skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I read the GoF book in '95 it was a revelation, I had learned C++ a few years earlier and here were all the things I had seen in my and other people's code with names and explanations. At the time Rogue Wave hosted an informal lunch meeting in our town where they and some OSU guys discussed patterns, I attended as a visitor and to me it just seemed magical. Over the years some of the high hopes have been dashed but I think some of the core pattern ideas have become useful standard idioms.

A year or so after reading the GoF book I saw the Alexander book in a used book store and picked it up to see what it was all about and I was very surprised. I like the book a lot but I really don't think the parallels with the GoF book and the software design patterns are all that strong. The Alexander book does not seem very systematic or analytic, it's more rambling and philosophical. I'm not an architect so I probably don't see the big picture but to me the book seems to lack a coherent vision.

If you're interested how Alexander himself saw himself fit into the emerging pattern movement, here's a link to James Coplien's description of Alexander's OOPSLA appearance in '96:
https://sites.google.com/a/gertrudandcope.com/info/Publicati...

Hard to believe it's been 15 years!
A lot of people are talking about oh, what will happen with IE / Firefox support. You know what's a better way to address all these problems? (Especially for Firefox). Why not just do the auto-update process Chrome does for Firefox? I can understand why IE doesn't, but why doesn't Mozilla expend significant effort into just doing that and solving most of these issues of "outdated" firefox versions
The article does dance around that concept a little bit, in an aside about the difference between Barcelona and other football clubs. But he never gets around to drawing an exact parallel to primadonna coders.

And that's a strong argument to make. I might rather have five exceptional developers than 1000 average ones, taking into account communication latency and overhead, but if they're five surly, haughty, egotistical asshats who are engaged in a never-ending pissing contest, then no thanks.
I don't understand why Drew doesn't either make these posts or find a PR person to filter Arash's comments through. Arash never comes off well in these blog posts or in his comments here surrounding these issues.

His comments always come off feeling like 'sorry bros, it's really not that bad, and we fixed it so no problemo' unlike Drew's comments which generally have a much more personal feel to them.
Yeah, it has gotten much better in the last two months!
Gruber is a prime example of this. Exactly as you describe, when Macs didn't have market share it was all about how market share didn't matter. And, to be honest, he made a pretty compelling argument.

But every time Apple jumped up a rank in US or global sales there was a gleefulness and gloating aspect to the posts that would report it.

When rumours of the iPhone was leaked there was enormous sledging of Apple. People literally made mocking posts about how ridiculous a one button phone would be. Apple and their one button phone were the laughing stock of tech punditry. For months people wrote about what idiots Apple and their fanboys were.

Then Apple demoed the iPhone, and everybody suddenly realised that the "drooling idiot fanboys" were right after all.

So yes, guys like Gruber are being hypocritical with their banner waving "we're number one" stuff. but they took so much crap for so long, that to resist that urge to thumb your nose and do the "nyah nyah I told you so" thing would require super-human self-control.

----

In market share there is almost never a complete victory. Even Microsoft almost but not quite had a complete victory in the OS wars. They could have killed off Apple, but didn't.

Now, 10-15 years later, if you looked at profitability or the market cap you'd be forgiven for thinking that Apple had won that war. But if you look at market share you'd still think that Apple had one foot in the grave.

The problem is that all these one dimensional views are (surprise!) myopic. We love to make straight-up comparisons of Apple and Microsoft - but Apple is predominantly a hardware/entertainment company and Microsoft is predominantly a software/business company. It's like trying to compare an insurance company with a supermarket (which is possible, but it requires hard work and patient analysis, neither of which pundits are generally blessed with an abundance of).

Would we compare Microsoft and Dell, and say that Microsoft had "beaten" Dell? No? Why not? After all, there are people who hold the view that Microsoft encouraged and pushed the commoditisation of PC hardware, which meant that the hardware manufacturer's profitability kept getting chipped [sic] away at.

Fanboy gladiatorial aspirations aside, you could probably make a better argument about Microsoft being at war with its hardware partners (atn: Nokia -> Microsoft is not your friend) like HP and Dell than it being at war with Apple.
Facebook, according to the Times, is the pioneer of this new phenomenon, acquiring a slew of companies, killing their products, but keeping their developers.

If Zuckerberg thinks that's a good strategy, then he's an idiot. When companies pull that stunt, morale at the acquired startup turns to shit and people only stay because of their golden-handcuff earnouts (note to all: never take a deal with an earnout; you will probably be fired 1 day short of the cutoff). Usually, what happens is that the acquiring company finds a way not to make good on the earnout, firing the original founders for "performance" three days before they could earn out, so then they rightfully get pissed and talent-raid their ex-employer for their next venture.

If you were launching a technology or developing a product, would you rather have five great engineers rather than 1,000 average engineers?

I'd ask for 3 brilliant engineers and 400 mediocre ones. The 400 mediocre ones would be able to support an enterprise system that might be ugly but would bring in lots of money: far more money than a small startup could bring in except with a lot of luck. I'd hire a half-decent MBA to make (and run) a profitable company out of these 400 mediocre engineers and spend maybe an hour a week actively managing it. With the surplus, I'd fund a 4-person startup (the three brilliant people, plus me as a relative hanger-on) and do something awesome.

All that said, the relationship between size and effectiveness is weird in technology. Friction and integration difficulty grow faster-than-linearly in terms of the number of people on a software project. There are some types of projects where a few good developers can do very well, but where an arbitrarily large number of mediocre ones just won't be able to do it. For example, you can throw 400 mediocre engineers at an enterprise product and make billions per year, but if you throw 400 mediocre engineers at the design of a concurrent programming language, you're going to get nothing.

After examining the careers of more than 1,000 star analysts at Wall Street investment banks

If you're talking about performance and not political luck, there's no such thing as a "star analyst". It's a braindead, utterly subordinate job with no room for creativity or ingenuity. By the way, "analysts" don't analyze anything; it's just the default title given out of college.
There is a solution to this problem. Websites should allow people to log in with their public key. You can create a new, internet-only identity with a public key. This would be a little cumbersome at first, but if browsers supported this ability, it could be just as easy as logging in with a password.

Here's how it could work: There could be metatags that specify where to submit the public key. The website will then send back a message that can only be decrypted with the private key. The browser has the user type in the password to access their private key, decrypts the message, and sends it back to the website. The user has now started a session with their public key.

Since you would use the same public key on all websites, your identity would be the same. This would not require a central server like OpenID.
The problem with tiered passwords is that if someone leaks a tier one password they get your tier one. It doesn't matter how important it is to you, if they mess up and lead your information its out there, nothing you can do about it.

This thread just encouraged me to enable 2 factor auth everywhere I could (aws, google, google apps, openid) etc.
I can't help but feel that one reason Color is struggling is that while Bill appears to have a good track record for startups, he has never built one that is as front-facing and user-centered as Color, where design is an absolute necessity. He appears to be busy hiring a lot of "smart" people, and unfortunately those types of people (e.g. D.J. Patil) don't seem to be the most appropriate for defining the direction of a product whose success involves caring about its users. If Color's new direction also involves giving its users the middle finger, we can safely continue to write all 38 of them off.
WorldWideScience.org Database Adds Arabic Translation, Mobile Access, More
1. We introduce limits. Which are blindingly artificial, and so it is hard for us to form a concept about why people want this.

I don't see limits as artificial as all. For example, Zeno's Paradox[1] is resolved thanks to the limit of a succession.
And the concept of the infinitesimal, which was something I had thought about before I learnt about limits, is another rather intuitive thing that is explained by limits.

Derivatives are only one of the most common uses of limits, they are definetely not the only reason they are useful.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_and...
Your premise that the web is somehow less effective because you can't scrape data from pages easily doesn't make much sense to me.

Have you taken a look recently at the plethora of web APIs for just about every purpose? The modern way of collecting machine-friendly data from a server is through APIs and semantic content (RDFa, microformats, etc.).

Not through HTML / CSS / Javascript formatted pages which are made primarily for human consumption.
Any reviews if you have bought it
I was talking about documenting the whole journey from day 1. Nobody makes money on the first day of their journey. I am sure many people make significant money on the first day their app is available, and I congratulate you for being one of those people.
Some Useful Points to Help You Draw More Traffic to Your Forum
This article will give you some useful tips on how to draw more traffic to your forum and get a decent amount of traffic.
Lobbying can only do so much. In the face of an ideology dedicated to putting humanity back in the stone age, it can do little:

"Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it." -- Amory Lovins

"A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation." -- Paul Ehrlich

What is needed is full a refutation of the quotes above, and a system of ideas (Google "Alex Epstein") to show us how things could and should be. This is why I say that simple political lobbying, while necessary, isn't remotely enough.
Off the cuff, I would come up with something involving parking valets and the pegboard for keys. It would illustrate the important bits of the mechanism and its purpose. I don't know if you would dismiss that as meaningless analogy, but explaining TLB (or Traveling Salesman, or functional decomposition, etc) to kids is not impossible.
Still a bit jarring/jerky when it comes to specific transitions but it's fantastic work for a Beta, and they've come a long way in a short time.

Looking forward to hopefully Android 3.0 support.
Given your budget, you'll likely want to avoid Hong Kong. It's generally considered a great intro to asia given how westernized it is...but hotels will kill.
My friend and his wife use their iPads completely differently. They keep their computers upstairs in their respective offices to use for serious work, and whenever I come over one of them is on the couch browsing the web on an iPad.
I wonder what the maximum bitrate is, NFC is already pretty slow. Can you get a stable 9600 baud with cellphone speakers and microphones?
If the future is played in such places, that isn't a great reason for him to visiting them now -- not to mention the huge language barriers in undeveloped or rural areas. I think his time will be more beneficially spent in Shenzhen, if it's to be spent in China. I do agree though that China will be a better option than Thailand or Indonesia (with some assumptions made of what will be attractive to those with a hacker mentality).
Did anyone else get a sense that this article provided no special insight? It mentioned repeated examples like "I just know" works for Ted but not flying saucers. What is the difference between Ted out the window and a saucer? I felt the author relies heavily on the audience sharing his sense of the obvious and absurd, but provides no argument to support his claims.
Quick! Somebody invent software which will allow people to have discussions that branch! Otherwise the dreadful disaster of discussion derailment will doom us daily!
See All Your Upcoming Meetings in Noteleaf (YC W11)
And in general, it's not. But certain platforms (e.g. OS X on PowerPC) have been artificially restricted to the point where no new browsers are being made for them, so the latest version you can get to on them is probably outside of Google's scope of support -- and if it isn't now, it will be shortly. For instance, sure, a PowerBook G4 isn't necessarily powerful by today's standards, but surely it's powerful enough for Google Apps, yet today I don't believe it's supported in the current version of any browser because of its inherent OS X 10.4 or 10.5 cap. Sure, it's possible to switch to Linux, but I don't personally believe the user should have to.

In essence, upgrades are not as simple as you may think due to forced platform incompatibility/vendor lock-in. Forcing an upgrade like this can cost users a non-trivial sum of money on top of what you're already charging for the service!

So while I appreciate the moving into the future, I feel bad for the people whose wallets are going to feel the pain of such a move.
For the less glamorous software tasks, you want to hire people who are in the B range (not outstanding, but notably above-average) for software talent but have an interest in advancing into project management or executive roles. Get a 25-year-old who's strong, but knows he's not going to be a CS luminary in 20 years, and who will look at tasks like documenting APIs as a learning experience and a way to get a sense of the company as a whole.
@lulzsec thanks for trusting @pastebincom with your 1000th Tweet :)
As an honest and simple question: what are the possible purposes of incarceration?
A non-profit and open-source exchange is necessary for the bitcoin economy.
The problem with most of these cloud initiatives from Microsoft is the missing integration with WinXP.
LiveMesh and Skydrive desktop integrations are fine on Win7, but there are still lots of XP users out there, and most of this stuff does not work on XP.
Agreed. I believe the concept was taken out of Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (great read, but it's been a while since I took it all in). After using it for a bit I have to say it's a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day.

Something about how you interact with it all just doesn't feel right. I might be able to say more after I used it for a bit, but I just don't want to. The UI doesn't invite the user into interaction so much as it does gawking.
The lack of "sorry", "apologies", "rest assured" and similar keywords is astounding. Where is the heartfelt apology for the screw up?
I completely agree. Sure, this way >99% of their users will never hear about this episode. But it makes dropbox look so much worse innthe eyes those of us who do.
> So... why, exactly will the tablet market be different?

I think the author states a good reason -- that a tablet device is more of a luxury item that appeals to people who want to geek out with it; it makes this a whole different context.

If Honeycomb devices can compete against iOS, then so much the better for everyone (even Apple); however, there are significantly different market segments that will be drawn to a device that is free-with-subscription and a market willing to pay $500+ to play.

Institutional adoption of Honeycomb based devices has big potential to jumpstart Android on tablets (i.e. schools buying devices), but it's pretty safe to say the consumer marketplace is locked up. Apple can compete on price in the tablet marketplace, so until there's somebody willing to subsidize the tablet -- like the phones are -- there's really no choice.
How do you mount it in your apartment?
I'm in whatever the topic is. Completely by accident I'm quitting my (cushy, working for the Man) job today and moving across the country to be back near dear old UW.

So it puts a smile on my face to hear that there's still a Hacker scene for me to come back to :).
It sure fixes a lot of the expressiveness problem.
Makes me think more of being on a boat. I haven't experienced the effect

I've slept aboard LSTs, and on smaller boats. I don't think I've ever slept better, or longer.
Compare and contrast how Dropbox has communicated this breach with the storm that rained down on LastPass when they forced password changes because of an activity they couldn't explain.

This might explain why Dropbox's poor communication of this security breach is the #winning move.
A couple months ago someone posted the story of a coffeeshop that takes many foreign currencies as a gimmick, to cover over the fact that they don't take credit cards.

Do you think they're endorsing the Chinese yuan?

There's a difference between passively making a payment technique available and actively promoting it to people. By conflating the two, you're opening yourself up to all sorts of ridiculous claims, like the one above.
Best way to spend a college summer? Start something
This is somewhat tangential, but I get mildly irritated reading articles like this when they equate medicine with hard science. If the physics community operated like the pharmaceutical community, I think our knowledge of the universe would be less than it is today, to put it mildly. (As a reference, check HNSearch for "Prozac" and "placebo".)
I certainly hope the N950 is keyboard-equipped and Meego-powered as rumored; thanks for providing the link. I can't cope with touch-only devices, despite the many times I have been told by friends/coworkers/HN/Twitter/etc. that I can. (It's surprising how often I have to defend a personal preference.)
Agree, it's not a very good article but if you're a regular Economist reader you know that they frequently put out charts like this exactly to highlight interesting but potentially misleading correlations.

Click on the "Daily Chart" link in the header to see more examples.
Yeah, well that will come in their next round of funding. This round is all about expanding the base.
"Keeping them in service is much more profitable."

Perhaps, but for how long? Profit over time from honest, new, innovative work can be much higher than scraping from the bottom of the barrel or from milking old achievements. (Just ask RIM or Nokia about how well that worked out for them.)

But to do that, you have to have the freedom (from coercion, wherever it may come from) to engage in that honest, new and innovative work. For the most part, the computer industry has that freedom, but the nuclear industry does not.
I think a much better way to understand limits for a HS student is coin flips. Say heads = 1 tails = 0.

One flip and you can have 1or 0. Three times it's 1,2/3,1/3,0. Five times it's 1, 4/5,3/5,2/5,1/5,0 As long as you do odds you will never see 1/2 as a option. However, if you divide ever larger odd number of flips you are going to see numbers really really close to 1/2 without ever really getting there.
Sometimes OSes are deemed obsolete for whatever reason, and browsers -- all of them! -- simply stop developing for those OSes. This means that you're at least shelling out the cost for a new OS, which can be (1) painful (if you're using Windows or Linux in some cases) or (2) impossible (e.g. if you're using Mac OS X and Apple has decided that your hardware is "end-of-lifed" -- e.g. PowerBook G4). If you're one of the unlucky ones to be in the latter category, you actually have to shell out enough money for at least some upgraded hardware (perhaps in addition to the OS), or possibly a brand new (or newer but still used) computer, which will likely be a lot more painful than just shelling out for the OS.

The key point is that Google Apps are tied to browser versions, and browser versions are tied to OS versions, and OS versions aren't exactly consistent in their support or end-user coverage. Users who figured their current setup works well enough for now, and who for many years haven't had any reason to upgrade will now be forced to if they want to make use of those Google Apps -- or, they can take the much less costly route and simply not use Google Apps, or deal with "simple HTML mode" or whatever.

The worst part about this that irritates me most, though, is that many of these systems simply don't have anything wrong with them except that someone, somewhere, arbitrarily decided they were "too old". So perfectly functional pieces of equipment now lack functionality because enough people have arbitrarily decided that they "don't have" that functionality anymore, even where it might actually be possible.

On the plus side, it does mean that no one has to support old browsers' quirky and always-varied interpretations of the same chunk of code...
I think this way as well. I was told that I am a slow processor of information, by a credible source. Also, that I would have a harder time learning on the fly but would have a deeper understanding due to making more cognitive links to each idea, and this would allow for tackling harder problems and long projects. It has turned out to be spot on, and if I would have to guess, I would say about a quarter of engineers that I know seem to think this way. In the general population it seems much lower.
The first cancer vaccine that works
That is awesome. I've got 20 Euro's lying on my desk and I won't be going back to Europe anytime soon to spend it.
Apple sued in India
There is a lot wrong with this article but I will take the rare opportunity to talk about football on hacker news

Being able to play as part of a team is one of the very major factors in someone being "great" I dont think many of the people who argue for quality over quantity in the hiring process are arguing that they want people who cant work with anyone else, they are arguing for the best set of people who can work very well together.

FC Barcelona is not an example of mediocre players who form a good team, they are the best collection of footballers who compliment each other and work together to form one of the greatest teams ever, Valdes, Iniesta, Puyol, Villa are the best players at their respective positions right now, Messi is very close / has become the best football to ever kick a ball. Using them as an example seems strange as they very much counter the point.