skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this slideshow would be better titled 'Standards Compliant C'.

At least for the first printf example, I would employ the boy rather than the girl. The boy gave a correct answer - what was missing, what would happen. The girl spouted a bunch of standards that added no value (with the exception of the 'return 3' which does indeed demonstrate deep knowledge).

In particular, the 'you should add a blank line at the end of your code' comment would immediately make me suspect her to be a finicky letter-of-the-law PITA who would be a nightmare to work with.

Standards are all well and good, but if your code compiles with no warnings and runs without errors according to the spec you were given, nobody of any consequence is going to give a damn.
Hong Kong design student says Jobs tribute not original
I agree. Though, it definitely depends on what the target market is. If it is an "average" computer user, then they definitely need to revamp their marketing. However, if they are targeting current site-specific browser users, then perhaps they just need to revamp a bit of their features list. Either way, where they are at now (right in the middle) seems to be confusing to both sides.
Thanks! (Though I'd ideally want my computer to take that decision for me.)
I disagree.

Warranty should be void if I am tempering with the hardware.Imagine laptop vendor doing the same if you install Linux on a Windows laptop.

They may refuse to support the software issues but saying warranty is void because you have changed OS is ludicrous.
I agree. Yes, I would have liked to just have coffeescript as their new language. Maybe they could have just supported direct native execution on Chrome. Maybe Firefox would have followed.
_ for enforcing encapsulation is great, probably the one thing I've seen in dart that's exciting. simple way of giving an existing naming convention significance and cutting down on character overhead. i could see a whole line of languages expand on this idea.
Natural Instinct Dog Food
Really glad that they address this issue:

Q: Aren’t you going to create a lot of space debris doing this?

A: Debris is a huge concern to everyone in the space community. We certainly want to be responsible space citizens in making sure that we don’t create more of it and will comply with the international rules and guidelines for debris mitigation...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/science/space/06orbi.html
I'm really starting to wonder if Hasting's days at the CEO position are numbered. I can't imagine the board and investors are already thrilled with the stock's reaction to the price hike and Qwikster.

Now that he's going back on his bold plan, I'm sure the big money is wondering why they're backing him, and if another whim will further tank the stock. (It's fallen about 60% in the last 3 months.)
It's perhaps worth noting that there's research showing that poorer, less supported children actually regress during long summer breaks, while those with a family with a "get ahead" attitude maintain or improve.

For that reason alone I'd abolish long summer breaks (and homework, which also actively hurts the progress of less supported children) perhaps trading off shorter days and/or more regular but shorter holiday breaks.
From the nytimes article [1] it sounds like the investors let him have it "Three days after the announcement, Mr. Hastings wrote in a Facebook status update, “In Wyoming with 10 investors at a ranch/retreat. I think I might need a food taster. I can hardly blame them.”

[1] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/netflix-aba...
As a Netflix customer I applaud their 180 turnaround on their Qwikster plans. It doesn't matter to me if their flip-flop makes them seem a little scatterbrained, because the decision to keep both services bundled together makes the most sense.

Perhaps they realized that if they spin off their DVD business that there would be blood in the water and the likes of Amazon Prime and Blockbuster would feast at their expense. While I do think that online streaming is preferable to DVDs-by-mail, the fact is that there isn't enough online content available for streaming and the DVDs nicely fill in the gaps and I honestly don't think DVDs-by-mail will die off as quickly as they first thought.

It makes sense to keep DVDs-by-mail until their online streaming selection is much more broad, diverse, and containing a lot more quality content.
Certainly feasible: Smalltalk debuggers do this. And Smalltalkers (allegedly) use a workflow just like you describe.
> I like that there is a difference between favorite bookmarks and reference bookmarks.

The sentence "We have finally started to make sense of the differences between Bookmarks and Favorites." bothered me.

I find the difference between a typical browser's bookmarks menu and its bookmarks bar quite clear. The menu is reference for later, the bar is everyday items.

My bookmark bar is cruft free, no favicons, just lowercase abbreviations for bookmarklets and one or two uppercase letters for often used sites:

read paper pin j.mp P Y TM LF G R A O T G FB F

For example, Y is this site. If I have too many to fit horizontally, I look for whichever ones I haven't been clicking and thin them back out.

My point is modern browsers all have this difference: visible daily use bookmarks, and bookmarks menu bookmarks, and there is a difference between them.
Right, but this is just a symptom of how the platform was designed. If you want "Facebook" and "Twitter" to come with the phone, it has to go in /system/app... and by virtue of again, Android's design, APKs are not removable from /system/app. If they were removable, bad things would be able to happen with low ability to recover without requiring a user download a 100MB file, name it specially and reboot their phone holding certain buttons down.

I have no problem with addressing this as a design flaw, but it seems beyond unreasonable to use this as a way to attack Android's openness.

The point remains, he can fork CM's repo right now, make /system/app user read/write-able and go on his marry way deleating whatever he likes.

It's like attacking Ubuntu as being not open, because Gnome-screensaver doesn't let you tweak the screensaver settings (it was among the other dozen features simply removed in the last 3+ years)
Dart currently compiles to JS that runs on Firefox 4+.

http://www.dartlang.org/docs/technical-overview/index.html#h...
Chinese Government takes the fight to Google yet again
> The point is ... that an IL is something that all the browser makers could get behind.

Sure, but that's not going to happen in the next decade unless that IL is in Javascript.
I quite like it. Check out the "Web apps", to understand what Raven is about.

But please, don't close all websites when I close the window. Closing tabs on closing the window makes sense for Chrome, where each tab represents something ephemeral to begin with. But in Raven, a "tab" might be my Twitter page or my Hacker News feed. I want that to be readily available when I reopen Raven. (For the time being, I might just use CMD-H instead of CMD-W)

Or maybe that is not what Raven is intended to be after all?
I didn't mean to say it's a rip off. It's different enough, and plus it's cool. I'm just speculating that the Plink coders must know about it. I got to play with the Planck alpha, and Plink "feels" similar in certain ways. The way the notes are displayed as ripples, the way motion across the play area triggers notes on a scale with different instruments (which in Planck are "weapons"), and the way the notes are quantized. In Planck, the notes/loops happen when you hit something you're shooting at, but the point isn't so much to hit things as it is to create rhythmic loops between the gameplay and the music you're generating. It makes some interesting compromises to keep the music on tempo and still give the sense of hitting the targets instantly. Really, I just wanted to know if the Plink guys had heard of it.
Steve Jobs: Artist or Hippie Capitalist?
While this rights the ship, Netflix made the colossal mistake of rocking the recurring-billing boat.

Smart businesses know that when you've got a customer setup for recurring monthly billing, there's a certain percentage of these customers who will continue to pay even though they're not actively using the service. Part of it is laziness of figuring out how to cancel. Another part is the thought that they may someday use the service more than they are. This has been the model for gyms forever.

What Netflix did was force people to re-evaluate whether they truly were getting what they paid for, and in the process they added complexity to their branding by spinning off part of the service into a hard-to-spell company that had nothing buy a landing page.

While this may be good for today's stock price, I suspect many of Netflix's customers that re-evaluated their needs may not come back for quite a while ... if ever. There's more options available for media than there likely were when they first signed up for Netflix ... and if those competitors are smart, they'll target those customers to ensure they're aware of the alternatives.
someString.append(System.getProperty("line.separator"));

vs

some_string += "\n"

Edit: Someone's in disagreement with me, so I'll try and clarify. I'd classify boring code as code where the intent gets lost in the syntax/language or other constructs the maintainer of the code doesn't care about but are required anyway.

Trying to open and read a file in Java is probably a better example as the intent (open this file and read the contents) is buried in about 6 lines of boilerplate code

I use Java as an example because in a previous life I used to write it and see this as perfectly acceptable
Well, 90% of the comments are "yeah, Paypal sucks!!", and it really has about 25000 upvotes and 22000 downvotes. And the dude is just ranting more in the comments. I'm not surprised he didn't name his product.
In some countries (like my own country, Norway), time-tracking is mandated by law for accounting purposes.
An interesting insight and thanks for sharing it. A quick question for you: were you at Microsoft before or after the antitrust lawsuit? I remember dealing with Microsoft people before the lawsuit and it looked like the environment was similar to Google today. After the lawsuit, people seemed more tentative and process-bound. But maybe I have a wrong read. So an insider's view is helpful.
A question to ask yourself: If this had been Microsoft creating an IE10-only language to replace JavaScript, instead of Google, would you feel any differently about Dart?
>This is an open source project that hasn't done a code release for the last few versions

what? Honeycomb's source (and only the ONE revision of Android) was not released and I can spout off the three most popular theories, but it doesn't really matter. We've been round and round this many times. If Google chooses to skip releasing 3.0 source, why is that particularly different than me choosing to develop on my own private Git repo and jump from version 1.0 to 3.0 while only releasing 2.0 in binary form. Is it "less" open source? Depends on how you want to define "is" and "open source" I suppose, but I'm inclined to enjoy it. As far as I'm concerned it's "open source enough", in that both my D1 and Fascinate are running fully open source operating systems (aside from proprietary drivers obviously).

>is tightening the licensing agreements to exert control (and doing so in such a way that anyone who isn't a proper licensee will struggle to compete).

Um, no they're not. The licenses are the same for both AOSP and the terms for getting Google Apps are the same still.

Not much of this post is factual. Like, hardly if any of it is.

-- tl;dr Google fails to release code for ONE revision of Android and has the exact same licensing terms for AOSP and Google Apps as always. And I get downvoted. Cool.
And here's a link to the PDF: http://www.pvv.org/~oma/DeepC_slides_oct2011.pdf

I hate slideshare requiring registration or facebook login before it allows me to download it in some decent format.
10 Most Transformative Products Of The Year
HFT is a disruptive technology that has been the target of lots of FUD from entrenched institutions and politicians looking for a "scary" issue to flog. Most of the practitioners are fairly small (relative to other investment firms) and technology-focused. Unlike complex, bespoke derivatives and products such as CDOs, this aspect of the markets is fairly well regulated, with a focus on bringing transparency to pricing for individual investors, which is in stark contrast to the regulatory environment in Europe and Asia.
To a point, JavaScript already has type inference: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2011-September...
Steve Jobs Speech Circa '82
Siine launches innovative icon-based keyboard
Probably he means: Jobs shipped some world changing tech.

Now, what exactly GNU offers that appeals to non-geeks?

It took Google to make Linux something the big masses will use (in Android).
In my life, yes. At home, yes. With my family, yes. With my hobbies, yes. At work, maybe, but wish I was more so.

Which one of these are you asking about?
> ... legacy systems that companies can't quite afford to replace yet.

Or rather, have no compelling reason to replace yet.

BTW: Many people would be amazed how much ADABAS + Natural still runs in government / banking around the world.
Do You Know What Is Columbus Day?
IPhone 4S Accessories
Of course they are, but you know very well that the word 'anti-semitism' refers solely to Jews.

If you can get everyone to switch over to 'Judeophobia', fine by me, but until then you'll have to accept that the meaning of words sometimes differs from their literal parts.
When You Raise Money - Save a Sliver of the Round
Our Greatest Freedom
Great Love Sentences
Chelation Therapy
I have used `class` less and less in my Python code, and when I still use it, it is as little more than a struct.

I never use inheritance.

Since I started to do this, my code has become much simpler and cleaner.
What I mean in the article is about cultural relevance. Much like Microosoft today is making gobs of money but has been written off by many in the tech community as an also ran (I'd love to create an also ran that's worth over $100 billion :) ).

My suspicion is that, on a 10 year basis, Google may be headed in the same direction.

One point I disagree with you on is about Siri. I strongly feel that Siri will drive some mobile business away from Google and thus lower its hold on the mobile search market. I suspect that it's only a question of time before someone else creates a Siri-like feature on Android phones that bypasses Google searches there. And remember that search is still what drives Google's ad engine and targeting. When less searches are performed, Google might have a harder time with targeting.
Google Unveils Dart, an alternative to Javascript
You're essentially saying since you're doing simple things you'd prefer to hire an ignorant programmer who doesn't understand anything more than what you think the job requires.

Well heaven help you if your application gets more complicated and you need to figure out something more difficult.

A truly good programmer knows all the tricks and knows when to not use them.
As an outside observer, Netflix appears to be in a state of panic over the content providers playing hardball with it. Much like Google, Netflix has such a huge lead nobody wants to give it a fair break anymore. In many cases, companies won't even give it an unfair break.

Without the support of content providers, Netflix went from disrupting the cable TV industry to playing catch up with HBO. Its only hope now is to produce some killer original content, license what it can, and sell its premium "channel" as a supplement rather than a replacement. All of the upside from its slowing DVD business will have to go into content production, which will eventually put it on even footing with HBO, Showtime, NBC, CBS, Fox, et al.

If I had to guess, the original plan was to sell off Qwikster. Get the cash up front for the content push. But now that's not going to work, I guess they're just going to milk it until it's done instead.
Whatever solution you choose, there are two key points:

1) Make it as frictionless as possible for the people tracking their time, or you will inevitably have people not doing it, and then someone has to hound them, and then they just put in junk data just to stop the hounding. Your "to the hour" metrics end up just being junk.

2) If you aren't actually using the data, don't make people track their time "just in case". Or at least assign it a real cost, and say, "Is this data worth 2% of my payroll to me?" In poorly run companies, this tends to be a classic example of management wasting the employees time for no reason, just because someone said they were supposed to do time tracking but management never gets around to using the data for anything.
At least they have the nuts to change it back
Napster founders return with Airtime start-up
For now, they're far enough ahead of any real competition that the flip-flopping won't be too harmful in the short term. They have a great product and they know it.

And, this isn't the first time Netflix pissed off customers. A few years back they tried to eliminate the ability to create multiple queues in one account-- they used some ridiculous excuse about technical issues.

However, once Amazon and other comers start establishing themselves in the market, Netflix would do best to get its act together or perish.
What sources does the app use? Plugins are all compiled SWFs :(
I think this comment gets to the heart of the matter. People want something different. They want a Haskell. How many blog posts about Perlis languages have we seen in the past several months?

Reading these comments I've come across the words: boring, uninspired, underwhelmed...

I couldn't agree more.

JavaScript's prototypal object model can at least keep my attention.
Apple says iPhone 4S preorders topped 1 million in first 24 hours
IPhone 4S Sales Pass One Million in One Day
I love C, but this is a pedantic waste of time. It's stuff like this that makes people want to move to greener pastures.
I'm not familiar with LINQ, but is that roughly equivalent to

grains.select{|g|
g.is_a?(Salt) && g.value.blank?
}.sort{|a,b|
a.irrelevance <=> b.irrelevance
}.first
Germany. My girlfriend lives there, and besides being the powerhouse economy of the Eurozone at the moment, they seem to have more or less successfully blended a highly successful capitalist economy with realistic and humane social initiatives. To broadly generalize, the people here have a strong work ethic, are highly educated by average US standards, and take pride in what they do. They have a strong outdoors tradition and have highly progressive (again, by US standards) green-living initiatives.

While I'm not yet that well educated in Germany politics and policies, my initial vague impression is that while they're not as big on certain civil rights as people ostensibly are in the States (open government censorship and sometimes discriminatory hiring practices, for example), neither do they have any illusions about those policies. If you do cross the law, punishments appear reasonable--not $3 million and a lifetime of bankruptcy and lawyers if you share 5 songs on Kazaa.

Lots of other countries like to poke fun and point out the flaws in many of Germany's policies, and they certainly may be right, but Germany as viewed from the lens of a self-employed American engineer unable to get even basic health insurance is, at times, seemingly a progressive paradise.
Is anyone else bothered that all of these contest problems are in no way associated with the real-world requirements of the specific startups that are taking part in this?
Tea party and Occupy are the same movement (anger at the ruling classes for screwing the general population) from different angles.

Plenty of stupid signs from tea party rallies too: http://www.prwatch.org/files/images/Medicare.jpg

In any sufficiently large group of people, you can find a few idiots (and they're usually the loudest ones).

The interesting/important thing here is that regular people from both left and right are mad enough to turn off their TVs, go outside and protest - three things that Americans are not naturally inclined to do.

Something is seriously brewing out there...
What a great tutorial - explained just enough to leave me desperately wanting to try it myself.

5 years on, but I'd guess it's still relevant to mobile devices. Anyone know if there are better accepted approaches now?
For anyone else who didn't get this right away: by "a food taster", he means that he thought someone might have poisoned his food. (It only took me a second, but it's not that common a usage today.)
This seems like a perfect example of a company that is too focused on what Wall Street thinks and not being able to deal with the bigger picture and plan for the long term.
Amazon only allows you to view it on the Kindle (and not the Kindle app either). $1.50 for a single issue, no subscription....it's a no brainer

It doesn't include any of the photos though. There's a link to all the content including images in the article.

update: removed links, they're in the article.
I use it. If I have a password, I don't know what it is.
At my friends today I checked the Netflix streaming catalog on her Roku. I was wondering if they were offering any better content, but nope it's still the same B grade level junk I canceled the service two months ago for.

I know their content problem is not completely their fault, though if they offered higher priced plans I'm sure their content selection would improve. Different price points should be offered from $8 to $25 or maybe $30.

Overall between these bi-polar business decisions and continual lack of good content I'm happily getting my content fix from other online outlets. I was a huge fan a year ago but in the summer it started to lose it's appeal.
If they built an IL that can also be implemented in Javascript they might have a chance.

e.g:

Javascript → IL → Javascript
You are confusing free OS with open device..yes Google's long term goal is an open device but comparing apples to oranges probably does not help
Notch posted an article a while back on terrain generation in Minecraft. Short, but contains some interesting details. He unfortunately never seemed to get around to writing Part 2, though...

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/3746989361/terrain-generation-p...
That is good to hear.

However, given the popularity of YC, I am assuming that most of the applicants are in advanced stages of development when they apply.
Yep, that's what exactly I meant by smarter. Perhaps I should have been rather explicit. Smart doesn't necessarily mean intellectual. For a rich guy, it might mean someone who's richer (here the fact that the other person is richer implies he is smarter). Hope you get the drift.
Seriously? Can you elaborate more on this? Why is it required by law and how to do it effectively?
I believe this interpolation difference in Ruby originates from Perl which in turn got it from bash and other UNIX shells. I actually like the fact that Ruby and Perl have so many way to quote a string a lot since I have always hated excessive escaping.
Wouldn't market questionnaire testing of just 100 people saved them this expensive juggling act?

Anyway, I fear streaming price increases next year for sure as all the media outlets start to gouge netflix and they pass it on.

Best thing netflix can do is make sure consumers know which distributors are purposely giving them horrible contracts and that it's not netflix's fault.
True. But in return we would have had to endure 10 years of in-browser Java.
there's sources for plugins on github here: https://github.com/mielophone/ and here: https://github.com/mielofan/
Thanks!

I hate slideshare so much.
To me it seems like they are nuts - just wait for the upcoming SNL skits and late night talk shows having a field day with this!