skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got Mac apps from the late '80s that ran fine on the last non-Unix Mac OS, and ran fine in the Classic environment on OS X up until that was finally dropped.

Apple did in fact do a lot of bending over backwards for compatibility, at least when it was a major developer breaking the rules. System 7 had special code in the memory manager for Microsoft applications to make them work with the 32-bit memory manager and virtual memory.

That said, Microsoft does do an outstanding job in this area. I remember when Win98 was coming out, we were not in the beta program at work. We got a call from Microsoft telling us that a VxD of ours was not working on Win98, telling us what assumption it was making that was no longer valid, and inviting us into the beta program. We were not a large, well-known company. That was pretty cool.
Super-Economy: Sweden is more politically corrupt than you think
I disagree with almost everything except the startup incubator, reducing the endless meetings, and getting started with hardware. Google has these things for a reason, and they have been more reliable than twitter, facebook, etc. and their technology actually works. So what if they restrict their engineers into using their own systems? They put reliability and dependability for their users first, and that's why we have all come to trust google's infrastructure, privacy, etc. way more than facebook. Would you put your corporate email on facebook?

It sounds like what they SHOULD do is streamline and document the system for their engineers better. There should be an internal project started to make their developers HAPPIER and more productive. For example, you have an idea for a new project? Here's the actionable checklist. Need to launch? Please make sure all of these are checked, then you can launch. Treat your developers like you treat your users.

As for capturing people into an incubator before they leave the company? I like that idea. Except of course, one has to wonder how much this will incentivize people to quit google, just to get more autonomy and a better deal :P Not to mention, that once acquired by google, the startups' technologies are just rewritten to live in the Google ecosystem, so this seems like a waste of money... except for possibly the IP licensing costs.
It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know
Am I the only one that finds it amazing that in 2011 a mainstream Linux distribution like Fedora is still having issues playing YouTube videos? I mean... Linux on the desktop? wow...
Israel Asked Facebook CEO to Remove “Third Palestinian Intifada” Page
Wow, I never thought about CNC/3d printing in the context of the SCA. Produce stuff at low cost using modern tech, sell it at Pennsic [1] for a massive, massive markup.

[1]: For those of you not in the know, Pennsic is a massive war in the SCA which lasts almost 3 weeks, outside of Pittsburgh. Over 10,000 participants and tons of merchants selling overpriced, awesome wares. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsic_War
Explain? I agree that the LTV of a Twitter user is higher than he thinks, but don't get the "capping" thing.

(I think Twitter "pro" accounts are a bad business move for other reasons, in the same sense as Google Search Appliances might be more trouble for G than they're worth).
Manchester, formerly Bolton.
It's amazing to have watched Twitter grow in the last four years. Now people even tweet from space. I think with regards to the architecture, it's not an old problem, and there are existing solutions from much larger entities. If they had the money, they could invest in an architecture worthy of a communications system that is so ubiquitous that it is being used to ignite social revolutions, manage humanitarian crises and talk to people buzzing around the themosphere in a tin can.

It's time for some real upgrades. And they do have a user base to support that. I would most definitely pay for better Twitter services if they were available. I think the question is, how do you not neglect the people are unable to pay for these services? How do you make it a fair service?
Yes, you are 100% correct. It is a very young language and project.

I've spent the last several days trying to solidify a distribution (.zip), maven artifacts (with David Calavera's help) and refactor the codebase to make it more approachable. Last night I made some edits to the mirah.org web site, and today I may try to work on the wiki. There's definitely a lot missing as far as documentation and support, but we'll get there.

I appreciate your feedback and links to your projects. They will help us learn what needs to be better documented, and also help us produce better error/info messages from the compiler.

We'd also love to have your help :) This is OSS of course, so anything you can do to document your experiences (blog posts, add to wiki on github, ...) will help us and others.
People who want to pay needs to understand that:

A. You are the exception. I am willing to bet .1% of users would be a overestimation of Twitterers willing to pay.

B. Setting up premium accounts and a payment system would probably run fairly close to break even. Not mention the additional customer service that would be expected and the complications that arise from splitting the userbase.

C. You aren't the real money. Twitter wants Coca Cola's money, CBS's money, etc. They don't care about pocket change from Joe Blogger. They are selling a package of 200 million people straight up, not a package of 200 million minus the most engaged and loyal users.
First time a government official asks facebook to remove a page?
the same in one line:

Gem.loaded_specs.map{|n,s| "gem install #{n} --version=#{s.version}"} * "\n"
Japan's two incompatible power grids make disaster recovery harder
We definitely want to do some posts (maybe a conference talk?) comparing the development and design for each of the environments.

As for usage stats, I'd have to check with the client (not sure they'd want that public).
I agree, generally. I find Mac the most irritating platform to use -- the shortcuts are all different because Apple has a silly insistence of using Super where they should use Ctrl, and common shortcuts are supplanted by the OS, leaving apps to have to find new ones. The Dock is a slow method of switching and Sup+~ shortcut to switch to a windows is more annoying than a straight Alt+Tab. Sup+H and your window goes away; this has confused a lot of people I know, and it annoys me a lot when I try to look at history.

I really see no serious UI benefit in Apple's products. It seems roughly equivalent to me, and it uses the same paradigms as other conventional systems, it just does it in a shinier way, and it seems cool just because Apple does it, just like everything MTV does seems cool to a teenager.
Docs...yes, we're getting there. Not all the languages features are even documented because they were added very quickly. It's coming along.

I've been thinking about a MirahDoc format. I think we could pretty much do it like JavaDoc. Potentially even make it work with Doclets.

There is an old NB plugin based on the Ruby plugin, but I doubt it works now. We'd love to have help here. The plugin is on github: https://github.com/mirah/mirah-netbeans-plugin. Of course we'd like help supporting Eclipse and IntelliJ too.
Actually I think this is a fair question. I think it's important to remove barriers and prejudices that prevent any person of a particular sex from being able to go into any field that they choose but I also think it's not straightforward to say that having a 50/50 split always leads to the optimal situation or that if a 50/50 split doesn't exist it automatically means there is some barrier or prejudice. I think it would be much better to focus on making sure that teachers going into the field are competent regardless of their sex.
They'd still have ambiguity in ad sales revenue. And if this development is as profitable as this guy claims, I don't think twitter will be concerned about how accurately people can value their company. The price will tend toward actual worth and profit per share in the end anyway, so they'd probably prefer the profitable decision over the ambiguity of their target valuation. That's not to say I think it would be profitable, but if it is, they should definitely take the concretely profitable choice over the choice which allows investors to believe they might be a little more profitable than that.
I did manage to generate a GWT application from Mirah=>Java once, but the Java source required some massaging. So it's close, but not quite there yet. Soon.
they still refer to web apps as "scripts"

I did some work for a local bank a few years ago where they used the same terminology. It was quite the culture shock. It reminded of me going to see movies with my grandparents, who still called them 'pictureshows'.
But I think it's wise, in all debates, to maintain that civility. At the end of the day, which comments are getting the attention?

I think he's right, I think it's important to defend what he thinks is right, and I understand how it can be frustrating, but we all just have to have the fortitude keep the flames in check.
Organic Entrepreneur Pork Chalupas Recipe
But don't you have to pay for servers, electricity, support, lawyers, etc? (I really know nothing big of the social web business, I'm a game developer trying to understand it).
WirelessEmporium
And said ethicists may also be of the prevalent opinion among civilised people, that death penalty is an abomination.
Interesting point. Let's see what that really means.

Twitter was on track for 200m users in 2011 [1]. Twitter was valued at 7.7b dollars a few weeks back [2]. That's about $38.5 per user. Surely fewer than half the users would pay for Twitter, which would mean that those paying must be worth at least 77 dollars. At a discount rate of 15%, each of those paying customers must yield 11.55 annually in free cash flow (i.e. after costs) to justify Twitter's valuation.

Of course, Twitter could always find ways to extract money from the non-payers, but yes, you bring up a great point: Is it reasonable to expect that half the users will pay about $12 bucks a year on top of his fractional costs to continue to use the service?

[1] http://www.tgdaily.com/software-brief/52284-twitter-on-pace-...
[2] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-7-7-billion_b6...
Here's a thread on xda-developer forum of working MicroSD cards list

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=834144

Confirmed Working(Data remains after soft reset):

Centon 8GB Class 6

Kingston 4GB Class 4

Kingston 16GB Class 4

Microcenter 16GB Class 2

Patriot 16GB Class 2

PNY 8GB Class 4

PNY 16GB Class 2

SanDisk 8GB Class 2

SanDisk 16GB Class 4

Currently Unstable/Unsure:

Kingston 8GB Class 4

Kingston 32GB Class 4

SanDisk 16GB Class 2

SanDisk 32GB Class 2

Confirmed Not Working(Data gone after soft reset):

A-Data

A-Data 4GB Class 6

A-Data 8GB Class 6

A-Data 16GB Class 6

Lexar 16GB Class 6

Transcend 8GB Class 6

Transcend 16GB Class 6

Also, just found Patriot 16GB Class 4 on Amazon, it now claims it works on Samsung Focus

http://www.amazon.com/MicroSD-Memory-Samsung-Mobile-MicroSDH...
That's a bit depressing to hear. The SSD perf I've seen on laptops seemed great, but I suspect that in conjunction with slower memory, we'll still see issues. :/
Scala is a great language, but the requirement that I ship Scala's libraries if I want to do thinks the Scala way is a nonstarter for the use cases I have. Yes, you can Proguard a lot of that away, but if I use Scala's collections or other libraries, I'm still stuck adding a runtime lib.

As far as the others go...I don't disagree. Perfect integration with Java is perhaps a bit debateable, since you can't overload constructors, can't define real static methods Java can see, and so on. But those are minor items.

I don't intend Mirah to be a Scala-killer either. Scala is more of a platform now than just a language, and if you're on that platform, you have my blessing. If, however, you just want something to replace javac everywhere you use Java today, I believe Mirah is a better fit.
Happy 80th Birthday, Leonard Nimoy
Interesting...and the point about "the name" being the most important thing is really insightful. That's exactly true.
Noticed this yesterday when I was going to download R14B02. Took me a minute to make sure I was on the right site...

Now I can't wait for them to update the online man pages. Something like redis.io documentation would be ideal. A console right there, shows the complexity of functions. I'd be so excited...
What is the actual issue?

What is the technical problem that Twitter are actually facing? Does it simply come down to something like processing power?
What We Cannot Predict
IBM? Isn't that the company who gifted the entire 'Personal' computer market to Microsoft and Intel?
Alternatively you can go "amalgated" (luajit, juce, and other projects do it). It's also called "unity" build (in game developer slang).

It's not the same, because two .cpp files concatenated into one should work as they were before being split (so careful on reusing static variable names, macro defines, etc.)

Also "amalgated", "unity" builds tend to make the compiler use way more memory, and reduces the possibility of spreading the compilation across many processes. Granted that latter thing is a bit of a problem by itself - for example MSVC's LTCG (Link-Time Code Generation - a whole program optimization) just produces some intermediate code in the .obj files, and maybe produces it way faster than generating real cpu code.... Then the linker takes it all and has to produce it (significantly slower linker times).

With amalgated builds, at least you can divide your big project into 8 or 16 files, that compile on 8-16 processes.

(JUCE splits it in four for example)
Edinburgh, like really north
We've slowly moved more and more of Mirah into Mirah code as well, which will help performance over time. Currently almost all of Mirah is written in (J)Ruby, with according startup and performance overhead. Great for prototyping, and great for extending (we will probably always allow defining language features in Ruby) but not great for quick startup and fast execution.
Sounds like a cool idea. It would be interesting to see the rules you're using in addition to the pictures of the dungeons.
I wish this were better written and better edited. I gave up after 2.5 min.
So if I understand it correctly: First they threw away the rhythmbox tray icon and made it quit on "X" in order "not to clutter the tray". Then they reverted to their own meta-trayicon and made even more applications fold to tray on "X". Now they want to remove "quit" completely and make "X" a "maybe quit, maybe close, you don't need to know the answer"?

I'd really like it if they started publishing their research / references / discussions. Right now it seems like they just do what they want and wait to see if it works or not.
Apparently, Eightbit.me has hijacked my Twitter profile photo
Film recreation of Gagarin's historic spaceflight to be shown off next month
I think they were actually trying to say that they are looking for people who will continue working past 5pm if they're hot on something, instead of -always- checking out at 5pm no matter what. Some companies will actually let you flex your time a bit and work late 1 night and come in late or go home early another to make up for it. It ends up better for the worker and the company both.

However, it definitely wasn't clear and if I were looking at that as a potential job, I'd have to assume they work massive overtime and don't get appreciated for it, since they don't bother to explain.

But as to hiring the right person, it really can be incredibly hard. In my previous job, we spent a lot of time interviewing to try to find people who had a good attitude (most important) and can actually do the work. We usually got the first correct, but the second was 50/50... If that.

And when looking for a job, I've found it's also incredibly hard to get a good sense of the work environment. Try as I might this last time, I didn't really have a clear view of how things would be. I assumed to much, and didn't ask enough questions. I'm not displeased, just surprised. Again, attitudes were good, oddly enough.
It would improve teaching the same way it would improve software development: statistically. Talent is normally distributed, across both genders, meaning that external forces that repel one gender from a profession reduces the quality of the talent pool for that profession.
Congratulation! Better look. Under Links->Erlang applications and projects, please consider to include Erlang apps such as Riak, RabbitMQ, CouchDB, ejabberd, Mochiweb, Webmachine and Zotonic.
Here's the example from Mirah's repo: https://github.com/mirah/mirah/blob/master/examples/dynamic....

It does require Java 7 and there's no plans to make it work on Java 6-. Unlike the rest of Mirah, this feature (if you use it) does require a runtime library, since Java 7 / invokedynamic do not ship anything builtin for choosing a target Java method. We use Attila Szgedi's "dynalink" project, which provides a default dynamic linker based on Java language specification method selection rules.

Long story short: yes, Mirah can support dynamic dispatch as well, but it needs a little bit of runtime library to support that.
Your task killer might be hurting your battery life rather than helping it. In any case, in recent versions (2.1+ I think), Android is better at managing tasks than a third-party app, and overzealous background task killing doesn't help anything.

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...
Yeah but those companies, Coca Cola etc, can only pay as long as Twitter have the user-base. And if the adverts cause users to go visit the site less, then their revenue stream from advertising would shrink.

Would they put averts in the Developer-API responses too? One one hand it's free to use, on the other hand it's being paid for by advertising. What company wants to be a slave to advertising companies? That sounds like a difficult situation to be in.
So proud to be working with two of the startups mentioned in the article.
Fake numbers: Pro accounts will go for $10/month, but Twitter promised investors that free accounts are worth $20/month. This is going to lead to some awkward questions, like "How do we convert the pro users to free users?", or they'll be forced to revise down the expected value of a user.

There are a lot of companies with freemium models that work, but they mostly treat the free version as a loss leader. I don't think Twitter is valuing its free accounts in loss leader territory. That's my take, anyway.
Economics of startups and ad industry is a lot like that of farmers and corn. Hard to find quality food without junk load of corn syrup in it, and farmers are always poor. Ads, like corn will keep winning unless tech crowd is able to think of equally innovative ways of monetizing their innovative ideas.
Teenage Scientists
I don't know why LaunchRock is invite only. I built the same thing for one of my websites in an hour. If you want the code, send me a message and I'll be happy to share it. For reference, my landing page is @recipebot.com
RIM has 2 people sharing the position of CEO and 3 sharing that of COO. Always thought it was great recipe for a soulless organization with no direction or vision.

No compromise.
How is Google entrenched in search? It's entirely feasible to build a competitive product and there are a few out there. Nothing locks their users in. Switching is no technical trouble, nothing needs to be relearned, and there's no risk.

Android weakly complements search, by making it the default, but it's still easy to switch if one actually cares. And they don't have complete control of the platform.

Really, they are just running on brand recognition from being uncontested for so long, and arguably still. That's not a moat, that's just a really nice castle.
Love the new design. Now I await for some form of erldocs.com-like documentation browser from them as well!

Citing a simple mailing list demonstration here:
http://www.erlang.org/%3C/div%3E%3Cdiv%3E%3Ch1%20style=%22fo...
Second time you post this anti-semitic garbage?
Is there an emoticon for heavily ironic?
If Pro users pay for quality of service, you can probably still sell ads to them, or sell their data to marketers; that's what I was thinking. I agree that Pro users won't be lucrative for Twitter.
MacRuby is moving to Github
Contracts are written and signed. Specs should wikied.
> C is a minefield of undefined behavior. Integer overflow is considered undefined behavior.

Only for signed integers. Unsigned integers are defined to wrap around.
Working around Android's screen.width bug
Hmm,

Why "modern, up-to-date design decisions" tend to actually make computers lousier despite their being conceived of by people whose very job it is to make things better?

And especially, why do they tend to make open source GUIs especially shitty?

Well...

First, what's good and desirable about these "modern, up-to-date design decisions" UIs is that they are organized around a tightly integrated, sort-of-intuitive metaphors in theory, and even in UI Labratories, let the average person accomplish more things, and accomplish those thing more quickly. The Office ribbon is fine example. In order to let a person accomplish more while confusing them less(giving fewer choices), it must anticipate what the user does...

Anticipation... stop there, there's the first problem - anticipating the users intentions. It's not just that the anticipation can be just wrong from get-go (though that happens too). It's that anticipation is an approach in it's present incarnations scales very badly. As soon as you want to do something hard, the system will stop anticipating you and so the hard thing is twice as hard.

And problem two of tightly integrated metaphors is that since they inherently have to abstract from how a computers' software and hardware actually work, any task that's hard for the machine will suddenly have to be done in a fashion that takes into account the machines' limitations and so violates the metaphors - if your app takes up 10GB, it need a quit menu item, damn - but giving it that menu now puts it in conflict with the "UI guidelines".

And finally, the reason tightly-integrated metaphors are especially bad in Open Source is they require more consistency so the user can count on them (even from otherwise separate applications). And you'll have a hard time getting that with a horde of volunteers. IE, why KDE 4 was terrible.
This is not anti-semitic, it is a true news story and ironic from a government to ask facebook for censorship, plus for your info Arabs are semitic too!
More money, perhaps, but to me that's not saying much. As usual everyone is competing for 3rd place, not just in the market but in developers' hearts. Whichever platform gets an amazing new innovative app first wins, third loses. The rest didn't even place.
Huh. I find that shortcut consistency is actually a strength of the platform. Are you talking about inconsistencies between OS X's choice and the other OSes you use? Because otherwise, I don't see it. Only on the Mac do I know that I can use the same key combo (apple-,) to get to the preferences of an application, regardless of where it came from. And I'm not sure how apple-` is "more annoying" than alt-tab; apple-tab still exists for switching between applications. apple-` just switches between the windows of an application. I actually like that ability, and again, it's consistent across applications.

OS X may not be your cup of tea, and that's just fine. You just happened to attack what I perceive as one of its strengths, so I'm surprised by your choice of targets.
http://feedblog.org/2008/10/12/google-bigtable-compression-z...

There's also an interesting discussion at: http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=81 You can get better compression by organizing your data such that similar data falls within the compression window, or if you can't reorganize data you can build a custom compressor that specifically looks at older versions of a page for matches (I guess that's like git).