-capable companies but fails to provide any names or links. Any voices of experience for which service should I use for purchasi.ng a Nigerian domain?
LDAP, particularly 389 DS.
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks. :-)

Still think he's overstating his case though.
http://www.onlinegames.com/basketball/
http://y.net-games.co.il/game/action/696/?utm_source=ynet...
These aren't new to the world, but they are new to me this year, and a lot of them sort of hit some sort of "usable by those without active interest in the continuation of said tech".

1. Mongodb -- This year it really hit its stride and have been able to use it without worry for storing test results and experimental data. This is much nicer than the textfile logs -> sql -> processing datapath I was using previously.

2. flask: this little framwork is in my sweetspot. It does all the annoying crap of webby stuff, without all the "use our orm/routing model/way of thinking of http" so common in the space

3. mongrel2: I like it because it uses 0mq as the backend and sanely integrates some components in a way I feel could be better for many use cases than traditional stacks.

4. 0mq: This gets special mention, because it has been around for a while and I was actively using it, but 0mq 2 came out sometime this year, and is different enough from the first round, that it could be considered a separate technology. It isn't revolutionary in the MOM space, but it is a cool lightweight approach, and the core team has the type of dedication I like to see in OSS projects.

5. ABSOLUTELY NOT NEW: Haskell -- this year is the first year I've had time to sit down with Haskell for real, and start understanding the weird FP thing. This has made everything I do feel shiny and new, because even though I never actually use Haskell, I find myself writing very short hsskell programs in python and c and the other languages I use in my day job. When I started coding I remember thinking "This must be what a wizard feels like!", Haskell has brought back that feeling for me.
makerbot cupcake cnc.

It was an on again off again sort of project mostly off, but i finished it up a week or two ago. Now I can print plastic in any shape i can draw in art of illusion. It's satisfying fiddling at the computer for a while then printing and having a real 3d thing.
I've found that, for a great many foods, the continental method is more efficient. Assuming you still use the knife with the right hand (and if you're right handed, that should be what gives you the most control over the cutting surface), then it's a bit of a waste of time to constantly switch your fork into your right hand for plate-to-mouth delivery. With the continental style, you never have to change your grip (until you switch to eating the rice and other rollables).
Couldn't Google just lease the backbone too in order to enter the space?
What she wants is Tumblr. And, from a developer perspective, look how they are coping with downtime. (Horribly.)

I think Twitter already pissed off enough developers by publishing their own free Twitter client. A free, integrated photo service would not appease a lot of people. I can still remember when TapBots touted their upcoming, secret iPad app, which, as it turned out, was a paid Twitter app. Ouch.
That was interesting to me because today I also spent some time tweaking Emacs to make it work more like Textmate.
If you go through an attorney to do your LLC paperwork or have an accountant, they will most likely be willing to help you out in this department. Most attorneys or accountants will act as a registered agent for their clients.
I'm reminded of the poem:

I eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life.
It makes my peas taste funny,
but it keeps them on my knife.
What's Your Tech Resolution for 2011?
There are a lot of small businesses out there that don't need to accept any payment on the site or offer phone support, they just need an easy to update, modern looking site that gives a good impression of their business.

'Local' businesses will often have their websites checked out by customers who have heard of them through word of mouth or other Real Life means. They google the name of the business to understand the service provided and to help them decide whether or not they want to give them their money. They will then physically go down there. That's often what 'local' means. In this situation simply having a simple, modern-looking, easy to use site with fast load times will create a vastly better impression on prospective customers. Better than 1998's leftovers currently do for a lot of these businesses anyway. If a business doesn't have a web site at all, customers basically don't really believe it exists in this day and age.

Wrap this up in a CMS that automatically pushes new content to twitter and facebook, does good SEO and has a mobile skin and you're on to a winner. Well, it'll pay the bills anyway.

This is essentially low hanging fruit, and modern development and deployment tools make it all the easier to pick.
2010 was, for me, the year of JS-related technologies. (I'm actually rather disappointed I haven't had more time to check out Clojure and to use Haskell and Scala more--I was doing quite a lot of front-end web stuff.)

1. Socket.IO (http://socket.io/)

It lets you use websockets and automatically fall back to flash sockets, long polling, or several other real-time communication methods if websockets aren't supported by the client. There's a JS client and node-compatible server, as well as in-progress server implementations in a few other languages. Node is nice by itself, but it's with things like Socket.IO that it really shines.

2. Coffeescript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/)

Coffeescript is a nice-looking and nice-to-type syntax on top of JavaScript. It's made JS development a lot friendlier, and I now miss things about it every time I'm programming in Python and Ruby. I now use it whenever I'm doing any significant amount of coding in JS.

3. Node.js (http://nodejs.org/)

Node should, by this point, need no introduction. Server-side JS. Plays very nicely with websockets thanks to Socket.IO, making it very easy to write the server-side part of real-time webapps. I've also found it very useful when trying to quickly prototype simple non-webapp things that have to communicate over a network.

I haven't had a chance to check out Backbone.js (http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/) yet beyond a very quick look, but I expect to use it (or something like it) next time I'm developing something that uses a significant amount of client-side JS.

I'm also very excited by the continued development on (and Yehuda Katz's participation in) SproutCore (http://www.sproutcore.com/).
Amazing how little you  actually need to bring the system back to life...
I think the job he referred to was not his first job