skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The unnamed second correspondent isn't really responsive to Broomfield's view.

Broomfield was talking about an idealized Java that never was -- but perhaps "coulda shoulda woulda" existed, if Sun had the right clues. Correspondent #2 criticizes Java as it was (and mostly still is)... which doesn't necessarily clash with Broomfield's estimation that Sun/Java didn't nail the client issues as it should have.
I agree, it's an interesting question. Keep in mind that "looks" doesn't necessarily mean "good looking," it just means an assessment of competence based upon physical appearance.

I think our knee-jerk reaction these days is to assume that looks don't matter categorically, and that any time we observe humans judging others based on looks some primitive bias is at work.

Two things come to mind that might challenge that assumption:

1. If outward appearance were such a poor determiner of attributes like competence, humankind's use of appearance to formulate snap judgments about others would be an exceptionally poor survival strategy from an evolutionary perspective.

2. The fact that we are duped from time to time by the Warran Harding's of the world could in fact be the exception that proves the rule. That is, because the rule proves true so frequently in our experience, it leaves an opening for the occasional impostor who looks the part to take advantage of our otherwise frequently accurate intuitive judgements.

Like the commenter above you said, I'd be interested in seeing someone test these theories more thoroughly, perhaps against a profession where competence can be more objectively measured.
any ideas ?? lol :P
Motor Trade Liability Insurance
"Looks are just noise" is the conventional wisdom. I'd be surprised if there was no correlation at all, between "looking competent" and "actual competence".

Isn't beauty (for want of a better word) associated with symmetry? And isn't that associated with healthy development of body and mind? And isn't that a positive factor for competence? I think people react against "looking good" because we have a tendency to over-value it; but dismissing it entirely (as an indicator) is simply the opposite error.

On the other hand, being naturally gifted (and relying on it), instead of working hard, can undermine one's success: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

In Harding's case (thanks for link; I'm not from the US), much judgment seems to dwell on his oratorical skill, not on his "actual competence" as a statesman. If voters liked his speeches, and that was their purpose, then his oration showed competence with respect to its goal. Disclaimer: I really know nothing about him.

I guess a simple solution to my original question is to select a field where competence can be measured objectively (not politics!), where the actual correlation between "looking competent" and "actual competence" can be ascertained empirically. I'm sure this has been done already...
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Tempest for Eliza - AM radio from your CRT
I saw your reply just after posting mine (though you posted ahead of me). Very similar.

One factor that is counter to your point 1: it could be that in our evolutionary past, there was greater variation in physical appearance than today that did affect competence, such as disease, malnutrition and accident, and so judgments based on appearance had greater predictive power then than they do today - but we still retain it as a basis of judgment.

A scary thought is that judgments of "competence" might really be judgments of "power" - i.e. it's judging whether you'd better go along with them; not their competence. In fairy tales, the princes and princesses are good looking, because they are well-nourished, looked after and trained - which is because they are supported by a power structure (the king/queen). Regardless of their "competence", you'd better defer to them. Keen awareness of the local power structure is strong in gregarious animals like us.

I'm suggesting that health and confidence are indicators of power to our evolutionarily-trained instincts.
There aren't any.

Hopefully one day there will be an east coast version of Silicon Santa.
Have you tried coding in postfix aka Forth, yet?
Stop Teaching Handwriting
A guy was brought in to consult on a startup I've been contracting for. I googled him: He had done something fairly impressive and pioneering in the early days of the web, and he currently held a writing/editorial position at a fairly prestigious web publication besides whatever company he was with. He was supposed to be polyglot, writing in PHP, .Net, and Ruby. I was kinda impressed--I mean, I don't have a wikipedia page.

So he helped us get off the ground with some new-to-us tech we were using, but it turned out that his Ruby code pretty much sucked. So maybe Ruby's not really his thing. He was supposed to be writing about PHP at that publication, so I looked up his articles. Not a single one with even a line of code. Just unfulfilled future plans and occasional business/culture musings. And really the problems with the Ruby code weren't just syntax or library unfamiliarity--there were smells there that should have been bothersome in any language.

So I start filing bugs against his code, and it turns out he's not interested in fixing them. In fact, if the startup has any more "architectural" consulting they want him to do, he'd be happy to weigh in, but he doesn't really like to code much anymore.

Yeah--my respect for him as a developer went way, way down. (I'm not comfortable saying respect generally here.)
Wanderlust: mapping the most famous trips in history, from Magellan to Kerouac
7 Fabulous Ways to Great Programming
Well you haven't really done that - your post says you are capable of everything. Business and tech and successful management and financial support. All strengths no weaknesses?

You reject Craigslist for being not technical enough, yet the most detail you give is "I have an idea"? Are you looking to compute spaceshuttle flightpaths using CUDA, make "a web daytybasey" or write a portaloo rental scheduler for SAP?

Someone who shares the same values? What values? Running a company then leaving it? Posting a vague post and when criticized and asked for more details, telling people to stop whining, then making insinuating comments about them? Complaining about being given a hard time when faced with a dozen paragraphs of text on the internet?

This is the internet, you talk people listen. Spend time and effort listening. Hundreds or thousands of people, minutes each. Person hours wasted. Consider the ice pre-broken.

It might be a bit late now, but giving lots more details is about the only way you could salvage this thread, IMO.
Seth's Blog: Firefox is missing the point
Learning one language at a time =). Haven't tried postfix / Forth yet.. so I don't know how that would feel.
Another big issue is that sites like the aforementioned all encourage (by their interface) upvoting /before/ you look at the content - so items tend to get voted up on title alone.

Sure, you can go and read a story and then remember to come back and vote, but it doesn't usually work that way. The upvote button is there, the title is there - most people are going to be making the vote at that stage, not after.
I think it depends quite a bit on what your end goal is. If your end goal is to make a desktop application that have a visualization component that runs on the mac, then using objective-c, cocoa and the graphics frameworks in OSX will be great.

If you want the application to be on the web, have a look at Flex for the visualization stuff. It uses Flash to render everything so it works pretty well across platforms.
I found this to be really touching. Dean's work is just amazing. I wish I could give this 100 or even 1000 karma points. It's not just the technology and the ingenuity, but the fact that he's helping people who are beyond help. I'm truly inspired.

HN talks a lot about startups and I'm sure most of HN's readers dream of their own startup. Something to think about before taking the plunge is "What benefit is this startup offering?" It can't be just to "make a lot of money". That's why I like what Dean has done. Sure he has made a lot of money, but look at how much he's helped people.

They solve some really tough problems, but the rewards are unbelievable. The video show's a guy named Chuck who has no arms and hasn't fed himself in 13 years, feeding himself. I mean can you even put a price on that kind of reward.

That's the kind of thing that drives you. That keeps you going even when things seem hopeless.
I completely do not agree. I use a keyboard since 10, and I write faster than most people, yet I have a fountain pen and maintain all my personal notes in a Moleskine.

It is hard to me to rationalize it but handwriting enables me to focus entirely on my thoughts, without any distractions, wherver I am. I stumbled upon my best ideas while handwriting.

Personally I even believe that people should be taught calligraphy. It does not make any direct sense but in our attention economy, with constant distractions, it is good to be disconnected for a while.
This is ridiculous. TFA claims that we shouldn't teach handwriting because her son struggles and makes claims that an author used a typewriter in the 1880s because they probably shared the same problem with nothing to back it up.

Sure, nobody 'needs' handwriting when they're in front of a computer keyboard but its a lot easier when you're outdoors and need to write a quick note down (and no, T9 is not the answer), especially given that paper doesn't disappear when it loses charge.
Ask HN: List your favourite social news sources
Another post on HN compared HN to Reddit and Digg, so I thought I'd ask people to list your favourite social news sources.

In no particular order:

http://news.ycombinator.com - :)
http://peeklocal.com - Pakistani news
http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering
Like everything else that we feel, I sense that we don't have a lot of control over who we feel great respect for... we only have the opportunity to justify it in hindsight.

I think that the people that I respect the most are people that I feel are honest and trustworthy. I have no patience for those who play politics or talk out of both sides of their mouths.

You could be the most talented coder or illustrator or kung-fu master or whatever fits the bill for the project that I'm working on... and if you're not honest and trustworthy, I really can't build any kind of working relationship with you.
Just because we have calculators doesn't mean we should stop teaching mental math. Same goes for keyboards/handwriting. On the other hand, "show your work" and cursive do seem archaic, and probably could be dumped.
That's precisely the equivalent of putting a passphrase-protected ssh private key on Dropbox. Probably worse, since personal banking data is more valuable than any Unix box most people log into.
I'm 18 years old, and I live and die on my computer day in and day out. And yet, for all of my college classes I take notes with pen and paper. It's insane to think that a child would be able to get by in school without decent handwriting skills. Maybe in 20 years, but certainly not yet. That said, the asinine emphasis on 'cursive' handwriting I got for two years makes me cringe every time I think about it. That time could have been much better spent on things that I might actually use in real life.
Handwriting has been a tool of the educated for several millennia, I doubt it will so quickly fade into irrelevance. The author of this post has some relevant points, but extends too far.

Handwriting's role is changing, and will be less relevant over time, but there is and has since the beginning of literacy been a difference between reproducing texts and taking notes. The former is already irrelevant (and is the part of the author's point I agree with). The latter won't be for some time.

And what I consider just as critical, is the basic ability to sketch. On a blackboard. On a notepad. On a napkin. Sometimes I need to express ideas visually in a way that technology hasn't caught up with to allow me to do as versatilely as I can with good old writing utensils.
Could I be terribly sneaky and promote my infosec news startup? - http://news.mandalorian.com

Apologies if you've all seen it before :)
Of Course You’ll Keep Developing For The iPhone
I think the perils in this come in teachers forcing every kid to write perfectly, regardless of any impairments they might have. I have dyslexic dysgraphia, which literally prevents me from writing neatly. It sounds like this guy's kid has something similar. Teachers who teach handwriting should be trained to diagnose something like this and help the kids along not by telling the kids that their penmanship is awful, but by teaching them new grips or ways to get around their lack of fine motor control.
This was, without a doubt, one of the dumbest articles I've read on HN in a long time.

I wish I had better handwriting, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who wish they wrote less clearly.
It's almost impossible to take notes in math with a computer too.

I tried writing all my notes in LaTeX for a semester, but I'd waste so much time/energy worrying about typesetting that I didn't pay enough attention in class.

That being said, I'd recommend everyone should try to take notes in LaTeX for a month or two. If nothing else, it makes you fluent very quickly (a skill any computer scientist/mathematician worth their salt will need eventually anyways).

Also, a student writing his G's backwards isn't a fine motor problem - it seems more like a memory/symbol disassociation thing (much more serious). Writing sloppily or in large print is a fine motor problem. Writing backwards isn't.
I heard NewsCred.com is full of awesomeness. In all seriousness, we have thousands of visitors a day loving it, so something must be good about it.

Personally, my day consists of Hacker News, NewsCred, some Google News, and a sprinkling of the Onion.
Wow, can't believe I've never come across NewsCred before...
Thanks... unexpected feedback is always welcome. And positive feedback makes us want to just work harder to continue to delight you guys!
My handwriting is awful. I avoid it if i can, but its a bad idea to not teach kids handwriting.
We just launched recently, so maybe that's why. I've bounced around a ton of ideas and got a lot of help from the HN community over the past year so you might have come across related posts before. Anyway, do let us know what you think - always looking for feedback!
Java subList Gotcha
Not teaching handwriting doesn't mean no handwriting. It would just decrease the emphasis. Besides, I'd rather see touch typing classes from a young age. Why not simply replace one with the the other? Just as typing is often learned with no formal education, so would handwriting be. Just invert the emphasis.

Even then, by the end of our lives if not sooner, speech recognition (and without overt vocalization) will probably make typing obsolete.
Photos from METALLICA`s Death Magnetic official launch party in Berlin
Agreed! A third grade kid who confuses the direction of the hook of a 'G' when writing it himself does not indicate that writing is obsolete. It indicates a failure of parenting.

Now I wonder if this sort of article should be tolerated simply because it generates discussion...
Bush war crimes conference LIVE
It's pg's recipe all over: spit out a lame version 1, see what turns out to be wrong, improve, iterate.
OVH also have sites for UK, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Polish customers (see the flags at the bottom of OVH.com), not just France. The pricing does seem to vary depending on the country though (the cheapest UK 'real private server' costs 9.99GBP in the UK, and 9.99 Euros (7.91GBP) in France).
My Science Fair project when I was 11 was about the Fibonacci sequence. That kinda stuff is all over the place due to the golden number.
I respect people who go above the call of duty. Sure you may be great at X, but if you only do whats assigned to you, it shows me that its just a job for you and not something you truly enjoy.
I wouldn't normally submit something like this, but the people talking are extremely well spoken so far. Mr. Dant (sp?) was just making the point that the last hope for saving the country is the military. His reasoning was that the only way to save the country will be get the support of a group of bright individuals with power. While that should be the congress, they've already shown they're not willing to do the job. But military officers have been consistently willing to stand up to abuses. His point was that enlisted men swear their oath to the president, but officers swear their oath to the constitution, so more people should write to and talk with military officers.
It still needs to be taught, but noone should ever be penalized at school for writing chicken scratch.
> What do you see people emphasizing about themselves over and over again, which actually signal they "just don't get it"?

Hard to answer, "it" has many values...

That the have the or all the answers. That they know and they have nothing to learn on a given topic.

Hubris, ego.

Also anyone who worships "personalities" like PG, joel, Jobs, Greenspan, Rand, etc.

In other words I care little about prestige, can't stand celebrity and value achievements lightly(which are often little more than being at right place at right time and not totally sucking). A person's character is vastly more important.

Character is something you can only discover up close. So, I personally know the people I respect and you have no reason to have ever heard of them.
I recently got a letter that was written in a really artful, beautiful handwriting. It was pure joy, reading this work of art. It would have been beautiful even if the words didn't make any sense.
I wish I could write even remotely as beautifully... Banning handwriting would be a terrible loss.
I use PyObjC, and it's makes Cocoa development quicker and less painful, but it isn't a replacement for knowing Objective-C. Especially when you get into the CoreGraphics stuff and occasionally crash through the floor into OpenGL, Python isn't going to save you (much to my regret).

Despite the negative hype against HTML/JS, it isn't hard to create cross-browser code using that combination. I wrote a project called sparklines.js a while back, which uses the canvas element and it renders appropriately on all major browsers (including IE using http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/). The speed of javascript is going to be sufficient as well for anything except the most extreme projects (I also wrote ptdef.com, which is a tower defense game in html/javascript. It plays poorly on I.E. but fine in more modern browsers, and its far more complex (pathfinding, etc) than the JavaScript you'll probably be dealing with).

Beyond that, using an html/javascript combination you can create content that renders correctly on the iPhone, in desktop applications (well, at least on OSX you can use the WebView to render arbitrary html/css/javascript), and on the web. It's also an open stack, which is my largest complaint against AIR.

In the end, though, I think the hard part should be developing the underlying algorithm to display the visualizations you are interested in, and transplanting it to another platform later shouldn't be impossible. Where you start out really depends on what you want to build. ;)
'I'm a devoted FF user, and have been forever.'

That's interesting, as according to Wikipedia version 1.0 of Firefox was released in February 2004. [1]

'But the response to Chrome shouldn't be to launch new features.'

Which new features are these?

'Here's the problem/challenge: when your friends switch to Firefox, your life doesn't get better.'

No, but when you switch to Firefox your life gets better. How many products or services are sold on the basis of making other people's lives better? Exactly one - charities.

'And the key to growing any piece of software (or just about any product or service, actually) is the opposite. People will recommend something if adoption improves their lives.'

Er, what?

'Fax machines?'

What machines? Fax machines? Oh, you mean version 2.0 of the telegraph?

'Life is better for me if you have one.'

The phrase you're looking for is 'network effect'. [2]

'Fashion? Life is better for me if I'm not the only one wearing this.'

Yes, everyone knows that a woman loves turning up to a party and seeing another woman wearing the same dress as her.

'Religious sect? Life is better for me if I'm not the only one in the building.'

Unless you're a hermit.

'So, Firefox needs to add functionality that makes the surfing experience better for all users when more users use Firefox.'

Say what?

'There are many ways to do this, and you can invent more than I ever could. Systems that allow for rating pages, or grouping them, or communicating (but only with FF users).'

Haven't you heard of the 'any browser' campaign? [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#History

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

[3] http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
Upwardly Mobile In Africa
No. That's missing the point. It's got to stop. Social features are great for some things. Social features are not great if you shoe-horn them in a totally inappropriate way that doesn't add value. Life is better for me and the vast majority of its users if FireFox doesn't add pointless social features that I won't use anyway. I don't want to see people's ratings for sites, see grouped recommendations or communicate with other FireFox users. The people who do want this functionality can install extensions, and those extensions largely already exist.

Besides, this may mean I need to rewrite Halo's Law ("Every site expands until it becomes a social network, those that don't are replaced by those that do").
Actually I think that Seth misses the point as well. I don't care whether other people wear the same clothes as me. I recommend because I like.

Firefox's response to Chrome should be not adding new features but removing existing ones, or, at least, redesigning them to make the UI even easier.
'5. Still reading? I thought you'd wizened up by now?'

http://www.answers.com/wizened&r=67

wiz·ened (wĭz'ənd)
adj.

Withered; wizen.

http://www.answers.com/wise

phrasal verb:

wise up Slang.
To make or become aware, informed, or sophisticated.
The irony is that people who have competence, knowledge, and experience usually got that way by taking risks and pushing themselves out of their comfort zone. And if you observe them taking a risk that doesn't pan out, it looks like incompetence.

Everyone was a novice once, and even experts are novices when they enter a domain outside of their expertise.
Summary - practice makes perfect. By the author's own admission ... stop reading articles like these and "Focus" on your coding.
Interactivity and signification in Head Over Heels
From Eliza to A.L.I.C.E.
He might be dyslexic or something. She's got a point.
My handwriting is awful, but the moment I switch to writing math, it becomes clear.

I think the reason is that my handwriting is bad not because I'm incapable of writing clearly, but that I'm incapable of writing clearly at the speed I want. I can write clearly if I slow down. When I write out math, each symbol means more. I don't have to write as fast, and getting the exact symbol correctly means more, so it's slow and clear.
And yet, this is an "intelligent" reply?

If handwriting is still being taught in schools, it's being extremely overvalued. When's the last time a kindergartner, or any elementary student for that matter, was required to take a typing class? And yet, those students learn to type at a passable level.

Teach touch typing instead. The children will learn the same fine motor skills but with something that will be much more important throughout the rest of their lives. They'll pick up handwriting as necessary, but public education shouldn't hand out grades and devote significant resources to its teaching.
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