skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>A number of Objective-C 2.0 features and extensions are now supported by GCC. These features are enabled by default; you can disable them by using the new -fobjc-std=objc1 command-line option.

This seems like a much more important announcement. Apple had been maintaining these features in their own branch of GCC for years and years, so it's noteworthy to see them finally merged/added to the official GCC distribution.
Do we know any sales numbers so far?
Well, it depends on the exchange ;)
Buffett: "One of the things we try very hard to do at Berkshire, is to stay within what I call our circle of competence."[1] It would surprise me greatly if the social network sphere is within Buffett's circle of competence, and it would surprise me even more if he thought it was, and so I would interpret his comments about it accordingly.

[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/148662-circle-of-competence-...
A spec is a contract between programmers and in the long run, it's better (for users and programmers) to follow specs and expect others to follow them, rather than to let others break them willy-nilly and just bend over backwards to accomodate.

Oh, but I guess since this point requires actual thinking to understand, it's not in the realm of reality...
I don't think that the OS "war" will necessarily lead to an open, web based standard. It may well be that one of the contenders manages to make their "platform" so irresistible to users that they flock to that one OS, and we all will have another "MS" for a decade or two.

Its also the job of every developer to "guide" the users towards the best choice. More apps should have a browser version, for instance.
Imagine a mobile phone without chargers
Imagine a mobile phone without chargers
I'm sorry, I just don't see where the problem is. To take two applications that I run almost continuously, an editor and a browser, both have multiple instances of task--- both shown to me as windows as it happens. No problem in either opening or closing them. The mechanism is as old as windowed operating systems; find the menu item that says close or click in the corner (or it's analogue.) This action scales; do the same thing if I wish to close the app (although as was pointed out in passing in the article, this action is decreasing.) Is there anyone reading this that is confused over these actions? I really don't think so. Instead of the disparaging remark about cargo-cult interface design, maybe it was a case of the designers understanding that there are some wheels that need to be shared and not re-invented. Given the time these methods have been in place and in use, it doesn't seem like a good thing to change without a much more compelling argument.
Android and the natural economics of digital goods
Interesting, but it feels like a re-implementation of SVG. What is the advantage of this over something like RaphaelJS[1], where the SVG/VML objects are actual DOM objects already?

[1]: http://raphaeljs.com/
Message still delivered. No worries!
I played chess for a while in a chess club. But to become any good you need to memorize a lot of positions to be able to efficiently recognize good moves. Playing creatively to have fun almost always leads to defeat.
From the GCC 4.6.0 release notes:

>Support for the Go programming language has been added to GCC. It is not enabled by default when you build GCC; use the --enable-languages configure option to build it. The driver program for compiling Go code is gccgo.

>Go is currently known to work on GNU/Linux and RTEMS. Solaris support is in progress. It may or may not work on other platforms.
You're right that Stack Overflow appeals to a technical user. My point is that probably the majority of Stack Overflow users are not using microsoft tools and won't get the joke. A site like github manages to make a joke with their 404 and 500 pages that will likely resonate with the vast majority of their users, but even the ones that it doesn't won't be confused by it.

My point is that making a controlled outage look like dumped error code isn't wise if you're trying to appeal to a diverse crowd who might not get it.
Okay, how was it, did Lisp introduce if expressions or if statements?
Don't underestimate the peer pressure to have an app on the AppStore or, to a lesser degree, the Marketplace.

Web apps are like the place the cool high school kids and poseurs avoid
um, good luck with that.
So, glibc changes, breaks adobe, and it is adobe's fault? Even if adobe was relying on bad behavior, it was glibc's bad behavior it was depending on.

These are the kinds of problems that finally convinced me to move from Linux to OS X. I get the Unix without the egos (just the fanbois, but I can usually ignore them ;).
One thing to be aware of is that they can't safely take your money unless you're an accredited investor. Hopefully you meet the requirements or you wouldn't put 50k down but FYI.

http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm
> I get similar negative vibe when I talk to people who don't use data structures (seriously I interviewed a guy who wrote a frickin' file system that was linear arrays, all the way down)

An array is a (simple) data structure.
Nah, that's a solved problem. I let my VCR watch TV for me. Now if I had an electric monk, I could stop believing in things.
Getting rid of quit/close requires the user to learn entirely new metaphors every time they use a program in order to know how to get a program to stop taking up resources. In a system with effectively limitless resources this is fine, but in lower specced systems, not so much.

Also "effectively limitless" means equivalent to the specs of the worst system the designers use, which will likely skew things. Where I'm sitting we share 384K down / 128K up between about 40 people. Updaters that refuse to stop downloading when you close them really bog down the network. Now, you could try and put in some custom menu to control that sort of thing, but that's going to be a mess of configuration and hard choices, and developers will have to do that for every single app.

Quit/Close are two well-defined commands that give the user a well defined way to say when they want something to go away vs. when they want something to go away and quit doing anything. Re-implementing "go away and quit working" on a case-by-case basis is going to end up with every app either having a nonstandard interface for doing so, or no way to do so at all (like most update managers.)

Personally, I think "some apps don't quit properly" is a description of a problem with the apps, not with the "quit" command. Comparing to mobile is a red herring, because you can in fact quit background services on most mobile platforms, and it's a necessary thing to do. It's only programs that by design, always gracefully suspend, full stop, and resume later that make sense to not have a quit command.
How hard can it be for Adobe to write standards conforming code?

The user doesn't care, but professional software developers, which I assumes Adobe's developers are, should make it a priority to follow the relevant standards.
Patio11 at Business of Software
I just had a look at tungle.me and I think this is a different concept. Fasterplan is more wiki style and allows everybody to edit. I also think it is much simpler to start with.
If I'm Apple, Google, or Microsoft I'm going to care a lot because - native or web - users need a platform for applications, and those platforms represent a) revenue potential (see the iPad business) and b) a potential control point (see MSFT for the past two decades). As far as I'm concerned, the native vs web application question is secondary to the platform question. We're going to have both, and yes web clients will increase share. That doesn't change the fact that whoever is supplying the most popular platform for apps - web or native - will have control and profit potential in spades.
How to get Node.js, sqlite, and Locker installed and working
First of all you should to analize theirs finance situation. If you don't know how, then invest smal part of money. And then, if all goes well, you could to increase the value. Otherwise you just lose your money.
Yeah, but it doesn't mean the desktop war was lost/won.

Desktops are the niche of professional (or power) users. Tablets are where the web will point - because tablets (and phones) will be how the casual user will "compute" in the future.

So to me, web apps will never (well not in the near future) win the desktop war - just because they can't offer the speed and power a professional user needs.
I keep reading how porn is at the forefront of technology, driving innovation and being a real game changer.

Yet HTTP authentication is still the norm, tubes appeared several months after YouTube and porn hasn't migrated to make good use of HTML5.

I think the industry made one good choice with VHS decades ago and has been rewarded with such unjust acclaim ever since.
Since Go is still in development and with updates being released regularly, does this mean that the GCC GO compiler implements a specific version of Go and will be out of date soon?
Apple IPad 2 Accessories
Apple iPad has created waves in the market for high tech gadgets and if you have one of them.
>an AMA on reddit would be really neat

Sadly I can't see this going well. Reddit generally makes a big joke of how much Digg [supposedly] sucks. I don't think it would be generally a fulfilling experience for the AMA subject or most onlookers. YMMV.
In other shocking news, your ISP knows what websites you visit.

While we need to have real discussions and set real policies, we should be talking about the length of data retention, the way the data is stored, the entities who can access the data, the purposes for which the data is collected, the exact data that's being collected, and a rational weighing of the benefits vs. the costs.

Instead, we usually get fearmongering and witchhunts, usually instigated by somebody selling something. If you've successfully kept a low profile, all is permitted. If you haven't, you get to be the Great Satan for a while. While the hate mail will help you grow a thick skin, if you're the Great Satan a little too often, the politicians, prosecutors, and bureaucrats smell a 'winning issue', and will attempt to ruin your business and make your life a hell.

I would not start an analytics or an advertising company in 2011.
Does this app help someone who spends most of his time looking at Emacs.app with a dark background and screen brightness turned all the way down?
YC takes common stock. They suffer dilution the same as the founders.
tl;dr of the article:

90 year old Granny runs 100m, a task that even Usain Bolt finds very tiring.
Depends what you mean by "where". With respect to finding it amongst other files, making it available on portable devices, sharing it (or NOT sharing it) with others, "where" is very important to the user.

What we really want is the user's concept of a file decoupled from the system's concept, and then cleansed of various baggage from the prior coupling. That's very different than making it a system concept exclusively.
Such a simple talk, such simple advice, but I learned so much. So much is obvious upon reflection, but great advice usually is. Awesome job.
I think of it as a two-dimensional market segmentation perspective: gender on one dimension, race on another. In a lot of segments, almost everybody is fighting it out in the "white guy" quadrant or at least the "guy" half. Take the Q&A space, for example: Quora is 80-90% guys, and so is StackOverflow. So there's room for competitors targeting the "niches" that actually make up most of the population. And there are similar dynamics in most market segments ...
Make your meetings more efficient
Tired of attending several meetings and getting no results out of them? Try this tool. Loosely based on 37signal's Rework, I believe this tool could help you have better meetings!
Web apps are like the place the cool high school kids and poseurs avoid

IOW, webapps will (continue to) be making good money 5 years down the line while iOS apps are bagging groceries at the local supermarket? :)
Thank you. I just checked, looks like I fall in one of the categories listed. Never knew I am an accredited investor :)
The blue blockers should be more effective:

http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Safety-Glasses-Copper-Blue-Blo...
Adobe had a bug which worked because of a Bug in memcpy(), the bug was fixed and Adobe's code broke.

win95 had a similar one with the game Civilisation, they actually put code into win95 to detect the game and change the way the OS worked - doesn't sound like a good solution
Ask HN: Why there is no good Graph Visualization Library in Javascript?
Ego, properly applied, changes the world.
Would very much like to receive feedback and suggestions on making this tool more useful.
These seem to be standard guidelines most tech companies have followed for the past 10 years. What I would like to add to this is metrics collection through something ganglia will give you an overall view of performance and usage across your servers, not just at that point in time but summarized over an hour, day, week, month. I cant tell you how helpful that kind of thing can be. And you can add your own stats to it as well very easily to track any number of things. I've added mail, apache and release graphing to my stats. John Allspaw of Etsy, formerly of Flickr is huge on metrics collection, so is John Adams of Twitter. It plays a key role in assessing where you've been and where you are going.
Everyone has their own "will to power" -- for Atilla the Hun, it's death and mayhem; for a gangsta, it's money and ho's (or whatever, I don't know any gangstas personally); etc.

Ironically, though, priests and therapists and ethicists have their own (whiny) will to power, and get a rush feeling their way of life taking over in the world, just like a warlord gets the same rush with new territory, etc (and I get the same rush with a new script or query).

"Genealogy of Morals" deserves any credit for this idea, not me.
Often it's because a user accidentally double-posts, the second post gets auto-killed, the user can't see their own dead posts, and they delete the live one rather than the dead one (because they can't tell which is which).
Get a $70 template from WooThemes (or any of numerous cheaper options) to make it look professional, then find a stock image of e.g. a woman sipping coffee at Starbucks and do one of those hand-drawn arrow things saying "She'll be a published author by the end of the latte."

Alternatively, a youngish mother playing with her child. Again, hand-drawn callout: "My mom is a published author."
I just want to say how much I appreciate WakeMate being available to non-US buyers. I've seen a lot of gadgets similar to it that don't ship to the UK and I find that to be a bit of a pain.
Now I know what I'll be doing at 3am tonight.
How much advice from the nuclear plant guy is relevant for bingo cards? Honest question, I can see "surprisingly more than you'd think" to "well, not much, really" being in the range of possible answers.

Sounds like a fun conference, but I'm cheap: $2000+ plus travel plus hotel, plus lost time is a lot of money. Conferences always seem like a much better deal if you get invited as a speaker. You get a super-power-bonus for your own networking, because people recognize you from you talk, you get a speaker badge, and so on, and plus, you don't have to pay so much (or anything if it goes well). I pretty much stopped going to conferences where I'm not speaking.
What about online payments? I thought the porn industry was (one of) the first to start accepting credit cards online.
I've seen this BS reporting before. The original paper, I believe is this: http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/657042

Money quote:

We analyzed bee flight movements in an array of four
artificial flowers maximizing interfloral distances.

Four flovers…
Do people even know or care about the difference between Windows phones and Android phones? My sister certainly doesn’t. There is the iPhone (which she doesn’t like at all) and then there are all other smartphones, some of which she quite likes.

When she talks about cell phones she talks, with the exception of the iPhone (which she just calls iPhone), about manufacturers – HTC, Samsung – and she only recently said that she quite likes the HTC Mozart (which, to my surprise, runs Windows Phone 7).
it was glibc's bad behavior it was depending on

Hmm. Well, I was assuming that glibc was following the spec all along but just changed some implementation detail that mattered because Adobe wasn't following the spec all along.

I think there's an argument to be made that the way an API is implemented is an implicit contract that ought to be upheld. But that's not the arugment I see being made.

Anyway, this level of detail is below the scope of the "specs vs pragmatism" debate that's going on.
Which libraries did you check, that did not fulfill your requirements, and why?

I've used both gRaphael (http://g.raphaeljs.com/) and jqPlot (http://www.jqplot.com/) before, and found both to be at least decent (though, I had a few issues with jqPlot, but switching to gRaphael solved those).
Why is that not yet available on the website?
The checklist for Scala:

- Performance equivalent to Java for equivalent code

Pass.

- No language-imposed runtime library

Failed. 5mb runtime lib.

- No more (or not much more) complicated than Java

It depends. For some, Scala feels much more streamlined than Java. For others (esp. those used to dynamic languages), the type system is a huge pain.

- Beautiful

Certainly much more beautiful than Java.

- Perfect integration with JVM libraries

Use existing JVM libs without change.

- Extensible

Major language features such as actors are all libraries. Very easy to embed DSLs.
That's great feedback for Charles. I suspect he's trying to settle down the language, then push for beautiful docs. The biggest push for accessibility and language adoption is great documentation.

Cool example.
Steven Strogatz' Blink-level introduction to synchronization, Sync has a good chapter on Sleep titled Sleep and the Daily Struggle for Sync. I almost used it as a prescription for avoiding certain activities that may prevent me from getting a full sleep cycle.
Meanwhile Apple is moving away to LLVM and Clang.
I've seen Middle Men and yes there was no options at the time and banks should be have take more notice. But it does read like adult is the driving force for all online commerce and technology.
Fine, I'm done with HN, Bye.
I guess you are referring to this:

> I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it [...] the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

(from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html )
Can you please post your per-platform usage stats after you launch? I think that it would be of value for the mobile developers here.

Also, since you are attacking simultaneously on four fronts - a blog post about the advantages and disadvantages of developing code and assets (graphics) for each platform would be great (obvious one - no IB/ExprStudio for Android?).
Growth Rate of U.S. E-Commerce Sales Hits 3-Year High
Heck, I've been using this for months now and still sometimes have to check myself when I notice my colour temperature start to change.
SmartTemplate - html templates with extra zazz 
SmartTemplate is a client-side CoffeeScript library that adds zazz to your html templates.
I'm far from being a presentation pro, but I've talked myself out of getting nervous - just by reasoning it through like going on a flight.

When you're in an audience, do you want to kill a speaker? I know that when I'm in an audience, I (a) don't care at all; (b) switch off if the speaker is bad; (c) actually want to hear the information being giving them (and don't mind if the speaker is bad - and probably rooting for them if they are).
Since you don't want to share links, instead of relying on a 3rd party, why not use Firefox 4 and take advantage of the syncing feature?
Top Five Star Hotels: St Albans Hotels, Cheap Hotels in St Albans
If you want to improve your sleeping you should expose yourself to less blue light before bedtime.
I don't see the desktop becoming obsolete. I can't think of another way to do my daily tasks without it. I can't think of another way for my clients too. A tablet and a smart phone are a great addition for my client X, but they don't replace his desktop computer. The iPad, iPhone and Xbox are enough for the kids to have fun, but when they want to browse the Internet and do a presentation, I doubt that the iPad is flexible and powerful enough. I doubt also that Google SpreadSheet is flexible and powerful as Microsoft Office Powerpoint.

A new trend has emerged (Internet + SmartPhones) because we have (the citizen of Planet Earth) become excessive technology users. We have become data holics. We like communication and Internet had just made it easier and more accessible. People got addicted to Information and the awesomeness of technology. That's why they buy the iPad. If they affrod it, they'll pay for it. People pay for the desktop because they need it. Different people have different usages. Some poeple don't use a PC everyday, but a one week usage justifies the purchase.
Looks to me that the meme "Citation please" clearly needs to spread. The irony here is that it applies to the folks on their high horse; i.e. the ethics committee...
Linus: “I (obviously) always compile my own kernels”
Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save.

I guess a regular save can be the same idea as a tag in version control with the automated stuff to, I think the next OSX was doing something like this?
lisp introduced if-then-else expressions. 'if statements' was a little vague, so i've rephrased.

i wasn't really expecting to be on hn :/
The article seems to mention a heuristic method the bumblebees use to improve their path, which consists of changing subpaths. A heuristic doesn't necessarily give the optimal solution, while there are methods that do give the optimum. An example is Concorde at GAtech, that solved problems with 15k nodes: http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/concorde.html
There's also Protovis (http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/) which has been used for graph visualization.
From Wikipedia -

Qualified services may achieve a precision of down to 50 meters in urban areas where mobile traffic and density of antenna towers (base stations) is sufficiently high. Rural and desolate areas may see miles between base stations and therefore determine locations less precisely.
George Orwell is one obvious suggestion, and I think he lives up to his reputation. "Shooting an Elephant", "A Hanging" and "The Spike" come to mind right away.

Slightly less obvious, I'm a big fan of Philip Gourevitch. He's somewhere between a reporter and an essayist. A lot of his essays appeared in The New Yorker, and a group of them on Rwanda eventually became a book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. That is outstanding non-fiction writing.
Wouldn't we if they were flying off the shelves?
The peer review process is broken. This is sad from the perspective that it is not easy to trust anything anymore. But at the same time fortunate because everyone in science has to prepare herself for judging independently the articles that are served by the journals
If I'm not wrong he had to get out of his Goldman preferred shares earlier than he wanted... wonder if his comments are a backhanded dig at Goldman.
GCC 4.6 - Support for selectively enabling and disabling warnings via #pragma
Every answer in my Quora feed right now is from a guy ...
Chrome auto-updates, you never realise it.