skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His point makes a lot more sense in the context it was originally intended. He's not making a point about programming or debugging in general; he's specifically discussing tech support as a one-man indie game shop. In particular, it's all about the cost-benefit tradeoff. In his words (taken from the first post in the series - http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/06/seven-tips-for-giving...):

But at the same time, as a small developer, you have very little time to spare for support. Time spent getting the game working for one person is time not spent making a new game for everyone. You will need to develop a sense of when the time lost helping a person is not worth it, either because you won't be able to solve their problem or because they will not able to implement the fix you provide.

...

Remember: It's only worth the time to do tech support if you have the chance to, in a reasonable amount of time, fix a problem and make a loyal customer. If you realize that, at the end of the road, you aren't going to end with a happy person and a working product, end the conversation as quickly and pleasantly as possible.

In that context, I think his approach is very rational. If you pushed him, he'd probably agree that more often than not the issue is in his code (even if it's just a question of inadequate error handling). However, if the problem is only seen by a single user and will be a significant investment to try and fix, then it's simply not worth the time when he could be working on a new game, a port, or even a different problem that has been seen by multiple users.
Did Apple Reject A Developer’s App And Copy It In iOS 5?
SolEol – Download and Upload Subtitles Using OpenSubtitles.org
I think he's trying to imply anti-academia is anti-intellectual, which would be hilariously ironic.
I kept hearing the same cliche over and over in my head as I read this:

Shipping code wins
You sure have managed to fit a lot of bias into such a short message. You're also quite certain that a product that no one has reviewed is "done", while giving no leave to competitors.

Honeycomb tablets are fantastic devices for most users, and the tablet-targeted operating system is quite well done.
They don't need to be. If Apple's policies in regard to iOS (not a monopoly) leads to competitors of iTunes (arguably a monopoly) going out of business, that fits into the jurisdiction of the DOJ. It's not hard to see that had companies like Rhapsody and Rdio been kicked off of iOS, they might not have been able to sustain a business on the other platforms alone (not to mention that the other platforms could do the same thing). I think it's crazy to say this possibility isn't part of the reversal.
Supreme Court i4i case: Patent invalidity requires clear and convincing evidence
If you look at the details of the case, you will see that this was NOT a patent troll. i4i had started work to integrate their product with MS Office and started negotiations with Microsoft for licensing; then Microsoft in effect said "no thank you" and proceeded to implement the same (patented) technology on their own. While I am opposed to software patents, and despise patent trolls, I believe that this case should definitely not be misrepresented and linked to patent trolls.
And that makes them more secure somehow?

I like Cringely, but sometimes I really don't think he has a firm grasp on what he's talking about.
Apple Reverses Stance on iOS In-app Subscriptions
I agree that the change will cause a lot of pain, however early adopters tend to have a high tolerance for pain. If you don't want to deal with the pain or are running a server (your EC2 mention sounds like a server), you probably want to avoid cutting edge distros like Fedora.
Disabling Facebook’s New Facial Recognition Feature
yeah, why?
"But that doesn't mean that no progress can be made without advanced math."

Right. But, it's tough to make good progress on tough problems without the most powerful tools!

E.g., for AI, it needs a lot of 'non-math' ideas before it gets to some math, if it ever does.
Happened to me as well... over a year, when iAd first came out, a friend and I built an iAd gallery app. Rejected.

A few months ago I saw on Techcrunch that Apple had released their own iAd gallery that looked practically identical. Oh well.
No government is immune from public opinion, that's why no government that rules by pure force has ever lasted a significant period of time either.
Room 77 raises $10.5M innovate in hotel search
Why computer jobs will become more challenging, interesting, and paying?
iOS5 and iCloud have connected even the naive users to the cloud. The author describes how this can make computer science a more challenging, interesting, and paying job. I wish he is right:-) It comes from a real engineer (at Intel) and not a "tech writer." This dude knows both software and hardware which makes his views balanced and insightful. Found him on slashdot.
Hey, I'd really appreciate it if you could send a report of your experiences to linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org. This is the first I've heard of issues with ext4 with EBS, and I'd love to know more. (Also, please mention the kernel version you are using; one possibility is that EC2 kernels tend to lag upstream kernels, and ext4 has had a lot of bug fixes since a RHEL or SLES kernel of 2.6.32/2.6.34 --- upstream is at 2.6.39, and we're about to release version 3.0. :-)
This is nonsensical from nose to tail.

Encryption capabilities that are (on paper at least) unbreakable by any agency† are practically de rigueur in all modern applications. Where those applications are getting broken, it is not because the government is weakening algorithms. Nobody is breaking 128 bit AES, let alone 256 bit (or Cringely's fictional 4096 bit version). They're breaking applications and protocols.

Similarly, IPv6 has practically nothing to do with network security. If anything, by reestablishing a static addressing regime, it makes the Internet easier to monitor. The devices that the government uses to monitor backbone connections aren't limited by protocols; they're limited by speeds and feeds. If the government has policies advising operators to turn off IPv6 on Cisco gear, it's because IPv6 has (at least until recently) made devices less stable and less secure.

What worries me here is that Cringely, who has been irrelevant almost since the moment he lost his gig at PBS, is feeling revitalized by these most recent infosec stories. He is clearly ill-informed, but has enough of an audience that his name puts him on the front page of HN. People seem to feel this way about Gruber, but there is at least a point to Gruber (apart from the fact that he writes circles around Cringely): he is a passionate advocate for a perspective that is at least valid, even when we disagree with it.

What's Cringely an advocate for? From what I can tell, it's "taking crumbs of information from anonymous sources and writing entire speculative stories about them". Just look at this one! "The government is suppressing strong cryptography which is why we don't have IPv6, [my sources tell me]".

† Using "unbreakable" for "the disclosure of information that could only have been obtained by breaking it, thereby disclosing our capability of breaking it, would be a calamity for national security, diplomacy, and the economy".
The market might shift towards DRM'd ebooks. Just look at the PC gaming market. Most big games nowadays come with DRM.
> What's the benefit over a well architected library? Especially in a language like Ruby where it's so easy to write DSLs, I don't see where you'd ever want a scaffold.

The benefit, I think, is that scaffolds:

* generate a pile of code that you feel free to hack away at, removing and adjusting as you see fit. I don't think scaffolded code is a good candidate for patches, really. It's a shortcut that writes code for you, not a library.

* generate code that is customized to your precise needs. For example, when you scaffold something using Rails' default scaffold generator, it creates a database migration and builds the appropriate form fields based on the columns you're using in the model.

* are great for generating the kind of code you tend to write over and over. For example, we do lots of custom website development, and a common requirement is the forms for CRUD related to the entities people are managing on these websites. The problem is, the entities are always changing. For an auto dealer, the entities are vehicles, makes, models; for a real estate brokerage they are brokers and properties; etc. We would previously cut and paste code and then modify it, but then we wrote a scaffold generator that builds all the forms for us with all of the appropriate structure and CSS classes and IDs to make them look beautifully integrated.
Hiro unit testing framework for JavaScript
But "TomDoc is a mentality". What the heck is "TomDoc" anyway? The author says it's a mentality, but since when do mentalities come with specs? As far as I can tell, it's an example of a function spec that's so badly written that it needs a huge comment to explain it. Lousy name, lousy parameter names, no statement of what it returns, no actual return, etc. Maybe the author just needs a language that declares returns and some practice at naming variables/functions?
If you haven't given beer traps a try for slugs, they have work ed wonders for me.
Spotting vaporware: nanotech, fusion, quantum computers...
Why You Should Learn COBOL
You're right. I was thinking of this in the scenario where somebody stole the whole laptop, and not just gained access to your email.
Knowit is! - knowitapp.com

"Went to Full Frame Festival? Up late again with Haskell? Looking for your Shangri-La? We want you! Homebrewed beer, 24/7 hacker house, and the great night life of Durham, NC. jobs@knowitapp.com"

shoot me an email, jeff at knowitapp.com. Full disclosure, we want your british chocolates.

ps - this is broken... http://snappishproductions.com/archives.html
How is a to-do app "should/could be OS features?" Or a camera app that uses the volume button? Or Instapaper?

I don't think there is an obvious way to tell what Apple has in their roadmap. Specially when they publicly downplay the importance of some features only to implement them later. Maybe they should make their roadmap public? :)
No, I don't think i4i is a patent troll, and it wasn't my intent to imply they were.

I was rather pointing out that patent trolls also win with this verdict. Software patents are stronger, and are harder to overthrow in court, even if you have, for example, prior art.

My point wasn't to say anything about the specifics of this case, which are complicated, but rather that an unintended side effect is that it does help patent trolls.
Absolutely ridiculous and myopic move by the government. Its probably a bunch of junior government workers influencing the retiring decision makers
I know HN is not really a place to talk politics, but something in the article surprised me:

> leftist academics who were already anti-intellectual

I'm French so maybe this is different in Europe and in the US (if it is, that would surprise me too), but since when "leftist" are anti-intellectual? It seems to me that it's quite the opposite. Let alone "leftist academics" who I can't even start to imagine being anti-intellectual.

To be clear, I really don't want to start a political discussion here. What I would like is just an anwser to: Is the part of the article I quoted something people find normal in the US or does it seems weird there too?

Thanks :-).
Announcing AWS CloudFormer - create templates from existing AWS resources
I totally see this! and like this:-) I know from experience that it has become harder to get good engineers as there is a shortage of engineers and a surplus of challenging jobs. Nice pick mate!
Mary Had a Little Lamb http://goo.gl/doodle/3aEE

Works on my Android phone too, even the keyboard (Motorola Droid).
Can't press the record button though.
Ah, that must be why people complain about my metaphors all the time. I am pretty good at not paying any attention to the baggage, which makes me judge a metaphor just on its merits, whereas other people complain because, ostensibly, they are offended by that.
Yeah, I was pretty shocked this his the front page on HN after reading the article. Your comment gives me hope that the greater part of the NH community might agree with you. This guy has literally no idea what he is talking about. It took all I had to not comment on his article.
Groupon-style Site for Daily Design Deals
Very cool and inspiring display :)
I have, but while it killed off a lot of slugs, I'm not sure that it actually protected the plants. We have a nearly infinite supply of slugs.

And now, I have an almost 2 yr old, and I'm not really into him pouring sluggy beer all over himself.
What Peter Thiel Is Getting Wrong
Because if you have a smartphone that you use to access your email then you'll be getting notifications non stop. That is, unless you want to whitelist every single IP address your carrier would use.
I still don't buy any argument that Apple is entitled to any subscription fee at all.

If I use my own subscription system, own payment system, own user system, and my own bandwidth to supply the content, then I shouldn't have to give anything to Apple. I don't need to send a fee to Microsoft if I have software that delivers content in the same way. That Apple thinks they are entitled to anything in this regard is absurd.
Nope, it's not possible to offer more for less. Apple is a "good" monopoly, that passes their saving onto customers.

The only way to beat them is to attack from below. Make a tablet that is only good for browsing the web. Maybe add a few cheap features like a camera and GPS, but skimp on expensive features like storage.

If you really want to be cool, add some kind of console controls, so teenagers can play games. Maybe even add some sort of social element - allow them to connect to each other through USB, and play arcade games.

Or attack some other niche that Apple don't own. You could add a bunch of graphics calculator functions, and target students. Just be careful you don't do anything that a $3 App won't do.

Price it at half the price of an iPad, and hope you gain a toehold.
At first yes, but we found that if the only option was what we wanted them to eat, then eventually they would eat it.

You don't have to have an iron fist to be assertive. Besides, I kind of like having rebels for kids.
In the time period during which the government cared about strong cryptography, its use was almost unheard of in off-the-shelf products. By the time SSHv2 was released, shipping strong cryptography internationally was reduced to a simple bureaucratic formality.

This notion that a malignant intelligence in the federal government is plotting ways to keep IT products insecure is a product of the narrative fallacy. The government may think that many steps ahead when it comes to China (or, as recent events indicate, maybe not), but when it comes to civilian information security, it is entirely reactive.
looks cool, wanted to signup except the form is completely broken and non-functional in newest chrome/FF
Things I didn’t know about MongoDB
I don't have to be offended to think that the emotional baggage associated with a metaphor clouds discussion.
Why iCloud won't send the competition to the ground
I think you can view pusher as being the quick and easy way to add chat and realtime. I would look into Juggernaut which is basically a ruby wrapper for socket.io which runs on node.js and gives you most of the same functionality that you get with pusher, except that you run the server yourself of course.
Read Jim Gray's Why do computers stop and what can be done about it? (http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf)

Excerpts:

"In the measured period, one out of 132 software faults was a Bohrbug, the rest were Heisenbugs."

"[retry] routines had a 76% success rate in continuing system execution."

Cosmic rays or race conditions, transient bugs are common.
Dan Kaminsky: On The RSA SecurID Compromise
I just think it's interesting that this building is the 180 degree total opposite of what Jobs built at Pixar HQ.
We've got open positions for Software Engineers & UI/UX front-end developers. We're adding new hotels every day to our database and our focus is on building a new way to help travelers find the right hotel based on room data.
I've used Pusher on a couple apps and it was extremely simple and painless. However, I've found that it's not that much more difficult to roll my own real-time solution using juggernaut/socket.io/node.js. What I lose is the support, but what I gain is obviously the cost savings.
How to Make Craigslist Better ...ish
Interesting, considering the #1 entity that's challenging the US Dollar is the government. You make it sound like Bitcoin is suddenly grounds to be concerned about the future of the dollar while the government has been pilfering its worth for decades.
It's so ridiculous theyre essentially patenting generic syntaxes for representing documents that anybody "skilled in the art" would come up with in 5 minutes. It would have been much better for small developers if Microsoft won this. It's funny how this is treated as a win for the little guys, who can't afford massive patent portfolios nor litigation battles like Microsoft.
Kindle is not a subscription service. The relevant clause would be about in-app purchases. But it wouldn't surprise me that Amazon threatened to pull off the platform, and more power to them. If I were Jeff Bezos I wouldn't be removing any buttons or links from my apps, either.
Show HN: A local multilistener realtime radio station based on YouTube
I'm working on this since months during some spare work time at my company and before knowing about turntable.fm.
Maybe some office worker here have the same niche problem as we did and find this useful. Feedback highly appreciated.

Intro (telling the story behind it): http://shufflingsux.appspot.com/html/radiocracy.html

Try it: http://shufflingsux.appspot.com/html/radiocracy_new.html
Face Painting Coloring Background Pictures, Image And Face Painting Collection
http://public.iwork.com/document/?d=2-core-concepts_old.key&...
A Easy Make And Beautiful Cool Background In Photoshop Tutorial
A Easy Make And Beautiful Cool Background In Photoshop tutorial, In This Adobe Photoshop tutorial we make Cool Background,in This Few Steps Tutorial We Make A Beautiful and Cool Background in adobe photoshop.
US Supreme Court won't weaken presumptive strength of patents
A list of the few things you do learn in biz school is an easier feat. I'll start.

- Gantt charts
- Dataflow diagrams

Did I miss anything?
I thought I was going mad for a second until I moved on to your comment.
I think that's where the reverse look ups to location becomes important. The chance that a hacker would be in the same physical location seems small.
Absolutely, we just joined a CSA this year and love it. Not only does it bring you closer to your food, but also to your neighbors and community.

For anyone in or around Lawrence, KS, Rolling Prairie [http://www.rollingprairie.net/] has been fantastic.
What I'm saying is that by default it prompts you about file formats, but it's easy to set it once (as .doc, even) and never bother with it again.

Do you like the ribbon toolbar? I was under the impression that pretty much everyone hated it. Honest question.
"American society doesn't need any city"

I agree that American society doesn't need any one particular city, but we do need a healthy ecosystem of urban areas.

My question is: are the smaller, lower-tier cities necessary in order to have that healthy ecosystem?
The quality of academia has been in decline for almost a century now as the bar has been progressively lowered by financial and political pressures in order to make them more "accessible to the common man". A post-secondary education is still somewhat useful in teaching one how to think, and in exposing one to higher ideas, but it's nowhere near the level of excellence of previous ages. A simple reading of theses and journals past expose the stark differences in thought.
You can no longer rely on NAT to provide a default firewall, can you?
Is this in HTML5? With your permission I'd like to use this for my free resume app, http://www.cvstash.com, to be one of the selectable free templates. It looks really funky. You can reach me via phektus at gmail dot com, and what I'd make sure each resume that uses your template gets linked to your site so your design skills also gets advertised. :-)
The seven deadly sins of fundraising appeals – and how to avoid them
Yup, and it took me over two months to get a Pre after it came out. And I was the first to get one from that Sprint store.
Time isn't binary, the fact that something happened "today" doesn't mean that no time has passed between when it happened and now.
As I understood it the criticism wasn't of the process but that you had to stare at the canary email every single time you look at your inbox.
http://www.amahi.org/ is trying to get into this space now. It's a Linux distribution that from what I understand started off as something like a home convergence device. It runs on plug computers, too.
As a webOS fan/user/developer I'm happy to hear this. It's a big step forward for the platform. Sadly though what I really need is a new phone. Where is the pre 3, when is that going to be release? A new phone would do much more for me right now than a tablet.
I'm not sure I agree, entirely, that the invention of the web was the key thing. I think really the invention of the internet (TCP/IP, DNS, routers, running cables) were the big thing. And it inevitably led to apps running on it, which became gradually more sophisticated. Email, Usenet, Veronica, Gopher, and eventually, the browser and HTML.

In a sense what you're suggesting is somewhat analogous to saying Microsoft Word was more important than the PC. Though I guess you could argue that Microsoft Windows was at least as important as the PC.
Anyone used both Pusher and NowJS?
"Interesting, considering the #1 entity that's challenging the US Dollar is the government."

I'm in 100% agreement, along with many other heavily-vested countries.
Bre Pettis of MakerBot on the Colbert Report
I personally find the notion that anyone at Apple with influence over app store t's & c's has ever heard of iFlowReader insulting to our intelligence. I'm saying that this notion that Apple actively tried to kill iFlowReader is pure geek fantasy, a product of nerds like us wanting stories with clear bad guys and underdogs. It bears no relation to reality. Apple did not give a shit about them.