skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
names a bunch of non-apple centric writers

I've named almost every other major blogger in the tech industry. How about this, give me a list of the apple-centric bloggers and I'll tell you who are the evangelists and who isn't. Since apparently you don't like my list.

Come off of it.

Don't be a jerk, jerk. And I don't read Mongol blogs.

Edit: Thanks for the apology. I also apologize for escalating. I actually think your Jordan analogy is quite good. But I think also spells out the difference, at least in my eyes.

I also view Jordan as the greatest of all-time. With that said, I didn't gloat when he did well. I was in awe of him, but I wasn't a cheerleader. I'd vote for him as MVP, but I wouldn't cherish Karl Malone never winning it. I wouldn't call Malone a lesser player in order to prop Jordan up as a better player. I wouldn't downplay what Magic or Bird did to recognize that Jordan was still the greatest.

I feel like these three would cheer about Karl Malone getting injured a knee or Magic catching HIV if it meant that it would strengthen Jordan's position as best ever.

This is probably most obvious in the tablet space. You'll see some bloggers noting that the iPad dominates. No question about that, but you'll begin to see a split between those who are looking forward to what Android and Windows have in store for the future, versus those who are just outright dismissive that there is or ever will be anything to compete against the iPad. And in fact downplay anything that might actually be even slightly competitive, ala the Kindle Fire.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that they exist. They provide a viewpoint, and there's enough viewpoints to go around. But I think we should call it out so its obvious to those reading it.
New Edge Location in Sao Paulo, Brazil for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53
Oh sorry, basically treating code as any other media file. "Game Scripting Mastery" by Varanese and LaMothe goes into a lot of detail about creating your own language and compiling it to I-code and then running the scripts in the game, the same way you would load images or sounds. My partner writes very expressive code with creative macros (he independently discovered iterators by defining a macro like SPRITE to mean sprite[count]). That might seem a little strange to a computer scientist, but look at what he did. He didn't have to explain how references or lists or anything else worked. If you understand arrays and #defines, then you can use iterators too. And he does things like that to me all of the time, writing one liners to replace my pages of "proper" code. The only problem is that he does it in c++ instead of javascript/python/lua so our games are in this constantly evolving state, so my top priority is adding a scripting library to our engine. Then again, that introduces the need to bind all of these functions and data. It will probably be a win though because we tend to work on large games.
your question is confusing
I completely agree with this sentiment. Look where automobiles were 100 years ago - nothing like the vehicles we use today; vehicles that are designed to squeeze every last MPG out of a gallon of gas, or can keep us from dying in a major car accident.

Computing will improve. Computing will always improve. I think rants like this are helpful to point out where we definitely can improve, today, to bring on the future - such as making the iPhone dev and release process easier ;-)
Simple HTML5 sound toy (works in latest Chrome/Firefox)
Anyone tried this? Customer testimonials on the website would be very helpful...
Ask HN: If I watched every video on Khan Academy - how long would that take?
Also, Can I download all the videos for a given subject to an iPod Touch/iPhone/Android?

Finally, there are so many videos - is there a syllabus/curriculum that will walk me through everything by, say, grade level - e.g. I want to have my 7-YO go through all "second grade math"

God this is the best resource online - How long till I can become Walter White? (JK)
MG's writing is barely passable for a professional, his knowledge about business and finance is lacking, and the subject matter he writes about is generally...Apple.

Granted, he does produce a moderately insightful piece every now and then, but to me, the fact that he's being recruited by old school media is telling; more bad business decisions from people who don't "get it". Personally, I don't get the appeal.
Erick Schonfeld is a great writer. Yes, he might not overuse words and phrases like "brilliant," "mind-blowing," and "game changer" in his headlines as often as MG, but his articles under-promise and over-deliver vs. MG's, in my very humble opinion. I've been reading his stuff since his time at Fortune and I hope, in his new position, he gets a chance to stretch his wings again. Just my two cents.
Counterpoint:

My office has a printer, yes, it's available over the wireless network. However, it cost... somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. I'm not entirely sure, we have a five year lease on the thing, and it costs something like $500/month to run. It's an okay printer, as long as you run Windows.

There is a postscript module for the printer, but it costs around $1000, so Mac/Linux machines are out of luck, and our vendor hasn't actually said when we can get such a postscript module installed. (And I get people in my office at least once a week asking how they can print from their MacBook.)

From a hardware perspective, we've come a long way. From a software perspective, it's a wonder that we're still using proprietary nonsense protocols for printing and scanning. And my organization is stuck with a 5 year lease. But even if we weren't stuck with a 5-year lease, it's a $10,000 printer that is incompatible with OS X.

That said, I think this article is over the top and mostly wrong. But it is a great jumping-off point to talk about the limitations of the jumble of incompatible technologies we find ourselves working with, and how we can make them better.
That you claim that this is far from trivial would seem to support his argument.
The Made to Stick (http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/) authors might say that the surprise of seeing an explicit claim about NOT being accredited would make the FeeFighers site more memorable. When's the last time you saw such a claim?
Disagree.

There's no 3G/3GS on Verizon and exactly zero iPhone 4 Verizon customers are eligible for a subsidized upgrade yet. So it only affects the tiny number of customers who are going to pay $600 for an out-of-contract upgrade. The vast majority of Verizon iPhone owners would have to wait for their subsidized upgrade date which for most is March/April 2012 at the earliest.

For AT&T customers things are a bit more tricky. Any iPhone 4 owners are in the same boat as Verizon customers. Most won't have a subsidized upgrade available until late December. (if you have a more expensive plan with AT&T your upgrade date is earlier) This also goes for people who bought the 3GS in the last 14 months. The people who opted for the 3G in the last ~20 months decided to buy a low end model. For them the iPhone 4 or 4S would be the natural upgrade path and a massive upgrade.

No doubt there are some risks but I doubt Sprint would have a very long exclusivity period so even if Apple takes a beating for a month or two it will be of little consequence compared to $20B in the bank.
I'd honestly prefer someone did it with a MOAB at this point.
BitBucket makes it super easy to migrate from GitHub to them.
I am convinced that for 99% of doctor visits the quality of doctors is completely irrelevant. So long as they can fill out prescription forms and scold you for your blood pressure/weight/drinking/smoking, you're going to have the same experience.

I would be more concerned about surgeon quality, but that sort of thing is rarely needed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moritz
Amazon is good at retail fulfillment, but they are absolutely brilliant at PR based marketing.

I really think that journalists, when they are called by a PR agent for a firm, should not report what the PR agent tells them as a "leak". "Leak" implies that some employee let the information out against the express wishes of their boss... but this is not what has happened here.

I'm familiar with the culture and organizational structure of Amazon. Only a very small number of people in Amazon would have access to this information, and none of those people would be where they are if they were the kind of person who "leaked" information.

This is a plant.

It is a plant based on the first 5 days of sales of a new product.

A new product that had weeks and weeks of "leaks" including someone putting an actual tablet in MG Sieglers hands. (Tell me it wasn't a PR rep or executive in the company that did that...)

So, Amazon hyped up their new kindle for several weeks, then announced it, and got a bump in sales of the new device right after the announcement.

I wonder how many fewer than average kindles they sold in the weeks prior to that?

Then, cult of mac, a blog who regularly plays fast and loose with the facts, compares those 5 days of sales-- after weeks of hype and right after the announcement-- to the average rate of sales of the iPad, over a much longer period, and concludes that the Kindle is "on track" to outsell the iPad.

Talk about picking only favorable data to fit your conclusion!

Also, shouldn't a device that costs half as much (and does far less, naturally) outsell a more expensive device? Shouldn't you expect a toyota to outsell a BMW, no matter how much extra value the BMW adds? Would you even say the BMW and the toyota are in comparable categories?
Tell HN:  Atari are looking for iphone/android game devs
An email hit my inbox before, they're doing some modern takes on some classic games. If any game devs around here are into contracting and want me to fwd it to them let me know - ben at playtomic.
Scalable realtime stats with Graphite
Why should - 50 years later - we still be astonished that our software works? Doesn't that alone say that we haven't advanced?
An organization that had goals similar to the BBB's would be very valuable for many consumers. What are some of the BBB's competitors? What's currently the best alternative?
Great analogy - every time I go to a hotel I have to figure out the damn shower; I'd never realised there were so many different concepts and designs just around shower controls.
Wanna start-up in Berkeley, CA?
I think I would like to convince the Berkeley, CA city council to make some zoning changes to attract YC-style start-ups. Maybe Berkeley could even aspire to be the location of a YC start-up school.

I need some help establishing whether there is realistic demand that would move into town if these zoning changes were made.

Downtown Berkeley has many vacant retail fronts, as do other retail corridors in Berkeley. These stores are hard to rent because they are "deep". They are narrow but go back from the storefront very far. They are like this because, back in the day, you'd store inventory in the back and have a storefront up front. Few need such spaces anymore, so the retail space is too expensive for retail.

I am proposing that tenants should be allowed a dual use: offices (such as hackerspaces suitable for a start-up) in the back -- and subleasing to artists, artisans, and other cultural uses up-front -- with no or limited partitioning between the two spaces. (Think, 3.5-walled start-ups opened up to cultural spaces on the main street of a vibrant university town.)

Is there demand for such start-up space in Berkeley? How can I be sure? How can I persuade council, if indeed there is such demand?
It's about time the CSIRO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Scientific_and_Ind...) got some money for their invention.
A lot of it really is a matter of what you know. I think SQL is incredibly easy to use. ESPECIALLY if all you are doing is select, insert, update, delete. Many people never use the full power of their RDBMS, and in that sense it may be the case that they don't need an RDBMS.

I recently built a view in postgres that uses windowed aggregate functions (what Oracle would call "analytics") to present a certain summary of statistical data. The beauty of this is that it's declarative, and took me a LOT less time than coding up a manual aggregation over the specific windows and grouping that I needed, the unit testing surface area is a lot smaller, and it's written once and available to any client platform/language/framework/tools that can talk to Postgres.

Postgres and even moreso Oracle gives you this kind of power out of the box. If you're not using it, you're not getting the full value out of those products.
Linux - Means Freedom [The Hacker News Magazine] October 2011 Issue Released
New Beginning Perl book
Allen Bradley 1747-M13
Professional Dog Food
PhoneGap to become an Apache project as Adobe acquires Nitobi
so surely if it is possible to develop a processor which is so much better than x86 then why don't they already exist?

Suppose I invented a new chip that was awesome for gaming, spreadsheets, word processing, databases and power consumption.

Who would build PCs with it?

What OS would it run if someone built it?

Who would buy that?

Its not merely a "huge, massively important thing". Its the only thing.
The first example off the top of my head is Adobe's involvment in jQuery development.

A little bit here: http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeandjquery/
These Parse posts are getting quite old. I know they are YC funded, but would it be possible not to include posts for minor features?
Microsoft sends an IE9 cupcake to Mozilla for shipping Firefox 7
Blog systems for non-technical users: Wordpress.com, Blogger.com. I'm not trying to be flippant Joe, but I'm not sure what demographic this really serves. Someone who's technical enough to understand markdown and dropbox but not technical enough to understand running a script (which can be done in GUI). I guess that's a sliver of a demographic, but what reason does that person have for wanting to do something like this (what do they gain IN THEIR EYES, not in your eyes).

This just feels to me like "popular webservice of 2011" + "popular markup syntax of 2011" = "a trendy blog platform that will be a pain in the ass in 5 years when the new hotness markup language is a must-use."

Things that don't go old: HTML. Exportable database-driven blog systems. Pick one.
I wasn't sure where to chime in on these comments but this one resonated with me because I used postscript for a year at hp and it's a remarkable language. I think it's a shame that it's mostly unknown today and the opaque pdf standard has taken over.

The world has largely established that http is the way to query devices and control them. Device drivers are the spawn of the devil to me and completely unnecessary (thank you Microsoft). They may very well be the pinnacle of what I'm complaining about.

Printers could have a free wireless web interface where you upload any file type from tiff to doc and it "just works." I realize it's more complicated than that because of colorspaces and half toning and blah blah blah. But it shouldn't be.

And I shouldn't need any special software to save images from my scanner or take a snapshot with my webcam. I actually wrote a command line tool on the Mac to tell Quicktime to save a snapshot from the webcam as a file. That is pathetic and makes me want to hit myself over the head with a sledgehammer.

I don't think I've said anything earth shattering here but wake me up when any of this happens.
Rails in a week — day 7
My opinion on MG Siegler cemented after the last fight he had with Dan Lyons. I don't even really like Dan Lyons that much (though I was pretty amused by Fake Steve Jobs). But this post: http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/09/28/kindle-fire-and-the-... seemed fair, reasonable, not hostile, and even careful in giving credit where it was due. And it had a great point: that we'll know when we know, and that the value of this type of "scoop" is close to zero.

Siegler's response was a fairly vicious, direct ad hominem with no greater point. http://parislemon.com/post/10774472888/fake-steve-jobs-funny...

Judge for yourself. I did, and I've decided not to read his writing anymore.
This rant is just the technological way of saying 'damn kids, get off my lawn!'.
The big difference is that this application is for tracking what users are doing on other websites outside of facebook.

Read the abstract:
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
> I am assuming that things are a whole level cheaper than
> in Tokyo

Depends on what. If it's not even on the mainland, then shipping could be expensive. For example. Yellowknife (Canada) is away from major cities, and I'm sure that real estate is cheap, but shipping costs have to be through the roof.
Anyone who liked this article may like to know that Alan Kay and his team at the Viewpoint Research Institute are currently making a silver bullet. A real one. Of the kind that really really hurts the Complexity Werewolf. They may not kill it, but the scars are already visible.

Take a look at their work, most notably the last STEPS progress report. They can use 50 times less code than well written, useful C code (like TCP). Compare with redundant, useless, badly written C++.

The secret is quite simple: you can write your own programming languages, and good code looks like a formal spec (to the point of being one, ideally). If you can't write good code, then write the language that will let you. How ? Start here : http://www.tinlizzie.org/ometa/
Markdown is much more human readable than troff. It's great for things like READMEs which may be viewed unprocessed, or converted to HTML.
Put another way, how do you design the due diligence process for examining the technical assets of the organization you are going to acquire? IE: is it uptime stats, code review, etc
It's civil rather than criminal, or at least it used to be, so it is not really accurate to call them "just as illegal." It used to be you had to show damages and then sue for reparations. Regardless, conflating the two is disingenuous.

> what is "nominally legal or moral" about protecting the rights of artists to be paid for the use of their works

"Nominally," as in, "in name." It is claimed to be done to "protect the artist" - while the same people making this plea are and have been shafting the content creators as hard as possible by any trickery and chicanery they can get away with. There is a moral argument to be made, but the parties who are usually first to go there are decidedly amoral.
Moen, Inc. 87316C Renzo Single Handle Pullout Kitchen Faucet
Depends on whether or not your side project uses more than 5MB of database storage. I'm running a tiny node.js app on Heroku and you get up to 750 hours per month of free CPU time, so I haven't paid a dime (but I am really in love with how slick everything is).

Is anyone else stunned at how quickly Heroku has been pumping out new hotness? I was kind of worried when they announced they were being acquired, but if anything, it seems like being acquired has increased their pace.
The thing is, Adobe has a history of not releasing anything remotely like 'nice development software'.

Even their installers and update processes are universally horrible.

Out of this, I expect some sort of massive IDE targeting mobile devices with HTML5/JS, basically like Titanium only an order of magnitude slower.
Fluke 712 rtd calibrator
> dont have to pay rent until end of contract or someone
> else moves in.

So if you give 30-60 day notice on an apartment with a contract that still has 1 year left on it, you can basically stay there rent-free until they find someone else to rent it (or until the original contract runs out)?
Amazon - The Walmart of the web
Steve Jobs hooked up Barack Obama with an iPad 2 "a little bit early"
None of those are actually any good. I installed the Travelocity app, and after fighting with the keyboard to select the airport from a dropdown, I got a javascript error that rendered the app useless.

PhoneGap does not make good apps.
Apparently I didn't have clarity on the technicalities of a "Partner". Always imagined it as someone with a percentage stake of the company and/or here, someone who was also investing their own coin.
Recherche mission humanitaire au Togo
The internet giant’s new tablet computer fits its strategy of developing big businesses by charging small prices. The report compared the prices of 100 randomly selected goods at each of 24 American retailers with those items that were also available on Amazon.com.

To me, it's shocking to see that Amazon's prices are lower than even Walmart. Only 2 companies fared better - Costco and Dollar General. I think Kindle Fire's business model is going to create some headaches for iPad.
Can Crowdsourcing Make a Dent in Unemployment? Ask MobileWorks.
Come on, this doesn't shock you. In a country where a movie like "SAW" has a lotta popularity?. Diggnation was very popular because of many factors, but watching a couple of guys who have enough money to drink beer on TV and talk about a mix of tech and cats is enough for many.
Good for him, but I don't understand what particular set of skills, apart from his ability to write, he brings to add value as a VC-firm partner. Anyone?

His 'network' is not a skill, and I assume his network is a subset of Arrington's, so I don't consider that an advantage. Honestly, outside of this being a reward for his loyalty in the past with Arrington, I don't see how this makes sense for CrunchFund as a business.
Creativity and You
Swifto launches beta testing - looking for testers
Swifto.com (http://swifto.com) is looking for beta testers in New York for their new beta launch.
The service is designed to help people "get what they need now". People enter in what they need, how soon, and the service helps them get it within that timeframe.
If interested, go to Swifto's site and sign up. The beta just launched, so it should be easy to get in.
Have you considered law school?

Your insights into the actionability of patent applications would be highly informative to the majority of legal scholars and practicing lawyers.
Yeah, Dropbox does not require mice. One of my Dropbox-hosted sites† gets updated automatically a few times daily, using a cron job.

† http://cmtorrent.inportb.com/
I've not found that to be the case. Usually I find that the sandwich and <size> fries will add up to, for example, $4.79, and adding a drink is another $1.59, but the combo price is $4.99. You're paying an extra 20 cents or so for the drink, which is IIRC still less than their cost for the soda, but I might be wrong in today's dollars. In 1990/91 when I worked at a Burger King, our food cost price for a medium soda was 5 or 6 cents, which included the cost of the cup/lid/straw and estimated "average" number of refills. I imagine its somewhat more in 2011, but possibly still under 20 cents.
It's amazing how much turd polish several billion in r&d will buy you.

X86 is amazing in spite of legacy and poor architectural choices.
> I'd rather lose than share them

You don't have a backup system?
It sounds like they're going after small business owners individually, so not necessarily "any old joe." Still, this gives me hope given how hot small businesses are in the current political climate. Perhaps targeting one or two of the wrong (read: noisy and politically-connected) owners will result in an outcome at least slightly positive for patent reform?
By using a field extension over √5, you can evaluate this exactly without rounding or resorting to floating point.
Tired of this crap.