skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? I've heard some, but not enough to dissuade me from getting it. I also got a two-year warranty for free and I live within reasonable distance of a Sony store (they exist, I was surprised to learn), so I think I'll be able to get decent support. I also suspect that they might go to a little bit more trouble supporting the Z because it really is their top-of-the line model, but I really don't know.

I've also heard bad things about Macs, but they all end with happy stories about Apple's support which is definitely a point in their favor.

While I can't say anything about Sony's cheaper offerings, the Z seems well-built and sturdy. The only real issues I've had were to do with Linux drivers, but I ultimately managed to resolve those satisfactorily.
I'm not sure I like it, but this works

def nil.method_missing(*args, &block); end

So now you can call nil.whatever.you.like and get nil. It's also still falsy, but now every nil value in your app silently works and doesn't throw an error.

It's both impressive and scary that Ruby lets you (or that new contractor you're not sure about) change the fundamentals of the language in one line of code.
That's why I cringe with every f-word

You have a physical reaction when you hear a sound? Have you considered therapy? Or meditation? You have an unnecessary, irrational response that is affecting your appreciation of the world.

If this were a drooping eyelid, or an eye deficiency such as short-sightedness, you would take steps to correct it. If this were super-sensitivity to sunlight would you wear sunglasses, or demand that the sun not rise? You perceive your reaction to be Zach's fault, you blame Zach and state that Zach should change his behavior.

This is absurd.
With infinite spare time, what I'd try would be to make NilClass usable as a base class. The way that would work would be to have all instances of classes inheriting from NilClass live in the 0bXXX...XXX100 object ID space. Nil is currently 0b100, which is consistent, and this doesn't clash with any of the other immediates - it just translates to a different memory alignment rule in MRI.
Make Your Art With Mixel On The iPad
didn't see that - for the rest it comes down to wanting to be cheaper, still

the Asus and the Air probably do come off the same line
"What is particularly sad here is that Apple responds to market pressures just like any other company: when faced with serious challengers, they are forced to innovate and improve."

What made Apple Apple until recently was an intrinsic force(from within the company) to innovate an improve(a perfectionist and angry force that will insult and denigrate you if she did not wanted what you made, that will demand the best of you whenever the company is well or not).

In life you don't have to wait for others to force you when you could force yourself for your best. E.g students that choose careers their selves (even hard ones) are way happier than those that let others to decide for them.

"I doubt they'll move nearly as quickly."

Your opinion is based on a prejudice "Apple responds to market pressures just like any other company".

Apple had made very good products without "market pressure" that comes when things go bad, sales and. stock go down. The last decade had no pressure on Apple so your prejudice is not true.
You seem completely clueless. Chinese dissidents are "disappeared" for far less than what Assange has done. Tianmen protesters where slaughtered.
Wow, that blog post was boring...
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This is actually eerily similar to a site I launched a couple of months ago called Aptly: http://apt.ly/

I've described it to people as "Instapaper for Apps" but it seems like AppQuu may even fit that description better than Aptly. (I haven't finished the companion iPhone app yet, but feel free to try it. I'd love to hear what you think.)

I really like how simple and elegant AppQuu is. Being able to send the user an SMS is a great idea. It makes it feel a little magical. (Though, it's a little strange that I can't get to the list just by browsing to the site on my phone.)

I was definitely hesitant about putting in my phone number. That's actually why I went with email instead of phone numbers for login on Aptly. Talking with people made me realize it was a huge barrier of entry. I guess emails feel less valuable and are more commonly used for signing up with sites that you're not sure about.

How do you find or determine the app on the page? What happens if there are multiple apps linked on the page? Does it just add all of them? Also, what happens if someone enters a number that isn't theirs? Maybe you could send a confirmation SMS that requires the user to respond in order to verify their account.

Also, I'd love your feedback on Aptly since it's such a similar concept, but with a completely different execution. Well done!

P.s. Let me know if you have any questions. I've probably run across a few of the same ones myself. Cheers!
I tried to register an account and when I saw the registration box with no openId/oauth login, I stopped and left. They should seriously support login with at least google, twitter, and facebook
That's certainly plausible--I've heard good things about ThinkPads. Most of my friends are Linux users, so I definitely know some ThinkPad fans. However, in the "ultraportable" (horrible marketing terms strike again) category, I think the Z pulls ahead of the Lenovo X1, which I also considered. Unless I'm much mistaken, the X1 is the replacement for the X300.
Love Bracelets
"Issuing takedowns for things you don't control is wrong, and it's easy to verify that it costs the host time and money to resolve their mistakes. Suing material, basically."

It'll probably only take a few of these, where the host was smart enough to post absurd rates like "copyright violation investigation service $90,000/hr ($500,000 minimum)" publicly ahead of time, send a bill on receiving a notice, then sue the pants off of the content owners when they don't pay to put a stop to this.
comparing by price is not fully justified because each have their own markup margins (they are businesses obviously) and i know apple definitely have a larger margin than it's competitors.
From the perspective of a startup, the most interesting aspect of Clayton Christensen's concept of a disruptive business is that incumbents will choose not to compete with it (at least at first). Disruptive businesses are either "new market", in which case they don't steal the incumbent's existing customers, or "low-end", in which case they take the incumbent's worst customers and the incumbent doesn't care. An example of the latter is the early PC market. Incumbents like Digital Equipment Corp chose not to pursue it. High-end mainframes had higher margins and prices. They were happy to cede the bottom of the market to newcomers, whose products seemed hopelessly cheap and crappy. Of course, the low-end quickly improves and takes more and more of the market. By the time DEC recognized this problem, it was too late. Same with the Japanese cars and electronics (which were junky at first), or minimills in the steel industry.

Sustaining innovations are incremental improvements that fit within the incumbent's business model. The incumbent can easily and lucratively apply them to their existing customers.

The disruptive/sustaining distinction is important for startups because, "Incumbents almost always win battles of sustaining innovations. Their superior resources and well-honed processes are almost insurmountable strengths. Incumbents, however, almost always lose battles where the attacker has a legitimate disruptive innovation." (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3374.html)

Christensen's disruptive/sustaining distinction is mostly lost in the press about innovation, where "disruptive" is used to describe either. That's life in the English language.

Incidentally, I think disruption is more about business models, which often, but not always, apply new technology.
Yesterday nVidia announced Tegra 3, arm announces new GPU, it's good when there is a competition.
Brazil vs Gabon Friendly Match
Why would they not steal technology? It's profitable. It's good for the PRC elite, it's good for the chinese people. The only losers --and in the space exploration game I'm not sure there are any-- are foreign IP owners or states.
Fyi, comments that big are hard to read without separating them into paragraphs.
In theory it's great since it should result in products that are more complete instead of the continuous stream of promising, but I got bored developing the tedious bits half-assery that has tended to come out of Google.

In practice, for every Buzz that gets rightfully killed, we lose an invaluable resource like Code Search.
I do https://entrydns.net (free DNS service) with a sysadmin friend. I's a side project we're evolving on afternoons and weekends.
The oddball thing here is not that people are being let go so that a startup can recapture their unvested stock (as you note, this happens all the time, for reasons both good and bad) but that a company would create what amounts to a "hit list" in order to systematically pressure employees to surrender shares on threat of being fired. The company-wide message to employees is, in effect, "we lured you to join us with promises of a high upside via this stock grant in case we succeeded but, now that this has come to pass, we think you are getting a windfall and want a good part of it back." Since employment is at will, this tactic can be effective in reducing the equity base and maximizing value for other shareholders in the company. But at what price? This effort is being driven by a CEO who is clearly dominant, holding almost 40% of the voting power in the company and using it, for example, to cause the company to buy back nearly $110M worth of his personal stock pre-IPO. The overall effect, then, is one of a leader who appears arbitrary and unfair to those who were there early on. While cashing in for himself, he is "clawing back" on others. It might be legal but it just plain looks bad and would hardly seem to be a good way to motivate people or to keep strong people in your company for the long term.
Confident coding comes from understanding the language.

Array({:foo=>1}).map{|h| h[:foo]}
TypeError: Symbol as array index

[{:foo=>1}].flatten.compact.map{|h| h[:foo]}
=> [1]
"Do you really think they copied Apple?"

That's what all the evidence suggests.

"Apple (or anyone else) couldn't make a motherboard without Intel's help."

Apple has a 35 year history designing motherboards without Intel's help.
I wonder what the control group/s who was/were asked the questions without the wheel came up with.
Agreed... AS3 had the sweet spot nailed at 99%, the best brace-language IMO.
Google+ invites friends without asking
Google+ just let me know I can open an account now with my Gmail/domain e-mail, and I did. It started recommending people, which I thought was interesting, since I didn't give permission to use my address book. I added them to circles anyway, only to learn (and again, Google+ doesn't tell you this upfront) that most friends actually weren't on Google+ but rather were in my e-mail address book and everytime I added them to a circle, they were invited through e-mail, to join Google+. This shocks me, wouldn't fly in Germany, at all. Why Google? Why all the evil?

Here is proof:
http://imgur.com/Hck8O
Healthy Eating With Fish
The quiz that accompanies this article [1] makes an error. Question 2 asks

"A team of psychologists performed personality tests on 100 professionals, of which 30 were engineers and 70 were lawyers. Brief descriptions were written for each subject. The following is a sample of one of the resulting descriptions:

Jack is a 45-year-old man. He is married and has four children. He is generally conservative, careful, and ambitious. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies, which include home carpentry, sailing, and mathematics.

What is the probability that Jack is one of the 30 engineers?"

The answer given is that the probability is exactly 30%, since there are 30 engineers out of 100. But this ignores all of the information available in the description! Imagine if the description said "Jack's hobbies include writing compilers, hacking assembly code, World of Warcraft, designing new programming languages and LARP." Would we still conclude that there's only a 30% chance of him being an engineer?

A correct answer to this question should apply Bayes' rule. With E representing 'Jack is an engineer', L representing 'Jack is a lawyer' and D representing the description, Bayes rule tells us

P(E|D) = P(E) P(D|E) / P(D)

P(L|D) = P(L) P(D|L) / P(D)

where P(A|B) is 'the probability of A given B' and P(A) is 'the probability of A without taking other information into account'. We can ignore the common factor of 1/P(D) and we know that P(E)=0.3 and P(L)=0.7, so the relative probabilities of Jack being an engineer or a lawyer, given the description of him, are

P(E|D) ~ 0.3 * P(D|E)

P(L|D) ~ 0.7 * P(D|L)

so the a priori probabilities of Jack being an engineer or a lawyer need to be weighted by the probability of seeing the description that we did, given that Jack is an engineer or a lawyer! If you claim that there is a 70% chance of seeing the description if Jack is an engineer but only 30% if Jack is a lawyer, then taking all the evidence into account, you should ascribe an equal probability to the two possibilities.

Basic probability fail by the editors of Vanity Fair, I think.

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/kahneman...
I don't know about Ruby but when this occasionally happens to me in Perl the answer is not to import anything and call methods by their package name.
This is off-topic and doesn't address the actual content of the article, but... "Trim a Bloated Ship"? That metaphor could use some work. How does a ship bloat? And wouldn't a bloated ship float pretty well? If you use the common meaning of trim (honestly, how many mariners read the NYT?), isn't cutting bits off a ship a bad thing?

I guess it could be worse. I'll give thanks that Thomas Friedman didn't write it.
@ mirthlab - thanks a lot for your feedback.

we tried to make it as simple as possible, thanks :)

reg phone/email: we're learning the same thing. we opted to keep it phone only so it felt "magical" for the people that did sign up. we should probably allow email sign up.

reg app: for now we take the first app that is found on the page. we could just as easily put all the apps in your Quu if multiple ones were found... or ask the user which ones they want to add. i guess we'll see how often/where/why that comes up.

reg fake #: yup, on it.

reg Apt.ly: really cool! i love how you're showing the details of the app right there for the user to see. i guess there's a balance between quick/effective.

where are you based? we should def talk in more depth off HN.

thanks again for the feedback
- satjot (satjot at appquu)
Interesting. The quicksort we were using was in one of the standard JDK classes from some ancient JDK.
That's not a Ruby issue, it's a cowsay issue. Unix base supports it, Windows doesn't. Ruby actually has a great deployment system. And the author's general point, despite him being an obvious Ruby programmer, is that efficiency and confidence are more important than scrambling to cover your bases, and what the latter means in coding behavior. The examples would differ, but his point is universal.
How come none of the 13/15/17" laptop PC motherboards and internals look like one of a MacBook Pro then?

Reference designs allow precisely that: do the heavy "from-scratch" work and allow manufacturers to bend the reference to fit their constraints.

Also, didn't Apple get Intel to produce a small package, low-voltage processor just for the Air?

It's more probably the usual ULV variant that has existed for every Intel chip since they cared about wattage. I suppose it's more a case of the usual Apple strategy of upfront ordering bucketloads of components, essentially locking the production to themselves.
Ironically, a significant group of Singaporeans want to leave because costs of living here are super high.
"If an alien was looking down on us and inspecting our language, they would see that the worst thing we do on this planet is we torture, we kill, we abuse, we harm people… we’re cruel. And those are the things for which we should be ashamed.

"Amongst the best things we do is we breed children and we raise them, we make love to each other, we adore each other, we’re affectionate and fond of each other. Those are the good things we do.

"And they would say ‘How odd, that the language for the awful things is used casually all the time.’ ‘Oh the traffic was agony. It was hell, it was cruel. Oh, it was torture waiting in line!’ They’d say ‘You use words like torture! That’s the worst word!’

"And yet if we use the f-word, which is the word for generating our species, for showing physical affection one to another, then we’re taken off air and accused of being wicked and irresponsible and a bad influence to children. Now, we’re part of this culture so we often don’t question it, but if you think of someone from outside it, it is very strange.

-- Stephen Fry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSQmk6gGTcE
Nude Photo Lindsay Lohan Playboy as Marilyn Monroe
Gowalla Engineering / Likeable: Love your Objects with Redis
It's more like a thermonuclear war for the cell phone and tablet market :)
I've owned several laptops that only featured "the nipple" and I had one where it every so often would get stuck in a single position whereby it would always go off to the top left. This seemed to happen after having owned and used it for a year or so.

I have also owned several laptops, both Windows and Mac OS X based and my MBP's trackpad is far superior over any other trackpad I've used.
That's the problem: in many recent machines ASUS has used Elantech touchpads to save money. These are are absolutely terrible: they don't even have pressure sensitivity, let alone proper multi-touch.
I find ML of great quality too, maybe the best of all 3 courses. Maybe I'm biased because I already have good knowledge on the topics in DB, although DB is high quality too.
This is a lot like PushThePage (http://www.pushthepage.com/welcome) which uses push notifications and your google account to send you any bookmark.
Watch Luck Online
Some consequences:

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-...
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> can't make a Ruby object falsy

You can override ! (see
http://www.rubyinside.com/rubys-unary-operators-and-how-to-r... from earlier this week) so !!obj can evaluate to false. But there is still this to solve:

ruby-1.9.3-p0 :008 > obj ? true : false
=> true
ruby-1.9.3-p0 :009 >

If only there was a #to_bool to override...

(For the record: yuck).
エピレ
"The elusive technological future" - John Naughton at ALT-C 2011
This remind me of the Dutch Christian ad "When a curse falls, something breaks' (http://babbleonbabylon.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/vloek.jpg)

Whenever I saw that I thought "Then don't drop the fucking glass!"
I was immediately won over by "FLAC", "Scrobbling" and "Speedy"! I've been struggling with iTunes and Songbird for a while now on OS X, and a replacement would be very welcome.

I've been enjoying using Enqueue for a day or so now. My only gripe so far is that I expected to see Play/Pause controls in the option-click/right-click menu of the dock icon. My keyboard's media keys just launch iTunes and I'd like an easy way to pause the music when on a different desktop to the Enqueue UI.
Vaio notebooks are nice, I had one before my MBP, but they lack the little problem called Windows. But when forced to, I would choose a Vaio or a Thinkpad (depends on model). Both know what they do.
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I like to use andand, which also encompasses the maybe monad, but in a better way IMHO. http://andand.rubyforge.org/

I'd also like just letting nils be nils :) but good presentation.
right. read the doc beforehand, and for financial data use the time proven relational dbs. they're "slow" for a reason.

for massive user generated content where big numbers of statistics come into play, and noone would die if you lose their hard-composed 140 char tweet, use transaction- and lock-free, easily-sharded, rarely flushed to disk stores.
Most people would weight his advice more heavily than equivalent advice from someone else, though.
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I use the trackpoint exclusively, so I always buy a Lenovo without a touchpad. It's much better in my opinion, because you never have to move your hands away from the keyboard position.
Cricket online
I’m not exactly sure, though, why you seem to be so outraged about someone else’s opinion.

I think this is a dramatic exaggeration of his opinion to illustrate the existence of opposing perspectives.
Assassin’s Creed Revelations To Feature New Gameplay | SoftSupplier
Resize or Scaling -- IM v6 Examples
Oracle has duly and at last announced the Solaris 11 Unix system
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Mathalon - http://mathalon.in/ Mathematics Problem Site.
From the biography:

Page came to Jobs for advice on how to be a good chief executive officer, and while Jobs’ immediate reaction was to say “f-you” to Page, he remembered how HP co-founder Bill Hewlett advised him in his younger days.

“Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map,” reads the biography’s account of Jobs’ interaction with Page. Later Jobs came to Page with a sharp advising tone, warning Google was making products “that are adequate but not great. They’re turning you into Microsoft.”
For reference, my Vaio does not have Windows. And if I had gone for the Air--I did consider it--it would not have had OS X. The sub-par OSes sold with pretty much all laptops these days can trivially be replaced, so it really isn't an issue.

I've spent significant time on both various versions of Windows and Mac OS (a bit of 9 but mostly 10). I've had the best experience, and been the most productive, on Linux.

If you are not willing to tolerate anything except Mac OS, then obviously the quality of non-Apple hardware is of little importance. (I guess you could go the Hackintosh route, but I think that rarely goes well.) Besides, Windows 7 is really not that bad at all--certainly no worse than Mac OS, just different.
Hi HN. If you get some value out of these slides, great! But please, do me a favor: don't try too hard to construct a narrative from a stack of slides which:

a) represent about 15% of the actual semantic content of the presentation; and

b) are shaped by the consideration that there's a limit to how much code you can put on a slide and have it still be readable.

A lot of this material has been covered in more detail on my blog (http://avdi.org/devblog) For instance, I wrote a whole article about Maybe, NullObject, and the limits of the ability to make objects falsy here: http://avdi.org/devblog/2011/05/30/null-objects-and-falsines...
At kearney interview