skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very interesting to me, as a computer science student, who does "techie" things like code a take a lot of technical classes, yet always been considered (or considered myself) a "artistic" person.

When I was younger, my best subjects were Art and English, and my worst subject was always Math. This had continued to be true, as I consider myself much better at design than at coding or problem solving. I wouldn't say the dichotomy is necessarily true or false - I hate to think we are stuck as one or the other, and I certainly know people who are talented at both.

On the other hand, in my observation, there always seems to be an inherent aptitude - I struggle and work a lot harder with "technical" things; but it can be overcome - I am still a CS student at top university, and am not a phenomenal coder, but I can keep up. For so-called "technical" people, you may or may not believe in the dichotomy, but that doesn't mean hard work can't make you better at "creative" work than "talented" others.
The term "strong" appears overloaded here. A language can be dynamically typed, but still have strong typing (in the sense that the language, whether at compile time or runtime, enforces what operations are allowed on a particular value).
As a developer/designer, I spend a lot of time getting this _exact_ message across to developers who "don't do design" and designers who are afraid of code. I've given that same schpiel many times before -- in almost the exact same words ("false dichotomy", "labels", "we can be skilled at anything we dedicate ourselves to").

Can't upvote this enough.
Clicable http://moviebyheart.com
Static analysis is a great tool - Clang's isn't too bad - but it isn't the right one to drop into a normal workflow.

We still develop using GCC - for our use case Clang performance isn't there yet - but have our continuous integration system perform Clang builds (as well as other platform/compiler variants, with unit+regression tests, etc.) so we miss out on the immediate build breakage that you mention, but do find out within ~30 mins if someone slipped up.
Can you recommend any books (or projects) that would be good references for learning design?
Well, one of the best cell-level examples I can think of is somatic hypermutation, the mechanism by which your immune system refines a good antibody into an excellent one. Briefly, your body starts out with the B-cell that produces the good antibody, and randomly mutates the critical regions of the antibody gene, generating a large population of B-cells that each produce slightly different antibodies. The B-cells with the best antibodies (highest affinity for the antigen) are selected and given the "do not die" signal. The rest of the B-cells do not receive this signal and self-destruct. The end result is a population of B-cells that produce higher-affinity antibodies than the original. Repeat while ill.

I may misremember some of the details, but that's the gist. Your body basically generates antibodies via an evolutionary algorithm. Wikipedia has a good explanation. Keep an eye out for the word "selection": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_hypermutation

Hey, look at that. Wikipedia also has this enlightening article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_selection
There is an artist in everyone. Everyone.
I'm curious if atmospheric conditions were taken into account such as oxygen content, solar energy, saline content and whatever else would have affected the weather.
FWIW It was a pretty spontaneous creation. I'm attending the conference and being a regular user/visitor/lurker/fan of wompt, created a room and mentioned it to dan and he took the ball and ran with it. Which is a pretty appropriate experiment for a Lean conference methinks :P
Errata:

"Using the cache will automatically cache the index page by default" => "...cache the page that you put the cache manifest reference to"

"This only works on iOS devices, though" => "This only works on Webkit devices, though"
Did Richard dawkin's "selfish gene" not move us beyond this point in the debate? With the focus on survival of the fittest _genes_ rather than the fittest organisms altruism seems far more logical.
Joe Kraus once said in a talk that companies, especially startups, need to triple down on what they're good at rather than focusing on all their weaknesses - that's really the only way a startup can win since it can't be better than a big company at a lot of things, but it can be head and shoulders better at just one thing. I'm not sure how this applies to people, especially since balanced people can bring a fresh perspective to things (i.e. a programmer with some creative background might approach a problem in new and interesting ways).

Without arguing the efficacy of the TigerMom approach, this is indeed why a lot of parents force their kids to do something - you may not have a knack for it at first and be tempted to write off that it just isn't for you, but you need to put in a little more time to really figure out what your true learning curve for something looks like.

One interesting question is whether you really love doing something or just love doing it because you had a knack for it initially and picked it up quickly (which results in a positive feedback loop: you spend more time on it and get even better at it compared to the things that you didn't have a knack for at first). I think college really hammered that home for me - before, I just really liked a lot of math of science because it seemed to come naturally, but to find what you really love doing, you have to hit the wall and see if you enjoy it when it becomes a struggle.
Amusing, but far-fetched. Gruber wouldn't weep on camera on a daily basis to emotionally hook the vulnerable. If anything, his style tends towards the dispassionate.

Regarding the article, I'm amazed that owning a twitter username today is made out to be almost as if he owned the domain. Is twitter that important?
I agree. If I made a robot that could follow musical notes and play the guitar perfectly, would anyone describe its playing the guitar as 'creative'? I hope not. This is a lab-like situation where we can know for sure that the robot is using zero creativity to play the guitar. It is just following instructions, it is not creating anything new.

However, if the robot could create new algorithms on the fly and could use them to tweak the way it played the guitar for the better, then we could say it is a creative robot.

Creative guitar players, like the second robot, invent new ways of playing a particular piece of music, or just a few seconds of it, to induce specific reactions in the listeners. This is creativity, and it seems to be rare not common, possibly because of how difficult it is to master the notes, and then to build rapport with the audience and manipulate their emotions.
I don't disagree. The use of technical terms is sloppy, and some of the examples are weird (at the end, Prolog is said to be somehow an experiment along the same direction as Scheme...).

But I thought this was smart:

"C was shaped by poets. Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, and Thompson built the language alongside the idiom. This had an effect equivalent to Petrarch writing in Italian. The language suddenly found itself in possession of existence and poetry at once. It has no theoretical basis. It has no overarching logic. [...] but in the hands of a master, it scintillates as its brethren do not."

It gets at the way the concise coding style in the K&R book guided people to a programming idiom that is pleasurable to write and read in a way that comparable languages, say Pascal or Basic, are not.
30% is a lot more than the 0.575% Lodsys is asking for licensing.

http://goo.gl/Q1gnn+
Since it's like iOS, Android is also disruptive to the old OS models, but on a wider range of devices. I think what he actually means is that it's not breakthrough or anything like that, since iOS appeared "first". But it is disruptive and it's disrupting not only older mobile operating systems, but old desktop ones, too (soon enough).
No, it just works differently for women.
Edit: Imagine what would happen to the industry if you changed titles from software engineers to software artists.

I long the day when software engineers start looking at themselves as artists. Take this from someone who isn't an engineer. You take your ideas and turn them into something others can interact with, play with, control, morph, do other freaking cool things with and sometimes they even get a feeling/emotion out of it. That's f&&ing art to me.
They are. It's getting fairly ridiculous. Maria Klawe is, to put it lightly, a single-issue president. I'm glad she came (I did work with her husband my senior year and was grateful for the opportunity) but I'm getting sick of seeing bright kids accepted by Caltech and MIT but not Mudd...to tweak the gender ratio.
That seems bizarre, any job I've ever had or anyone I know get two weeks vacation.

Anyone you ask wouldn't get any more than two weeks and self-employed seasonal workers such as farmers and fishermen may not get any vacation.
The Internet Is For Porn (So Let’s Talk About It)
Certainly sold quickly - our startup http://www.happybuy.com/ is in a similar space (innovating on top of e-commerce sites for price tracking, price prediction and recommendations) so in a way its good to see there is one less competitor.

Sounds more like this was a talent acquisition as the technology from SparkBuy is something that Google could have replicated relatively quickly if they wanted.
I've looked into getting one but all of the matte films I have seen have a 'shimmery' appearance to them. It looks like the surface grain of the film is not fine enough. Does anyone know of a good brand of film to use?
Seems like if you take a retail vertical, use some solr/lucene to give you faceted search, you'll be golden.

I know it's not that simple, but the tech is very accessible right now to do just that.
Pandora is radio, you have no control over what song is playing aside from being able to switch stations and being able to skip (no scrubbing) a few (5 iirc?) songs a day.

Rhapsody, on the other hand, lets you play any song from their library at any time you want. You can skip, go back, scrub, and play songs/albums/artists/playlists just as if you owned the songs (you can actually even download the songs and drop them on any MP3 player if you get the mobile plan).

MAJOR difference in the service they provide.
Yes, but it's still cute.
You're probably about that, should have included it. They are both feeding into it. But the international piece is a definite trend - just look at the makeup of the classes.
>>How do you think the Google Apps accounts are going to be setup? Google isn't some magical beast that telepathically knows all the students in a school.

Haha, I know they are not. I am saying that often school IT departments are underfunded and understaffed and would be relieved to have people that are more capable handeling it for them. Our It head was also a gym teacher.

>>When you manage services locally - i.e. desktop/laptops with directory services, file&print, email handled internally, YOU (that is, IT) decides what users can do. They can stop users from installing random Apps, or visitng porn/non-educational sites, and do things like prevent students from printing war and peace fifty times just for giggles.

Well apps are a nonissue since it is chromeos, and only has one app. I thought I had heard of filtering options for enterprise/education customers but I can't find the article saying so. Acting on the assumption that it would be filterable, are there any other objections

>>Sounds like your school needs new IT staff, not an external provider. Incompetent staff will f*ck up anything they're given.

Completely agreed, as I said the head was also the gym teacher. I am sure everyone would love to have a better system in place, but it is not economically viable on he budget given. The relative low entry cost and high uptime of google services would certainly be an option though. But how is new it staff !== external provider?
That's pretty interesting! We'll give it a look and see how much it improves things.
This. It kills me that the new top-of-the-line Thinkpad ultraportables have the same vertical resolution as my x40 from 5+ years ago. Not much incentive to upgrade...
edit: I realized the answer to this question is irrelevant. Nevermind.
Personally, I don't think you can learn design without appreciating it first.

A good place to start is to study Bauhaus. There's tons and tons of books on Bauhaus. It's ridiculous how influential Bauhaus was on everything in western culture.
Apple obtains over 200 Freescale Semiconductor hardware patents
What kind of design do you want to learn?

If you're just starting out, you have to break it down a bit into some of the component parts. Typography, composition, color. Print design is different than web design. 3d design is another thing entirely; and so on.

Let's say the goal is print design. Get hold of a layout program, such as Quark, InDesign, or Illustrator. Start by doing basic things like business cards and letterhead. Work on just the type first. Use only 1 font at first; then different weights of the same typeface. Then start trying to add in drawn elements or even just geometric shapes.

Remember: if it doesn't work in black & white, it won't work in color. When you are ready for color, keep in mind that the 3 strongest colors in design are black, white, and red. Black and red are the easier of the three; so put extra attention into the use of white (negative space).
Data Journalism Developer Studio 0.9.7 / RC4 – SUSE Gallery
So that's how you tell if he/she likes you
Not really. What if I don't want to meet a guy. Its super heteronormative and more about finding men a women to date rather than helping anybody find their match.
Wikipedia for UNESCO World Heritage
Information by Wikimedia, with link to the petition.
We're looking into the best way to let adblock users turn us off, as well as a cookie based opt-out.
Introducing the "Bug Video"
"Shredding" alone isn't virtuosity.
Wanna be an entrepreneur? Start early.
These sort of articles (and the attendant comments about false positives) always scream out for Ada to me. It's a language designed by a calm, careful thinker back in the 80's for life critical programs. It has everything Java and C++ have except the vast number of undefined states and it's designed for static analysis. By designed I mean, there are formal verifiers and the NSA has used it in a test security system.

Plus the compiled code is pretty fast. So if you're feeling the need to reduce your workload take a look at it, you might be surprised.
That prompts an interesting (to me) idea: software as social commentary. Anyone have any examples of that?
Lady Gaga's $0.99 Album Download Overwhelms Amazon
I'm assuming the bad advice is the bit about not reading sites like useit, rather than the "get out there and think" part. But I guess I see it as good advice that was communicated poorly, since I agree with your response here.

Yes, you absolutely have to watch people use your site. You need to watch them use your competitor's sites. You need to watch them use sites that come up in conversations about your products. You do not need hundreds of people to make a difference. Get people off craigslist and other classifieds for $25 and have everyone that touches the product watch them use it (as video, after the fact). This input is hugely valuable. Metrics are also very important. If a button is on a page in three places, track which one they click. Measure response times, page flows, all that good stuff (although be wary of blindly conflating marketing success with usability).

If these are the lessons you've learned from Neilsen, I can only say I'm surprised because I see his work as the opposite approach. Perhaps because I've seen him cited so often over the years by people who don't think they need to do this because they think Neilsen already answered that question. Nobody I know that actually embraces this kind of hands-on testing has any respect for his "studies".

What I'm trying to say is don't try and distill universal rules from this narrowly-scoped input. Don't ask a small number of people about a small number of experiences that have no logical connection, and try to infer some wisdom from it that you can apply to another group of people in another experience that may not be at all similar. I've had a case where adding clearer text to a vaguely worded button killed performance. Others where making a button look considerably "worse" improved success dramatically. Sometimes you need to make the font bigger, or add an icon, or remove an icon, or have a popup, or add two pages to your wizard, or not even have a wizard, or whatever. Sometimes you need to do things the wrong way because you lose from inconsistency what you gained from local quality improvements. But usually just need to do things the way that makes sense to you, learn from your mistakes because you fully understand the context, and do it better next time.
Obviously it isn't great for users, but as somebody who licenses photos on a daily basis, this is fantastic. Trying to track down the origin of and acquire the rights to internet photos on a tight schedule is a real pain, and working with WENN is not.
I hear you, but I think the rest of the world is actually polarizing to some degree. Perhaps I'm just fickle or a language whore, but I love both the dynamism and freedom of Ruby (et. al.) and the "protect me from doing stupid $#@!" of Scala (et. al.) Although honestly, I don't know that I'd want a language that supported both, if even such a thing were possible.

I do see a lot of people getting all hung up on one side or the other though; and it could be that the rest of the world you are seeing is just that group "over there".

Perhaps predictably, as I get older (in my 40's now), I am leaning more towards the strong type system languages, but I do enjoy my dalliances with a dynamic language, at least for small things.
Kickstarter campaign, anyone? (to produce an iPad + Square dongle enclosure)
Enterprise distros don't really do kernel version upgrades and this problem would be short-lived anyway since 3.1 would come out three months after 3.0.

(Y'all may be amused to hear that IBM never releases x.0 versions at all; they go straight to x.1.)
Twelve Ways to Create Barriers to Competitors
How to edit, build and install iOS Apps without being near a Mac
Interesting demo, but I feel a bit duped since it's not a pure JS implementation. I expected something written to work with NodeJS, but instead I found a browser-based JS library that talks to an instance of Flash on the page.

Still, kudos to the author for coming up with this experiment.
Erlang is not a Concurrent Functional Programming Language
I'm a fence-sitter, but as you note, it's unlikely you know me. I do find that I'm starting to lean more on the strong/static side lately, but that might be because professionally I write financial institution software which tends to be big, and I want as much checked as early and as thoroughly as possible.

For fun hobby stuff, I love dynamic languages where I can produce quite a bit of functionality in a very short (if dangerous) time and rely on a set of tests to keep it all managed.
LinkedIn working to enable SSL site wide
You're 100% right from a technical standpoint, but it's a bit hairier on the UI design side.

A huge strength of iOS is that most iPhone apps look and behave like most other iPhone apps, and that's because of the coherency provided by the UI framework and HIG. Asking developers to write their own CSS styling for widgets would result in a much more fragmented experience from app to app, which would detract from the platform as a whole (on top of a whole other slew of tiny UI touches added to UIKit, like the surprising complexity of the view-to-view transitions in CoreAnimation, that would be lost on 99% of app developers if asked to develop their own animations).

One of the most interesting things Apple is working on that everybody seems to ignore is iAd Producer. They've basically created a full-fledged HTML5 app-building tool that recreates a large part of UIKit in JavaScript, but it's currently only good for iAd development. I'd love to see what would happen if they would let developers release apps built with the tool.
How do they deal with cash payments?
No way. I know from interviewing him for Startups Open Sourced that he's pretty excited about his customers, and he specifically referred to them as "Target customers" rather than "Wal-Mart customers" because they're valuable, willing to buy, and interested in good deals rather than just cheap, worthless deals.

If you read his e-mails on the e-mail list, you can tell he puts a lot of work into it. I doubt he could do that unless he truly cared about AppSumo and the customers.
Pandora is 6 skips an hour ( More for Pandora One I think), and thumb-downing a song eliminates in on that station. I can also say I'm tired of a song, which shelves it on that station for 30 days.
I think there's a good reason why there's often a separation between creatives and technical people, and this is it:

In order to be creative, or more specifically "artistic", you have to be comfortable with the irrational. In fact, you truly need to be able to appreciate the irrational.

Most technical people I've met (particularly engineers) can't make that jump, and it's not easily taught or learned. By definition, there's often not really a rational way to go about irrationality.
Disruptive criticism? :)
> Nobody's going to deploy a dot zero in a production

I routinely deploy software right off the version control. Exhaustively tested but, still, "pre-alpha".
Okay, let's just stop the speculation. My team is focused on all kinds of marketing. We were just written up in TheNextWeb, were just interviewed by Earwolff, were on Eye On Business in Orange County, have closed two very large marketing partnerships scheduled to launch soon, as well as are launching some great contests designed to draw eyeballs. We've written 29 blog posts in May, 65-75% of them are album reviews, recaps of the week's new music releases and information about festivals and concerts. The other 25 are either about startups, music industry chat, or both.

Has it proven beneficial to us to write about our startup experience and post to HN? Yes, it has. And based on the number of votes our posts have received, people find the information valuable. We'll try not to make it so frequent that it's annoying, but the content is relevant for this forum and it has driven some great, very feedback-oriented tech people to our website, which is important for not only early adopter traffic but also getting smart people to tell us what they think of our product.

In other words, it's not the core of our marketing plan, but it's not an accident and we'll try not to abuse it. Thanks.
"Equalization of Opportunity Act" anyone? The "Anti-dog-eat-Dog Rule"? Socialism FTW.
Fortunately, that's not actually true. If the community agrees when the last valid block is, all the transactions before that will be accepted as trustworthy. The DHT (now moving to freenet) ensures that this transaction history is reliable up to the date of the exploit. Then it's just a social problem of converting into a less flawed system.

But social problems tend not to end up as near the worst case as is often feared. What you're describing is like saying that if we break the crypto underlying git repositories, you can trick the world into thinking you are the original author of linux. Obviously, no one would fall for that. But every git commit after the exploit, or from sources lacking a large consensus, would be of suspect authorship. It's a big problem, but not exactly the way you imply.
Intellectual Ventures is also a patent troll. It's just higher profile and has people involved that had some level of existing respectability at some point in the past.