skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting stuff coming up in Firefox 10 (Aurora)
This is my exact sentiment. I stopped reading after midway. It's great this man has so much passion, but I am pretty shocked how he can just continue to throw paint at a wall hoping he picks the right color that people will love. Maybe he should slow down a little and think through what he wants to do and what problem he is out to solve.
It's a greater good kind of thing. Eisenhower, Patton, Roosevelt won WW2, but were directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. In most case people no their chances when they decide to work under these kinds of people.
> Type inference is much different than static typing because it allows functions to be specialized at run/compile time which can result in having to write much less code.

You are confused, type inference is purely about determining what type something is. It can determine a function is polymorphic but this has nothing to do with how the polymorphism is implemented. AFAIK Ocaml (by that I mean the INRIA Ocaml implementation) doesn't specialize polymorphic functions at all. Types are boxed and the boxes are all the same size so a single function definition is all that is needed for a polymorphic function or type. .net does do these things but, again, that has nothing to do with type inference. There is no difference between me specifying a function has type 'a -> 'b and the compiler inferring that.
That pull quote blew me away. This guy comes across as totally arrogant, plain and simple. Even Steve Jobs, who Nguyen apparently worships, got inspiration from other people's products. If nothing else, this article is a great warning against ever working for this guy.
No worries;) I only said that because of your username...
Obama outlines pan-Pacific trade plan at Apec summit ~ Daily World News
Meh. No matter what you do you're not going to live forever. Some people push that thought away; for others it's a daily mantra.
I'll just point out that your chart, while relevant, doesn't necessarily disprove the original statement. Binge drinking is defined as a certain number of drinks in one night (four for women and five for men, I believe). It's possible that other countries drink more, but they spread it out, so they end up binge drinking less often.
Double clicking the vertical resizer also maximizes vertically.
True. It's also a bit frustrating, reading other stuff on gzip (from where I found this), that the author of gzip wasn't able to make it run as fast as possible because of patented algorithms. Sort of disappointing.
Education and its trying-to-be-legitimate partner Educational Psychology is even worse. It is essentially a smal set of theories based on very small sample quantitative and sketchy qualitative research. There's an added bonus of philosophical and political policy initiatives that go against accepted theory "just cause."
Sasha Gray Elementary School
Sasha Gray Elementary School
Sasha Gray So Storyteller Elementary School Sasha Gray So Storyteller Elementary School Delhi and semi-urban areas Planes
Flex also includes an open source SWF compiler, letting you build Flash content without buying the Flash IDE.
Show HN: RichestOnTheWeb - my submission to Hacka2thon
This is, sadly, something that happens often to victims of sociopaths. The sociopaths came, he did bad things to them (that is, directly, mentioned), then left them in the cold, feeling sad, and still, he was "the highlight of their lives".

At least that's what I see in so many stories in that book.
Can someone explain these college hireabilty rankings?
Nope, it's not asinine at all.

The problems this guy has with Apple are things still going on now.

Your comparison is equivalent with "one time long ago cotton was picked by slaves so I won't wear cotton".

That is irrational as its not happening right now. But the horrible apple conditions are alive and well.
It's an interesting argument, but (coming from a physics perspective) I don't know if psychology should let Physics Envy drive it away from being about exploring phenomenology.

It seems to me like any "theory" that psychologists come up with is going to be necessarily less ironclad than what physicists come up with - more likely to be a guideline (a mnemonic, almost) for understanding how phenomena relate to one another. I sort of think their time is more profitably spent in just obtaining encyclopedic knowledge of phenomena.

This could all just be my obsession with first principles talking, though.
The issue there is that coming from a Windows environment the terminology isn't exactly the same. The command is called "go", hence Cmd + Shift + G.

It would be useful if one could enter keystrokes into the search bar in the 'Help' panel. That would solve a lot of keystroke identification issues and familiarize them with OS X fairly quickly.
> I do not remember BeOS lacking networking, it may have lacked TCP/IP at one point, but so did MacOS at the time, you had to get it and a PPP app via a third party application. My memory could be failing me on this one, but I don't seem to recall not having networking in BeOS.

BeOS had a networking stack at the time; the problem was that it was notoriously buggy and incompatible with the standard POSIX APIs.

Be was working on a replacement to it when they were sold to Palm, known as BONE. You can find a bit of information about it here: http://wiki.bebits.com/page/WhatIsBone

At the time period we're talking about, it was clear that the writing was on the wall about the internet being the future, and the poor networking stack on Mac OS was going to be a major problem going forward. NeXT had a mature stack based on BSD; BeOS had an immature stack that was in dire need of being ripped up and rewritten.

On that front, NeXT's networking was a clear step forward, and Be's barely a step sideways.
One of the great secrets of the Valley is that investors love hypomanic CEOs.
That really depends on how you define planning. Sometimes, I write code, realize I'm going in the wrong direction and need to re-plan things. Planning isn't always something you do before you put your thoughts to code.
I think RIM has already done too much damage to itself. They seem to be supporting every run-time they can: AIR, Flash, Android, QNX, BBOS. I think I counted eight at their last devcon.
Seems like the whole thing is at risk
Marathon Running – A Primer
As someone else mentioned - learn more than one language. That's fine, and good. The main takeaway is often a broader understanding of how to solve problems from new perspectives, but at some point you need to implement things in a particular tool.

If investigating other platforms gives you a new appreciation for modern techniques which you can apply to your previous platform - that's great. If you decide to take the plunge and hone your skills on a new platform - that's great too. Seems like in either case, the net result should be getting better at development overall.

To the extent the OP didn't initially - found himself making the same mistakes in new platforms as he'd made in old platforms - it was great that he had the insight to realize the meta of the situation and reexamine what the real problem was. I (less often now) run in to people who jump to new platforms every few years, and never really get good at development, just good (enough) at shiny-new-tech-X.
I think he's more commenting on Jobs' behavior and how he doesn't like it. I mean, lots of people at Enron talked about it being the thrill of their lives. But as observers we can recognize that their behavior sucks and not like it.

(reference -> "Enron: Smartest Men in the Room")
Hitler exemplifies your last statement beautifully. The world needs people who stand strong with their ideas but constantly think about others and be open-minded. And not douchebags.
I'd like to know that too. But for the record: "Alcohol Consumption per Capita" does not tell us HOW alcohol is consumed (I can drink 1-2 bottles of beer 7 days a week, or binge drink on weekends). To me "Binge Drinking" implies an aim towards delirium.

EDIT: According to the telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7616405/Britain...) a research (http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_272b_en....) found that the EU countries that drank the least also drank the most frequently. While relatively absent countries like Britain and Scandinavia tend to drink more at one sitting.
If you had to give up your mobile plan or your home broadband, what would you pick?
I must be the only one, but BeOS felt faster in 90s hardware than OS X does on this 32 GB Mac Pro.

I love OS X and Unix but it has always felt dog slow to me. It was infuriating in PPC days but it's still frustrating even in current hardware.

As someone who has worked on Macs with kilobytes of RAM and was flabbergasted by BeOS, waiting for my computer to respond seems unacceptable.
This is so last week.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198393
It seems like Scala has the potential to be the next language widely used in large organizations. The JVM means you can fall back to Java if you really need to, and overall development with Scala is more developer-friendly. It'll be exciting if it happens because it could really validate the build-on-the-JVM strategy for new language designs.
Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but even after reading the instructions & watching the video I'm getting odd results which don't match what is in the video at all.

I realize there is a disclaimer that it may not necessarily be accurate, but it varies between 0 and some wildly innacurate value like 30 cm when I'm holding it 1 or 2cm away.
I've read quite a few biographies and what i hate about Walter Isaacson is that everything becomes an oversimplified Time magazine article, which makes every character into a flat cartoon caricature. My guess is that Jobs could be a jerk, but then if you were a multimillionaire in your early 20s how could you not be a jerk? Also the tech industry is filled with tons of very bright people who are social cripples. The harsh reality is that to build something like a Macintosh you might have to be quite nasty to pull off the scale of cat herding that may be required.

I also hate to admit this: But I half suspect Jobs picked out Isaacson because he'd draw a cartoon sketch instead of doing a serious biography. I'm still not done reading the book yet, but I almost feel that I know less about Jobs than before I started reading the damn thing. And the other thing that drives up the wall is that you get the feeling that Isaacson doesn't have a clue about technology -- so you half wonder how much he missed. And I suspect Jobs wanted it that way -- instead of burning his papers he just picked a lightweight.

By the way if any of you want to read an amazing biographer look at the work of Robert Caro who is a real writer. His first book "the Power Broker" is an amazing study Robert Moses who is a very flawed hero who really made NYC what it was (for both better and worse). He's also written several books on LBJ who also starts out as a progressive and does both amazing and terrible things in his life. I wish someone like that had done this bio...
Interface that allows engineers to create tasks and send instructions to humans
slightly off topic, but i spoke to a Technical Department director in a Chinese computer games company yesterday about planning and length of projects etc.

He said they never have a web project lasting more than 2 weeks. ie. from planning to completion.

It's not because they're using agile methodology or iterations or whatever.... they just do things differently (and yes, sometimes that means zero planning, zero testing and generally 'worse').
How so? Open standards have held open standards back. Usually, competition is what drives things forward. Flash won for a long time because it was better.

Even today, compare flash games to games done with web standards, and that's after everyone has put considerable effort into making their JavaScript engines faster!

With apologies to Carl Sagan, not everyone wants to create a universe to make an apple pie.
Everyone is better off with Adobe on the "same team". They were trying to swim upstream and they knew it. The web dev world was marching forward with or without them and I'm glad they made the difficult but correct decision to embrace what is clearly the future.

Despite the widespread hatred for the Flash runtime it's almost universally agreed that Adobe makes great tools to create Flash things, and now we have them making those tools for the web. Which is also widely acknowledged as a giant hole in the modern web dev process. This really is a good thing for almost everyone as far as I can see.
Agreed. I use Calibre to download all of my news subscriptions to it and between that and a several books per week, I've never seen my kindle 3 crash in the many months that I've been using it.

As opposed to my iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and iPad2, all of which I've taken down rather horribly with just the normal apps (typically frozen, sometimes insta-reboot), not even counting things that bad programs _I_ wrote were doing.
After so many times encountering Color, I still don't understand what this is.
I predict the world will undergo an enormous robot revolution at some point. Things like highway maintenance, garden cultivation, cutting trees that leer over powerlines, self-driving cars, painting, home assistants (mixed with Siri technology)... it will certainly outshine things like the hippest Twitter clients.
How is is different from Amazon's mechanical turk?
The Importance of Bees to our Ecosystem
مسلسل بائعة الورد الحلقة 49
(Assuming that his behavior was necessary to the quality of the product (an assumption neither Steve nor his biographer were willing to make)):

He didn't "kill" them. He hurt their feelings.

Weigh a few bruised egos versus hundreds of millions of people with delightful, time-saving devices. As the book points out, yes, there is a real and measurable cost to wasting people's time with a badly designed device. And there is a benefit to delighting people.

I see a lot of people fixated on the, let's face it, pretty mundane human costs, unable to see what he actually accomplished. I don't want these people to be leaders, and in my opinion we are in a worse position when these people become leaders. They harm the rest of us because they cannot overcome their fixation on a few pitiable people to see the larger picture.
Review: Skyward Sword slashes Zelda's sacred cows
As someone that has worked around and with flash for years, I say good riddance. Though there are portions of the flash 'product' I think are much stronger than HTML5 and javascript (specifically, I feel that actionscript 3 is lightyears ahead of javascript), Flex was always one of the weaker parts. It always came off as half baked and did not blend well with everything else. The whole concept of MXML files was ridiculously obtuse and only led to unmaintainable code.
Security roundup for week ending Nov. 11
Oh awesome. Thanks for clarifying :)
Just in time for the season of Joy
I don't think the form of the offered equity matters that much, it's going to be whatever is most favored by tax laws. I'm guaranteed to be worse off accepting any form of deferred equity compensation if a manager is going to sink to this:

if (market.valueOf(employee.equity) > market.valueOf(employee.labor)) {
this.equity += employee.equity;
employee.dismiss();
}

If Zynga's tactic is legitimized by succeding and not getting crushed in court, nothing short of cash or fully-vested shares will have any value for motivation, which screws all startups.
Adding to the other comments, I find it easiest to think of Flex as a Flash-version of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and pick-your-favorite-JS-libraries such as jQuery and Sencha. Instead of HTML, Flex has MXML. Instead of JS, it has ActionScript. (Though both come from the same language standard.) CSS works, and they bundle a good set of default themes and widgets. I think it's a really nice piece of work, especially when they put out Flex 4, it's a joy to work in compared to raw HTML+JS. The only downsides are Adobe, the flash runtime, and the intellectual heritage of Java sometimes getting in the way.
Though code is used for test cases I would consider it planning. Especially in a TDD/BDD development process because you're taking the time to define what/how/where/when and why the implementation you'll write after works. Just my $0.02.
Almost nothing runs great on that many cores.

Certainly not Xnu.
I'm a designer and I can tell you the following: Don't be fooled by anyone who tells you that you can learn everything about usability or design in general after reading one book.

If on the other hand you're looking for a starting point I'd recommend "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" by Steve Krug.
Those are research topics, not items for a curriculum. Certainly they have the potential to make interesting papers, but they're far too narrow to support an entire course of study.
http://www.flightglobal.com/atlas too
Ask HN: Why do you hire interns?
What is the purpose for hiring interns? Is it to help you hire top talent? Is it just to benefit the interns? What are your purposes?
What is the best flowchart/graph Open Source Software?
As someone who has a hard time visualizing the control flows of my own programs and scripts, I find these things absolutely amazing. But I've been having a hard time finding a good program for Windows. So I ask you HN for suggestions. Thanks in advance for any replies and suggestions.
It'll be interesting if there will be a new super organic which means nothing artificial involved.
He complimented businesswomen -- therefore he hates women?

Huh?
VCs know that most of their investments aren't going to pan out. When they evaluate companies, they aren't worrying about whether they'll fail. Even the good companies fail. What the VCs are worried about is that they're going to say no to Facebook, and then have to explain 5 years from now how the fuck they possibly could have said no to Facebook.

What that seems to mean is that if you:

* have a persona that at least superficially seems driven, ambitious, likely to succeed, and

* you tell a convincing story about a market that might experience explosive growth, and

* you have any kind of track record of any sort to make it hard to write you off as a total bozo, and

* you have some sales skill, so you can manage the pitch process and create pressure to VC firms, then

you're probably fundable even if you think testing means "practicing instead of really playing".

These kinds of pitches seem very different from the kinds of things people write in Show-HN: postings. In particular, these pitches aren't meant to be reasonable.

This is way more of a response than you were looking for; sorry, I just had to get this out, since all I can think of when I read about Color is how good an illustration it is of VC cliches.
I used to work with Bill at Seven, and this article captures his personality pretty well.

His biggest strength is he's an unbelievable salesman. He can talk pixie dust and make you want to sign on to his vision.

I believe the ability to sell your vision is the most important skill for an entrepreneur (which is too bad for me, cause I'm a coder and I suck at this skill).
First off, I say all this as a fan of both Isaacson and Jobs.

I am convinced that this book is Jobs' attempt to counter worries that Apple is in trouble without him at the helm. Given that he was a perfectionist, that he would both commission, support and supposedly proof a work that paints him in the light that it does, there must be a motive to the caricature it paints.

Think about it. Everyone is worried about the staying power of Apple without him at the helm. He is the quintessential micro-manager, so the concerns are valid. He was also a very private person that, despite some oft-reported claims, held a demi-god like status in the company and with a lot of people around the globe.

The book repeatedly (oh god, the repetition) remarks on his intent on "creating a legacy", "making a dent in the universe", "working only with the best" which speaks directly to Apple's future without him.

Isaacson even doles out micro-biographies on Cook and Ive. Two entire chapters!

It then completely obliterates his demi-god status by painting him as a petulant child, terrible father (early on), liar and narcissist. I cannot imagine anyone reading the book and idolizing Jobs afterwards. It makes him very, very human which is an ideal image to paint if you are/were worried about Apple's future.

I am more interested in the biography on Jobs that will be written in 10-20 years from now.
>> Can't we admit that monopolies are basically a myth? Why do people keep bringing them up as if there's numerous examples of monopoly abuse or monopoly-induced misery.

Exactly. The only monopolies that have ever existed in history are ones given monopoly privilege by government force.
I'd say because it was first. But then again, it's not unusual to replace established terms after some time to give it some fresh paint.

The "cloud" has always just been a marketing term. If anything I would say it refers to a snapshot of the ongoing IT development at a certain period of time.
It's a very tough question because 'planning' can include time when I'm in the shower, falling asleep, or driving to work. I work at a megacorp though, not a startup.
My only disagreement is with your disdain for MXML. AS makes it a lot nicer to build UIs than, say, Java with Swing et al., but I still prefer some sort of structured language like XML or even S-expressions to build a UI with over the procedural "make new widget, set the attributes, add it to this other widget" pattern.
xmind's pretty good.
Looks like you gave up on it before trying. It can do everything you complain about.

Homebrew beats apt-get any day of the week.
I recognize that I'm a deviant on the other side - I abstain from drugs, alcohol, and smoking.

Same here and for similar reasons (although I still strongly oppose the WOD). But at least with alcohol, I'm pretty sure the optimal amount isn't zero in our current society. Not drinking has definitely interfered with my social development, which wasn't great to begin with. I don't plan to start now--among other reasons I can't stand the taste--but the advice I'd give to my 18 year old self is "go to parties, get drunk, and learn to enjoy it".
Nokia Turns Mobile Phone Into A 3-D Touchscreen
On the subject of Steam can someone answer this question for me regarding Steam's pricing...http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3229558
I used to get around the problem in my country by using a VPN, but that no longer seems to work/
There are all sorts of way to do the math. The issue is that he made a statement with zero factual support.
Surely the problem at hand is not simply an atomic transaction in a distributed system, any HN reader worth her salt can do that.

The problem is satisfactorily handling money laundering, fraudulent transactions, and a myriad other user-facing issues. A better question is what regulation should exist in this space, and the actual mechanics of the payment.

Who gets to say the buyer's money is good, and that the seller has adequately dealt with the conditions of sale?
I've never, not even once, missed static typing since accepting the move to JavaScript; you just get used to it. You shouldn't rely on the compiler to detect 'errors', rely on your test cases.
Care to elaborate on how this works? I couldn't find any about page (and the site's down now).

From what I could gather, this looked like "person-who-just-spent-their-fortune on the web". :)