skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. The first is blindly following a dogma, the second is true knowledge.

An example: I have been taught to never attempt shifting the gear in a car before pressing the clutch. I accept this as a dogma, but I have no idea what would have happened had I tried really hard. When I asked "why", the only answer I got was roughly "the engine would break". Only some car mechanics / engineers have enough understanding to explain in detail what would have happened. They have knowledge, I'm following a dogma.
Definitely.

But if they released an open-source version of IE, started shipping IE frequently for Windows, Macintosh and Linux and released the Dart language spec and implementation under an open-source license... well, then I'd like it a lot better.
Show HN: A delicious Stack of Stacks about iOS Development 
I've just started collecting a delicious stack about iOS development. Composed with other stacks with sections about getting started, iOs libraries, Articles, tools.

What do you think? what do you think is missing? what other resources should be included? Thanks for contributing! cheers
For the record, anic was and still is pure vaporware. Sample code exists but there is no working compiler or interpreter to run it...
You are incorrect. Android applications can be compiled against purely Android libraries, or Google's additional libraries. The ones which do not depend on Google's services specifically can be used anywhere you like.

For example: There's a company running Android apps on iOS now.
Infinite Carousel for iOS Web Apps
I don't know if you're disappointed that some comments were stating the obvious (the code stinks) or that all the more experienced coders joined in on the pile-on.

I agree that it would be nice if the OP took the time to deconstruct the example and explain why some of the coding practices are bad. Then again, some of the comments do explain why it's bad code. Seeing comments like the one below, however, makes me wish there were enough time in the world to educate beginner programmers (and that they'd all give a darn about avoiding problems like this).

> Hm... I like this code. All the stuff is combined together in one place.
$95 for three months of a reading training program. That's one way to crack out of the $1 app market.

I predict great success for them, and if the claims are true, happy customers too.
"we try so hard to hire people like ourselves"

Part of this is self-selective in that we communicate well with people that think like us. Perhaps the other side of the coin is that is takes a lot of energy to determine that someone is a good fit unless they think like ourselves.
I think many just wanted a pretty new piece of hardware that looks different (‘better’) than the current form factor.
Huh?

"In fact, of the seven fundamental metric units — the kilogram, meter, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela — only the kilogram is still dependent on a physical artifact."

Followed by:

"And the luminosity of light, or candela, is measured in terms of power, designated in watts, or joules per second."

I'm not an SI expert, but Wikipedia suggests the candela is in fact an SI base unit with a definition based on physical phenomenon of the universe, so the second sentence seems erroneous.

[edit: clarity]
Tons of stuff in Java is infested with hard coded URIs and you will never find them all. For example to load properties in XML format the XML doctype is the following little gem: <!DOCTYPE properties SYSTEM "http://java.sun.com/dtd/properties.dtd>; . http://download.oracle.com/javase/1,5.0/docs/api/java/util/P... claims the URI isn't loaded- but that is only if you are using the exact set of XML libraries in the exact classpath order they were thinking about when they wrote that promise (especially on the IBM JVM which isn't smart enough to put the system copy of the XML libraries in a mangled namespace to prevent the user from accidentally overriding then when they and new XML implementations to the classpath). Frankly I'd like to see all of this stuff broken and then excised.
SEEKING WORK

Considering going full time / part time freelancing

* 2+ years with Windows Desktop application development. WPF, C#, .NET 4, MVVM.

* side project experience with Ruby on Rails

Would really like to get some experience freelancing and help solve my late-20's-life crisis I'm going through ;)

Please email me if you'd like more information.

mikeackerman at gmail dot com
I think we are arguing the same point: the iPhone 4S is a great product and does have solid improvements.

I am not disappointed with the 4S, but it is apparently clear that a few vocal people are. Why are they disappointed? I can only guess that it would be because it doesn't have a 'next generation' design.

At first I was disappointed because I was after a larger screen (or just more of an 'edge-to-edge' display) for my iPhone and I would happily upgrade to that, but that is the extend to my disappointment. It is evident that the 4S an improvement upon the second generation and will be welcomed by people coming off their 3GS contracts
Yeah, I touched upon the parameterized query with the SQL injection part but should've mentioned that more specifically. Good point about the catch... I missed it because I was shocked at everything else ;)
Monarchy, Empire, and Why Humans Adore Steve Jobs
The diet changed, and more then compensated for the exercise change.
> The straw that really broke the camel’s back in this case
was the naming of WebForm2.

This is the real WTF.
And in any case I seem to recall being assured by Mozilla that we don't need no Native Client because Javascript is going to be fast enough for everything. Even pre-existing non-JS code could just be compiled to mighty JavaScript, the Assembler of The Web™ and all would be well. But now Dart is unacceptable because Dart-to-JS won't be close enough to the performance of native Dart?
MassChallenge Top 26 Finalists announced
It's articles such as this that scare developers away from C. You honestly do not have to mind meld with the C compiler to be a safe and productive C developer. If you're not sure what's going to happen if you don't initialize a variable then that's OK, because most developers realize that being explicit is better than allowing the implicit case to occur in every language.
You are right- nobody should knowingly allow this sort of dependency. Except Sun hard coded a few of these in.
Cal. Governor Vetoes Bill Requiring Warrant to Search Mobile Phones
lol

we would have crossed paths then as I would be the world's only consulting detective.
I must be living in a different version of the United States than the author is. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of false optimistic outlook referred to here. Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Most people I talk to about our business are fairly realistic about the challenges we face, or progress thus far, etc.
China's Reality Goes Buy One Get One Free
Giant QR Codes Might Help Businesses Get Noticed On Google
Tractup.com, early startup traction, features now interviews
Replacing RabbitMQ with MongoDB
3 Leadership Lessons that Steve Jobs Never Learned
Imagine the potential Steve Jobs had if he had been a Leader…
Brain linked to robotic hand
Isn't "Not enough value at the 2X price." a bit hyperbolic? Most people would say a 60% cut is "around 50%". I'm not trying to criticize you, but there seems to be a systemic overreaction that I can't quite figure out.
I've tested a variety of HSPA+ devices on AT&T's networked and never even approached the HSPA theoretical max of 14.4Mbps, let alone HSPA+'s max. More commonly, I'd see speeds of 1-4Mbps down. Never any more than 4.
I fail to see what Dart accomplishes that other languages don't already accomplish. Not just syntactically, but all things considered -- runtimes, compilers, etc.

Sorry to be critical, but this looks like technology for technology's sake.
The iPhone 4S will probably be my mom's first cell phone. She doesn't like tech and likes her big button home phone (as in 3/4" button big button). My father and her just moved and my Dad doesn't really want a home phone anymore. He has been looking at getting her a JitterBug. She uses and Apple TV fine (netflix, mlb, and iTunes), so it isn't like she cannot use technology. She just has a phobia of current cellphones. I think it is more from her not wanting to wear her glasses and not being able to read the phone (she sees the TV fine).

Given Siri, Mom will be getting the iPhone 4S.
It's easy to say that, but that's not the default in Java and it takes a decent amount of work to completely decouple yourself. For example: it uses XML all over the place to setup and configure things and, by default, will validate these XML files against a schema at a URL. If that URL starts redirecting to a splash page (as http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd currently does), it breaks the build.
What drives some people away is the price tag, regardless of quality and features.

I just dropped $1800 and change on an iMac, which really doesn't have any more mojo than an equivalent PC.

If I need support, someone will say: "How can I help you?" no matter how inane the question, instead of (Linux) "RTFMNoob" and (Windows): "Google, install driver, visit MSDN, etc.".

The difference (in my mind) is that I didn't buy a personal computer, I bought a Mac. I didn't buy what I needed, I bought what I want.
But is it something people actually type? I haven't played with Java for almost ten years now but I do C# for a living which is pretty similar and I can't remember the last time I had to type something that long, Visual Studio does it for me. I can see the point if you say it's longer to read but it's also much clearer, isn't it?
you need a working microphone to do this. i wanted to do this for fun, but i didn't know that they'd be relying on voice communication (i didn't watch the video they have embedded on the blog)

e: also the prize is for US residents only, apparently (since that's where they are trying to recruit, that only makes sense)
Not sure why there are so many negative comments, the exact detail of the questions and answers aren't as important as the overall message and the guy and girl are archetypes.

We're interviewing some candidates for embedded C programming right now and these are the types of questions (although generally easier) I ask to find out the level of C expertise. For embedded systems with a focus on stability I want candidates who have a very good grasp of the fundamentals like the difference between normal globals, statics, volatile, etc. Also I'd like people who understand enough about the linker to know about data segments, zero init and stuff like that. For embedded you generally have to be able to implement interrupt handlers so the exact translation of a line of C code to assembly is important, as is knowing what's atomic and what isn't.

I'm continually surprised how many programmers have worked on embedded systems in C without being able to answer almost any of my questions. Many seem exactly like the guy in the examples, none like the girl.
Apple allows plenty of interpreters -- Lua, Frotz, C64 emulator, BASIC interpreters, etc. They relaxed their policy about a year ago. I doubt they're going to reject an educational app that teaches programming.
I watched the keynote, and as someone who does almost all his purchasing online, found myself in Best Buy the other day. So we wandered over to the phones and checked out a Windows phone and an HTC which were right next to each other.

The windows phone was pretty interesting. It took my partner a couple tries to figure out how to use it (I'd seen demos online so I was more prepared for the UI) but they eventually got it. Still, the UI was broken in some very weird ways-- for instance, going to the datebook app, you could easily scroll from day to day, but what if you wanted to go a year into the future or the past? (The phone was set for last year)... eventually we were able to figure out how to bring up a calendar view that showed months at a time, but tapping on a particular month or day didn't bring you to that particular month or day's agenda! Never did figure that out.

I give Microsoft credit here for trying to come up with something new. I think in a couple years, they will have something very usable, and it certainly is very different and potentially innovative. (Didn't get to use the device long enough to see if it was different for difference sake, or if there was a fundamental UI insight behind the way it worked.)

Then we picked up the HTC. It was pretty eye opening. I did like the animated background, that's cool. The icons are fugly, though. Its like someone who didn't know what they were doing tried to copy an iPhone. The device was really cheap plastic. The touch screen wasn't very reliable, and the apps were ... poor at best. I was surprised at how fiddly everything was... you couldn't just launch an app and immediately know how to use it. On the iPhone (and windows phone it seemed) there are standard controls and paradigms, like the tab bar and swiping left-right. I'm sure android has these features as well, but they aren't really supposed to be features... they're the common commands that Apps should share so that the user spends time comprehending your app and what it means, not trying to figure out how to get to the next page, or whatever.

I don't know, or care, whether this was the "latest" android phone. In fact, replacing an iPhone every 2 years is a much better experience than having to keep up with a marketplace of phones that changes every three months... and given that Apple always delivers a superlative experience, while the android hardware market is competing more on headline features, there's a huge incentive for android makers to put in some feature (like LTE, or a power hungry processor) that undermines a more important, but less exciting capability, like battery life. Trying to keep on top of all that, making sure I'm not getting screwed is more effort than I want to spend when shopping for a phone.... especially when I can just buy the latest iPhone and get the best experience, and know I'm not going to regret my purchase.
I'm a Netflix employee. If you ask me I'll tell you in no uncertain terms that it's not a culture of fear. I've been here for one year and have only seen one person removed for performance reasons. Fear is never a driving factor in any of my decisions.

Employees ask tough questions during company meetings and our executives are incredibly open. I guess we've become complacent because their decisions had been bold and right before these past couple of months. I believe this is why there was not a stronger push back internally.
That was the first thing I thought about when reading this - it would create a lot of debris!
Although this shouldn't affect applications, some xml parsing libraries request the defining URI. For those that don't know, these URIs are for unique identification, not necessarily a real URL.

The W3C has major problems with browsers doing this for DTDs: http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dt...
Recession Officially Over, U.S. Incomes Kept Falling
That code is filled with all sorts of horrors (Sql injection, passwords in plain-text in DBs, passwords sent in query-string, all logic in web-layer), but redirecting in a using block is ok, the disposers will always be called (outside of fatal exceptions like StackOverflows)
What is your stack like? How many servers, what back-end technology, amount of memory, processor, etc?
Moped Gang Hits Covent Garden Apple Store in Smash & Grab
I predict $1 copycats in 3, 2, 1 ...
But 'regular' people are loving the Galaxy S 2, I guess because of it's large and vibrant screen, and it's thinner (to hold) compared to the iPhone 4[1].

I really like the Galaxy S 2 and I wish so hard that Android was actually polished to the degree that iOS is. My iPhone bores and I love the screen on the Galaxy S, yet I know I will miss out on OS updates and being able to smoothly rotate the screen. The day android is as polished as iOS is is the day I switch.

[1] I'm not sure if it is actually thinner than the iPhone 4, but it feels thinner, much in the same way the 2nd gen iPod touch was thinner than the previous gen)
The -webkit- and -moz- prefixes are there for stuff that's not standardised yet. They're experiments, maybe they'll be standardised as is (sans prefix), maybe the behaviour will be tweaked and tried out in the wild some more.
It's sad that chef differs so much depending on server/solo usage:

Without chef-server using so called "chef-solo" lacks a lot of good things:

+ (remote) bootstrapping + distribution (like "little-chef"; non-official)
+ data bags (third party cookbook only; non-official)
+ search (e.g. on a central file system based data-base which gets dumped into a json that will be uploaded on bootstrap/update time (push))

As others stated, running your own chef-server (even external/paying for it) brings a new risc factor into your provisioning business and if you depend on data bags and search you'll most likely not be able to bootstrap new app servers when your chef server is down. This is a huge SPOF.
java.sun.com is down and redirects to Java-related section of Oracle's website. Other than that all the DTDs and XSDs are in usual location, so there is no need for panic.

For example the mentioned http://java.sun.com/dtd/properties.dtd can be found with no issues. Other example is http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd that sits in usual location and I don't expect anyone was going to touch it.
Mozilla's Firefox Manifesto video
UIViewController retain/release dance in IB
This may be the subject for a part 2. Aka more intensive testing for the implementations that actually perform. And other recursive algorithms (such as the classic factorial). I didn't test the language (implementation!) performance, but the recursion and how the various implementations can actually handle the bad recursion algo.

A proper testing suite that tests various aspects of a specific runtime takes time. I am aware of that, but I am not aware of any test suite that does this.
> I didn't buy what I needed, I bought what I want.

The funny thing is that's the complete opposite to what Apple retail employees are taught. Sell what the customer needs; nothing more, nothing less
Exactly. I don't see how this is in any way related to Android being open or not...
My mom could care less about better Linux connectivity. My girlfriend doesn't care about copying files on/off the phone. My aunt doesn't care about running emulators.

You know what they do care about? A nice camera. An easier way of interacting with the phone (Siri).
> Why should Verizon have to deal with bricked phones because some user wanted to root it?

Because Verizon conspires with the manufacturers to sell you a phone capable of being 'bricked' in the first place. A proper bootloader doesn't have to be overwritten to install a new system image.
F-Secure & Sophos Detecting Germany's "R2D2 Malware"
Please detail which phone you use and which apps were unintuitive.

I hear complaints like this a lot, then try to replicate them on hardware I have to hand, and shockingly I am unable to do so! It's almost as if these stories are massively embellished versions of real interactions.

For example. Have you actually seen how complex the home button on an iPhone is?
Turn a github.com URL into a git.io URL - shell script
The digital camera and tripod sounds like a great version 2 of this. I've never heard of Motion but will check it out!
Musings on Dart
I wonder if this affects the price of very expensive per weight materials.

It would be nice for HP to start measuring their ink in grams instead of ml, that way they could increase their prices based on the grand K.
Okay, I don't get this. I thought the original node.js article was using a terrible implementation of Fibonacci precisely because it was stupidly slow.

Why are people writing articles looking at how fast different languages / implementations are at running this terrible code? Does that give us any useful information whatsoever?
1 server, shared hosting, Apache + mod_wsgi + web.py, MySQL. 160mb of RAM. Not sure about the other system specs on that host. It held up because I used a CDN for all the assets and because I generated static pages. I did have to monitor it though and increase the RAM at one point.
i like the look of your tool.

my top feature request: playlists! and i think you need to increase feedback for the user. e.g. when i click 'play all' i see nothing that tells me that the click worked and that it will begin playing in a few seconds.

keep it going!
Google+ Lost 60% Of All Active Users
I don't understand your argument for "you shouldn't stop trusting your instincts ...". You say that you would have been right dozens or hundreds of times. But we all know that startups are a numbers game. It doesn't matter if you say no to a hundred startups. It matters that you said yes to the one that became AirBNB or DropBox.

I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing. I am genuinely perplexed at how monumentally bad outcomes can be produced by a series of rational choices.

The best I figure is the following. I gain my "wisdom" by making mistakes and trying to learn from them. The problem is that the environment from a year ago is quite different from that today. Heck, every passing second yields an environment different from the past. And sometimes (always?), it is the external factors that make the big difference.

Let me illustrate a case in point. When I first saw MIDP/CLDC on a Motorola IDEN phone, I knew this was the future. I spent a lot of time making something of it. Yet, the market wasn't ready (and frankly, neither was the technology). In 2003-2004, I saw .net compact framework on a Compaq iPaq. I was so amazed by the technology that I again spent a lot of resources making something of it. In those days, you'd have to put a bulky sleeve on your iPaq in order to get wifi. Cellular data? Forget about it ... it cost a fortune and the carriers were determined to milk their monopoly to the max. When the iPhone was announced in 2007, I saw it and dismissed it. And it wasn't just me. I was in grad school and had worked in the cell phone industry. Pretty much every smart person I knew told me this was yet another non-event. We all know what happened next to the people who wrote software for the iPhone in the early days.

When I reflect upon this and other similar experiences, I can't help but think that my hard-earned wisdom may have become obsolete without my knowing it. These days I subscribe to a different sage advice that might work better ... "Stay hungry, stay foolish"[1].

[1]: From the last issue of the Whole Earth catalogue as relayed via Steve Jobs in his Stanford commencement speech.
I guess it depends on what you'd consider a "computer", but I'd probably be into radio engineering and electronics, what I was into as a kid, before home computers were around.

Sometimes, I still feel like I want to go back to it.
My experience flipping through the bug reports for ubuntu is that hardware isn't 90% solved it is more like 70% solved(the scary part is that each release tends to move that 70% coverage around a bit.) Both windows' and Apple's hardware support is poor as well but they fixed it by non-technical means(control of the hardware distribution channel.) Which is a perfectly viable channel for Linux, and seems to be working well for them(System 76 and Dell's Ubuntu boxes.) However as an OS that is primarily distributed after the fact, it would be nice to see user friendly hardware configuration.
Floating point (IEEE754) error visualizer
I think it comes down to the fact that although Android has more features, it arguable lacks the level of polish that iOS has.

Windows Phone 7 has less features than Android (and iOS?), but is way more polished and 'pretty'
I saw this strip a few minutes ago in my feed reader. My immediate reaction was, "this is why Kurtz scares the printed comic industry so much." He is very talented. It's been a joy to read PvP over the past 8 years or so (just guessing on my part).