skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a hilarious remark:

We are not like basketball players or musicians or chess masters where only the extremely gifted (who also work hard) can rise to the top of their craft. With few exceptions, we all can.

I have no idea why, in the same breath as you disclaim the necessity of inborn talent for computer programming, you reaffirm that necessity for some arbitrary skills that you plucked out of nowhere. You have exactly the same amount of evidence supporting your claim that anyone can become a great programmer that I do to support the claim that anyone can be a chess master.
When I look at the iPod evolution, then yes. I do expect Apple to continually innovate.
Firefox 7 now available for Download
HP tested webOS on an iPad. It ran over twice as fast as the TouchPad.
An interesting hypothesis, but the game used as an example in the article features emergent gameplay. In RDR, you progressively receive more weapons, mounts, and (to some degree) abilities as the game progresses. I think emergent gameplay pulls some players in, but I'm not sure it explains the statistics provided by the article.

I think you really hit on the primary reason in your final sentence. RDR is, again, a great example. Hop in to a multi-player session of RDR and you'll find a very wide variety of gamers. Some people are just there to hang out. Some are there to explore. Some are there to play the free roam missions. Some are there to participate in more traditional PvP game modes. Some are there to grief other players.

When you play the story, you're secluded. Even though the production quality of RDR was great (it won GoTY), single-player lacks the critical human element that you get with online play. Multiplayer gaming is a social event. It's social networking for people who play games, and the draw is undeniable.

Single-player has become a sandbox for you to hone your skills to the point that you can participate competently in online play. Once you reach a threshold where online play isn't completely miserable, there's no turning back.
I wish we had sandboxed tabs. Ie you create a sandboxed tab instead of a normal tab, it has its own cache, it's own cookie store etc. I could open my bank website in a separate sandboxed tab and not have to worry about sites in other tabs hitting it with CSRF attacks etc.
That's why we have languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby.

More relevantly, it's why branching is such a lightweight operation in Git.
Why Software Patents Need to Disappear
Just to be contrarian, I'm from St Paul, its mostly macs, but sometimes you'll see a Dell as well.
Biased techcrunch reporting apart, I felt a bit saddened by the announcement because I actually thought HP had a chance at being "one of the three" in the devices space. I liked their webos demos and their devices seemed pleasing to use. Oh well.
IPad mandatory for every student: Welcome to the 21st century
¿Se puede ganar dinero por Internet?
Samsung and Apple fight over trial schedule, case consolidation and more
Very interesting idea. I usually maintain a list of snippets that do very common processing and paste it myself.

I see CodeMatch as a nice interface to access template-ized snippets, such as those that come with TextMate. Is it more than that?
Blaine Gabbert jersey Jaguars
Hello World, I'm Jekyll
You can also take your AWS images and run them on Eucalyptus. Amazon also has some initial support for exporting to VMWare. In any case, there will always be a certain degree of lock-in, but it should not be at the image level. You can always use something like http://bitnami.org (disclaimer, I am the author :) that allows you to share the same environment locally, as a VM or as an AMI
Good find. I was about to post a link to that very same discussion, because the same thing crossed my mind.

Interestingly there was a lot of negativity in that discussion about the author's idea. Criticism was mainly along the lines of "it's too risky" and "it won't work with old browser" along with "the old way works fine, I don't get what the big deal is."

Well, now we have at least one very good reason to pay closer attention to the spec and consider that the use of 303 may be more appropriate.
"Put in a quest log for zeus's sake. I may have been looking away or talking to someone or doing something else on the side."

... or coming back to a save point halfway through the game after two years. My game of Persona 3 spanned three years, I think. Didn't have a reason to finish it until suddenly my evenings were tied down with caring for a new (sometimes colicky) infant, which isn't a literal 100% of your time job, but the shattered remnants of your evening left over certainly aren't useful for much else.
Ask HN: Will working on my own hurt my career?
I'm an experienced programmer (10+ years) that loves programming and technology. However, I'm pretty burnt out at my own job, and I'm learning nothing new. It's not a bad job or bad company, but I don't think it's the right fit for me anymore. What's even worse is that I'm left with no time to learn new technology because of the hours, commute, etc. I've spent some time on weekends and after work learning on my own (iPhone programming, MongoDB) but I really want to do a deep dive and a fresh start.

I'm thinking of taking 6-9 months off, and developing and releasing 3-4 iPhone apps (I already have them planned out) including the corresponding backend, and in the process learning Python, GAE, Java, web programming concepts, NoSQL databases (like Cassandra), etc. Also, I plan on contributing to open source projects in terms of bug fixing, etc.

Will this hurt my career? Or will it look respectable, as long as I have actually released products, etc?
Yes but.

Imagine yourself as a user of this service. You sign up, get the "email confirmation", think everything is good. A day later you notice that it isn't working, check up, actually read the email and click the link.

Now you want to report a bug. What do you say? How do you explain that you got it to work, but it could have worked better? When there's a large helpdesk, this kind of feedback is nearly impossible to give in any meaningful way. Even if you could speak to the coders concerned, often it's hard to get them to think in a different way and see the problem.

So it's obvious but it's hard.
So it looks like we've now got the term "iPad effect" to represent when someone creates a new market... Wonder what the next one will be...
True. Sorry for my lame, sarcastic hyperbole.
I think we just know different lawyers. I'm also in Florida, there is no shortage of nice golf courses (though the nice day part is a bit tough to pull off in the summer heat).
"Make the iPad as irrelevant as the iPad seems to be doing to the consumer PC."

I don't think this is wise goal in the short term. The iPad/tablet space is just ramping up. There is certainly room for competitors here, but I just don't see a vector for disruption right now. Maybe in 5 years.

There are plenty of other markets to disrupt, though. Look at Sonos-- they blew up the (hugely expensive) whole-house audio market. Or Flip (rip) with their camcorder.
This article seems to ignore the fact the point of a game isn't about reaching the end, its almost by definition about the journey. Just because someone didn't tick that particular checkbox it doesn't mean that there was too much in the game, just that they didn't tick that checkbox.

Unless the game is single player only and very tightly on rails, completion is really dumb metric of game quality. Even when it is one of those games, is it a bad thing if a game contained enough content to deliver a satisfying enough experience that someone is full before then end? And still has more to go back to if they get hungry again? A game can have an unnecessarily padded length that turns a player off, but thats a separate issue. That case is an issue of level design and game quality, which are not measurable only by completion rates.

I know games are software Skinner Boxes, but if they actually care about player experience, they're optimizing towards the single goal of completion a surprising amount. On this issue they don't, it's the business side thats driving the look at length and completion rates. They care about being able to sell more titles. This article is a showing where the industry (as far as the AAA space) is going, shorter games.

Less in a single package means more sales. If completion rates are low, someone who wants more of game X can just go back to the software they have on the shelf. If the game is designed for a high level of completion, it drives DLC sales. A lower average time per title means that it will be sooner that the next title is bought.
Stock market reporting is broken
Right. "Through" is better than "until" because "until" leaves the reader unsure whether it includes August 19th. And 2011 is unnecessary; if someone does find an old message, they can look at the Date: header.

Personally, I would say "August 19th", not "19".
Why yes. Apple makes way more money via yearly must-have-for-some-reason updates than they do if people keep their pads for years.
3 suggestions for engineering managers
all so depressing.
Absolutely. The first half of the blog post reminded me of this piece by Derek Sivers:

http://sivers.org/15-years
If there were 6 people, he wouldn't be saying 82%. 83%, maybe.
I might just be a little slow this morning, but it took me a good minute to figure out where the content was: it's an audio interview. Hit play on the left.

Also, go watch the movie Helvetica, if you haven't already.
Pointing out where other discussion on the same topic happened, or is currently going on, is a Good Thing. You are confusing helpfully pointing out where more discussion exists as a complaint.
Less than an "iPad Market" or a "mobile market" I think we are simply seeing the beginning of a world where you think less about the gadget that you are using and more about what you want to do. Now, the only reason this will be possible is because the gadgets are/will be designed so well that you are able to start ignoring them.

For instance, I have my contacts in Gmail on my Android phone and when I update them in one place, I have access to them everywhere I use Google. Why can't my GPS use my google contacts so that I can find directions? Why would I have to check my voice mail from my phone (I don't with Google Voice)? etc.

Apple understands the gadget aspect of this. Google understands the "cloud" aspect of this (Apple is catching on). What people want -- normal everyday people -- is not PCs/tablets/iPhones; for the most part, they hate computers; they want to interact with people and things made easier for them. They stick a key in their car and it "just works". They wash their clothes in a washing machine and it "just works". As hackers/developers/etc, we love computers for what they are, everybody else just wants an appliance.
Cleaning up after closures in Flash
Open-ended or unlimited vacation policies... everyone should have them
As was posted in the comments last time, why are the courts relying on pictures of devices that exist in real life? Shouldn't they just ask for an iPhone and a Galaxy S as evidence? Is there some rule disallowing that?
I think this is more Rails encouraging somewhat sloppy use of return values, since Rails (and the community) claim to be kind of slavish about REST-y code but in practice tend to template off of well-known Rails-y code samples rather than thinking "What am I really doing here?"

Rails happens to function under browsers popular at development time, but what do the standards (see nbpoole's comment) or logic suggest is the correct response for this? Asking the user agent (which in this case essentially means Javascript running on a page the user is browsing) whether /widgets/32 is equivalent to /widgets/ so it should know whether it should nuke it or not? That's a tough question for Javascript and an impossible question for the actual human who is trying to get this year's widget catalog ready.

"User requested a delete, server doesn't say delete is impossible, we'll try deleting until we get back confirmation or get told it is impossible" seems like a fairly sensible decision for me. (It is non-compliant with the specs, but GETing the new URL is also non-compliant with the specs, and that is the non-compliance that Rails relies on to actually function.)

There were similar issues way back in the day back when the Rails community was enamored with redirect_to prior to finding out important constituents on the Internet like, say, Googlebot think there are hugely meaningful differences between 301 redirects and 302 redirects.
This is a local politician, Thilo Weichert, trying to make a name for himself. I think everyone in germany except him are wondering what he is doing.
In what sense is there less lock in with Brightbox than with EC2? I've run EC2 images on other IaaS clouds, and it's easy to pull an image out with ec2-download-bundle.
>> Until he said, "So teach them!" He believed that almost anyone can learn and get good at almost anything.

I agree with this statement. But haven't accepted it as the fact yet.

You managed to learn "new things" quickly has not always meant "they" (as you said) will.
>Apple utterly dominated that market long ago

Was that true outside the 'States? I don't remember the iPod ever dominating here, while in the tablet market the iPad does seem to dominate.
段子大全
I agree. It's going to take some time for manufacturers to pull their heads out of there asses on tablets. If you want to compete with Apple, your tablet has to be cheaper. Otherwise, why would anyone buy it? And, it has to not completely suck.
As a long time HN reader and contributor, please do not ask other community members to stop helping the community. If I go to the discussion page for a submission, but find it mostly empty except Colin's link to a dupe, I can then read the discussion that happened.
We think parameterized shortcuts will be the primary use case, but there are several other cases that we're also excited about. Code snippets can easily be shared (they are stored online) and code snippets are searchable (beyond memorized shortcuts, you can find snippets previously unknown to you).
Oh man, Autonomy. I know some people who worked there after the Interwoven acquisition. They uniformly described it as a disaster. Million-line codebases with no unit tests (and a UK dev office that didn't care). Routine selling of non-existent features, followed by dev getting shit on because they had to work over the weekend to make a proof-of-concept for it. High-priced sales-engineers who spend 6-8 weeks on site installing stuff, upselling on hardware and software the whole time.
Same here - the best could just read APIs and start using them, while I was always referring back to them.

I've started meditation again; dual n-backed games are next to try and improve my working memory and concentration. Also, just regularly re-reading the core APIs I'm working with.
You put it into words. Nice fit.

Letter and layout create space with edge and curve.

One big graphical language..
The whole idea that we try so hard to believe in "Everybody is born equal and we are the masters of our destiny" maybe be evolutionary in nature .I was reading a book introducing evolution (and I forget the name but can dig it up if somebody wants the source) that individuals of a species sometimes start working together in such cohesion that they no longer are really individuals but are combined into one "social organism" if you will.

For example Bees ,though they are made up of individual bees they don't cross compete but actually work together to protect the whole group and it makes sense to look at the group as one entity instead of a bunch of individual bees.

The author of the book argued that human beings also have crossed that line from being individual members of a species to being a "social organism" that functions as one and in this scenario it really hurts to have a few select individuals born "better" than the rest.This is because we no longer are cross competing but are trying to optimize as a whole and it doesn't makes sense when you are doing that to have some people have better chances of survival etc as it will ruin the cohesion

Now I highly doubt if we are really born equal but that is just my opinion, from what I have seen around some people clearly were better than the rest in certain things even with other factors being more or less alike
HP's webOS Reportedly Runs Significantly Faster on iPad 2 Than on TouchPad
It was the first mobile OS that handled running multiple applications in a crisp clean way. Notifications were done very well. These are two very key components. Combine that with a hardware keyboard and an easy/common development platform.

It was totally mismanaged.

I was thinking about the Pre3.. Now I'm stuck with the Android or switching carriers for an iPhone. Neither are pleasing choices.
Show HN: itsAlmo.st
At the Type/Code studio we love counting down to things, whether it is lunchtime, beer time, or Arbor Day. However, we couldn’t find a countdown tool that was both attractive and easy to share with friends. So, in some free time this past week we built a little web application to solve our frivolous problem, dubbed itsAlmo.st.

It’s dead simple: just give your countdown a name and a time, and let it begin. Every countdown has its own spiffy URL for as long as it’s running (like itsAlmo.st/#BeerTime), so you can share it with friends and post it to Facebook or Twitter.

We hope you get a kick out of this little utility and find it as handy as we do.
Bank of America BofA Plans 10,000+ Job Cuts
I take issue with pretty much all tests of potential. In my humble view, all they really do is measure how your experience, up to the point when the test is taken, has prepared you for whatever it is you're testing for. A sufficiently intelligent person should be able, given enough training, to become proficient in any area of expertise.

I have no hard data to back this up, save for my own observations.
Gender in software is hard
I just tried it out myself: I can't get DELETE to work in IE9 forms.

My code (I've tried it with both upper-case and lower-case DELETE):

<form action="http://example.com" method="DELETE">
<input type="submit" />
</form>
Newspaper editor sneaks in column about new owner's censorship policies
I just gave advertising a try.
I agree, it's sad that not everyone gets the opportunity to have a great mentor. But somehow, when it's meant to be, most will still push through.
How to Read Tech News
I'll Take the Special, Hold the Gloss
Fed's Pianalto: years to lower unemployment
WebOS ran over twice as fast on an iPad 2
No. Spammers include unsubscribe links, too; they just don't obey them.
Boomer Dilemma: Delay Retiring Or Take On More Risk?
Phones Are Roasting Your Sperm…Sponsored by Blackberry
Wall Street swoons on global recession fears
Action Recognition with Independent Subspace Analysis on the GPU
A Website Audit: The Beginnings of an SEO Campaign
apple fanboying at it's laughably-aggro, faux-chest-beating worst.
Question: can't design-impaired programmers think visually(as article suggests)? I thought that being able to 'see' how a collection of code is supposed to work is thinking visually. Does visual has more to it than 'can-made-to-be-seen-with-eyes'?
Ask HN: Questions for an already successful startup?
I've seen a several of threads that suggest questions to ask your interviewer when talking to a new startup but what are some good questions to ask someone interviewing you to work at a company that's not in danger of loosing its funding in the immediate future?
Test Your “Subitizing” Ability
Subitizing refers to the rapid, accurate, and confident judgments of number performed for small numbers of items.
PyPy Architecture
Yep, that states it better. It is similar to how a *NIX CLI gives you a few primitives that can interact with each other in powerful ways. You can see all the primitives individually, but you probably won't grasp the myriad of ways they can be combined until it is required of you.
FYI - found a bug: Yesterday I started doing some exercises, but I guess the site was getting hammered and some of them were never marked as completed. So today I finished the exercises and re-completed the ones that were never recorded as completed. Now I have two "Getting Started With Programming" badges and two "25 Exercises Completed" badges. Just wanted to let you know.
You just increased average developer productivity tens of times. I can already see the haters hate this new easy way to "code by copy paste", but for people who just want to use code to get things done, i.e., all 100% of coders, including the haters, this is a revolutionary boon.
I mean, file a part time H1B for yourself
So does Microsoft, but that didn't stop them from not innovating between IE6 and IE7, for example.
College Debt Sends Students to 'Sugar Daddy' Website
Did Groupon, Zynga and Facebook miss the IPO window?
The Theory of Quiet Influence
+1 for planetary references
Student Loans Have Grown 511% Since 1999
Using objects and a functional style aren't mutually exclusive. Use objects for encapsulation and abstraction and use a functional style for clarity, conciseness, expressiveness and less mutating state.
Interested to know where 'here' is for you. In the UK ipod did and still does dominate the public perception of modern portable music.
You mean MusicMatch? Yeah, I had MusicMatch, and it was horrid for connecting to ipods and other gadgets. Plus, the buying experience was a mess. I don't remember SoundJam too well, but I don't seem to remember that you connect devices to it to transfer music, and I'm completely certain you couldn't buy music from the software itself.

Remember, this is back during the heydays of Napster, Audiogalaxy and the free download craze for music. iTunes, along with mp3.com, made it completely easy to download legit copies of music, which hadn't been possible before.
DIABETES IN KIDS  Diabetes In Kids Guide And Tips
Well, the iPod certainly dominated in Australia, at least. I have to think for a second to even remember another brand of mp3 player. Ah yes .. the Creative Rio, or Zen, or something. I have never actually seen one in real life.

I would also like to know where you are from. iPod was an incredibly strong brand here. It was basically synonymous with mp3 players. Anything else seemed, and in truth was, second best. I owned 3 or 4 of the things.
If you take the entire corpus of knowledge required to use a language, I'd argue that F# is less complex than C#.

It may seem like it's more complex if the user doesn't have a functional background; but if the user is equally comfortable with both OOP and Functional paradigms F# is the simpler, smaller, more regular language of the two.
I try very hard to find original games but new, triple-A games are always very similar. I've killed a gazillion of guys with a shotgun in my gamer life, up to a point that it doesn't feel so exciting anymore. So I pick up a game, discover the environment setting (sci-fi, medieval, ancient times,...), learn the quirks of your "game changing engine" then realise I will do exactly the same things for 5 - 10 more hours. No more progression, no more new levels, no more new items, no more new KINDS of quests. Same copy/paste of the past previous 5 hours. This is usually where I quit.
A Wireless Communications System That Works When Cell Phones, Internet Are Down
Apple is worth as much as all euro zone banks
I wonder if anyone really loves working for McDonald's, or if this kind of advice is only supposed to apply to privileged middle-class (and above) folks?
I don't know. Perhaps the utter iPod domination was largely a US thing - especially since it went hand-in-hand with Apple coming back from the dead and them not initially having the resources to go global in a big way?

I think Apple has been largely US-centric up until the iPhone, so that could explain why there's a disconnect online when topics like this come up since obviously non-US people will have had a different Apple experience over the last decade or so than those of us here who have been seeing iPods everywhere for years.