skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the problem? Most of the difference between success and failure is marketing. This is a great way to take advantage of the momentum of his previous application.
Can you do the memcache calls in parallel with get_multi?

Unless you're doing something like retrieving 1MB objects, it should take no more than 10ms per memcache call even if they are done in serial.
If I hear one more entrepreneur complain I’m going to puke
I came here to say just this.

But I had something to add. A higher credit value will make people crush only (mostly?) on real crushes. Oh but this applies only to poor people :D.
Happened to me on Techcrunch for a comment about MG Siegler and his unnecessary and irrelevant attack on some random single-parent mom and AT&T employee on twitter.
Ok, as an iPhone + iPad app developer (I created Trainyard), and as a Flash developer who has created a PlayBook app, and as a fellow Canadian, I feel I should weigh in on this.

Despite the whiny tone and bizarre "Bueller?" moments, there were a bunch of valid points made. Yes, the amount of forms you have to fill out is ridiculous. Yes, the fact that the simulator .iso has an installer is crazy. With those things, I absolutely agree with you. They're just silly... but they're also not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

It took me less than 2 hours from when I decided I wanted to make a Playbook app to when I had something running in the simulator. You're correct that the iOS SDK is easier to get started with, and it's only a single download... but it's also 3.5 gigs, every single time. I'll take three 100mb downloads over a 3.5 gig download any day.

Ok, as for the cost of things... You only need to pay for VMWare if you're on a Mac, on a PC it's free. I've talked to some guys at RIM about this, and they said they were trying to work out a deal with VMWare to make it free for Mac users as well.

There's no more $200 fee. I don't know why anyone still brings it up. The 10 app limit is a GOOD THING, and keep in mind that you're also getting a 100% free Playbook if you make an app right now, surely that's gotta be worth something.

As for the notary thing, I'm guessing that's because of the free Playbook offer. They don't want to give away 10 Playbooks to the same guy. If you're a company, Apple's process is even more painful. You actually have to snail-mail all your forms in and wait until they get them before you can publish anything.

All the other complaints were just petty. Who cares about the IP address and the password? That stuff takes 2 minutes to figure out.

There are a lots of positives about developing for Playbook that you didn't mention. For example, an interesting (and not well-known fact) is that application updates do not require approval on App World. That's a huge plus over iOS in my book.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on it.

TLDR: You definitely had some good points, but the rest of it got blown WAY out of proportion.
This doesn't make much sense to be honest. Just because two companies don't see eye to eye on an executive level and are competing on some products doesn't mean they will take a flamewar over languages and make business decisions based on that. That's nonsense.

You might be interested to know that Apple has released products built on top of python, such as the calendar server (which is open source, and built on top of Twisted). How would that possibly fit into your theory? Or what of the python objective c bridge? Both python and ruby come preinstalled on OS X, I don't think Apple as a company has a preference for one or the other.
You can now only un-crush two people per day. I think this should create enough lag time to prevent this strategy from working.
Sharing code between the browser and Node.js.
This is an old topic. Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, both foundational to the social sciences, each sought to bring empiricism and the scientific method to the study of social institutions. I would argue that they were largely successful and it is a shift in our modern understanding of science that questions whether Social Science is "real" science.

Specifically, I think the power of mathematics as a tool for objective description of natural phenomena has given us the impression that any field without underpinning equations is soft, subjective, and inherently unscientific. Biology is Chemistry is Physics is Math, but the study of social institutions resists reduction to "hard" sciences, to the objectivity of equations. I have even seen people say that Chemistry is not science!

In this view, Sociology seems inherently less legitimate than Biology. And I think that is dangerous. If this is how we are to understand science, then we are doomed to belittle and ignore the possibilities for better understanding society and intelligent behavior.
I know who he is. But whether he's famous is immaterial. You all are assuming that just because you can't imagine jobs that would require you to maintain a database of 10k contacts that there are none.
As a counter-point:

Soon game devs can develop their games for idealized hardware environments which is much easier than developing for the myriad of centralized mainframes. If a dev needs features that a mainframe couldn't provide, they can build the hardware that's needed.

The high cost of servers and bandwidth that Onlive are basing their businesses on is about to be obsoleted and replaced with dedicated rendering hardware for the consumer.

From here, it's only a small step to conceiving a world in which it is incredibly easy to build graphically intensive games, too. If the whole simulation lives on the one piece of hardware and nowhere else, then you don't need any network code or fancy servers or massive bandwidth.

I'm excited for the future console wars!
You know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I always viewed a true science as something held the scientific method at its core. So the big test for me is whether computer scientists apply the scientific method. And to be honest, I can't think of many examples where people rigorously chase a problem using the scientific method.

From Wikipedia, in case anyone's unfamiliar:

1. Define the question

2. Gather information and resources (observe)

3. Form hypothesis

4. Perform experiment and collect data

5. Analyze data

6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis

7. Publish results

8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

How many people do this other than maybe to try and solve P=NP?

edit: formatting
Yep, marketing and nuances.

But I'm a little surprised that you pivoted from an original and successful idea to an unoriginal and derivative idea.

Your priorities are not aligned with the developer's, me feels. You are worried about being "original" and not derivative--both only tangently related to financial success, which is what the creator seems to be after(and good for him!).
I'm just going to point out a single flaw in this argument.

2) Apple has _a_ dev on the MacRuby project.

One dev does not a complete project make. Perhaps in time, if they put more support behind MacRuby, but I'll believe it when I see it. So far, people are just chasing rumours.
Dude. The documentation for configuring your provisioning profiles and other faffing around was 60 pages long. If you messed up any single step in the 60 page long process you had to go back to the start.

Also, yes, everything was love and kittens for North American devs, but the process was (and still is) a major PITA for devs outside of NA.
> Dependency injection means giving an object its instance variables. Really. That's it.

I think the more standard term at the heart of this is "late binding". Really, it is about pulling in an object (data+code) at runtime.
It's funny that everyone on this thread is like "No one needs more then 10,000 contacts! Spammer!" when Highrise's medium-sized acccount has 20k. Their big account has 30k. Only their intro plan has less than 10k.

http://highrisehq.com/signup
What about charging people to find out who has a crush on them?

The idea is, if someone really cares, the other party should be ok with them paying to find out.

Give the user 3 free guesses as to who may have a crush on them. Then ask them to buy credits for additional guesses ;)

When I tried this, we had users taking hundreds of guesses. We were trying in Thailand so implementing the whole payment/credits system was too much.
QR Codes - Most Interesting "Strangest" Placing
Where is the strangest if not "interesting" place you've seen a QR code?
Link in article didn't work for me, this one does:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/random-defen...
Because you my friend are an annoying prick. I bet $100 that you are also the guy who always finds problems in restaurants and hotels and thinks something is wrong there. This type of attitude is typical of annoying guys like yourself.

You do not have 10,00 friends. In fact, you probably do not even have 10 friends. Just shut the fuck up.
These two are doing affiliate marketing but there are many other ways.
Hi. It's time for you to read SICP. The book and lectures are free online:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

If you can learn SICP then you'll be in the top 5% of programmers in terms of understanding theory, and you'll be in a position to understand if you like CS or not. If you don't like it, then consider changing careers or setting more limited goals (like you could program not-that-well while caring more about the rest of your life, that's what most people do).

Do not go back to school, at least until after you read SICP. SICP is the single best thing that schools have to offer anyway.

I love Ruby and use it a lot, but if you want to understand programming then Ruby isn't what you're looking for right now, and definitely not rails (building a website isn't all that hard, kinda like java enterprise work). Ruby will annoy you less than java, but it won't make you feel like you really understand the concepts behind what you're doing.
Argh, I didn't really like to see the "Here's my new app" at 4/5 of the article. I understand that opportunist people like to leverage situations.. but I don't like the fact that this article has been ranked first on hacker news. I mean, the first reason I go on HN is because of the "Smart Filter". More precisely, I have trust in HN users that only good articles are shown. (Like I try to only upvote good articles thinking that other HN will like them). I'm disappointed.
As someone who, at one point, tried to write for Palm OS: wow, that must be awful.
Why not use http://jruby.org?
I'm all jruby all the time these days, and I couldn't be happier.
It would be unavoidable. The controller writes to areas that haven't been written first, and not 'deleted' areas.

"90%" capacity will be reached no matter how diligently the user prunes their files.
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Marcus du Sautoy's "Brief History of Mathematics" (10 MP3 episodes)
How do you feel about YARV? I mean, Matz has always been honest that he's not a compiler guy...

That said, I think rbx is the way forward too.
That CPython faces. Neither Jython nor IronPython have GILs, and it should be much easier to remove PyPy's.
27 Circular Social Media Icons in 3 Sizes
Mesh generation in Ruby (targeted to Computational Fluid Dynamics)
From one presumably in the know, that would lend (to a suspicious individual like myself) credence to the theory that.. a future version of the OS will definitely be 64-bit by default.
2 times smaller? I wish I had the math chops to compute/debate that, but it seems like an even more substantial gain than dropping PPC code in SnowLeo did(plus binary/compression optimizations).

A bright future, thanks for all your dedication and hard work!
I agree whole-heatedly with your comment on the "gatekeeper" mentality of the medical industry. Armed with a current copy of "The Merck Manual," some internet research, and local feed store antibiotics, I've successfully self-treated for a few infections.

I can only imagine that retired nurses, field medics, and EMTs (you know, people with real training in this stuff) all being able to legally administer rudimentary healthcare to their local communities would provide much-needed care for a great many cases, thereby increasing the quality of life for many more people.
Ask HN: Shouldn't LinkedIn have a "Worked together" option to add a contact?
We all work together on many projects where our colleagues/seniors aren't from the same company. This is a very common scenario and I couldn't find an appropriate option in LinkedIn while adding those as contacts. I believe, "Worked together" option with a provision to mention the project name would be a great addition.
BugHerd Progress Report
We had an incredibly positive response to BugHerd from the HN community (totally hadn't anticipated hitting the front page). So seriously, thank you guys for that, your feedback has been invaluable in helping us flesh out prioritise our roadmap.

So I thought you guys deserved an update on what we've been doing since, where we're at and what we have planned.

We have made significant changes to a new user's first experience with BugHerd. We found that because BugHerd works very differently to a conventional bug tracker, a lot of folks ended up not knowing what to do.

We are using the same process when users setup a new project as well and have seen a sharp increase in usage as a result.

We also recently combined our home, about and signup pages into one to reduce the steps required for people to get up and running. We're running some multi-variate testing at the moment to gauge what works best in terms of explaining what BugHerd does.

We're also making improvements to how issues are displayed in the embedded bug list and being able to filter and sort them. Alan is simultaneously working on tweaks to the admin to make things a little bit easier on people that are in a project management role.

We're happy to answer any questions you guys might have, rationale, process, workflow, setup, whatever you guys wanna know about, so fire away :)

To check out the landing page, go here: http://bugherd.com
It's the exact same thing as http://adore.ly, a Facebook app that's been out since the beginning of January.
The controller writes to areas that haven't been written first, and not 'deleted' areas.

[citation needed]
Christ, will these websites please STOP doing this crazy hash bang shit? Its absolutely horrible from a user's perspective. You break the the URL. I don't care if Google said they can crawl it or not, they aren't your primary responsibility. Ever since the Gawker sites switched over to that awful new site design, it has not only been difficult to navigate (UI design problem, not hash bang), but simple things like the back button only work about 50% of the time.

I'll put an offer out to the community. If you guys can provide me with a list of urls for sites that use the hash-bang, and that have normal url equivalents, I'll write an extension, site, or javascript bookmarklet that auto-corrects these.
C extensions are a very big reason why not; the pain of demand-starting JVMs is another minor reason.
Except maybe the whole retina display support?
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-i...

Alternatively maybe Apple's ability to hide new features is getting bettr?
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that Safari now has iOS style pinch-to-zoom instead of awkwardly resizing the page elements / increasing font size.
If you're serious, you could purchase bribe.me and be reasonably assured of some media coverage when you launch. I think virtual secretarial services would be a better business model.
Aaah, but it's in "the cloud," and the user of the software can't change even the binaries.
This is interesting, and likely the way most of Google's open source projects will go.

Google's statement to the K9 developers was pretty clear: Android Mail is open source in that you can fix bugs for us, but actual features or design changes must be left to in-house developers.
Also apologies for the double post, was intended to be a text post, but posted as a link accidentally :(
It's okay, I wouldn't say it's exactly a direct replacement of Google's own supported Chrome Browser.
I suppose it depends on what you're using ruby for. I use it for long running processes like rails apps so the jvm startup time really doesn't matter. And jruby has support for c extensions that use ffi.
deeper search functions

The "booru" style of tag-based image sites have been incredibly successful in this regard. Most of them primarily focus on anime-style content, but I haven't seen anyone else get even close to the level of effective user-driven tagging that they have.

Take Danbooru, the most successful such site, for example. Do you want an image of a long-haired character from the Touhou game series wearing a ribbon while involved in a hug? You can do that (search "long_hair touhou ribbon hug") and get over 200 results, all relevant. A large part of this is due to effective moderation in order to keep tags consistent.

Now here's the most intriguing part: how does Danbooru make money? They charge for a premium account -- which allows you to search with more than 2 keywords at once. Yes, that's right -- they monetize based on little more than the power of their tagging system. This shows just how important tag-intersection search can be -- and doubly so for porn.
"1970s: Want to use the computer? Take intro CS.

2000s: Intro CS course relevant only to future cubicle-dwellers"

This is a serious problem. When I speak to students from programs other than Computer Science, even from other scientific disciplines, they question why they should ever have to take a Computer Science class. But if you tell a Chemistry major he needs a Physics course, or tell a Biology major that he needs a Chemistry course, it is likely to be accepted as perfectly reasonable. To many, CS == Computer Programming.

But this is a tough problem. To get non-CS students interested, we probably need to stress the applicability and practicality of being able to understand fundamentals and concepts of Computer Science as applied to other scientific disciplines. "Putting the science back into Computer Science" may be the only way to do so, while also dispelling the notion that you only need Computer Science education if you wish to program computers for a living.
This idea is not worth it
GoogleBot & URL Structure
If you're like me, half the time (at the very minimal), you'll be using your laptop at home on a desk. Personally I use the bluetooth apple wireless keyboard (exact size as the laptop keyboard with no numpad) BUT I also own the full size keyboard from apple. You should shell out for some money on this if it helps you do work and when you're on the go, it's unlikely you'll be actively needing the numpad.
The click-through is the real source of info:

http://inoveryourhead.net/maybe-you-should-just-stop-being-a...
Well, I guess you're out of luck then.
Lymbix Emotional Spell Check
Like the disabling the transparent menubar and 3D dock, enabling the Dock indicator will be one of the first things I do on reinstalls.
Every person needs a different amount of F##K You Money, because each person has different financial requirements.

If you are singled, then once you have your house and vehicle(s) paid off, then the cost to live is fairly low. Nothing is like the feeling to have your largest loans paid off, because it empowers you to be able to tell your boss "F##K YOU".
My impression (given the next FAQ about Matlab) is that by "abstraction" he means "static types". Whether static typing is better or worse for beginners than dynamic typing is (as far as I know) an open question, like (unfortunately) most questions about software engineering practices.
There was a series of these back before facebook, and >50% ( I would guess somewhere in the 90+ range) were just traps that sent a list of your crushes to whoever set it up.
From the article: "But he’s primarily a scientist. Myhrvold has a master’s degree in geophysics and space physics and another one in mathematical economics. He got his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton at 23 and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. He started a software company that Microsoft bought in 1986, founded Microsoft Research in 1991, and left the company as its CTO and chief strategist in 1999. He has hundreds of patents issued or pending. Oh, and he’s also a photographer, a patron of paleontology research, and a world-champion barbecue chef. Seriously."

And he's also the worlds biggest patent troll.

Seriously.
Uniqlooks - Facebook & RenRen Driven Community Fashion
A few points:

a) The ruby standard library is written in Ruby and is actually surprisingly well-behaved from a threading perspective. The code is not super-pretty, but it uses appropriate locking strategies and has been well-tested in threaded environments. All three major implementations (JRuby, MRI and Rubinius) share the vast majority of the Ruby standard library, so if JRuby works, Rubinius will work.

2) For the part of MRI written in C (which Rubinius calls the "kernel"), Rubinius has reimplemented the entire thing mostly in Ruby with some primitives. Since they own that code, it is their responsibility to define its semantics when run in parallel.

3) Rubinius implements its locking classes (like Mutex and ConditionVariable, see https://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/blob/master/lib/thread.r...) on top of its own low-level Channel implementation (see https://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/blob/master/kernel/boots...), which can be used to implement more sophisticated locking strategies. They have been working on this for a long time, and have been planning for it even longer.
Fuck Yes
why is that? my business model doesn't include a strategy to win over HN readers with my comments. secondly, i'm not interested in joining y combinator, nor am i here to network. i read the news here and occasionally comment on something related to google apps, but not nearly to the extent that i do so other places, where my input has far greater value. i have already stated that i do not come here seeking approval. commenting on a link to an article on a website that aggregates links to other websites is not really a great use of my time (i happen to be on the tail end of a business trip sitting in my hotel room after a long week of work, so i have some downtime and this little conversation has provided me with a little entertainment this evening). the person whom i said clearly lives under a rock made a stupid and baseless comment meant to dig at google apps, as i stated above. this isn't exactly in the spirit of HN, yet when i call him out on his obvious bias, i get scolded for being a "jerk". sorry if this seems off to me, i am clearly in the minority here. i understand that now. in any case, i still stand by every single word i have written in this thread. and furthermore, the guy who did make the original comment is a liar. google uses google apps,...anyone who knows anything about google knows that (if you know of the existence of HN, you also know about google). last time i checked, google had over 20k employees, again, a common fact amongst the tech community. so i was being polite when i said he lived under a rock (insinuating he was uninformed), rather than calling him a troll or a liar.