skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of those are absolutely true, and many of them reduce to one thing

- didn't have a frickin' clue what the code was supposed to do

I remember reading the old cartoon (and it was already old when I saw it 25 years ago) of the manager saying "You guys start writing code, I'll go find out what they want", and swearing I would never be that kind of manager only to find, all those years later, that many of my programmers had already internalized the notion and routinely sat down to write code without having a clear idea of what the block of code was supposed to accomplish.
Uniformity in code is bad - it tells you that there's a common concern or pattern which should be factored out. Uniformity in code style is essential, the same way it is for prose.
The "death knell" will be when they flip the switch and only allow apps to be installed from the Mac App Store. The capabilities are there, it's just a matter of slowly moving users there so they don't revolt. It'll be locked down just like iOS.

Apple is moving in a direction I don't particularly like. From an investor standpoint it seems they're doing it the right way. From a freedom perspective, not so much.

On another note, the new screen sharing in Lion that will allow multiple users connected and viewing their desktops without affecting each other is an interesting feature. In the enterprise this could be adapted and used as a dumb terminal model to deploy Apple products on the cheap.
It reminds me of the Pentagon, which has the same sort of stuff along with food vendors. It was pretty busy at lunch time and seemed to be a popular place to have a walk and talk meeting.
>If this were true, how come not all great programmers are great writers? Why don't more great programmers become fluent in other spoken languages?

Why doesn't Mark Twain have any novels written in French? Why would you hold computer programmers to a greater standard than any of the great authors?
Haven't read it yet, but here's a direct link to the report:
http://www.visionmobile.com/rsc/researchreports/VisionMobile...

FYI for those on mobile/capped access, it comes in at 15 MB.
"The Internet Is My Religion"
There's not a chance in hell that Apple would trust something so core to their business to someone else - let alone direct competitors like Microsoft or Amazon. Next.
Godwinned in 1st comment.

(edit: apparently it wasn't actually the first comment)
Rubyish, perlesque, lispy are all words I've come across.
I doubt he intended it as an argument. I'd read that as a very awkwardly phrased (ESL-garbled?) version of "It's genetically modified to be better for you".
I don't know about Apple, but whatever runs intiniteapple.net, it wasn't ready for our interest.

There's a similar one here:

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/06/08/is-icloud-running...
Are you not contradicting yourself here?
Financial Times web app
The sheer stupidity of the comments scares me. There are good arguments to make against genetic modification -- at least at this point in time. However, the hysteria in the comments... ouch.
New Portfolio -- Thoughts?
Need feedback/reviews of my new portfolio design from the HN community.
Love the implicit dualism in the title. How come is it that our brains are misled? As if we or our "minds" were somehow less susceptible.
Wouldn't the best way be to use humans to make human milk?
That's very likely a simple function of cost: You can't do iOS programming without the (relatively expensive) mac hardware.

Also, the actual report is here:

http://www.visionmobile.com/rsc/researchreports/VisionMobile...

Other points from the (CC/BY) report:

Platform revenue potential. Not all platforms are born with equal revenue
potential. Our research revealed large discrepancies across platforms in terms of the
revenues applications are bringing to developers. iOS topped the chart, making 3.3x more money per app than Symbian developers followed by Java ME (2.7x) and
BlackBerry (2.4x). Android (1.7x), mobile web (1.6x) were the weakest performing
platforms in terms of revenue per app and only ahead of Symbian (1.0).

....

App store fragmentation is an under-hyped challenge for developers. Each of the
fifty-plus app stores available has its own developer sign-up, app submission process,
artwork and paperwork requirements, app certification and approval criteria, revenue
model options, payment terms, taxation and settlement terms. The marginal cost of
distributing an application through one more app store is significant, contrary to
popular perception.

....

Platform priorities For companies going mobile, platform priorities are mixed, but
the core challenge is common – market penetration and reach across the customer
base. Organisations developing B2C apps (targeted at consumers) are extending their
offering first Apple and then to Android, to mobile web, to BlackBerry and finally to
Windows Phone 7. For B2B apps (applications paid by the corporate IT manager or
CIO), HTML is already the platform of choice- not just for deployment on mobile web
browsers, but also by converting HTML and JavaScript into native iPhone and Android
apps using tools from companies such as Appcelerator, PhoneGap, RhoMobile and
Sencha.
I am going for millionaire! what say you?
30 Must See Web Generator for Lazy Webmasters
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I really don't come to HN to read these types of articles... I come here for technical and entrepreneurial topics, not this.
Ask a novelist about the pains they have when the extremely clean, excellent plot fails due to some small point, and they have to adjust it.
As a user I've unfollowed twitter accounts that were developers but as there was sport literally flood my timeline with comments. It's a question of volume thought. I don't care about the occasionnal comments on things that doesn't interess me.
"...67 per cent of developers code for Android..."
I'm a little confused. 67% of all developers? 67% of mobile developers?
Anchoring is but one of the many reasons that fixed point estimates are fraught. Intervals are much more useful, and the discussion that results from trying to elicit them is often more valuable than the estimate.
"Entitled Developer Economics 2011, the study shows that 67 per cent of developers code for Android, up from 59 per cent in 2010. IOS lags behind at 59 per cent, but that's also up from 50 per cent last year, most likely due to Apple's introduction of the iPad."

Last time I checked 67% + 59% != 100%
I don't know that the ITT Tech thing is enough to condemn him. Sure, it's a crappy school, but great people can rise from humble places. One of the absolute very best programmers I know has something like two ITT Tech courses under his belt, and is entirely self-educated beyond that.

This guy doesn't need any credentials to prove he's a fool.
It's interesting that they mention the Monty Hall problem. I've found that most of the misunderstanding for it comes from the lack of separation of stages in the problem. People confuse choosing a single strategy versus given probability in stages. It seems much easier to understand when that distinction is made.

On a tangent, the part about Africa really ties in well with hypnotism. I'm not sure how many of you have studied it, but hypnotism is full of subtle suggestions like what was mentioned. In fact, it's really just a bunch of suggestions that we have no reason to think critically about. Off the tangent: Considering this makes me wonder how many studies are heavily biased. What a fascinating subject.
Language can be expressive in ambiguous ways, with multiple valid ways to express the same emotion. Notation should be definable, unambiguous, and precise. The fewer ways to express something, the better.
You say that on a site where the ethos is "start building a company and product now, we'll figure out what it should do later" - because that's a way that works.
SEO Checklist for Re Designing a B2B Website
Like most people can't afford to buy a mac mini for development..
What is Inbound Marketing?
When you're reading a novel you don't have to worry about concurrent access to a resource, threads, asynchronous events, or even much less conditional branching.

When you're writing a novel, you do.
Like someone said, you can find people to buy BTC with Dwolla in the #bitcoin-otc channel on freenode. The order book doesn't show much now but you might still find people there willing to buy if you want more cash sooner and more safely than paypal.

Do you have an idea you are set on? I am kicking myself today because I sold most of my few hundred bitcoins right before the market went nuts. I would love to have a technical cofounder and/or a small amount of seed money if you would consider me.
Well, I suppose developers could develop for more than one platform.
SEO Is A Mindset
Well that might be all well and good if you want to be a programmer with the rest of the herd. But the most profitable app store is the Apple store. Personally I'm happy that there aren't so many Objective C programmers around.
Other languages call such code... idiomatic :-)
Chamunda Mataji
History Chamunda Mata is when the two demons named 'Chanda' and 'Munda' good for the road for many years thanks to the Lord Brahma. Brahma was pleased when he appeared before them and asked the demons warriors strong and dominate the world and into the sky. Brahma was merciful wish.There granted to the chaos of the world and demons became very greedy and tried to revive the sky and the three houses of Vishnu (Vaikuntha), Shiva (Kailas) and Brahma (Brahmaloka).
Hey, Duncan -

Thanks. I'm on vacation next week so I will have plenty of time to put something together. I'll shoot you an e-mail when I do.

Also, if you hear anything on Lisp gigs, please let me know! I am tired of explaining to folks I work with how annoying it is to have to fight a language when there are better alternatives out there.
It took me a while to realize that the author meant Smart (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29). Using the marketing typography made it seem generic, which I find amusing in some ironic way.

Also, speaking of typography, what's the deal with the bar over the 'o' in TransLoc? Is it like röck döts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots)?
"We're sorry, not in the sense that we're going to undo this feature or make it opt in or actually change our behavior in the future, but in the sense that we aren't entirely pleased that people are whining about us in the media for a news cycle or two again."
I've been able to get by in Apple's app store with minimal knowledge of Objective C and a massive usage of C++. Thank God for *.mm files!
Show HN: q1tifier
This is a side project we did.

We call it q1tifier (pronounced 'quantifier') and it's main aim is to make sense of numbers. E.g. if you search for the number '5000' one of the result is '5000m = about the length of 89 NASA Space Shuttles' (see it here! http://duuble.com/q1tifier/view/3/=5000)

Numbers don't really mean anything by themselves, so through this such numbers could be more meaningful! This idea spawned from seeing infographics that often compare numbers we real life stuff, and we decided to make a database for people to supply such small pieces of info and facts.

The database is completely free and open, anyone can add any fact or bit of info. There is also a very basic api that returns results in JSON format.

Help contribute some info/facts to the database!
Link: http://duuble.com/q1tifier/
Why it would be good if Color failed
Google granted leave to file Daubert motion; attacks Oracle's damages report
Laptops in class: How distracting are they?
Should be of "mobile developers", upon reading the article. But nonetheless, the numbers are a bit pointless since they don't indicate overlap (gosh, you can develop both iOS and Android?). What would be interesting is to know the share of "original" development (not "just" porting - but apologies for the generalization) on platforms, or if it is done multi-platform from the start.
Is it? In prose you say "first he rushed to the exit door, then he leaped down the stairs, finally he ran to get the train" while in programming it is better to write

socket.close(); window.close(); file.close()
Does anyone else get a creepy Dubai vibe reading this? Some of the statements like 'there will be no straight glass' beg the question - is it really worth it?
I think the ethos here is clearly different than you suggest. Trying to build a product without having an idea what it should do is not a way that works.

Being open to refining your idea or pivoting as you go is a horse of a different color.

But trying to write code without a clear purpose in mind is the equivalent of monkeys banging away at typewriters, to return to our "writing" metaphor.
Android Apps on NetBeans 7 – Crash Dummy Guide
I have a few feature requests; mainly because I noticed missing 3 letter words in my own cloud:

* Add handling for hashtags (overriding the min character length)
* Slightly more complicated: consider adding click detection on mentions, replies, and hashtags to link to their perspective urls. This would be a very neat addition.

http://www.quora.com/HTML5/Is-it-possible-to-add-links-to-HT...
Perhaps chinese women don't have enough milk? I remember reading somewhere that this is the case in some developed countries. Or perhaps there is too much pollution in cities (with lot of women and little cows) so the milk isn't as healthy? I don't really understand how could it be better (any change would surely be for the worse, no? After so many generations the evolution would have perfected it otherwise), I'm just trying to find some sense in what he said.
Don't go to the Marina and you won't have that problem.
Then again, very often what seems absurd is a pretty sensible engineering tradeoff.
You'd be overpaying at those prices, unless you care about the label. Go to Target, check out their luggage section, grab a $30 bag and go on one hell of a bender with the savings. That will make you far happier than a $220 messenger bag will.
Clickable: http://duuble.com/q1tifier/
If you have any suggestions/improvements, tell us here!
How much credibility does this have? BlueVia is sells a product for developers that targets Android and not iOS, while VisionMobile is a market analysis company they presumably paid to produce this study. I'd never heard of either before, and it sounds like they have a substantial financial interest in presenting Android as more interesting to developers.
This discussion brings to mind Robert Lefkowitz's Pycon keynote from 2007 on Programming Literacy, very similar to this video from Stanford: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Own-89vxYF8. He is definitely an advocate of literate programming and basically says we will all be able to read programs when they can be written in English and not in code.
This isn't impressive to me. What would be impressive would be building a skyscraper in downtown SF. Being environmentally friendly isn't building a massive campus on a plot of suburban grassland. Apple likes to say they think differently, but this isn't different. It's just slightly nicer than most other headquarters in a suburban wasteland.
> The World Wide Web would get my vote as mankind's single greatest achievement,[…]

I'd place the Internet before the world wide web. The www makes great use of many-to-many communication, but the Internet enabled it (which was its entire point, I think).
I can think of a number of novels where it's obvious some scenes got moved around for plot reasons, and their were continuity errors or other ways in which the seams showed.

But novelists only have to deal with that for maybe a year or so; programmers have to deal with this problem for potentially decades, and at that point it's a completely different problem just because the scale is different.
Thanks for clarification. I missed that completely at first. Even if the marketing dept. wants the logo in small caps, human-readable text has proper names capitalized. That's the way it should be.
You're sure your app will make at least $700 to recoup those costs? I like your optimism.
The bar over the 'o' is a pronunciation hint. It means you should pronounce it with a "long o" sound. Therefore TransLōc is pronounced more like "Trans loak" and less like "Trans lock"
At iCloud's potential scale it would be cheaper to build and maintain your own data center. Either way, they've already built the data center so the point is moot.
Ideally, yes. But all that does is add to the market for human flesh, and we don't need yet another section of the impoverished being milked (this time literally). Furthermore, a large swath of mothers have been trained by Nestle to distrust their own bodies, and instead buy formula. As sorry as it makes me, at least the profiteering in this method will provide correct nutrition for children.

I bought this yesterday because the author did an AMA on Reddit:

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Market-Brokers-Thieves-Traffickers...
As I mentioned above, it's one of the two major functions in hypnotism: delivering suggestive material to elude critical thinking. When someone asks you a harmless question, we don't tend to ask ourselves whether he/she is lying. However, here, we introduce a benchmark for any further opinions that the brain needs to check against - which serves as an effective suggestion.

You'll see similar suggestions through tone changes (down for commands when asking questions for example), and stories. It's quite fascinating!
I suspect a lot of these people are in the OSS hacker demographic (in my mind this means a college student running linux with lots of free time), in which case, why would you bother getting a Mac?
This can go in line with questioning the status quo: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663429/big-innovations-question...
That may be better milk, but I doubt it's as affordable as this could be.
Microsoft is to open Skype cyphers to FSB (to ease wiretapping)
Yeah, people have houses that are 4 stories high. No big deal here, although I'm not sure how big the houses are out in Cupertino.
Link to OP article, cached:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
YouTube - Facebook Facial Recognition a total turn off - Iq187 Tech Talk #15
Lessons Learned For Startup User Signups
No they're not.

If you're sorry, you don't do it again.

Facebook do this again and again and again and again.
I think fear is involved, too. I know that's why I picked Android over iPod when I jumped in. (Disclaimer: I don't have anything ready for market yet... And may never.)

I started looking at Apple's policies and how apps would be rejected without any reason given. And that there was -no- other way to launch a product if Apple rejected it.

And then looked at Android and saw that even if Google rejected it, I could still get the app onto the device in other ways. (And then Amazon came out with their own Android market, making things even better in that regard.)
meh. i work at a small shop. most of the code i see that sucks was written by competent programmers under high schedule pressure. the code is clearly not well understood anymore, but if you trace the history you can see it's due to a few years of tacking on features as quickly as possible. the technical debt surely slows us down sometimes, but hey that was a business decision, maybe even a correct one! core business functionality is rock solid, its mostly UI code that sucks.

I wonder what the average startup codebase looks like?
Interesting. You could teach blocks of code in a similar manner to the way poetry is taught.

"Why did the author do this?"

"What effect do you get when reading this block?"
Cow milk is for feeding baby cows. The concept that cow milk is healthy for humans is a sophisticated advertising claim sponsored by the dairy industry.
>Almost all aid is delivered by governments.

I'm pretty sure that the opposite is actually true. I don't have any stats on hand, but I've read before that private donors in the U.S. give more foreign aid than any government on Earth, including the U.S. government.
Above Ground Pool 
Above Ground Pool Shop do more than just sell pools, we provide expert advice and guidance to ensure that you find the perfect pool for you and your family.
Lee Smolin argues pretty concretely and convincingly that the anthropic principle cannot be science because it cannot yield falsifiable predictions:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0407213

On a side note, his book "The Trouble with Physics" is a great (though very pop-physicsy) read on the history and philosophy of physics.
When I was a kid, that's how they showed a 'long' vowel as opposed to a short one. So it would be pronounced 'trans-loke' instead of 'trans-lock'.

I don't know the company, but that's my assumption for the logo.
10 reasons to start a company (and 10 not to)
The bar over the ō is a macron. It is a diacritic marking a long vowel. Hence you should pronounce 'loc' like 'location.'
Programming Perl 4th Edition due in 2011
I'm working my way through Stephen Donaldson's latest Thomas Convenant novel (book 9), a series he started writing in the 70's (first book published in '77). He expects to have the final book (book 10) completed by Fall 2013
You made a typo : http://duuble.com/q1tifier/
Medicine is a great example. Do we really need to know everything about, say, penicillin or sundry vaccines to know that it's a good thing we have them?

If GM human milk can help babies that don't have access to enough actual human milk to be healthy in their infancy, then what more do we need to know? (OK, rhetorical device. Obviously it needs to be tested - but we don't need perfect understanding of everything to know that healthy babies >> unhealthy babies.)
Personally, I am building an app for the iPhone first because of public perception and marketing. It seems more people write and review iPhone apps versus Android apps - you can just tell when they start Android review articles with a tone of appeasement ie. "Ok, finally here's something for all you Android users.."

When someone finds your app and sees there's an iPhone version but no Android version, their normal reaction is: "That's understandable, Android is coming next, right?". If you have an Android version but no iPhone, their reaction will probably be "Hmm.. wait, that makes little sense...". It's just a side effect of iPhone being the first one to come up with app store.
Human Scale has a different meaning in art and architecture than it does in scientific fields. In architecture, it simply means that the building is designed to fit well with the human senses.

Wikipedia has more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_scale
Nope. I just click "remember password" in my browser after the first time.

At least for most sites. For banks and really important stuff I usually do memorize the password myself or copy it from the encrypted file.
It would seem that this guy has never actually used more than one Android device.

Cause Android has done this from the very beginning, syncing data and apps through your Google account. Which is free.

Indeed it has been awesome. When I turned on the Samsung galaxy 10.1 I got at I/O this year, it already knew my wpa key. That was just the latest in a series of small touches that have gone completely unnoticed by those living deep within the apple ecosystem.
Nitrogen in fertilizer is extracted from the air (not from petroleum as stated). The hydrogen can be gotten from electrolysis of water, or from methane.
Until Facebook adds the possibility to prevent people from tagging me completely, then I don't believe they are sorry.

However, such an option is not available ... you have to untag yourself after the fact and some people just keep re-adding you ... how do you explain to people to fucking stop tagging you without hurting their feelings and without sounding like a weirdo?

I loved Facebook in the beginning, but their intrusion on my privacy is getting too damn annoying. I wish there was an alternative.