skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The analogy also falls flat in that it starts on the assumption that the Galaxy is Honda to the iPhone's Mercedes. It's why analogy is such a terrible for of argument, it's almost impossible to form one without begging the question.

Having not used iOS4 or the Galaxy's spin of Android, for all I know Samsung may have produced a Veyron to Apple's Geo Metro and it's a case of Gruber "not being able to see it."
Salesforce to Acquire Rypple
hmm sounds nice but as some one in IT who started in mech eng I think you have a very optimistic idea of what is possible.

Also your mistaking cheap DIY tools with the ones the pro's use.
>4. Build something someone uses: build something, anything, that at least one person other than you finds useful enough to use it at least 5 times. It doesn't have to look good or change someone's life. In fact, it shouldn't. Just find someone with a problem that recurs every once in a while and build something that solves that problem for them. Learn both how easy and how hard that is.

Very much agree with this, but I'd add to SELL that solution you built. App stores make it insanely easy to sell and (sorta) promote a minimum viable app.

I did this with Reddit Notifier, a simple Mac OS X app that gives your menubar the same "orangered" envelope you get on Reddit:

Reddit Notifier: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517?m...

That "wow, people will pay real money for this little app I made" mindset goes a long way towards encouraging your loftier startup/technology goals.
I haven't listened to the hearing, so I'm curious (and slightly facetious) -- when the RIAA inevitably flags videos on YouTube that are using copyrighted music -- will it be legally fairly simple for the industry to request a DNS take-down of the whole site? Will site owners have any recourse or will they just wake up in the morning and be completely out of business?
I don't know if this helps but the UI feel of the site felt more like the products were adverts instead of browsing actual products to buy right-now.

Start collecting e-mail addresses en-masse for the purpose of birthday/anniversary reminders. Hit them with a prominent & simple signup form. Just email address, dates & names of occasions, submit. You can play on the forgetfulness, saying one signup and you'll never forget again.

Once you start getting within 15-30 days of those dates you'll start to see conversions growing. That's when a simple order process (4 clicks and you're done!) will boost conversion.

The fact that you are getting sales shows your idea is of interest, that percentage can only grow as you expand your gift selection and gather customer information & feedback.
> Where it got interesting is when Mel Watt came out and said "We all know that everyone in this room on both sides has enough resources to pull in experts that will aid their side of the argument equally, so we're going to get into the same mess we did when we talk about derivatives being the most evil things on earth by one party and the saving grace by another".

That's truly frightening. "We have no clues and we both invite biased experts so let's just disregard facts and vote according to our ideology."

It is OK for a politician to vote on laws about things he does not completely understands, the catch is that the JOB of a politician is to know WHO to ask to get an expert advice. If they can't do that they are simply not fit for the job. The rush without reason should indicate to them that something screwy is happening. Yeah, "screwy", come on, politicians can not even identify THAT ? It is either gross incompetence or conspiracy. Since the W Bush administration I no longer bet on which one is the correct option.
I've always wondered if Steve was inspired by the movie "Network":

"We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF..."

I highly recommend it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(film)
"Everyone can notice it, even if they aren't experts on cars or design."
I'm not so sure about that. I think Siegler's point was that he believes there's a select portion of society that can appreciate the difference between the Mercedes and Honda. That's why Topolsky interprets it(correctly IMO) as a class thing.
possibly but this has been going on for 40+ years under the name of sustainable development.
http://keepthewebopen.com/open

They're broadcasting it in Flash at the top of the page.
Yeah lot of data private but working on surfacing as much as possible...wish we could do profit filter of course... main point is to showcase case studies for further exploration
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"
-- Donald Knuth

Getting the code written and the app out the door in a "good enough" state is almost always the most important part. If you're a startup, it's may well be the only important part.
In case we reach the exhaustible amount of bandwidth: http://www.mediafire.com/?v92bxi1m82uz4mz [PDF screenshot]
> By the way, if you ever want a conclusive argument

Does it negate any evidence for the fact that for hundreds of years our predecessors were hunter and gatherers, whose roles were distinctly filled by men and women? There is a theory that hunters (men) largely looked for large blue horizons (hence a blue sky) to go hunting for animals and gathers (women) looked for berries (hence red, or a hue of red) and thus why we are drawn to those colors. I'm curious as to how far back in history her books relates back to.
If it's so easy to abuse the DCMA, I'm curious why the 'unwashed masses' haven't been issuing DCMA takedown requests for all the official music industry music videos on YouTube. Wouldn't that quickly highlight how broken the model is?
Yes it's obviously both. It's genetics, and sometimes bad stereotyping parents/upbringing.
In the early to mid 2000s, the US rendered military aid to Georgia, in both training and equipment. This included unmanned aircraft.

In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, and presumably captured some of those aircraft.

No security system should rely on the secrecy of its function, but in practice, many do. If any agency in the world can break the security of US UAVs, it'd be Russia.

Remind me again how the Russians and Iranians get along?
Yes they can: Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari ...
So I played the Lego board game series Heroica recently and at first I thought it was brilliant. It's pretty much a simplified version of D&D where you build the map with Legos. Then at the end I realized that the game-play pieces were set specific and you couldn't do what I thought was the point.

What I thought was that you could use any lego piece you want and add it to the set and use any lego figure and add it to the set and simply follow the same gameplay mechanics to a map limited only by your imagination. Let's play Heroica with Harry Potter pieces. Nope can't do that. You have to purchase their overpriced sets and only play what the sets let you do.

Looks like they're just looking for cash based off of numbers. Bummer.
Actually this is informative. What was important to me was the ability to see how many users they have, then relate it to their amount of funding. Thanks for sharing.
Sounds like the answers are split into two camps:

* be a fanboy and visit corporate campuses

* be a tourist and go run around somewhere

Not being a fanboy myself, I'd vote to spend the day in Santa Cruz. Stay for the sunset. Much more interesting than Google.

Good luck with your interview!
Yeah. I'm not a pilot but am a bit nostalgic for "the old way". A modern autopilot system that's linked to GPS will let you type in waypoints and then it will just fly to them, keeping the heading adjusted to account for the wind data it gets from a satellite weather uplink.

What happened to airmanship? :)
I plus +1'd your comment, I get what you were trying to say, sorry I came across wrong. I was trying to supplement it a bit by saying there are many tiers of UAV's. I was joking about you having crazy crap on your kitchen counter, but typed a bit too fast to make a point of me getting what you were saying.

You can see in my other comments that it is pretty nuts if they actually captured the plane the way they claim. Based my knowledge of navigation design, it seems to be pretty impossible to convince a properly designed plane that it is somewhere it isn't without turning off the inertial navigation equipment (what is done during testing in anechoic chambers).
I would argue that designers are technical staff, just specialized in a different area than Developers. Git or an svn shouldn't be difficult to learn at all for general use.
> "Let's get some nerds in the room"

Was that a direct quote? I'm Canadian, which means that I have no impact on this legislation whatsoever. I can't email my congress(wo)man, threaten to vote for the other guy, throw money behind a better candidate, etc. All I can do is sit back and hope that somehow you yanks'll take care of it, so therefore I try not to pay too close attention to this since it depresses the hell out of me. As such, I wasn't watching the proceedings today and don't know if that's a direct quote or not.

If it is, then I find that comment extremely disturbing. The reason being that Congress, being made up mostly of old people largely out of touch with technology (senate.gov lists the average age of members to be 56.7 years in the House and 62.2 years in the Senate[1]), they should be looking to the younger generation in general, and experts in technology specifically, to help them make informed decisions. Calling these people "nerds" seems incredibly derisive and shows a general lack of respect for the very people that can best help them.

It's appalling.

[1] https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/R41647.pdf
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3355958
But then if they're equally capable but prefer shampooing dogs then is that really a problem? All of us are capable of things that we prefer not to do. I was on a track to become a doctor but decided to program instead. I'm capable of both but prefer not to be a doctor. See what I mean?
RIM's 'secret sauce' must be an hallucinogen
Didn't he say he'd made like half a mill?

That means it had 100,000 downloads in 5 days, each d/l 1/2 gig maybe (I have no idea of the bitrate/size used)?

You need someone who's done that before, plus all the other stuff like actually designing it and that's going to cost you.

It might look a little high, but I think it was probably worth it.
first idea - birchbox
Neat tool. Looks like I need better friends :(
I think Topolsky's analysis of MG Siegler's and Gruber's comments are absurd. Sure, I don't know exactly what they were thinking when they wrote what they wrote, but it's hard to imagine that Siegler and Gruber would implicitly or explicitly make it about class.

I saw a special the other day on CNBC called BMW: A Driving Obsession and it really opened my eyes as to the incredible attention to detail that a car maker like BMW has when building a car. Just check out how much effort they spend just on getting the little sounds the car makes just right at 16:00 and 20:55 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O... If that's how much time they spend on just the sounds, it's not difficult to imagine how much effort they put into everything else. Heck, at 29:03 one of the BMW designers even says they use Apple products as inspiration.

Now, if you agree that iOS is that much more polished than Android, I think this is a pretty accurate metaphor and any class distinction Topolsky inferred from Siegler's Gruber's comments are of his own creation. I doubt Gruber and Siegler would ever admit to it even if it were the case so I guess we'll never know.
There is only one thing that makes "bad code" acceptable, and that is accountability. The article hints at it, the author clearly recognizes it, but it should be emphasized more.

Bad code without accountability, without a reason why the quality has been compromised, and no one to take responsibility for both the choice and the consequences of that choice, is a just crap that doesn't deserve respect.

Most bad code doesn't have the excuse that it works (it usually doesn't, at least not for long), or that shipping it was an overriding priority. Most bad code is just plain laziness or incompetence. Very few of us fall under the heading of Spolsky's mythical duct tape programmers. Most of us merely competent developers can only do one of two things: write decent code that works well, or bad code that doesn't. And the fact that we are actually able to do the former already puts us in the top 20% of people that get paid to code.

As long the majority of programmers either produce bad code or spend most of their time trying to clean up that crap (or rather, just keep it running), I don't see why people feel the need to keep writing apologies for the very few cases in which "bad" code was the best possible option.
Nice post from Felix Salmon on the topic:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/12/15/do-any-real...

He makes the point that virtually no average citizens support this (either they're against it or they don't know anything about it.) People often worry that congress fails when they can't agree on anything, but this makes me think that the time to really worry is when they do agree. When they disagree, they're at least probably mirroring the electorate.
That's a big reason why I left a defense job I otherwise liked. Due to government regulations regarding contractors, every change had to be directly attributed to a request for functionality that the government generated or approved. It could take upwards of 2 months for a single one-line change, which was quite frustrating. There were spots in the code where the engineers KNEW things needed to be fixed but they weren't allowed to because they couldn't get the proper authorization.

An interesting side effect was that the group I was in made a point to use the best software engineering practices they knew (100% test coverage, all tests pass with each checkin, every checkin was code reviewed) because the engineers knew that, once code went out the door, it could be a long damned time before anyone touched it again.
+100

The Iranians have obviously never seen Troy or Holy Grail. Horse, rabbit, stealth plane, all the same really.
Hey look, another turtle.
Wow, they are really digging into the syndicates there.

Even if these places did hire them, I really don't know how much they could help. When I open the newspaper these days nearly all of the comics have their own website, and the ones that don't are so old nobody reads them anyway. I see what they are doing, I just hope nobody actually hires them and suddenly they are faced with the daunting prospect of bringing silent movies into the 80's.

Either way, this should make a good podcast :D
Relevant but downvoted and generally ignored comment.
Epic tantrum thrown by 30 octillion ton baby
Open Source Challenger to Dropbox and Box.net: ownCloud
Even if it is $30,000 better than the Honda, some people's requirements differ.

I drive a 20-year old Volvo 740 that sits in the garage all week. I use it to run errands on the weekend. It cost me $1,200.

On the other hand, if I were doing a lot of driving (more than 1,500 mi/week), I'd opt for the nicest car I could afford.

You don't need an iPad if all you're going to do is watch Netflix and read eBooks. Buy the Kindle fire and use that $300 for something important, like your kid's braces.

I buy the right tool for the right job. I'll try not to be too disappointed about what snobs think.
Hubble Serves Up a Holiday Snow Angel
Ebay-owned StubHub acquires Zvents for event listings
Attempt to be helpful by posting the relevant quote formatted as code with horizontal scrolling:

You may be familiar with social news sites like Hacker News and Reddit. Users can vote for stories they like, comment on those stories, and more crucially, vote for and against each others comments. Voting on comments is a highly imperfect way to shape discourse, mostly because there are two conflicting goals: The first is to moderate discussion and the second is to argue the topic at hand. Ideally, if you don't agree with someone you reply to their comment with a counter-argument disputing their point, and you down vote comments that need moderation, such as comments that are off-topic or comments that descend into Ad Hominem Abuse ("U R Fag"). In practice, users tend to down vote comments to punish each other, and people being people, disagreement ends up being "punished" with down votes. This is widely accepted as harmful, but difficult to stop.
Those two "reported vulnerabilities" are clearly not vulnerabilities. Whoever spent 5 days investigating these "vulnerabilities" should be embarrassed instead of blogging about it. The blogger, Raymond Chen, is somehow claimed to be "Microsoft's Chuck Norris" http://microsoftjobsblog.com/blog/raymond-chen/
That Bush bit is a little biased, Clinton was just as bad. Both had loose screws and power grabs, they were just in slightly different places. Go read Bovard's books, Feeling Your Pain and The Bush Betrayal, then tell me that you could see any significant differences between them.
Complaint about HN turning into Reddit.
>John Gruber will be a great blogger when he grows up.

You read him every day. Achievement unlocked.
Can't solve a quintic? Galois Theory in 1500 words
I'm waiting for the day I have enough to do a Scrooge McDuck and swim through mine :)
For some time now it's been clear to me that as society grows ever more technical, it's leaving legislators behind.

At the same time, the background of lawmakers has increasingly narrowed.

In Australia, for example, it used to be commonplace for the Parliament to contain people whose first careers were as teachers, farmers, train drivers, engineers, small businessmen and so forth.

Not any more. Today it's an almost wall-to-wall collection of law students who were all groomed by party machines. Go to uni, join political club, graduate and work in minister's office/a union/a politically-connected law firm, get pre-selected at the local branch, elected to Parliament.

At no point has this person a) studied something other than law or b) held down an ordinary job or run a small business. I imagine the pattern is similar elsewhere.

And so our law making bodies are filled with folk whose main skill is forensic disputation. This is problematic when technical debates are held because politicians are often mistrustful of experts outside their circle of loyalty -- because for any expert I can procure, someone else can get an expert to say the opposite.

Having experts inside the circle of trust is golden. The classic example is the banning of CFCs. Margaret Thatcher's undergraduate degree was in chemistry and so she understood the mechanisms. In turn she was able to assure Regan that the phenomenon was real and serious and the rest is history.

I have for some time toyed with the idea of forming a non-partisan organisation whose purpose is helping STEM professionals to get elected. Please contact me by email (check my profile) if you are interested.
Mangling is not standardized and every compiler does it differently. In general, you can't link files compiled by different C++ compilers.
New arrival Custom MIC Oem Electric Guitar
Price: $395.86.Save $20 off Christmas Day Sale. Free Shipping Worldwide I got a guitar when I was about 14, for a Christmas present, and went from there. Robin Trower
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3358490
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3358487
If you can squeeze that kind of inspiration and international cooperation out of a bunch of robotic missions, then great.

Edit:

Then again, this is what Cassini cost:

"Cost of mission: $1.422 billion pre-launch development; $710 million mission operations; $54 million tracking; $422 million launch vehicle; $500 million ESA; $160 million ASI; total about $3.27 billion, of which U.S. contribution is $2.6 billion and European partners' contribution $660 million"

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/quickfacts/

So you could get just less than one funded Cassini a year for what we spend on the ISS. You would still need to find additional funding.
Scott has been on this bandwagon for years. It has always confused me why he has concerned himself with this issue so much over the years. Certainly he is right in his thinking however the effort he expends on this continuing campaign seems wasted on an industry as close minded as the newspaper businesses appear today.

This is the perspective of an outsider of course, who enjoys web comics and on occasion buys their loot. Scott has long been a leading figure in the web comic scene and so naturally he has a passion for the medium.
Well, yeah. But it's no excuse for some witless profit-maximizing / revenue-stabilizing Danish corporate drone to subsume all nuance into Boy and Girl.
Active income VS Passive Income
You've nailed it on the head. Virtually all criticisms of this nature can be summarized as "Humans often want things that aren't best for them." Unfortunately, putting anyone else in charge of people's preferences usually ends up being even worse than letting them decide for themselves.
An ELance for high-end, professional services.
Gmail flagged it as spam...
As somebody that often gets hired to say things in a legal setting, I will confirm you can (unfortunately) find an expert to say anything (to a point). This is generally why the option for a neutral party is available (but expensive).

No idea if Congress has that option.
Well put. Lately I worry the most when Dems and Repubs find something that they can slam-dunk agree on.
Yeah, absolutely - clearly people should be able to choose what they want to do. The problem would be if you wanted to become a doctor but were told by everyone that you shouldn't be (because, you're a man, or a woman, or black or white or yellow or whatever it happens to be). You might still do it (and let's hope so, we generally need more doctors) but it would be harder for you and thus statistically you'd be much less likely to do it. That would be society's loss - especially if you ended up shampooing dogs :-)
tl;dr - gruber knows exactly what he is doing, which is generating page views. the market for information is greatly surpassed by the market for confirmation

clearly he is a reasonably intelligent guy who puts a lot of thought into his writing. whether or not he really believes everything he posts, i don't know and don't care.

the thing is these type of posts serve a very specific purpose: to activate the apple fan's and generate page clicks.

we live in a world where the way to drive traffic in the tech blogosphere is to post rumors, and predictions about apple (and to some extent, other big tech cos). readers then seek out stories that confirm their pre-existing views--the market for information is greatly surpassed by the market for confirmation (see: fox news). and this works both ways, i imagine that gruber/seigler are getting lots of page views from people are angered by the whole apple fanboy thing, and want to have the satisfying feeling of knowing that gruber/seigler are just two more unthinking fanboys.
Set "showdead" to yes in your profile and then see whose comments are dead right after being posted.