skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The process of giving away something of value completely for free, completely optional for you to read, in hopes of creating an audience for a book (which takes a lot of work to write, hopes to improve the world in some way, and is also completely optional for you to read) sucks? What do you say about things that actually suck?
Thanks. I've been testing different text throughout, but haven't looked at button placement. Will definitely look at that.
The "which parts to avoid" conundrum shows up as every outfit that uses it in any serious way has a different set of "which parts to avoid".

It is just a mess.
House panel votes to invalidate net neutrality rules
This whole Xcode/$5 topic (which seems to be getting unnatural air time on HN) reminds me of an old joke:

A mom is at the beach with her child. Child gets swept away by a wave.

She says "God, if you just bring him back, I'll [insert long set of promises]!!!"

The next wave tosses the kid back on the shore, unharmed.

She looks up and says "he had a hat!"

How easy our lives have become that we can spend all this ink griping about $5, or a 15GB download that has to be done twice a year over our very fast broadband connections.
But then I'd be sitting at an empty desk in silence!
Give me a break! $5 for accounting legislation compliance is a personal insult to you? How is it at all comparable to selling tickets to leave a restaurant? You have to leave a restaurant. You're perfectly free to download the Xcode 3 developer tools, which are still available on the developer page.

The melodrama from people criticizing this is embarrassing to read. People on Reddit were acting like it's some huge scandal.
That could be surprisingly popular. Easier to decipher than textspeak too.
Original Link: http://www.fabiomilito.com/index.php?/2009/wrapping-paper/
It's still XML. Albeit with compression.

I'd rather use Google Protocol Buffers.
Because the whole "SOX accounting theory" is made up by people who don't know what they are talking about.

In its defense it was initially put forward as speculation ("what about this theory"), but now is being taken as fact.
Thanks for the links, as well as the feedback. I have been wondering if oAuth with Twitter has been turning people away, so definitely appreciate the comment and will look into straight email.
> Apple already wastes gigabytes on printer drivers and extra languages you don't need.

No, they didn't. For example, Snow Leopard downloads printer drivers from Apple as you need them.
It's best not to lead with an offer. Make them offer first, no matter how long it takes/how far down the line you have to go. Giving your upper range like that gives them an easy excuse to dismiss you.
No, he's arguing that asking somebody else to spend an hour of their time to install a gem is placing extra barriers to people experimenting with the software that came with their computer.
> It certainly shouldn't be any kind of tipping point in platform choice for developers.

It won't be. After the usual anti-Apple trolls have had their say, everyone will have forgotten about this phony "controversy" by next week.
Business Decisions != Accounting practices

Can you seriously imagine Steve Jobs being told they he has to charge for something he doesn't want to because of accounting practices?!
Book - Natural Language Toolkit
Thanks. Your feedback makes me believe I've fallen into the chicken/egg trap, where I switch between different types of users. Will fix.

Also appreciate the feedback on the video.
Why Facebook Won't Ever Replace Your Website
I'm not sure why having to separately install XCode to get gcc is a "blight." OSX is a consumer OS. If you are a developer, you're savvy enough to know that you stick in the OSX DVD after booting your Mac up for the first time and install developer tools. Then you never have to think about it again. Where's the blight?
Same here - I just wish that Instapaper would share on Google Reader.

One wonders why the "drink from the firehose" style reader (Reeder) hasn't been merged with the "save for later" style reader (Instapaper). Everyone I know who finds one of those indispensable becomes enamored with the other pretty easily.
FWIW, it doesn't come with the new Air models.
Well there's a limit to how many developer tools should be free.

If you're talking about the basic command line utilities and libraries that you use to build applications, then yes, they should be free.

If you're talking about a fully featured IDE with all the bells and whistles, stuff that can refactor code easily, has a decent built in build system. Then no, you shouldn't expect it to be free.
I don't own or use a Mac anymore, but when I did in grad school a few years ago (using Tiger) I always got gcc binaries from here: http://hpc.sourceforge.net/

I never installed XCode.

I very very far from being an expert on this, so forgive me if I'm mistaken, but is there a reason these do not suffice?
Thanks Patric. A more compelling preview screen is something that hasn't even crossed my mind (Sometimes it's the little things). Also appreciate the other feedback.
Yeah, younger women never marry older men.
(make-dream-happen '(This is cool but if all the hackers of the world would pool up to create a corpus of technical text in as many languages as possible and use that as a base for an awesome hacker translator the world would be a better place.))

now how do you define the make-dream-happen macro?
Time Machine™ comes with every Mac!
iPaper[1] is a great instapaper client for Android. Yeah, Instapaper is more like a service than an iPhone app.

[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=org.hijava.instapaper
This reminds me of the controversy when Apple decided to stop developing (and pre-installing) Java. Strictly speaking, nothing any Java developer had been doing became impossible, but a lot of things became more inconvenient, more complicated and / or more frustrating. It felt like Apple didn't care and they thought (rightly or wrongly) Apple should.

This Xcode 4 situation feels like the same thing. Maybe the status quo will return after Lion is released, maybe not. Right now, however, things are a bit more inconvenient / complicated / frustrating and it feels like Apple doesn't care all over again.
Movies by request. Rip & upload svc emerges. Pmt using digital currency Bitcoin
Step 1.) You ask for a movie, usually a rare one.<p>"Request would include an XviD rip fitting on a CD, plus subtitles if available, and an upload to The Pirate Bay."<p>Then an XviD rip and an upload to The Pirate Bay.<p>It's going to get very interesting.
Why the confusion? Why all the cramming of information? Yes! Good Content/Service, but also keep it simple. If I have to read a "chapter" on what you do, or play with four widgets to "learn" more, or visit your blog and troll for topics of interest, then I'm already turned off. I want to know if it's a product I can use/sign up for in less than 30 seconds -- speaking of which, there's a good chance you'll snag me if I'm 30 seconds in and still with you.
Un-possible. PG said so and PG's word is Gospel on HN
> but salary isn't based on how special you are, it's based on what you're worth

Sorry, but that's just bullshit. Salary and skills are correlated very loosely. The salary spread among (roughly) equally skilled developers is enormous. It's up to you which side of spectrum to be on.
You really shouldn't neglect to mention Mono among those developers. There are a lot of them of C#/Mono developers out there making applications for every platform that love using OS X and monodevelop.
Is there an equivalent one for the Australian market as well?

I saw first hand how powerful (something like) Grub Hub is when I was in Chicago back in 2008. Would be very useful for all of the Australian slackers, erm, students.
Re-usable wrapping paper is good for the environment as well.
Amongst the people I knew (young people with no money), MSFT was seen as a sure thing from about 1990 until 2000. I dissuaded them by explaining that Linux was just around the corner to mess up that sure thing...

It's a wonder I was even able to tie my shoes.
My strong anti-C++ bent comes from having used in in demanding production situations for 12 years. It is a beast. When Scott Meyers of http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Specific-Addison-Wesley-Prof... fame reads a book on C++ template programming and is surprised, no, astonished! at some of the things done there, and attempts to write auto_ptr and fails at least twice.

It takes way to long to learn (probably 2 years for a developer working with it 8 hours a day), and the grown ups don't like it either: http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

This isn't even an ugly chick.
How about OpenGL* in the browser ?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSSf_umjOgU

Or many, many other new features in browsers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFmuNApHFec

How about some multitouch ?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL2dwXa1_gw

* a subset of OpenGL called ES and in browser land called WebGL.
Lots of these exist and have tried to exist in the past, but end up failing due to the non-automatic nature of tagging. (Unlike Last.FM and music, to play off the title's example) It's cool that trakt.tv is at least trying to integrate with some TV 'boxes'.
the font size is kinda freaking me out. I'll check it out though, collaborate with fellow spanish-speakers.
yeah, BOGO FTW!!
Why All Your Bulbs May Soon Be LEDs
LinkedIn Today’s layout is a terrible, content-less mess.
Hopefully immune to social media optimisation, too!
They may not suffer from the efficiency problems, but diffs and merges are still problematic. Is there any VCS tool designed to handle these sorts of things?
There's a danger that Intel will continue to chase high profit sectors and stagnate technically due to lack of competition there. The gap between what is technically achievable and what we get today in x86 processors has been widening for years and is not slowing down.
Thanks Bill! Your post was actually a big inspiration for me to finally put this post up.
Considering flying out from Japan to attend, that's if I can arrange some vacation time.
This is not a linked list, it's a dynamic array.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_list#Linked_lists_vs._dy...
How to increase your torrents download speed
Just a law student, but I can buy the SOX thing. Companies have very different approaches to compliance, get advice from different counsel, account for things in different ways, etc.

I feel like there is a Occam's Razor argument in here. What purpose besides SOX could Apple have in not giving away XCode 4? Could be pure greed as others are saying, but when Apple wants to make money they're incredibly good at it. How many people are going to download XCode? Tens of thousands? Apple might stand to make, what $100k off the venture? If they were really trying to monetize XCode why would they price it so they don't make any money off it?
Real disruption won't come until ARM create (edit: design) a real general purpose, mainstream 64-bit processor.
Noob here. Where does ObjC fit into all this? I know it's primarily used in Mac development, but is there any language-specific reason it's excluded from these debates?
That's a pedantic comment to make, given that Python doesn't care about the difference. Ruby calls the same thing an "Array".
A more accessible alternative is butcher paper. You can buy it in enormous rolls that will last a lifetime, and draw/write whatever decoration the event requires.

On the other hand, you have to write or draw whatever decoration the event requires.
As a McKinsey alum, I must say I did not feel any resonance with the position of the author. In fact, I was very surprised at how strictly the firm prohibits sharing of confidential information between clients. Quite often, consultants had to choose studies (the McKinsey term for a client engagement) very carefully because it may preclude you from ever working with certain clients again. McKinsey certainly has a number of faults, this issue is not one of them
They do distribute it, it's on the OS X install disk.
If you just need gcc: http://llvm.org/releases/download.html#2.8

Also, how many Apple developers don't already have an iTunes account?
Microsoft also hires more people per week than have left Microsoft to join Facebook, ever.
This kind is logic might work with coca cola stock but it certainly doesn't with apple. How do you measure the roi of a Mac Pro?
What does that mean, "goes from nods to nudges"? It seemed like some idiom I didn't know, so I googled the phrase 'nods to nudges'. However, this very Hacker News page was the only result, so I am still in the dark.
Imagine the good high level language, like Lisp or Lua, stepped into the teleportation chamber from _The Fly_ with C.

It is not a terrible language to write in, once you get over the verbosity; it is not, for instance, the waking nightmare that C++ is. But as a deployed system it is the worst attributes of C and of interpreted languages: a complex runtime in which many (probably most) of the errors that can creep into deployable Ruby code can bite you even though your code passed both compilation and static analysis.

Its high-level constructs for the most part share the same reliability issues that C++ has; exceptions, for instance, are not really any safer there than in C++.

Blocks are nice, but I say that having only used them within the past few months. It could just be that the zombies haven't eaten their way to my particular shelter yet. They may, for instance, turn out to be horrible to debug.

Imagine a variant of C or C++ that you have to unit test as vigilantly as Rails code, and you're not far off the mark.
lionhearted is.

Point being that when it comes to making money, no verifiable list of achievements with sources is necessary: the kind of car you drive (as a proxy for how much money you make) should be credentials enough.

That's kind of the reality of the money world.
Assuming you can use STL. Many projects can't use STL because of its reliance on C++ exceptions (cf. Mozilla or Google's C++ style guides). If your legacy code or some third-party library is not exception-safe, then you can't create reliable C++ software using the STL.
Bridgelux demonstrates silicon substrate LED that produces 135 lumens per watt
Sure, if I bought stock instead of Apple products I'd be loaded.. but would I understand why?
I flagged it for that reason. F'in annoying.
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I did too, and I'm almost sorry I said anything because comments like mine don't add anything and usually amount to karma whoring.

Still, I thought it was an interesting idea and would rather the submitter know why the article was flagged so that he (or she) would continue to post interesting things, but with more accurate titles.
One thing that could help this would be if Square let you pick a secret image, and they would show it in the app, when you're signing.

If someone is using a fake app, they wouldn't be able to incorporate your secret image, and you'd be tipped off. They'd still get your credit card, but you'd know it right away, and could cancel your card/call the police right there.

Same thing banks do on web sites to prevent this same kind of attack.
They why $5? Why not 1c, or 99c, or make it $99 and include a year's membership?

I said it elsewhere, but I'll say it again here: can you really imagine Steve Jobs agreeing to charge for something he didn't want to charge for because of accounting practices?
Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 99
Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 99: How is the continuation of the story telenovela Triunfo del Amor ?, after in the Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 98 we witnessed scene Jimena threatening María Desamparada with a knife, and whether Maximillian finally met with Maria? ... Watch El Triunfo de Amor Cap 99.
SEO spam has no actual users bro.
Download Apple iOS 4.3 iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS
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That's a general problem with large companies, they often can't afford to pivot and succeed in lower profit sectors, even if its clear that the high profit sectors are going to stagnate and shrink over time.
Instapaper is definitely the number 1 reason I use Twitter as my primary news source - and the integration to the Twitter iPhone app is perfect. Seems like a perfect potential acquisition.
First, Apple does make the GCC source available: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5646/

Second, Apple doesn't ship GCC in the default install, why would they need to make it the source available?
Much like how women never marry multiple men.

The complex incentives mechanisms of child birth and relationships have already been distorted by the Chinese government, and I don't think that the solution to this problem is to distort them further.

It may be helpful to subsidize female births, but an obvious complication is the fact that these females will be much younger than their male counterparts. Not a big deal on an individual level, as females do sometimes marry men ten or twenty years their senior, but at a national level?

That's just one easily identified complication of subsidizing female births. How verifiable could this be? What about enforcement? How do you make sure that baby girls don't die of "natural causes" once their parents pocket the baby bonus? Who knows? I don't. You don't. The Chinese government doesn't. Shit's complicated.
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The Ross-Littlewood paradox
YouTube Acquires Next New Networks
Maybe it's just your wife who's shady: no matter how much she loves you, it was deceitful of her to review your book so positively without indicating the connection between the two of you, particularly since that connection probably means she also benefits financially from sales of your book. But I suppose that's a bit like insider trading, which I hear is actually ethical and should be legalized[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Altucher#Ideas_and_Theori...
Let's assume it isn't as clear cut as you say. That still leaves the question, why use an inferior tool? The argument that programmers are too dumb to reason about the distributed nature of a dvcs isn't a good argument to me. It took me one weekend with the pro git book for me to understand git well. That's a small price to pay for a superior tool.
Love it. I have a blog about code and other web development stuff but did not have a place to submit links to because I write in Spanish. The wait is over.
For comparison, this is about 10x the efficiency of an ordinary incandescent lamp.

EDIT: today's Fast Company story is better: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2311641
C'mon it's five bucks.

That's less than the cost of the average meal at a fast food restaurant - and Xcode only has to be bought once (and we don't have to buy it at all).
Steve Jobs on Apple's brand strategy in 1997
The icon is a direct copy of the iOS app icon, and the app is in violation of Marco's API rules (http://blog.instapaper.com/post/3208433429).

Outright theft? Maybe not. But definitely not kosher.

[ Also, the 'developer website' is an inaccessible Chinese social network page. Awesome! ]
Is LiML meant to attack concurrency or parallelism or both?
Nudges: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT3_UCm1A5I
You have to deal with dependencies already. In fact, today you have to compile the dependencies. Why isn't downloading their binaries a simpler way to do it?

Whenever I type "{brew,port} install X" I spend the next few minutes watching a compile and muttering "why? why? why?".
Yeah, but what kind of unfilial Chinese son and unfilial Indian daughter would disgrace their own families like that? It seems unlikely to happen en masse.
People who study negotiation have this concept called the “anchoring effect”—the first number that gets thrown out becomes very prominent in the other party’s mind and affects their view of the deal. If I’m on the “employee” side of the negotiation, I want that first number to be as high as I can reasonably justify.
I bought some early LED spot lights for home.

These things cost $55 each and gave out a light that was a bit too dim, and very, very blue. My wife hated them and we took them out and put incandescents back to get the light we wanted.

We hated CFCs too - way too dim, and they take a long time to warm up (we tend to turn off the lights we're not using).

I'd love to see how good these newer LED bulbs can be in the real usage.
Same here. And then the person up I'm pitching the iPhone to is like, "Oh...cool." haha!

When someone asks what my favorite apps are, he is expecting me to tell him about the apps that use the accelerometer in some crazy innovative way. Oh, the look of disappointment when I excitedly talk about Reeder.
As for the polish comment, it's really a matter of what you're used to and strictly a matter of opinion, but I find Xcode a nightmare to navigate compared to VS2010. Sure, Xcode is shinier and looks better, but the UX is far superior in VS2010 (again, just my opinion). I'm very much looking forward to a single window interface in Xcode 4.3.

Oh dear - you haven't been using the multiple-window layout in Xcode 3, have you? The single window layout is the only way to be productive.

Update: wow - I got downvoted for saying that? Someone must really like the multiwindow layout. If that's you, and you don't want to pay the $5 for version 4, have a look in View->Layout in Xcode 3. Try the single window layout. You'll like it. Really.
Thanks. It seems like it's Skype's tunneling prowess that I'm impressed with instead of the protocol itself.
Ask HN: How to get comfortable on the OS X command line?
I'm very comfortable on the command line on debian-based distros but when ever I get on the terminal in OS X, things are just not in the right place or I'm not able to do what I want.

Is this because I'm not familiar with BSD Unix or has Apple moved things around?

What are the best resources for learning the OS X flavor of Unix, coming from the perspective of having good Linux knowledge?

Edit:
The motivation behind these questions is that I need to decide what my next dev machine will be: some pc laptop with linux or a macbook with darwin. Either way, I need a workable command line as I spend probably 50% of my time there.
i agree wholeheartedly, especially about the self-mythologizing. Not only might a person be unaware of the steps leading to their own success, they might intentionally conceal those steps.
I forget exactly where it was that I read it, but when researching the Y Combinator program it was mentioned that the time spent with established entrepreneurs at weekly dinners (time spent off the record) was so valuable specifically because of how heavily these people must normally censor themselves.
Sadly, Rob and Mike have been locking their blog down, editing comments to remove criticism, and insisting that in posts entirely about math that the math is not what matters. Access to the LinkedIn group they sell is being locked down when it's used to make polite discussions of how to respond to ethical problems with vendors, and commenting on their blog and linkedingroup, for which they charge hundreds of dollars to access, has been shut off where people politely disagree.

They suggest that they are merely removing rudeness, but what they remove isn't rude, and they're leaving significant accusations in place while disallowing response.

This community is gated to exclude people who politely point out errors in the math.
Who The Fuck Is Wikileaks
When the have the force of law, and when they've been burned in the past, absolutely.
Given that the guy was personally in the hot seat a few years ago for an option backdating scandal, yes. I can imagine him agreeing to this.
You could always get the dev tools for free* because they always came with some other purchase. That seems like it would cover the "SOX" compliance to me.

Examples: you bought a copy of Mac OS X (the dev tools were in the box), you bought an ADC membership (dev tools are included with your membership). Now, XCode 4 from the App Store is the first time you could get them standalone. And they charge for it.