skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, but that's a little mixed up, like a lot of PHP. That function returns a string, and something "not a string" to indicate completion. The standard way this is done in sane languages is to declare a nil reference (null pointer, whatever, undefined constant, etc...) that is guaranteed to be distinct from all strings, not to overload a "boolean" on top of a function that returns things that can be implicitly converted to a boolean in the first place.

Perl, for example, would write that test as "if(defined $str) {...}".

The point being: strings and booleans are an overlapped type space. If you want something outside that space, the proper choice is not a boolean.
Bram isn't running the company; he's not even the CTO. Worst-case, Bram gets to collect a salary for five years and then walk away from the smoking wreckage.

There's still time to sell to Adobe. (I don't think Amicima's technology is comparable to BitTorrent.)
Some of us bike to our desks. ;)
A common theme seems to be, google was great when it was small, now it's much like every other bureaucracy heavy big corp.

So it seem financial independence by itself would not have been enough to make them leave google.
The rules are confusing, but if you want it loosely typed there isn't much else you can do.

I have a few things I would change:

empty('0') should be false not true
if('0') should be true as well
Comparing a string and int should convert the int to a string not the other way around.

But mostly the rules are logical.
PHP's been my primary language since PHP3. The post is meant as a wry observation (and to blow off some steam) rather than an attack.

Yes, we all instinctively work round PHP's oddities by now, but you've got to admit, "more often than not the operator does exactly what you intend it to" isn't something you want to hear in relation to a programming language. A bit of rigour is no bad thing.
Thinking About Starting a Business? Try a Sales Job
"Although fears are widespread that science education in the U.S. is far behind that of China and India, Tyle and his friends are doing their best to prove that belief wrong."

I don't think when people say "science education" they're referring to "some of the best and brightest U.S. high school students" taking summer classes at MIT; they're talking about regular high schoolers taking regular classes at regular schools.

This program is cool, but it doesn't do much to say "Look at the US, it's good at science education after all"
This is obviously a fairy tale, no SEO consultant would ever give a quantified, testable prediction of the effects of their work.
the app was pulled from the apple store yesterday. it was reported that no sales went through, and if so will be canceled.

not hacker news.
Despite the anxiety about a recession, the Great Depression probably couldn’t happen again
Will Popcuts Out-Surrge Surrge with Music Rewards Program?
AdCamo's Background Ad Platform to Kill Popups
Kind of snarky... but I agree, more or less. This wasn't a particularly witty story. This was a re-enactment of Hamlet that used Facebook terminology. I mean, it's stupid nitpicking (dead people joining groups? Laaaaaaame.), but it was more-or-less drab and really only funny if you're willing to look at it with a wholly uncritical eye.

And I also agree with you that HN stories are slowly turning less interesting. It's a shame, but hopefully the tide will ebb soon.
It's true that you can't put a uniform probability measure on Z, the integers, in the way that you can on a finite set {1..n} or, for that matter, [0, 1). However, to say that one can't put any probability measure on countable finite sets, the minimum that would be required to have a definition of "most", is clearly false.

I might say "most words have vowels", and few people would disagree with me that this is a valid claim. The denominator is infinity, in the sense that I'm not constricting "words" to those existing now, and language is an open system. The set of strings that could conceivably become words is infinite. (Who would have predicted "blog" and "pwn"?) On the other hand, if we place a probability measure on words according to frequency of use (allowing that m("zwrskwzpn") might be some very, very small positive number instead of 0) we can now make statements such as "most words contain vowels", with the tacit understanding that our claim of "most" involves a weighting according to frequency of use.
More alarming than the fact that someone bought the 'I Am Rich' app is that at least 20 people here thought this possibly-fake and definitely-trivial issue was 'Hacker News'.
Will anyone miss popups? Not likely.
How to start a multilingual site
Words the Internet Killed
It's bad if the user interface for something this important depends on hidden state that the user might not remember.
The point isn't for you to tell him he is wrong. You are supposed to admit you aren't familiar with what he is talking about.

The assumption being you will do the same about a real piece if information, instead of pretending to know everything.
It seems a little hypocritical to downmod me and complain about business people taking advantage of hackers.
The price, of course, was $999.99, which isn't deceiving at all.
Or possibly it was done because it was the highest possible price you can sell your app for. And since the whole point was to show off your wealth, its likely $999 was picked for this purpose.
So is this on?
We've always had sets that approach infinity, and we've never had any trouble using these words to describe them. Grains of sand/rice, stars, cells in our biosphere, drops of water...etc

And "All" or "no/none"? That's completely ridiculous.
All water droplets on earth contain Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms. All Bloogles are Bloogles. No Floozles are non-Floozles.

The only thing new about "blogs" and "videographers" isn't the number of them, but that the definition of these words and their set boundaries are still being refined, and as such the number varies depending on one's criteria. A much better thesis would be "It's difficult to make statements about things difficult to define." which could be shortened to "Duh".
> They're the people who will succeed or fail in launching successors to Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Amgen (AMGN), and Genetech (DNA).

What part of being a child prodigy or going through "hell week" summer schools makes you entrepeneurial? What they're going through grooms them for careers in academia, which has relatively little to do with building products and companies.

> Tyle says he feels a much closer connection with his fellow young scientists than with his high school classmates.

This is setting him up to be out of touch with what people like, what they want, and how they respond to new ideas. How is that helpful?
Guys and girls both do it. It's just that it happens in two different ways.

Guys are more likely to lie about things they haven't heard of, in my experience. girls are more likely to pretend to have a similar opinion as somebody they're talking with. On the contrary, girls will admit if they don't know what you're talking about, whereas guys are very willing to say that they loathed Moulin Rouge and that your taste is terrible.

It cuts both ways.
(This article is a year and a half old now. "News"?)
Adaptive Path and Mozilla - Bringing the Lights
You need to answer one very important question before I would consider using your stuff:

Why should we trust you with our passwords?

Memengo looks an awful lot like:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/the_doghouse_p...

I know you say that you never send the password without encrypting it first, but how can we be sure of that with the iPhone app?
Although your guess is as good as mine as to why the author was surprised by 0 == false

I don't think he was surprised. Based on the post title, I gathered that he was just using that fact to set up an oddity.

The point here seems to be merely that non-empty strings can evaluate to true or false depending on whether they are typecast during the comparison. But that's less of an attention-grabber than true == false, particularly since the latter is patently false in PHP.
I would suggest working on your wording a bit inside the iTunes Store. It does well to describe it, but not so smooth when it comes to "selling" the app. I'd also play up the connection or the benefit between the iPhone app and your online offerings. What exactly does buying the iPhone app get you? Its not completely clear.

Remember, iPhone owners are like a completely separate audience. They might not have heard of you, and all they know is what your icon looks like and what you've written in the app's description. You have to sell it. Like "Once you purchase Memengo, you also receive free....[insert whatever service you provide on your website].

And you spelled "reckon" wrong.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AACN

Andersen has been shut down, but their consultants seem to be doing okay.
DOM it (Firefox extension building tips)
Well, if you prefer it that way, there is a 'null' keyword as well that does exactly what you want:

$str = string_function(...);
if ( is_null( $str ) ) {}
if ( null === $str ) {}

Just a matter of preference.
Does your email program have a confirmation step after its "Send" button?

Confirmation steps, in practice, don't really help. After a few uses, people build up the muscle memory that "action, confirmation" is the action. Then the one time in a hundred they want to cancel, they don't realize until too late.

One approach to try would be, for any purchase over $5, make a "confirmation step" that looks like a restaurant bill, and require the user to sign it (with their finger). Perhaps "sign name next to a big number" would be enough to jar them.

But really, the solution is to make it undoable/refundable. No matter what barriers you put up, somebody will do it by mistake (guaranteed), and is going to want their money back. If I can return a $1000 jacket in real life, I should be able to return a $1000 no-op app.
4 sales in 14 hours:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/the-worlds-first-luxury...
Our best responses have actually come from a Craiglist posting.

Years ago, dice did very well for us; not so much these days.

I'm somewhat aware of a lot of the job boards out there, but I didn't know if people had any good response from them. It sounds like jobs.joelonsoftware.com is probably going to be our next stop; but I'd like to spread out anywhere we're likely to get decent results.

I'd forgotten that 37signals has a board now, so I'm off to check that one as well.

Thanks a ton!
I keep reading the name as "idlework."
Tiny open source computer made from six ICs (hardware startup)
Great article, thanks for providing a point of view from someone who's not talking out of their a$$ (aka me). The wiki idea is very, very interesting - it's got that same "I'm not doing this for money but to help the world be a better place" vibe that (imho) is what makes Wikipedia successful. There are valid criticisms of this approach in the comments, namely that it would require a very strict quality control process before educators could trust it. Otherwise, millions of children would grow up thinking that Stephen Colbert really did single-handedly triple the elephant population.
Well, there is only one Java book that I really liked. If you're into things like that then just go read "Effective Java" by Joshua Bloch (who also happens to be at Google at the moment). It's one of those rare books that doesn't have a catchy title but when you will read the whole thing you will realize that you've become a better programmer. Got any recommendations for another such book? Please shoot.
that made me sad (that i spent the time) =(
To be clear: it's a matter of correctness, not preference. Using a boolean constant to represent "not a string" when there are legal string values that are equal to that constant is a design bug, that you are working around via the identity operator. I'm happy that PHP has a null; less so that you don't see value in using it where it's required.
When I hit Control-Enter to send, it actually does confirm with me that I want to do that; however, it does not when I use the mouse... (Thunderbird)

But I still completely agree with you.
"A much better thesis would be 'It's difficult to make statements about things difficult to define.' which could be shortened to 'Duh'."

Hence the need for obfuscation :)
Sure you can: 50% of positive integers (Z+) are divisible 2.

It just doesn't do much and can be easily proved to be true.

Most of the time when people use qualifiers like that it's to express some type of instinct - which seems to be what the author is against.
yeah, cause with twitter, scaling is a feature!
I think mobile apps which do this are coming, and the iPhone SDK hasn't been available long enough for really spectacular stuff to have come out. It takes a while for a neat, massively-socially-networked (how's that for a neologism) mobile game to gestate.

Here's a freebie idea for someone adventurous: a few years ago, I read about some online game, where players would sign up for some kind of a spy, murder, and conspiracy thriller. They would then periodically get emails, phone calls, faxes, and letters, to which they should react in the real world, and which advanced the plot. I don't think this was particularly multiplayer, in that I don't think that players interacted with one another.

I think using the location awareness of an iPhone could make a thriller game like this incredibly exciting and immersive. Imagine a beeping device guiding you up the stairs in a building, telling you where to find the next clue? Telling you to quickly contact another investigator, because she found something and needs to share? Pitching teams one against another to follow a trail of clues in a race to find a hidden object somewhere in the city where they play?

Implementing this would, without a doubt, be hard. Dealing with the liability issues alone could possibly sink this idea (e.g., how can you safely put random people in touch with one another, how can you ensure the safety of a particular building or other locale, and so on). In addition, it probably would require a fair amount of coordination and manual work by the organizers, so the game would have to cost a pretty penny to play. It would also have to have settings like "only play the game between 7 and 8:30 in the evening," which would of course be an even bigger nightmare of logistics. Of course, if someone figures all this out, it could become a huge hit.
You have to swear in writing you didn't make the purchase

No, you don't. And my suggestion was a fail-safe one. Realistically, he should 1) Demand a refund, then 2) See apple's policies about refunds and complain through them, then 3) See if his credit card allows chargebacks through "buyer's remorse" and if not, 4) Say you didn't buy it.

Obviously, this guy made a mistaken purchase, and if it was a physical store it would never have happened.
I'm not sure I would still agree with everything I wrote though, so take it with a grain of salt. (Although I haven't actually reread it recently.)
Oh, bullshit. I'm an SEO. You'll find a link to a downloadable pdf case study right here: http://www.voltagecreative.com/search-engine-optimization.ph...

True, many SEO are snake oil salesmen, but not me or my firm. We back our SEM program with results.

</mild-overreaction>
This is on, for those interested.

Noon at Shake Shack on Saturday, August 9. Look for me in a light blue Plaxo tshirt.
Well, my point is:

$str = '';
$str == null; #true
$str == false; #true
null == false; #true

So in the case of PHP, it's not a matter of correctness, simply because of how PHP handles type coercion. 'false' and 'null' both have legal string values that can evaluate as equal to them or each other.
"A fool and his money are soon parted."
- Thomas Tusser
Much ado about the iPhone's 'kill-switch'
Har har, but Vista actually changed a number of fundamental things about XP, including a totally new security model, an overhaul of the graphics system to move it out of the kernel, and a ton of new performance optimizations like SuperFetch. What's changed so much about desktop Linux in the same time? Compiz?
> Comparing a string and int should convert the int to a string not the other way around.

No:

'0007' == 7; #true

By your logic:

'0007' == 7; #false, wtf?

And why the hell should `empty('0')` return false?! emtpy() determines if the value contains something. I would most certainly think that a string with even one character is not empty, even if it's a space.
sending an email != charging your credit card
This app would go nicely with one of these: http://www.extraordinary-i-phone.com/

Though if you buy a $50,000 diamond studded iPhone you don't really need a $1000 app to tell people you're rich...
Anthrax suspect got into frequent Wikipedia edit wars about a sorority
Sometimes it is better to not make bad copies of good things.
"Most of the time when people use qualifiers like that it's to express some type of instinct - which seems to be what the author is against."

Hah! Wonderful sentence. Love the irony. Also concur. Sorry if this is a bit off topic, but I couldn't let such quality wordsmithing go unheralded.
All is fair in love and war.

The real point here is to just relax and be human while making a pitch. If your feeding lines of BS to a VC he won't want to be your business partner, because it will want to know when things are going bad. Complete frankness and a normal conversation will get you far in life.
Here's a soviet cartoon film "Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке" http://rutube.ru/tracks/749406.html
Copyright and "Garfield Minus Garfield": from Web Sensation to Book in Less than a Year
The interesting lesson is that this trivial story made it to a high spot on Hacker News. It is just as with that satire of xkcd: just put some stick figures on whatever you have to say, and people will love it. Obviously it works with fairy tales, too.

Then again the lesson is not that interesting, it was known before.
The Right Answer to this question is, "No, I hadn't heard about that study. Can you send me a pointer?" That completely defuses the situation, and hedges against the possibility that the guy might not be joking.
SQL attacks inject government sites in US, UK
I'm sorry to say, but my first reaction was "How much are they charging for the PDF?"

There are a LOT of SEO snake oil salesmen out there. Or maybe there aren't that many, but they're bad/loud/obnoxious enough to give the majority a bad name. Unfortunately, the result is the same...
Cybersecurity lessons from the Civil War
Flock Web Browser Eases Multitasking But Has Drawbacks
Warner says music video games (Guitar Hero, Rock Band) must pay more for music
Amazing 3D brain MRI visualizations
d) "No, I haven't heard of that"
whose (I'm surprised that's the actual title of the article!)
New Patent May Allow For iTunes Streaming
Words that result in buffer overflows:

* more

* double

* triple

* ...
Are you secretly Steve Jobs? :) Because your post does a lot to explain why Apple's initial position on third-party apps was "no, thank you".

I don't think the gatekeepers' primary role is to keep apps out of the store. It's to make sure there's an easy way to yank apps back off the market, and issue a recall notice to every single affected user, after trouble strikes. Kind of like what's happening to this app right now.

If Apple weren't just rubber-stamping applications, the process would be even slower, and we'd be hearing even more complaints from the long list of people who are still waiting for their applications to go live.

As for the "horrible engrish descriptions"... can you imagine the firestorm if Apple were to reject apps on the basis of the quality of their ad copy? Not every iPhone developer writes fluent English, after all.

It is annoying that approved apps appear and disappear more than once. What other examples of this are there, besides the tethering app?

(I can well imagine why the tethering app might appear and disappear... it raises the question of whether Apple is allowed to sell an app which is explicitly disallowed by some customers' service contracts, but perhaps not by all of them. They've probably got AT&T lobbying on one side, the app's authors, Apple's marketing department, and every self-respecting developer lobbying on the other, and lawyers from several countries in the middle. Perhaps the availability of the app depends on which of these parties is shouting the loudest on any given day.)
MIT Report: We Can Cut Auto Fuel Consumption 50 Percent in 25 Years
CEO:

If no one notices, we save money, which means a better bottom line now, which means a better bonus for me, since my reward incentives are strongly biased towards the short term. What to do...
Is "Apple bashing" the new "Why twitter doesn't scale"?
Can hi-def porn save Vudu?
DC Post of the Week - Graceful Server Connection Draining
Giving Telemarketers a Taste of their own Medicine
> Apparently you can be an idiot and get funding in Canada though, maybe I should move there.

Well .. are you an idiot ? :-)
Is the iPhone NDA About Patents?
Nokia E71 Grey Unlocked
The Nokia E71 series takes a step in the right direction by introducing the E71. This smartphone with a full-size QWERTY is the perfect solution for anyone who wants a slim phone with Push email. At 10mm thin.
Exactly. Read Tufte's 4 books, or just Don't Make Me Think, or just read Joel of pg's stuff about usability, and you've gone from extremely shty to mediocre, but you're ahead of 80-85% of everyone else. Throw in a little about typography and color, and you're probably ahead of 95% of developers. You might not be the greatest in the world, but the state of the industry is so bad that you'll have a huge relative advantage.
"The point being: strings and booleans are an overlapped type space."

That's the problem. Because they overlap for comparisons, you can't tell an empty string apart from boolean false. It would be safer if it wasn't that way.

But the function returning false is perfectly valid. It's not any different from returning null or some other value because it is distinct from a string.

In PHP, like your Perl example, you could easily write "if (is_bool($str)) {...}" if you wanted to. It's not really any different. The problem is that you don't get an error if you go ahead and treat that boolean as an empty string.
Build a custom web page or database for free with webepags
Why do Government and State's official websites suck?
If the best coders work for governments, then what about the best designers? I have yet to run into a Government or State official website that looks decent and has a good search feature.
"How much are they charging for the PDF?"

:-) It's FREE
Unless it was not known and storytelling is a good way to communicate a lesson.
And a few hours later, I can verify that it works quite nicely too. Again, thanks very much.
This almost sounded like an interesting article until the phrase "Cutco Cutlery" appeared. Those guys are only slightly less cult-like than Amway.

My ex tried working for them, years ago. Not a fun experience. Cost her money in the end -- the best salespeople at Cutco are the hiring managers, who begin by selling their prospective employees an expensive demo kit. Beware, beware, beware.

And, in case you don't know, I should mention that even high-quality expensive cooking knives are a big ripoff. The first words out of every pro chef's mouth are "go to a restaurant supply store and buy a basic steel chef's knife, with sterilizable plastic handle and a brand like 'Global', for about $19. That's what all the pros use, and they chop more than you'll ever chop."
That is pretty cool, congratulations!
I realize that, but it is still misleading. If Eistein said something misleading in a relativity lecture, it would still be misleading :)
DVD/NES Mod
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Apple_Computer

WTF? Unreal. It was a joke the day is was born. My god, I'm going to patent sitting on one ass cheek, cuz, you know, nobody's actually patented it yet. Think of the license fees!