skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HP at a 20% discount is looking pretty good... ~50billion market cap, 5.8 p/e, 2% dividend, and they're getting out of unprofitable sections of their business. At risk of being cliche, think of it as failing fast and pivoting. Go big or go home kind of thing. Success is far from certain but it may be better than staying the course and crashing into the beach.
Was HP's expecting customers to kill each other over Touchpad?

HP is buying spree feels like recently dumped women who finds solace in shopping and dumping the new dress in overflowing closet.

On serious note, WebOS is praised all around for beauty and technical supremacy yet HP wants to drop it because the failed to execute one piece hardware. This is a very emotional and personal reaction.
I hope you realize my initial comment wasn't addressed to the child in question, or I would have e-mailed it directly to him and worded it less strongly. Rather, I intended to discuss with the HN community the technical merits of the article. (If treating his article as the work of an adult isn't praise I don't know what is!)

On a side note, I feel mildly insulted that you feel the need to tell me how to do my job. If you're interested in the intricacies of the art of teaching self-directed youth (which mostly involves understanding the child in question, and saying the right thing at the right time) I'd be glad to discuss them with you.
Misled? Tell it like it is. They lied.

They may not have meant to. It may have been an internal miscommunication. But that lie stayed on their site until after launch, when people started calling them on it.

There was a rumor they (and/or Steam) were giving refunds, but that turns out to have been false, too.
Meant it in the sense of, you are defendant in patent lawsuit, and can show within your patent holdings, prior art related to plaintiff's infringement case.

Probably worded wrong, I'm not patent expert.
To be fair, they also missed on earnings. that's going to account for a fair bit of the drop as well.
Emergent peer programming is the best. I've done 2-3 instances of it over the last 3 years and it definitely felt like we truly moved mountains during those couple of hours.

One time we wrote a quite complicated graph-based algorithm (as in, lots of bug potential, but it turned out bug free) and the other two times we fixed bugs that hounded us for weeks in just one session.

I definitely feel like it works best in those situations when both people can complement each other somehow. If it's just a junior/senior person it will probably not be very useful for the senior person (note I mean a true junior here with little programming experience, not just some non-senior engineers).
I have read some bad advice here before, but this ranks among the worst. I would like nothing more than to spend my days sleeping in and my nights creating the next Angry Birds but I live in the real world. There's 14% unemployment here. I don't have my pick of jobs and until I have a major win with the software I create, odds are I won't. I'm very glad that this person has a Utopian philosophy that everyone should only do what they're truly passionate about, but here on Earth that isn't the case for 99.99% of society.
No, it appears as if it was just altered in the ways that would help their case, in this instance. With the tablet filing, the aspect ratio appears to be altered - and perhaps not coincidentally, altering the aspect ratio in that filing was more beneficial.

The end result appears to be, in both the tablet and phone filings, that the alleged image manipulation produced something that appeared more similar to Apple's products. That the image manipulation is different (aspect ratio adjustment, vs resizing) seems to be more damning than if the same adjustment was made across the board (i.e. it looks less likely to be accidental).
Yes, this article sort of follows this logic:

- We tried pairing for one day

- Pairing was immensely productive for that session

- Therefore pairing is AWESOME all the time

Pair programming ought to be considered like trimming your nails. Don't do it everyday or it's going to hurt. A lot.
I think once a month you should pair program randomly with someone. I think programming effectively involves combining thinking in the large and implementing in the small. Ive found that occasional pair programming teaches me new keyboard shortcuts, tools, workflows, idioms and when pair programming with a great programmer also gives me a very clear feedback that much remains to be learnt. In short Ive found that pair programming is great about teaching me about 'implementing in the small'
> Meant it in the sense of, you are defendant in patent lawsuit, and can show within your patent holdings, prior art related to plaintiff's infringement case.

Sure but my point is that you don't need the prior art to be in your own patent porfolio, or even in a patent. You just need to show that the patent in question has prior art of any kind.
Isn't pairing just a more immediate (and annoying) form of code reviews? I'd take code reviews over pairing any day.
API Documentation: What's Most Important?
Sure, Python is even more popular today, but it showed up frequently in /. "what language should I learn programming with" threads in at least as far back as 2005. I seem to remember much earlier.
The Surprising Science of Smiles
That's a reason why there are more and better online games available now, but that isn't a very satisfying explanation for the initial statistic. There are still plenty of non-multiplayer games and 10 years ago the game completion rate wasn't much better.
This is such a good point. I've noticed that the personality style of "algorithm obsessed, Knuth worshiping, all about optimization, hardcore coder" doesn't have a lot in common with "creative, new software, good UI, unique application builder" personality. While its important to have some of the former under your belt, its the latter that gets shit done and makes things. I consider myself a maker, not a coder or a computer scientist. I'm getting a little sick of the attitude that you need to be this hotshot coder to be into software. Its just this geek macho poseur mentality that's harmful. A mediocre coder with a few good ideas is all it takes. I'd rather see a slow python app or a simple web app that's unique than some super-fast C or low-level me-too implementation.

I feel this dichotomy is typical of geeks. My poor metaphor is we learn the notes, scales, and do our practices, but at the end of the day we're supposed to be writing songs, not waxing philosophic on music theory or who makes the best pianos. Geeks are just too prone to being "technically correct, the best kind of correct!" and those of us who want to create unique things really need to think more like artists than engineers half the time. Oh well, back to our typical barrage of "Why PHP sucks" and "real coders walk like this..." articles
It's always good to remember that ten years' worth of experience and repeating the one year of experience ten times are not the same thing.
FWIW I think your point was well suited as a counter to the attitude in the first half of Atwood's article, so I'm glad you posted!
1 coder for the price of 2! What a steal ;-]
Will you have an API? I'd love to see integration with github's editor :)
Entrepreneurial Habits
To all the people saying this would affect only Schleswig-Holstein: Facebook is breaking German federal laws (BDSG, TMG) by not obeying to their requirements when handling personal data. This has nothing to do with Schleswig-Holstein.

The only interesting question is whether you as a German company or individual can be held responsible if you include facebook's like button on your website. Thilo Weichert says yes, but we'll have to see how the first judges will decide on this matter. If he is right then this is true for whole Germany.
>someone stealing a water trailer at gunpoint

I can't imagine how frustrating that would be. You do however now remind me of generators going missing at night and purposeful damage of barricades.
Profitable sales: Picking your go-to-market sales strategy
That's a Wall St. view that completely misses the point. You could look at it very differently. The new CEO is making some bold moves to undo a bunch of bad decisions his predecessors made.

Buying Palm was nonsense. HP was never the company to make it work. Contrary to that, Autonomy, one of the best software companies in the world, is a good fit for HP's enterprise strategy.

Spinning off the PC business is very likely a step towards selling it altogether, similar to what IBM did years ago.

I think these are all steps in the right direction and I'm thinking of buying the stock once the current stock market panic has settled down a bit.
7 Product Tips for Startup
I use usertesting.com. You get a ten minute video and audio of testers using your site. These types of small (aka big) problems are weeded out pretty quickly.

Can't rate them high enough.
Teaching Design Principles to Kids
People hate math because they are cowards and people are cowards because we have math 101 in school but not courage 101 ... I have spent a lot of time teaching myself how to learn, so I agree that current institutionalized methods of education are very flawed. But it's like, life is hard. It's not going to get any easier just because you pretend it's not hard.
The thing is, the Touchpad already had a dual core cpu built in.

I can't really imagine that HP has put the effort of completely porting webos over to a different hardware platform, but I think that instead they might have tested the enyo toolkit on the iPad and have seen tremendous performance improvements. Those, I think, can be attributed to the superiority of MobileSafari (having hardware acceleration and having a very fast Javascript VM being the primary sources of better performance).
John Siracusa explained on an episode of his podcast that part of the reason long-time Mac users experience so much schadenfreude about PCs and PC market share is that Mac users have felt like the persecuted minority despite being advocates of what they saw as a superior product for so long. It's a very emotional thing, he explains.

That does not explain, however, why a Mac user imagine himself, just because of his association with Apple as a consumer, that he had anything to do with Apple's success, or that his advice to anyone would be in any way meaningful.

Especially when that advice is "be disruptive." Disruption's easy to see in hindsight. But it's almost impossible to see before it happens. That's why it's called 'disruption.'

And anyway, Google is a force of disruption. On many vectors. In mobile, Google has introduced a business model that's so disruptive that all the industry players feel threatened enough to resort to litigation. (I'm referring to licensing of Android, wherein the manufacturers actually get paid for using the OS, through some ad-sharing deal that's never been completely explicated as far as I know.) They're also still quietly working on ChromeOS, another potentially disruption.

My point is, saying "be disruptive" is about as valuable as saying "just win!"
Awesome! I think CodeMatch could be the keystone for a partially voice-controlled IDE. CodeMatch maps relatively simple strings (like "read files") to nice code snippets. The next step is to map simple voice commands (like "read files") to their string representation in CodeMatch. I'm excited :-)
If you think you're right and the market is wrong, you should buy the stock.

This is what makes a market. I you are right, you will make money. If you're wrong, you lose.
First genuinely interesting article I've read ever since M.G.Siegler hit Techcrunch
Those rewards won't buy me or my kids food, or pay the mortgage.

I get the larger point the advice is supposed to make, but I'm sorry, I will never work for free.

I will quit working, if I ever become wealthy enough to afford it, and I would tinker on my own "for free", but I wouldn't call it work at that point.
Leave a little uncertainty in your plans
Al Franken: Wall Street rating agencies' corrupt system
"Lockheed Martin wants billions of dollars"

Well, no shit.
The author of that also uses a great deal of selective evidence, flat out ignoring genetic research in relationship to music, for example. Specific genetic sequences have been linked both to perfect pitch and to success in classical music. If you can't find it via a quick google search, I'll be happy to provide citations.

Evidence for the role of genetics in running, swimming and a variety of other sports is equally overwhelming. In short, he (and others like him such as gladwell) sell a fantasy that millions, possibly billions would like to believe. It's an excellent strategy for selling books and developing a base of hard-core fans, but it's just not true.
We are privileged to work in, quite possibly, the best industry in the world to have a short blank space in one's resume. No place where you would want to work will ding you for "I wanted a new challenge so I took a sabbatical after leaving my old job and spent some time experimenting with new technologies. Want to talk about what I learned?"
Germany vs. Facebook: Like Button Declared Illegal, Sites Threatened With Fine
IWARP - Been There, Tried It and Walked (Actually Run...) Away
What if Google bought StumbleUpon?
Even for privileged middle+1 class folks, this advice is ridiculous. There aren't that many people that can quit their job and be near-guaranteed to find something better.

Can anyone name a field for which that's true, not counting software development? Even among us, that's not even true for 50% of programmers.
Umm.. Yes it is.
The market thinks it's a bad decision. If you disagree, buy the stock. A stock doesn't drop 20% for no reason. Overpaying for a software company and dropping webos, tr maker thinks it's a BAD decision.

If you think otherwise buy the stock and profit.
Fascinating article for a non-designer like me. Things like visual rhythm and baseline grids hint that designing isn't just having the talent to know what looks good; there's also a whole science behind it.
That seems like a pretty good idea to me; would make the last-modified response header unnecessary. I'm guessing it's not done this way because of synchronization issues? (e.g., if someone has their computer's clock set to the year 2025, they can never refresh on servers that use the header)
Personally I think that big enterprise software and its sales model, as perfected by Oracle and SAP is dead long term, it will be killed by an on demand cloud products. HP maybe had a chance to get into this market eventually, and WebOS was part of his strategy.

But instead they decided to chase last decades model which makes high margins in the short term.

And why does no one want to try to compete with Apple?
I'd use this less to deal with a language's lack of expressiveness and more to deal with abstruse APIs. It would be very useful for httplib2 or SQLAlchemy, even though both are written in a pretty expressive language.

I'd especially be interested in creating snippets for my own proprietary APIs, which are typically move more quickly and are generally less documented that big, established public APIs.
You can replace "iPad" with "iPhone" and "2011" with "2008" to see how silly this argument is.
Another MBA type killing a great tech company. I don't understand why it doesn't occur to these boards that engineers/technologists/innovators should lead tech companies. For some reason they can't imagine that technology can save a technology company. It wasn't some genius business maneuver that turned Apple into the biggest company in the world, it was genius technology.
I believe even a commercial advertisement making this kind of comparison is required to have a disclaimer immediately above or below it describing any changes made to an image. I would imagine a legal document would have more stringent requirements.

You remember "not actual size", right?
This reminded me of the PBS NOVA episode about how the Mandelbrot set can describe nature, like the spacing of trees in a forest, the spacing of branches on a tree, the spacing of leaves on a branch, the spacing of veins in the leaf, etc. It's not just random.

Apparently, the fibonacci sequence can be found within the Mandelbrot set, which makes sense from the author's discovery.

http://www.sunflowerblog.ch/2007/06/03/the-fibonacci-numbers...
sure, but as they say about cameras, "the cameraphone on you is often worth more than the 5mk2 dslr you have at home".

or something along those lines.
Local Motors is Hiring
Local Motors needs a wicked smart php developer to help build the website lets users design the cars of the future!

http://vimeo.com/27821581
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_2zD-hs0aU
In wolframs "A new Kind of Science" there is a long discussion of not only the fact that leaf arrangement tends to use the golden ratio and that it is optimal for the plant. But also he describes a model (using cellular automata) that explains why such a pattern might emerge naturally. Unfortunately i don't remember all the details but it was a compelling use case for why automata might be a good model for natural phenomenon.
I can't cite law, but there must be implicit permission for download if your SWF is up on a public site. Otherwise everyone could sue everyone for it.

And once you have the data, I'm sure there are very few, if any, restrictions on how you process it internally.

Redistribution is another matter, but Google doesn't seem to have done any of that.

Agreed, awesome.
73 for the link, KE6QFN
This is why I mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect. You have no idea how bad you are at programming and how completely wrong you are. From other comments in this thread we can already see how poor of a decision it was to use a dynamically typed language to introduce programming to fresh newbies. Javascript is NOTHING like C. Just because it has curly braces in it doesn't mean it is like C. That is like saying you saw a red ferrari so all red cars are ferraris. No.

The concepts I mentioned are not advanced concepts. They are BASIC concepts, such as would be covered in a basic freshman/sophomore class in college. You probably have no idea about the huge class of bugs that you could easily avoid if you understood these concepts. They are not used some of the time, they are used ALL of the time.
I almost feel like saying, "If you would do your job for free, quit", just to be flamebait-ey.

Hewever, I think there's a level of professionalism that comes with getting paid (ie: you feel bad slacking off reading HN), but if you're working for free, then I can see it turning into: "Hey, let's try framework Z, because it looks like fun!" (not because of client requirements). "OH LOOK, HASKELL ON A HORSE! I've never written Haskell, but let's try it for the Foo subsystem!"

Yes, this is too simplistic, ie the open source community. Usually when I work on open source stuff it falls out of client work (I want X to be better, I found a bug in Y, etc).

Then again, I've been a contractor for the last 8 years, so I might have a different view than a independent software vendor with their own product lineup.

(Yes, I am working on my own product, but not because I want to work for free: it's because I want to create a revenue stream and get paid.)
I have seldom done it well. Normally one person rushes off to "just quickly try this idea", without really explaining it ("just wait a minute, it will be quicker to just type it in than explain it") so the other person is limited to basically spotting errors which is slightly useful, but probably not the best way to spend a second programmers wages.

It excels in combination with TDD. One person writes a test, and the other person makes it green and writes the next test and so on.

Combining those two practices is very powerful.

Another time I don't like to pair is when debugging or trying to understand some old legacy code or something. If two people have different strategies for doing that it doesn't really make sense to pair. I like to write a lot of stuff down on paper for example, another guy likes to click "step" in the debugger on a lot.
Build Apps Linked to Times Square
I'm confused by people who pair all the time, because it seems like the benefit of pairing varies heavily depending on the current programming activity.

For example, when I'm debugging, I can easily be several times more productive with someone else trying to guess what is going wrong. On the other hand, for most "glue programming", it feels like a huge waste of time to be looking over someone's shoulder while they try to figure out the best library to play sound or how some website API works.

Regular programming where all of the libraries and general plan are known seems in between those two extremes. Sometimes a second person can help detect problems and/or keep the first person on their game, but sometimes basic conflicts over code style can arise.

I've never been part of a pair programming shop, but I've tried pair programming with similarly inexperienced pairs before. How do people who pair all the time resolve problems like redundancy when looking up or learning information? Relatedly, how do they solve situations where basically one person is the only person who understands how to solve the problem (either because of skills like statistics or because of knowledge like understanding some API), and the second person is just along for the ride?
I wrote a blog post with a nearly identical example.

http://jaydonnell.com/blog/2011/08/07/is-your-idea-clealry-e...

The code gets nutty when you have to do multiple transforms on collections. There are some libraries in Java which make it more bearable.

http://code.google.com/p/lambdaj/

List<Person> sortedByAgePersons = sort(persons, on(Person.class).getAge());
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_end_job
When your phone is a plain black square with rounded corners, don't they all look the same?
http://mobile.engadget.com/2008/11/04/htcs-touch-hd-gets-ove...

http://www.theandroider.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/ca...

Are we really expecting the courts to compare aspect ratios, and corner radii to decide that one is to similar to another?

Where will we draw the line? Sorry, Apple, 4" screen with 11mm thickness was already done by htc, your phone is only 2mm thinner, that's too close to the other devices.
When you say "WoW is dominated" you're probably talking about the median age of a player online. That's a different metric than the median age of all players. Young folks have more time to spend on leisure, and routinely spend 8+ hours at a session. Older people with careers might play much less, but they still play.

And more to the point: as game billing is generally per-seat or per-month, it's these older players that actually dominate the revenue.
Programmer George
Can ex-Microsoft employees make great entrepreneurs?
As someone not too familiar with HTTP -- given that you're redirecting them to a an actual page and not some user-associated resource the page needs to grab, why would the redirected DELETE request be honored in the first place? Or am I misunderstanding what's going on here?
Get banned from the PlayStation Network in 30 days or less
I like this a lot, but I'm frustrated by not being able to browse the snippets online. Ideally this would have an online backend like StackOverflow where users could browse the "keywords => code snippet" relationship, make comments, vote, and make revisions. With an open API, people would create the IDE plugins for you. I know I'd happily contribute to a vim plugin.
I think at this point, it's just a matter of conflicting definitions.

But yes, his advice only applies to independently wealthy people, unless you start attaching caveats: "If you wouldn't do what you do for FREE, then find another JOB, secure IT, and then QUIT your current one".
How a $1,500 Start-up Changed Health Care
Droid Bionic latest rumor: $300 on 9/8