skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking outside and seeing people get wet as they go from their car to the lobby is observation. Noting that you could put a place to borrow/leave umbrellas in the lobby and near where cars park is an insight. Figuring out that the reason they are coming and parking and going into the lobby can be re-interpreted so that they don't have to leave home/office and even bother getting wet is a 'deep' insight.

The link that pg gives to the drobbox app is full of win. It isn't about shared storage 'per se' its about the things that currently suck and will suck less with less effort when this capability is available.

Insight is looking past the problem and finding the underlying intent, and then re-working the solution based on that intent.
yup parse is one of the most exciting companies right now for mobile developers like myself.
No one has characterized the right task scheduling outcome.

What tool will give us the the best task scheduling outcome, with appropriate effort?

Node schedules each task to run until it is done or you tell it to do something else. This seems simple and honest. The impact of excessive CPU load is obvious.

Other tools offer automatic task preemption and time slicing between tasks. Once CPU load gets high the impact is much less obvious.
The creation myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation
Programming, at least the fundamentals, should be taught in elementary school just like any other language, but the teachers don't yet have the required familiarity, so we should start with them.

There's much to enjoy, agree with, and debate in this essay. But this is the most important line.
That is the best "rant" that I've seen in years and practically sums it up.

It is exactly the reason why I say that Computer Science is still in the Stone Age.
I think you pretty much nailed it. I know a few guys that run a VoIP carrier out of Cleveland, OH. They started out building their core SIP switches on Asterisk, but quickly learned that Asterisk isn't the best piece of software for that role. They moved their core to OpenSIPS, but still use Asterisk for feature offerings (like conference bridges and IVRs).

It's a 'horses for courses' thing.
To sum up, how Etsy fixed their technical problems: they hired a bunch of people from flickr.
Is boxconfig there custom made deployment tool?
Try using PCL. My wife's office had a printer that didn't have a postcript module option. Every technician said it was impossible to print from the Mac to it. I tried a couple of CUPS PCL drivers and it worked fine.
Ten years ago, I might agree.

But now, not so much. In my experience, Japanese doctors are on average quite good, and unlike in the U.S., you can actually walk into a clinic or hospital and speak to an actual doctor, not a PA or RN, within a reasonably short period of time... without having to go to an ER.

A very close friend of mine is an ENT, and her husband is an oncologist, so I've got a bit of insight into the medical system here. There's no direct equivalent of the AMA, so there's no artificial restriction on the number of physicians produced every year.

Starting pay for a new physician out of residency is much lower than the US, but rises quickly with experience. Also, to become a doctor, you aren't required to first get a BA or BS -- you just go directly into medical school for about six years, as I understand it. Followed by rotations and residency, just like we do it in the U.S.

Other than not needing to get a BA/BS first, medical training in Japan is effectively the same as the U.S.

There is one problem that deserves mention: "chinese medicine".

Many people, especially the elderly, prefer to seek 'traditional' treatment for health problems, so there are plenty of 'doctors' and clinics certified to practice chinese medicine.

These operate alongside, and sometimes inside, traditional clinics. They are part of the medical fabric here for historical reasons, and many Japanese swear by them.

Personally, I've had the misfortune of visiting one of these when I had a minor bronchial infection, back before I understood enough Japanese to know what I was being prescribed.

Two weeks of worsening coughing and hacking, and each visit I got a stronger packet of what, pardon the pun, boiled down to being some notably awful tea.

Once I figured things out, I visited a real doctor and picked up the local equivalent of a Z-pack (azithromycin), and was fine by the end of the following week.
The Internet of tomorrow: Faster, better and cheaper
The part about pushing out a iPhone app is soul crushing. But the same can be said about web applications. Back then a bit of HTML, CSS, and some forms processing and you were in business. Now you need to know about server side vs client side processing, AJAX, blocking, HTML5, CSS3, and all the quirks about the browsers. Then after you actually get some version of a static page up you are busy debugging your SQL models and why your many to many joins are taking forever. Throw in the myriad of libraries you have for both front end and back end code and you are in for a nightmare.
Congratulations on your first rails app! I picked up Rails about two weeks ago and challenged myself to launch an app in 7 days. I'm not going to make it in that time-frame, but my app is turning into something I am very proud of. I'm hoping to have something to show within the week. I've been blogging about my progress: http://jpastika.posterous.com.
I was working under the table. I got paid in cash, in a big manilla envelope. This was ages ago. I no longer live in Tokyo.
Government isn't effective, democratic or otherwise. But I'm not a cynic. I have high hopes for humanity, long term. The sooner we get rid of the institutionalized use of force (government) the better.
Phonegap has nothing to do with form inputs, and is used to access native phone functionality (camera, address book, location, device information etc).

I'm building mobile app with HTML5/CSS3/Backbone.js/PhoneGap and it's an excellent stack that allows you to build native-like apps for multiple OS's. Everyone I've demo'd the app to has no idea it's not written in Obj-C..
Just picked up the Kindle version for free. Thanks for the recommendation.
Very nice looking.

I know that Marco Arment runs his blog off of his PHP version of the same idea, dubbed "SecondCrack"
http://www.marco.org/secondcrack

I've also been looking at a simple blog updater that can update from anywhere (especially my phone or email), so I'll definitely check it out.
Kezer Browser 0.2
Cooperative multitasking will always have the blocking problem, whether implemented manually or by the language. The manual callback chaining is tedious, though.

Preemptive multitasking solves that problem, but if mixed with lots of shared mutable state, it reintroduces much worse problems of non-determinism and unreproducible bugs.

The golden path involves preemptive multitasking with little-to-no shared state. That way you get to have your cake (determinism) and eat it too (no blocking problems/starvation).
Kindle Touch 3G can't touch most of Internet without WiFi
I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end").

I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fundamental, something in the process itself that has become horribly broken -- but they'd rather tell you why you're wrong rather than really listen to why you're frustrated.

Then if, as a user (or programmer) you complain about something, they say, "So build your own version." What, we're supposed to re-build the world? OK, fine. So you start building your own version of something. Then the response is, "Why are you reinventing the wheel? That's already been done."

But, what the fuck do I know? I spent a couple of hours in a meeting today with a client explaining why upgrading -- er, pardon, "migrating" -- from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7 wasn't going to happen without a lot of money involved. Then I went to another client and we fixed a broken Windows network stack and a handful of other stuff. Then I came home and unboxed the new laptop that I just bought because my old one could no longer run Firefox anymore -- even though it ran it just damn well fine enough a few years ago. Other than the new laptop, this is pretty much my day -- all day, every day. Well, me and the other guy in my shop.

And nobody else seems to think there's anything strange about this stuff. So Samba's documentation is a mess and Samba 4 never got around to implementing allowed_users, which is absolutely necessary in a Windows AD environment? Pfaah, big deal, so what? So Western Digital's backup software interferes with Outlook in funny ways? Psh. Who cares, who's that going to affect? So everybody's decided to abandon sane software versioning altogether and make the support end of things even more nuts? Hah! Get with the program you support idiots, you're supposed to want to spend all day upgrading software and dealing with the inevitable fallout.

Besides, users that don't like upgrades are just morons, they just don't know what they like. As soon as they get used to the new version, they'll like it better, you'll see.

All of this is stuff I've personally heard, or seen in places like HN ... and not just a few times here and there.

Software used to be fun. I remember when it was, when it seemed like most things just worked, even though they didn't look pretty. I remember when it seemed like I could just open something up and start hacking on it without having to hold tens of thousands of lines of code in my head, spread over dozens of files. I remember when looking at someone else's code could actually teach me something, instead of making me want to cry.

I really don't like this industry much anymore. I guess that makes me a bad hacker or something.
Is the source code for the Phonegap Build API open?
No, there are too many security problems. You could do history sniffing with drawWindow(), for example, by making a link and checking the color. Or you could read the contents of cross-domain iframes, allowing web pages to discover your Facebook identity.
I love this perspective. I think part of the problem is so many of us are stuck doing stuff that is far too damn complicated to be fun to build or fun to use. If you're burning out on hard stuff, do something easy for a change that puts a smile on someone's face. If you don't think you can make a cynical, stressed-out adult smile, make something that puts a smile on a kid's face - that's easy, and it's a way to remember the joy of building fun and creative things.

When I was a kid I loved computers and I saved my paper route money and bought Borland C++ and tried to learn C++ from the manual. I failed utterly and I had no one to teach me. Now kids can learn easier languages that do cooler things on cooler hardware and they have the Internet to learn from.

Great things are possible and computing has made great leaps forward. Enjoy it!
Visionary? ...

That's not even a stretch, its an intergalactic leap.

psychotik is right, this is just a reward for his "loyalty".
Dude, I would get Borland any day of the week instead of Apple. Just hit F1 if you are not sure what command does.
if only someone would help them with the first few steps

FWIW, I completely agree and am also hoping to help people take the right first steps.
Well, to be fair, Oracle has provided NoSQL database (Berkeley DB) since they acquired SleepyCat in 2006, aka before even the term "NoSQL" was coined.
For those of you who, like me, had no idea what Burroughs was: An old American business equipment company.

Roughly: American Arithmometer Company (1886) → The Burroughs Corporation (1904 rename) → (1986 merger) Unisys.
The Next Big News Aggregator
Dang, this is a REALLY good idea. Get a whole slew of companies to combine patents and start suing "influential" people. Call it lobbying with teeth. The EFF could be the "troll" and could take the extras as contributions.
While this is great news, I really don't need an interface for sideprojects (yet). Codeplane's been great so far for private repos.

I just backed up my Github stuff using Github-backup and added them to Codeplane. Honestly surprised nobody challenged GitHub in pricing until recently. As far as social coding goes they are the Facebook of repo hosting (SourceForge is Friendster and Google Code is MySpace).

https://github.com/ddollar/github-backup

http://codeplane.com/
Envy vs. Greed - a new basis for economics
The market is competitive, though, and there's a lot of places offering zero-reikin (礼金), or if they don't, are willing to negotiate.

Especially if you look during the off-season when nobody is moving; for those that don't know, almost everything in Japan is seasonal, from new-graduate hiring to apartment-hunting. This is changing, but bucking the trend can save you some serious money.

You'll still have to hunt to find something good, but I'm willing to spend some evening and weekend time to save myself enough cash to purchase all new appliances.

For example, my current place took almost a month to find, but was zero-deposit, zero-reikin, and came with a free month of rent. I'm in central Tokyo, so I cough up $1300 USD/month in rent for a whopping thirty-five square meters, but the convenience is very much worth it.
Adobe: We've got the Touch for tablets
MA-Hewlett-Packard completes Autonomy buy-out
MA-Hewlett-Packard completes Autonomy buy-out
Less Used Ruby APIs
Unfortunately I don't have the detail on our technical roadmap to give this the answer it deserves. I'll see if I can get someone from the Flash team to address this...
Ask HN: Question about Sparknotes and book royalties
I have a question about the website sparknotes.com. For anyone that isn't familiar it is a website that summarizes and analyzes popular books. It is usually used by high school and college students to avoid reading assignments. Does a website like that have to pay royalties to the publishing companies of those books? If so, how much money are we talking about?
How do VCs mitigate risk in their investment portfolios?
For Americans, it's worth noting that Japanese apartments don't come with appliances. You'll get to buy your own fridge, microwave, and washing machine. Dishwashers are insanely expensive, and some older places don't even come with a stove.

Appliance sales here are like car sales in the US, so negotiate the bejeezus out of them. A friend of mine picked up a free 50+ inch brand-name TV when he bought his refrigerator and bistro oven, to give you an idea of what's possible.
Mike Moritz' biggest mistake (according to a 2000 interview with Forbes): Not getting into the VC business sooner. http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/0529/098_4.html
Hey, that's a good point!

To get more control one should move to AWS. But wait, I don't control the network card on the server with AWS. Hmmm... I know! I'll get a colo. Now I can purchase and build my own machine and have control over the network card. But wait, I don't control the backup power system. Hmmm.... I know! I'll rent a building, get an internet backbone piped into it, buy some generators, and control the backup power system. But wait, I don't control the...

I guess what I'm getting at is, why is this an entirely different path? Why isn't using a service such as Heroku "the path" until you hit it's limitations and need to spend a bit more time going to the next step in the process.

One could easily make the statement of "blah isn't under your control on blah" for anything. Where does it stop?

:)
Thank you.

I have an email address in my profile if you (or anyone on the Flash team — Senocular, perhaps?) would like to take this conversation private. But I'm sure all the people up-voting my question would absolutely love an official, public answer.

And to clarify: I don't mean to imply that I think the Flash Player is going away. I'm just hopefully awaiting the day that my existing Flash-made content can run beautifully on the iPad and Win 8 Metro. Platform independence was the ideal that led me to choose Flash, and I'm excited about this ideal continuing into the future.

I just need to be sure that the processes I'm using today won't limit my options. My ever-growing library of resources — the result of a decade of hard work — depends on this.
Why 'Occupy Wall Street' Won't Work
It's night and day.

For what I'm paying for a tiny 1LDK (one bedroom, living-dining-kitchen) in Tokyo, I could get something about three times the size in Saitama, and that's still within commuting distance.

Go out into the boonies and space gets really cheap.

Food is also cheaper, but you pay a lot more for transportation.
South Korea tops in Internet download speed: study
Interesting. I consider the BBB to be an utterly useless organization. Seeing their logo is actually slightly off-putting to me, and if I see it on a site I usually pause to ensure the site is not some tiny operation that is going to be unable to deliver. I don't easily recall ever seeing the BBB logo associated with what I consider a 'real' company online.
This is the exact rationale and hope in the field but it a false hope. I'm not opposed to using math but as your comment implies, humans are not atoms or particles like in Physics and the subject requires different methods than the physical sciences. Economics is more closely allied with the methods of Psychology or Ethics, identifying and validating basic principles such as the examples I mentioned which require no math to understand. The proof of these principles are validated via logic and observation of human action not mathematical proofs. This methodology was dismissed as non-scientific early last century and, in the context at the time with very successful mathematical Physics, the mathematical economists took over the profession to counter the charges of not really being a science since there was no math equations.
You are kidding, right? Cars have hardly changed at all, still the same petrol powered devices with are a hard shell. Sure the car companies were forced to add in some extra safety mechanisms, but this does not mean much.
Looks cool, I'll probably try it.

In the readme, it says:

- Less keywords, punctuations and runtime errors.

Please, I know "less" is a trendy word with programmers these days, but the word you're looking for is "fewer".
Good point. Definitely makes more sense after some of the points folks have brought up here.
I don't want my personal account on the server in case it was compromised. Besides, even if you use that "dropbox exclude" command, the client will start downloading all of your files when you first link it and there's no way to tell it not to do that before you have the chance to do all of your excludes.
Intel & HP tried this with the Itanium. A decade (or two) and billions of dollars later and x86 or at least x64 is still king.

No doubt they made some mistakes, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

(And having debugged code on an ia64 I'm quite happy with the status quo!)
Not keen on the word "folk" being used to describe them because it has a more homely feel to it, for a common purpose, etc. These people are scum.
“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
Very true. I suppose the knowledge gained from writing about the companies can be as useful as the knowledge gained having run his own company.
Audience.
Politicians would notice more quickly if they were ever reliant on coffee shop wireless and not working from expensive Blackberry accounts.
It's completely ridiculous. 30 million iPhones over 4 years is about half the rate at which AT&T is currently selling iPhones in the US. Why would Apple give exclusivity to a lagging carrier in exchange for a promise to purchase phones at only half the rate that one of their current partners is selling them?

It seems likely to me that Sprint made this commitment in order to get access to the iPhone at all. But an exclusive on their network makes no sense at all for the relatively small deal (from Apple's perspective) being described here.
We've complicated the plumbing to the point nobody knows how to work the damn shower any more.

This is probably the single most irritating thing to me as a developer. And, the most frustrating part is that this aspect often turns a simple project or a curious dive into a new technology into a knock-down, drag-out brawl with configuration files and dependencies that in the end produces frustration instead of working code.
Bitcoins are actually divisible, one bitcoin can be split into 100 000 000 pieces. I don't know how inflation would work though. You can't print more money. Maybe not having enough bitcoins would drive prices down.
It's cute of you to link that as if it gives a reason for the hype. Just the same list of incremental package updates. Oh, also multiarch is architected better, a nonvisible change to the backend.

Or are you actually answering 'no' and I'm too dense to pick it up?
It's true, system administration is a bitch.
The full stack isn't under your control on Heroku.

Oh, so you have the ability, time and motivation to rewrite your firmware, operating system, network stack, database and web server and implement it on a CPU you designed yourself?

No? Then the full stack isn't under your control either. Get over it.

That's a different path entirely

You know what? It's not a different path at all. The convenience of Heroku is no different in principle to using closed source hardware.

Look, I'm a freedom-zero[1] type of person. I run Ubuntu - not OSX - and I admin my own servers. BUT the chains of convenience of apt-get are much closer to the chains of convenience of something like Heroku than many would like to admit.

[1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0
I think this chart has cause and effect backwards. Places with programmers capable of doing formal code reviews are less likely to have bugs in the first place.

It's really hard to do a (proper) code review, a programmer who is capable of it is probably a high caliber programmer (I assume programmers review each others code).

Also I don't like this sentence: "code reading detected 80 percent more faults per hour than testing".

If you look at the article that sentence links to you will find that the problem is poor technique in creating the tests. You can't do "white box" testing without reading and understanding the code in the first place. And if their "black box" testing didn't find bugs, they didn't write the test properly in the first place.
Bustin' Balls Bureau is more accurate. They can keep their acronym, and their logo shouldn't be too hard to adjust.
I want the federal government to fund the school system; I'm neutral towards federal standards, although we already have those in the form of NCLB.

The current system ensures that the people who need the most help get the least.
Jeff Jarvis on Occupy Wall Street and the Hashtag Revolt
Please open source boxconfig.
I'm in the process of building a PM tool for my self and many on the pain points you mentioned are covered. The tool will be simple - any simpler and it would be excel + email.

If you are interested we can talk some more and maybe we can help each other.
Mozilla: Market Share Isn’t Everything
I don't think any of those things describe him. I always imaged his next move would be to go to an apple rumor blog, because his real skill is obviously churning out fluff pieces on Apple and Arrington doesn't have to chase ad revenue on uncrunched.
But it's not $20B in the bank, it's a commitment to buy $20B worth of phones over four years. Assuming 50% margin on Apple's side, this deal is worth about $2.5B/year. Compared to Apple's revenue of $65B/year or profit of $18B/year, this is peanuts, and not worth any sort of beating, especially since many of the sales they would make from such a deal would not be new, but merely shifted.