skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not entirely sure that's a cogent argument. Two major objections:

1. If anything, I think the problem with Java is that it encourages too much abstraction. This isn't inherent in the language design, but is a product of Java culture—the massive UML diagrams and fragile class hierarchies which are glorified in Java tend to encourage adding extra abstractions to things which don't really need to be abstracted away, and you spend time doing extra work to accommodate them. There's an attitude among computer scientists, especially of the academic variety, that there's no such thing as "too much abstraction," and while abstraction is generally a decidedly good thing—I have, in my time, written Strategy-Factories, after all—I think it can be possible to overemphasize and overuse it. (John Carmack: "It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!")

2. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the statement that Python has poor data abstraction, especially in comparison to Java. Python in many ways lets you abstract away more details than Java does; e.g. duck typing allows you to treat several pieces of data as identical black boxes without having to worry about the implementation details and without using subtyping or interfaces, which is exactly the definition of abstraction. On the other hand, Java fails to abstract away some of the implementation details which are unimportant to the kind of programming that beginners do, e.g. the differences between int and Integer.

My own two cents is also that I also prefer Python's OOP-but-not-necessarily-always philosophy to Java's OOP-all-the-time-everything-in-a-class-somewhere philosophy. I am involved with teaching a Java course right now, and it has made me really wish that students could start out not worrying about classes and just writing scripts, as in Python, before they have to learn about classes and inheritance and data abstraction. (I have previously taught everything from C to Scheme, and it really is wonderful to just start people out writing code in a high-level Python-like language without having to handwave about static and classes and so forth.)
You're forgetting the magic of compound interest. At 5% annually, $3/day comes to more like $137k. For $1M you need to save $655/month at 5%.
5. Hold regular family meetings....There should be scheduled, structured family meetings with a written agenda.

Ugh. I think I'd rather have my old job back.
The post doesn't claim that the fee isn't waived, or that the limit is enforced, it just claims that there is a fee, and there is a limit. Whether they are enforced in the future is of course still possible.
glad to see you've herd of this, and are flocking to it. if you're not too flighty it's worth a peep, but you may have to duck some bugs in the code.
furthermore i think flocking should be part of everyone's schooling, and there's nothing fishy about that.
Until RIM makes its own desktop operating system I don't think it's comparable at all. And, once again, iOS is the market leader. They get to be different. RIM doesn't.
Well, apart from the Honeycomb issues, it is a pleasure to use. If you don't have your phone plugged in and hit Run or Debug, it installs it to the emulator and runs it. If you do have your phone plugged in, it goes there. It's one button for either phone or emulator.

As a side note, I assume it will be this easy with 3.0 as well, so the slow emulator may not be a problem if you have a tablet plugged in. Even with the current emulator, I prefer to just use my phone; it's faster and gives me a better idea of how it really looks and runs.
I barely use my iPad anymore
What if the goal is getting hired at ITA Software?
If you think an SSD can be "resilient to that issue" you don't understand the problem. From the Anandtech article you mention:

"Either the Toshiba controller is using over 12% of the total NAND capacity as spare area, or there's only 30GB of usable flash on the drive."

So they're lying about capacity to offset the need for TRIM. Who knows the long-term implications of that decision? I noticed the benchmark didn't saturate the drive to capacity before speed tests. Maybe they didn't mention it, sloppy either way.

Perhaps long term results aren't relevant; a frequent upgrade cycle is assumed. I suppose the average user is agnostic to the capabilities of their hardware, like you suggest.
Haha, that's ridiculous. I've never heard such rumors but if I had they would be up there with 2Pac releasing a new album.
The choice of VMWare over VirtualBox is worth complaining about then.
I know it's unfair, but as an overseas developer you should probably expect a bit more pain when working with such a US-centric company (correct or not).
Where does my data live?
Well to get technical there isn't a "sleep" function in flash. The best you can do is use setTimeout, which will call a function back in a specified amount of time. Everything including screen drawing, mouse interaction, effects/animations, code execution, etc all run in a single thread, which means if you could actually sleep(1) it would lock everything up for the full second.
is it really new? i tried to enlist to this list almost a year ago

or was it pivoted somehow?..
I've also been an iPhone Dev right from the start and I didn't find it that difficult. Sure, the provisioning stuff took some hours, and uploading an app to an actual device was as simply as clicking 'build & run'.
Publishing an app was a tad more difficult, what with the distribution profile and whatnot, but the developer in question didn't even get that far with RIM.
Is Debian Dying?
If you're a business, you do have to fax in your business documents before your app will go live in the App Store (and it takes a couple of weeks to process), but it's most likely going to take you at least a couple of weeks to develop your app and get it approved so it's not so bad. And you don't need to get it notarized.
>"This focuses heavily on the wrong side of the 10% rule: For minute details on ANY creation.... only 10% of people who see it will notice. And only 10% of those who notice will care."

I see what you're saying but I think you're missing the point that though people will generally not be able to externalise why a design is appealing the effect of the design is still felt.

I'd be inclined to agree that perhaps <10% will notice and <10% of those will think that the details attended to will matter. But, I consider that those who are ignorant of the design process and considerations will possibly be the most effected by those changes.
LOVE2D provides a very easy way to deploy binaries:

http://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution

Also, py2exe is reliable and not that difficult to set up, but py2app is a bit of a pain. The resultant .app directories are also pretty big. My game is 6.5mb in Windows, and 32mb in OS X.
This is the same story I've been hearing from most people I know who have an iPad, with the exception of my brothers kid who uses it to play games, but he doesn't have an alternative device to do that with.

I feel the same way about smart-phones. There are very few apps I use that are really game changers.

The smart-phone replaced an existing piece of hardware, so it isn't like you were going to leave it behind, but I'm not so sure about the tablets.

I've got a Kindle for reading, and have very little interest in a tablet. Still questioning what would I do with it??
I hear you.

But to put your last statement another way, a large part of these inefficiencies comes out of having to create unions in the first place, to counter the abusive employment practices of management.

I think it's a two-way street. Auto unions are corrupt now, but they were obviously created as a reaction to some pretty bad behavior from management.

The worst, most unnecessary, most counter-productive unions, in my limited experience, are at universities :)
The fundamental problem is that their devices works the same way as their developer model. It's unintuitive, clunky and overpriced. The only thing RIM has left is BBM. It's not worth developing for.

I got the legal bullshit from Apple too. Seriously, it had to be notarized, I had to send Apple docs that had some kind of embossed type seal (I'm surprised they didn't require it in wax) like I was delivering a proclaimation from the King in the 12th century.
My experience might be dated, but I remember having a Windows desktop around 2000 where each and every application tried to introduce "skins" to look distinctively not like a desktop application. Remember WinAMP? There were tons of applications like that then. Damn, even the same InstallShield installers looked different by application!
Dogstorm (A Math Problem)
Um no, the source is directly noted and link properly within text and in the source list of the article.
I don't know if you're familiar with Brad Feld (post author), but he's a big-deal VC at the Foundry Group in Boulder. Most definitely not a spammer.
You did well to pull out early if you found this part of the process painful, unfortunately end to end it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts. Theres nothing glaring wrong through out but lots of annoyances which really add up, when compared to iOS or Android development

We recently developed this so speaking from some experience
http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/28561

The bb version took far far longer than the equivalent iOS, simply because of other nonsense such as the pain in the signing process (isthesigningserverdown.com the fact it exists tells you all you need to know). Random exceptions being thrown that have no useful meaning and of course the joy of RAPC throwing errors such as "CreateProcess error=87, Parameter is incorrect" which we eventually found was due to the classpath being too long for RAPC to handle

However once complete the application it is something we are very proud of!
Ask HN: Actually good perks
So, I'm running a small startup and I'm trying to figure out things that would actually make people happier.

So far we've got:

- good chairs

- you can get whatever monitor you want

- you can get good headphones

- you can subscribe to music services

What other perks have you really enjoyed at your job? Or otherwise made life good.
so maybe you should have kept your uninformed comment to yourself? http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/customers/index.html
OnLive willl give you a free console if you buy a game
Yeah, I mean the process is a little complicated, but it works perfectly if you just follow the instructions step by step (and you don't need to do any of that to run your app in the simulator).

I think it took me about an hour the first time, and it takes maybe 10 minutes to generate the certificates and profile after you do it a few times.
Seems like cheating.
Because Adobe has some kind of serious systemic code quality issue and they get beat by exploit writers all the time. It doesn't help that their applications are so popular and widely installed that they present a juicy target. I refuse to have acrobat installed, and I'm super paranoid about where I let flash run.

If you have flash and acrobat installed and let the plugins run anytime a site requests them you're begging to be owned (and owned and owned).
This app refreshes too frequently. That one refreshes too infrequently. Then I installed this other one and it refreshed just right. Then 3 Bears came in and crushed my computer.
I made my comment at about 23:05 last night, my local time; I was talking about 22:59:59 to 23:00:00, or (approximately) #F5FFFF to #FF0000.
I picked up the 64GB 3G iPad. Never used the 3G (except the first day or so). Rarely used more than half the storage.

But I still use it 5-10x day and increasing.
As another commenter mentioned, it's general practitioners that's limited. According to salary.com, in Austin, "general practitioner" and "family practice" make $58k, "family practice physician" makes $73k. I'll assume the salary is about $75k. Compare "surgeon" at $101k, "heart surgeon" at $114k, and "orthopedic surgeon" at $165k. After going $200k in debt for medical school, I'm thinking family practice isn't looking very financially rewarding. (For comparison, $75k - $100k should be easy for an experienced programmer in Austin, and it doesn't take $200k in debt, either)

The economics definitely penalizes family practice.
Ha. Clicked the link and came to a full page error:

Our apologies:

It looks like you are using an unsupported Operating System. BlackBerry App World was designed to support the following:

Windows

Although you can browse BlackBerry App World with your current browser, some features may not be functional.

To their credit they did let me continue.
destmapper.com uses Adioso for the same thing.

Edit: Actually, I just noticed they do it for one way tickets.
RIM: The next Nokia
For algorithms, have fun on TopCoder. Work problems from past competitions, read the writeups, figure out how to solve new problems, and have fun competing. Competing at a high level requires a lot of extraneous skills you aren't interested in, but if you just concentrate on solving the problems, you'll learn all you need to know about algorithms.
> In an ideal world, the user and the developer are one in the same.

I have always understood this freedom as "You are free to find someone you like who'd be able to change it and not be forced to make use of your expensive support contract with the one and only vendor". As mentioned elsewhere, there are people who needn't know anything about code, but they'd profit from the software being free too.
civility, the new HN buzzword
Because the US is big and fuel is expensive.

LA -> Denver is 837 miles. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angel...)

London -> Rome is 892 miles.
(http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+london+to...)

LA -> NYC is 2,462 miles.
(http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angel...)

You can fly the longest flight I can think of in Europe in the same distance.
(http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+Lisbon+to...)
Amazon Web Services Moves into New Territory...Again
Free snacks/drinks are always nice. Having lunch delivered also keeps people at their desk, working longer.

Edit - I used to work for a company that offered a daily lunch budget, on the condition that it be delivered. You were free to eat anywhere you wanted, but realistically, you stayed in/around the building.

In the event that you had to stay after-hours, you were alloted a dinner budget to order in with everyone that had to stay.

Also, we had fresh fruit delivered as needed and Monday/Wednesday/Friday, fresh bagels and pastries were delivered.

We worked our butts off, knowing we didn't have to go home and make dinner/do groceries.

This was over in Denmark...I've only worked for one company in North America with as awesome a setup.

Implementing any of the above would probably go a long way.
From the blackberry app world vendor agreement:

"5.1	Application Revenue Fee

Vendor shall pay to RIM thirty percent (30%) of Application Revenue..."
That re-downloads the file from the server, whereas the Adobe plugin keeps a cache of the file and saves it straight to disk. Most of the time there's no difference, but if the PDF came from a single-use URL provided by your bank to view a statement, then there's no way to save the PDF file from the Chrome viewer.
Doctors being the gatekeepers to pharmaceuticals also means that when you seek care for an ailment or symptoms favored by pill tourists, the doctor will make a snap judgment based on your appearance and demeanor and possibly decide not to give you appropriate care. You might just be sent home with a follow-up appointment, or if you're in the emergency room, you might be left on a gurney in a hallway for hours while the nurses ignore you.
What would a lawyer do? From what I understand they are correct they don't owe you a reference. Employment verification is all they are required to do. Most places see giving references as a liability. After all what happens if they gave you a reference and it didn't work out at the new place, could they be on the hook for it?

Move on and try not to poison the well. Heck maybe one of your coworkers would be willing to be a reference. Typically the reference just needs to be from someone familiar with your work not necessarily your boss.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the colors were given by following a space-filling curve in three dimensions, like the last figure at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HilbertCurve.html
A monthly book stipend
Maybe it's been fixed, maybe it was my browser, maybe it was a heisenbug, but when I wrote my comment I clicked on the "wrote in a blog post" several times, and each time got a "Bad URL" message. I've just tried again, and this time it's sent me here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-qua...

which I assume is what was intended.

Fairy Nuff.

My real point is that the blog post lunk to here offers nothing extra to the original from Google, and to quote http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In Submissions

...

Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site,
submit the latter.

I could be wrong, but this submission just looks like blog spam. Can you elaborate on what you think the submission adds over the original from Google?
> Insurance companies don't make much in the way of profits. Those greedy pigs have profit margins roughly the same as home improvement stores, textile-apparel clothing and slightly less than packaging and containers.

And, their total profit plus executive salaries is a small fraction of the amount of admitted Medicare fraud.

I mention medicare because it's supposedly more efficient, but that's based solely comparing their cost to cut a check to the "overhead" of private health insurance companies.

Note that folks who have disputes with medicare are less likely to win than folks who have disputes with private health insurance companies.
Apple's Jobs question
There is a bunch more paperwork and cost related to dealing with non-accredit folks.

Since they are non-accredited, it is safe to assume they don't have a lot of money to invest anyway. So, the additional overhead/legal cost is very likely not worth the hassle.

If there are value add folks in this group maybe consider taking them on as advisors rather than investors.
That same thought occurred to me when I was writing it. The conclusion I came to was that if RIM is going to offer an SDK for Mac (or any platform for that matter), they need to do it in an integrated way, just like their competitors. I have no problem with NOT offering an SDK for a specific OS, but if you make the decision to do it, don't do it half assed.

I think it's less important how "good" an SDK is unto itself, and more important how good it is relative to it's competition. In this case you have to compare the Playbook SDK to Apple's and Google's because when developers are making decision about which platform to work with, they're going to be choosing between them.
It's standard policy in a lot of companies not to discuss anything further than to confirm that you were employed by them for the period stated. Apparently this reduces the chances of them being sued be disgruntled former employees.

I believe that in current times, the fact that you were employed by a company for 10 years speaks for itself; if you were incompetent, in 9 out of 10 cases you wouldn't have lasted there so long.

So, save your money and your time, prepare a couple of potential personal references, and stop worrying about it :)
Yeah, I can't believe that more people above aren't asking this question.

From my experience in the Canadian system, if you're really sick (ie badly injured, have cancer, whatever) you actually get pretty quick service. Sure, if you walk into the ER with your kid that has a flu, you might have to wait a couple hours while they deal with the people that just got in a car accident, but I can live with that. And really, if you're chronically sick enough to still be sick in 6 days (and could wait that long, ie you didnt need to go to the ER) then the 6 day wait to see a GP is likely not going to make a big difference. (Must be noted, I've never had to wait 6 days to see my doctor when I was sick, more like 1-2, and could always just walk in if I needed to)

It really comes down to this: If you need help now you'll get help, free, right now. No questions.
Why not just say Mac is unsupported? A friend of mine's company spent months developing a BlackBerry app, when he got me to do their iPhone app it took half the time and worked 100s of times better. Why? Because their developers were busy writing code trying to figure out what kind of connection the device had so they could open a TCP/IP connection, seriously the network interfaces aren't abstracted away from the developer.
Ask HN: How does your startup deal with tax liability in equity plans?
Or, how did you design your plans to make sure you and your employees have the cash to cover any personal tax liability as your company progresses?
It's currently waived, so don't let it block you...
This ones even more amusing on the actual Blackberry App World

http://failblog.org/2011/02/04/epic-fail-photos-blackberry-a...
I once worked for a place that gave its developers Safari memberships, and I thought that was an excellent perk. In fact, I still do because they haven't cancelled mine even though I quit early last year.
Yes, definitely keep the drink supply replenished. It's cheap to buy from bulk retailers. Check the yellowpages for beverage supply in your area.
Wow - that's mine! How did you find it?

(I'd ask you that off-line, but you don't have contact details in your profile)
Download the customisation wizard, build a transform which installs it with the EULA accepted and no desktop icon.
If the sector is tourism, there's plenty of space for verticals. I have a client who has a ring of sites offerinf holydays for board sposrtsers: surf, kite, snowboard and the such. Sambeau suggested cyclists. Another idea could be: travel for families with children. Travelling with children can be hard, especially if the destinations are exotic and the children are small; so a website featuring advice on this topic might have an audience.
Prada en la semana de la Moda de Milán 2011
> "At least with Adobe Reader all the crap comes from the same company."

Actually, last time I updated Adobe Reader it came with a copy of McAfee something or another...

That was when I nuked all traces of Reader off my system. Not only is their software crappy, bloated, and slow, but it's also a crapware vector to boot.

If I were a dev on the Reader team, I'd be pretty depressed about my life - millions of people cursing your name, eviscerating your product in forums and boards everywhere, everyday... and they're right.
Kidlandia Raises $2.5 Million To Create Personalized Fantasy Maps For Kids
no set number of sick days, vacation etc.

you do your job, you get to take time off as you need/want.
Hacker News February 3th Edition
Favorite YouTube Videos This Week: The TED Edition
13 Awesome Startups That Launched This Week
We are using it and loving it. More important than just shipping syslog to graylog2, we're using it to monitor 30+ servers in a cluster. Each server has a "health agent" that sends all the important metrics that happened in the last minute, packed into a GELF message. This could easily scale to 1000+ servers. On the monitoring side, one server dips into MongoDB to pull out the records and maintain records and graphs of everything that's going on (including sending alerts when a machine fails to check in as frequently as it should.)

Graylog2 is pretty solid, and the people working on it are extremely responsive. If you suggest features that make sense, they'll probably be implemented within a few weeks (if not a few days!)
Someone not doing their homework doesn't give you a license to be a jerk.
An interesting post on habit-setting is on the front page right now.

http://lifehacker.com/#!281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-...

& the comment thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262437