skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd argue that cover art is still important even in the digital age. Humans are visual creatures, and your first impression of a book is always the cover. Whether you like it or not, many people will always judge books by their covers.

Digital typesetting is actually still a difficult thing to do. The state of ereader rendering engines is comparable to the browser wars circa IE5. Each ereader family has different attributes it does and doesn't support, and sometimes they support the attributes in different ways. (For example, on a Kindle, text-align: center will reliably center text. On a Nook, text-align:center is applied BEFORE text-indent, so if try to center indented text, it won't look right). At this point in the game you still need a professional if you want your book to look perfect on every major platform.

Even if an author wanted to individually outsource each of these aspects, they would have to first research the market, find the right people, negotiate prices, take a risk on quality, manage every aspect of that, and so on. Writers are busy writing. Many don't have the time or inclination to learn the intricacies of the professional publishing business just to save a few bucks.

There are already some services that take care of all of that for you--bookbaby for example--but at that point you're still self-publishing, without the implicit validation that I think is the most important part for readers.
The MacBook Pro has essentially been the same 'MacBook Pro' for quite a while now - albeit with spec upgrades every now and then. It still sells.

Why change the design of a product if that design still works? After all, how many radically different washing machine models have you seen in the last ten or fifteen years?
If line noise, conflation of initialization and allocation, needing to box primitives for something as simple as an array, inability to pass functions, inability to define operators, and inability to overload operators, are it's best parts I'd hate to see the parts designed by committee.

Any language that forces me to write

BigNum five = new BigNum(5);
BigNum seven = new BigNum(7);
BigNum fiftyFive = five.add(seven).multiplyBy(five);

Is not something I'd worry about the "best parts". I'll leave the whole language for enjoyment of programmers who are more "enterprise ready".
Previous entries in this excellent series were discussed at:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o... — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i... — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937541

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/04/14/the-gervais-principle-i... — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1267202

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/14/the-gervais-principle-i... — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790749
Yeah I like the setup for the ML class better. You can easily make 100 in the class and all that counts is learning the material which I find much better system.

And by letting you redo the assignment they get to actually see if it takes someone 1,2,10,50 tries to get them all right so they can figure out the problems.
Thanks, added it to the post.
> The 4004 is not the ancestor of the 8008; it was a completely different processor family with different antecedents.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the 4004 was really an ancestor of the 8008, which is why I wrote:

> Overall, it bears little to no resemblance to its successor in name, the Intel 8008 (except for the internal stack, which both had--I will cover that in another posting).

I am pretty sure that the 8008 has its name because of the 4004, at least that is what Wikipedia told me (not a reliable source, I know). I will fix the article to make that more clear.

I have no experience with CPU-design, though, so I wrote the article from a ("modern") assembler developer's perspective.

Thanks for your comment, really interesting tidbits!
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Apple doesn't believe that niche exists [the 7" tablet], but you can bet it will if the Kindle Fire succeeds.

I hear this a lot, and I always think it discredits the authors analysis of Apple. Apple doesn't think there is a product worth making at 7", which is far different than there not being a market.

Apple also thought Netbooks weren't worth making (worst of both worlds). That didn't mean there wasn't a market or a niche, but that Apple doesn't rush to fill a void because other people have a product that is selling there.

Apple doesn't think about marketing like other companies. And they don't create products to "counter" other products. They create the products that they think are perfect.

That said, i do think there is a market. There are times I wish I had a 7" iPad. Not often, but occasionally. I would probably buy two of them to keep around the house for the kids to use.
Sure, because a 200-800 dollar spend is how we honor fallen CEO's.

When a band breaks up or a musician dies, the run on music is to the tune of 9.99, and usually less because they sell them as loss leaders.
It doesn't matter whose name is on the patents if the company owns the patents.
Not sure if it'll add more credibility to the claim, but interestingly the wikipedia page for Anakam doesn't talk about Founders. And the company's official leadership page is empty!

http://anakam.equifax.com/Company/Leadership/
To be fair, he is still pretty iconic as the guy who really ramped up the war. I'll give them the benefit of that doubt.
How PowerReviews is using customer reviews for 'social navigation'
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I think it's funny that you need to "like" Marco in order to use Instapaper.
People are used to logging into PayPal in order to send money or pay for purchases, so I would think that associating PayPal with a website login is going to be hard for a lot of people to feel comfortable with, particularly because people are so used to the PayPal logo being used with actual purchase buttons. As developers we can try to explain the difference, but ultimately I think that PayPal logo has a pre-existing connotation in most people's minds and I think that will work against them as an OpenID provider.
The title of it is "Build & Analyze" right? So, it should be about "building" things (whether that be coding, building said code, or as a metaphor for other things in life) and "analyzing" things related to the same... code or life.

The title is actually taken from a feature in Apple's Xcode, and as far as I can tell is just meant to indicate, "Here are the thoughts of an iOS developer." Nothing wrong with that.
He has a good point on: "Limit the Size of Student Loans to $2,000 per year" in order to lower tuition prices.
That doesn't solve the trademark issue.
I upgraded my Ubuntu from 11.4 to 11.10 Oneric Oncelot … and back.
Remarketing: Is It Right For Your Business?
David, with due respect. You're sounding a bit hypocritical here. You make reference to Detroit as an "Armpit" when, in the same sentence you make reference to only "reading about it". Congratulations on becoming a sucker to the media stereotype.

As for brand? We are working on it. Not through what is outwardly projected, but by focusing on building great companies with products and services that fulfill our clients needs. As we, the greater Detroit community become more successful, the media will change their tune... and you'll get your "better brand".

Until then, we dont really care to pay a whole lot of credence to what the "Arm Chair Experts" have to say about Detroit and the surrounding area, because they couldn't be more wrong.
I'm the original submitter and I'm American and I did intend to write "runs!" Ugh. But: I do agree that one could interpret the headline as "data center [is] run on..." Wasn't my intention though. Even in British English I don't think it would be right to use "run" in the active voice though. "IceLandCo run on renewable energy," yes, but "data center" is conceptually singular even to the Brits. Also, it would be a "data centre" probably. OK, I'll stop now.
Analysts should understand that most 3GS users didn't upgrade though. Most people don't replace a bit of hardware costing several hundred dollars / pounds (plus associated contract costs potentially) after 12 months.

The same will be true of the Samsung Galaxy S2 - those users won't be queuing up to replace it after 12 months (or if they are it's a bad sign rather than a good one).

You're not wrong about it as a factor, just saying that analysts should get this and figure it in.
Hi Michael, got a few questions for you:

1) Will the update to 3.1 be free for existing customers?

2) Would you mind to share a bit of your process of making the screencasts?

Thanks!

PS: I have the print book, the pdf, and the screencast. Love them.
Can Eating Too Much Spicy Food Kill You?
"Will the advent of online education make that situation worse?"

My guess is that we will still need teachers, but their role will change. They will spend more time tutoring students or helping them make progress on individual projects.
Papers: http://kevinkarsch.com/publications/sa11.pdf

Looks like film makers and others will save a lot of money in decorating scenarios.
Snakes on the Walls (arduino)
It's four words because Objective-C methods are self-documenting. From that method name, I know it returns a new, autoreleased array that has been filtered using the provided NSPredicate.
But I think the author's point is that if you find yourself worrying that a deployment has even a sliver of a chance of causing downtime, you should be spending your energy on finding ways to eradicate that risk rather than proceeding in the middle of the night.

Besides, in the small event of deployment-caused downtime and problems, who is to say you have enough time to restore service by the time your customers come online? By taking advantage of the clock you've only given yourself a few more hours to deal with any problems, rather than finding ways to not have any problems in the first place (canary-in-the-coalmine-style deployments, etc).
Untrue. The company usually owns the patents. It just depends on whether he assigned his IP to the company when they incorporated, which he should have.
Sorry, but neither DDG nor Google know about the term "swegr", what does it stand for?
XII Salón de los Mejores Vinos de España Guía Peñín 2012
I think this only furthers the author's point about skepticism-as-an-identity. When you apply the term "real skeptic," you necessarily invoke some form dogma about what skepticism is.

This can be avoided by not treating skepticism as an identity, but rather a name for a collection of tools. Like the OC said, it's being skeptical about things rather than being a skeptic.
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I think you may have taken my comment in a harsher context than intended.

First, I don't think it's good for a developer to have all the crap in their head that I do in mine. They'd be spending way more time pre-optmizing code than they would just getting stuff done.

A good developer will write a well thought out TDO that infrastructure and business units can provide feedback to.

Your questions about asynchronous i/o and memcached are great, and if memcached was a requirement for a sysadmin at a position it would be a good question to make sure they understand the software.

As a sysadmin though, you're also balancing

- Can the new system exist on an existing server/chroot/virtual machine
- What monitoring is necessary for the application afterwards
- Does the application meet all the standard requirements for database access
... out PFC is over 100 steps, this is just some of the bigger ones

- Can the sysadmin support the system after go live? The developers job is to create it, the sysadmins job is to keep it running long term.

Also, you are correct. The sysadmin shouldn't be auditing your code. The sysadmin should have a stack in place that they know works, and be able to help you do one of 2 things:

- Give advice on how your system can best fit in that stack
- Help you change the stack to best fit your application

Which direction you go on those two choices depends on the nature of the application, how mission critical is, required timelines for launch, budget and more.
Just to be clear, your hypothesis for why the 4S is successful is that Apple nailed all the attributes of a smart phone product line that get users to pay for regular upgrades. :)
I love the applications of the luddite fallacy to IT..the treatments of code as looms or steel mills hit hard on the fact that economists are historians, and prone to assumptions that past performance will indicate future performance.
This is what Carnegie Mellon is already doing - contrary to other university's I've seen/attended, CMU has three classes of professors, instead of two.

1) Tenured Professors - traditional tenure track.
2) Untenured Instructors - traditional instructors.
3) Research Professors - essentially freelance entrepreneurs in the research space under the CMU umbrella. They seek their own funding, hire students, advise, but don't teach.
Whatever your feelings are, if you don't have the evidence to support your claim, you should just forget about it.

Evidence is the key to any case not the lawyers. You can't stand-up in court and make claims if you can't subtantiate it. That's just a fact of court cases.

Best advice : Don't become the next Winklevoss, you won't make friends and that notoriety is not the sort I'd wish on any entrepreneur.

Channel your anger : get on an build the next big thing instead.
I never read anything from sysadmins complaining about the astonishingly low level of knowledge of a lot of devs

There are plenty of DBAs complaining about the low knowledge level of a lot of devs, e.g. using an ORM instead of writing SQL and wondering why the app runs like a dog.
First question that comes to mind is: Will Google collect data from students to enhance their other products (i.e. Adsense, G+)?
Given context, 'software engineering', I would assume.
Strange way to write it though...
The title is misleading. This is an article from 2008 on CEO pay and the issues in the banking system that's made its rounds several times.

It has a lot to do with the core issues of the unrest right now but it is by no means Mark Cuban's response to the movement itself.
The iPhone 4S appears to be outselling the iPhone 4, which was a ground-up redesign of the iPhone, and (IIRC) Apple's most successful product introduction ever.

They could sell 50 million phones and you'd still be able to write this comment. "How much more than 50MM phones would they have sold with a different form factor?"

These sales numbers do in fact make the analysts look stupid.
I agree commit Logs are extremely useful when they tell you what was it purpose. this kind of commit logs are useless for history tracking.
Is the SE/SO podcast another example of unstructured dialogue? Or is it more structured?
SoftWare EnGineeRing.
The science of bullshit [pdf]
How does ATT get their subsidy then? Apple pays them a cut of the retail price of the iPhone?
Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts" the opinion of any of his peers. Then, for any book, he could ask the question "How good do my peers think this book is?" or "How good does the faculty of University of Manchester School of Computer Science collectively think this book is?" This then propagates the ratings of this group, and the ratings of the people they "trust", to come up with an answer. The amount of trust can act as some sort of a coefficient at each step.

Now, instead of saying "a group of well-read professionals, picked and chosen by Random House, thought this books was good enough," you can say "a group of people, whom I trust to be well-read professionals, or to have good taste, or to be accurate, or to be knowledgeable in their field, thought this books was good."

The technology is there, and frankly I won't be surprised if someone already wrote something like this.

BTW, this isn't limited to books. You can substitute "book" with academic paper (and you get peer review!), films, music, or pretty much anything provided by a social-web recommendation service,
What a tool.

His main issue with Randall Munroe seems to be that by drawing smart, capable female characters; Randall is opressing innocent female stick-figures, by coercing them into his own ideal. I guess he should also be tried for war crimes, after all the stick figures he's killed off. (Yes, you can twist words till the make all sorts of stupid conclusions. I guess the OP has already made that point, though).
Bingo. Deployment with us is automated. I don't actually stay up to 3 AM. However, during the deployment the machine is automatically updated with new packages and the new version of the software, caches are cleared, it's restarted, etc. All of this probably takes 5 minutes at most, but still ... why do that in the middle of the day?

Also, we do a daily backup around midnight. If the deployment is botched, I can come in early in the morning, notice it and simply do a roll-back using the backup. Very easy.

Now, if you're actually staying up until 3 AM and doing things manually ... you need to automate things.
What is RSA Secure ID?
The Tyranny of Silly Expense Control Rules
You may dislike the verbosity, but it's hardly "completely unnecessary." A typical Objective-C program is inherently self-documenting. It's nice knowing what a group of arguments is used for without having to look up the method prototype.
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They just might. Automation will continue to reduce the cost of labor. All the more reason to be an entrepreneur.

But chances are it will be the tedious parts of your job that will go first. In fact, if you're a programmer, you've probably been doing that already as part of your job.

In any successful business, systems and processes that reduce manual effort and increase what can be accomplished ultimately allow more money to be earned. That's been going on for hundreds of years.
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That is my experience too. The people here are going crazy for func - and none of them have even heard of Expect!
I've just replaced a 3GS with a 4S as I saw it as a major upgrade.

You're getting a massively improved camera (including flash, increased resolution, HD video, HDR), front facing camera, retina display, improved processor, SIRI, new form factor, iOS5 running at an acceptable speed (it's a dog on the 3GS), potentially greater capacity if you go for the 64Gb.

The fact it's not a major change from the 4 in some regards surely isn't a factor for those of us with 3GSs as we never had the 4? It's certainly a major change from the 3GS.
Time Zone Database Has New Home After Lawsuit
Yup. Posting on the internet can hurt your case. Although this is interesting, I'd honestly recommend discontinuing the thread and deleting the post.

A lawyer that thinks you have a good case will take this up for a cut of the settlement no problem. If you can't find a lawyer that thinks you have a good case... it probably isn't worth suing.
Looks like the wrong URL was submitted, probably meant to submit: http://blogmaverick.com/2011/10/14/my-soapbox-advice-to-the-...
Sounds like the transition to the corp is the root of the problem. Realistically there are very few restrictions on how to do this and it's SOP for non-contributing minority owners to get seriously diluted.

Harsh but fair: this is as it should be. Ownership based on work/effort/invention rather than invested capital is contingent on that work continuing for a LONG period. Generally these arrangements have a cliff also - so if you leave in less than 12 months your ownership is drumrole nothing. This isn't true only with startups - look at inventors in other businesses... in exchange for an idea and sample they get 1% of the royalties, it's small because sales & marketing & production are more important than the invention

It's entirely possible you have a case, but your description sounds like the prototypical ex-founder nightmare. Based on pattern-matching, you may get some cash, but nowhere near what you're saying you're entitled to have.

There's a risk though, if you have any entrepreneurial aspirations you'll burn all your future potential with the lawsuit. VCs and potential co-founders will be very wary of dealing with someone who has taken this route.
I've got a question for my fellow long-form-reading HNers.

I check my phone for quick hits of information, but I hate reading long-form articles on it. Do you guys know of any "Send to Kindle" apps or bookmarklets for iPhone/iOS?

I know, I know: this is a hell of a first-world problem, but I'd like to read on glowing screens as little as possible.
I don't know about most, but I think many are upgrading. I've had mine for over two years now and preordered the 4S.
Maybe it would behoove them to use the "x.com" branding for login?
This problem is pretty simple in my opinion.

You say you own 20% right? Do you have this down on paper somewhere signed by all parties?

If no, you get nothing. If you do, then you have a case.

Simple.
The 'S' models is a clever idea; allow late adopters to catch up, provide a sight boost to the spec to keep the phone competitive.

People who upgrade late, need to feel like they're upgrading to a phone that's competitive with other new releases .. the iPhone 4S provides that feeling. I don't think it's revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination.
I believe OP meant to link this blog article:

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/10/14/my-soapbox-advice-to-the-...
If you are looking for something that is more front-end specific Paul Irish has put together a really great list of blogs, and made a google reader bundle out of them.

http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/1116587048495144532...

Some standout blogs that I always read about programming are:

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/ - Was writing about JS before it was cool, now it just has some of the most detailed coverage you can get of new things happening in js.

http://dailyjs.com/ - a great daily roundup of the news in the JS community

http://www.nczonline.net/ - A developer who lead many FE efforts inside of Yahoo, very outspoken about how JS should work.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ - Joels essays can be a bit cantankerous, but also paradigm changing.

http://sheddingbikes.com/ - pretty much everything that zed shaw does is fucking awesome. Take it with a grain of salt though.

UPDATE:

Oh, I almost forgot steve yegge, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ - In a few essays from steve my programming world opened into one of ideas, and not just syntax.
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Core Intuition (http://www.coreint.org/), is a really great podcast by two iOS/Mac developers (Daniel Jalkut of MarsEdit fame, and Manton Reece of tweetmarker). Daniel's shtick is that he's a punkass, but it's immediately apparent that both of them are pretty humble, and always trying to keep it positive. The most insightful part of the show they take questions from the audience and answer them.

I was hoping Build and Analyze would be more of the same, but the show took another direction.
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FWIW, one has been submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115105