skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When the Pre came out, both my brother and sister bought one. They both liked iPhones, but couldn't get them because they were on Sprint. I had an iPhone 3G.

They didn't like the keyboard, and the fact that I could grab the top and bottom half of the phone and twist them at least 10 degrees relative to each other was rather worrying. The Touchstone was fantastic, and I assume the only reason no one else has done it was because it's patented. However since the Touchstone cost $70 the only person I know who had one got it for free when their phone (when they were given away at some sales conference long after it was clear the phone was dead).

I though WebOS was very nice, and my siblings liked it. I did just a teeny bit of development for it, and thought it was a decent environment. I liked the documentation, and it was pretty easy to do. The simulator, which ran on VirtualBox (IIRC), was slow as hell. The phone liked to use gestures to trigger things, which was a bit unintuitive and was very difficult to trigger in the simulator.

However, I thought the card metaphor was fantastic. At the the time the iPhone didn't allow any multitasking at all. I still think the card metaphor is elegant. My mother has had an iPhone for two years and still doesn't know about the multitasking or how to close apps if she wanted to. They Apple or Google could buy just the card metaphor patent for a few million, I would say "do it".

But I always thought the main failing was apps. By the time the Pre came out the iPhone app store was already huge and the reason to get an iPhone. After a few months, Palm finally announced an app store and... nothing happened. It took months and months before they actually opened the store and let people download things. After it was open, only one or two apps would come out each month. The ones that did gave the impression the internal developers were making them as demo apps. If Palm had paid a few big app developers to port their apps, it would have gone a LONG way.

From the end user's point of view, the app market situation was a fiasco. The time between the announcement of the store and starting to get any recognizable apps was eons.

It doesn't surprise me that HP didn't fix things. The Touchpad was nice, but overpriced. The fact the first thing HP said was "We're putting it on our printers" wasn't reassuring in any way.
The "Maybe" monad solves exactly this problem.
I was working on a project with another more senior developer and I remember saying we should refactor some part of the code or design it differently somehow and he said "Why, it already works?"

The only argument I could really come up with involved too many coding buzzwords to be taken seriously and we moved on to the next task.

That's kind of stuck with me. Whenever I'm thinking about a code change or "clever" design I just try and see if there's a justification beyond something involving words like "abstract" or "cohesion".
Ask HN: Asian or African News Sources?
Thanks to all for a great 2011 with a lot of opportunity to learn together on Hacker News. One of the best things about HN is how international the community is here--Americans like me may make up the plurality of users, but there are users from all over the world. I have a question for all of you who know news sources from outside the "inner circle" of traditionally English-speaking countries: what news sources do you recommend (in the English language, for this question) published in places where many readers use other languages? A while ago on Hacker News there was a discussion about whether a story from India came from a reliable source, and there was a subthread about which newspapers in India are most objective and do the best job of checking facts. Similarly, there is a vigorous English-language press in Pakistan, in several ASEAN countries, and in a variety of countries in Africa. I'd like to hear from knowledgeable readers how the different sources from different countries compare as reliable sources of news.

For finding (and commenting on) new stories submitted to Hacker News, what are news sources with good reporting on science and technology developments (always interesting topics here) and what are news sources that accurately report economic trends or business stories of interest to hackers, start-up founders, or investors? What sources are especially good for helping Americans and other people who live in English-speaking countries see the world beyond inner circle of English-speaking countries?
That's sad to hear, but I think he's right to realize that it's going to be really hard to deal with losses when the auto theft community gets wind of their business.

I am always amazed by the efficiency and technological prowess that the kids I grew up with who steal cars apply to their trade (even if I wish they were involved in a better trade).

One kid I grew up with now has a ring of six guys working for him, paying good benefits and matching retirement accounts, where all they do are steal Honda Civics. Just that model. I swear he's implemented Kaizen into his workflow.
> by only allowing rentals to people within two degrees of separation on a social networking site

Thereby increasing the chicken and egg problem ten fold
GPS would be useless for a determined thief, be it by simply jamming the GPS/cell signal or a RF sniffer to locate the (cellphone/whatnot) transmitter in the car and destroy it. From what I see, your social network sanction would be the only feasible option.
Perhaps it's just me, but it seems like the quotations from Fred Wilson, pg, and Douglas Rushkoff are made in direct support of codeyear/codecademy.

The placement makes it seem (to me) that the quotations and made in promotion as opposed to being used as backing for support.
> These people take themselves entirely too seriously.
> ...
> look at the Internet's success with GoDaddy and the few other companies changing their stance on SOPA.

What exactly is your metric for success here? A sleazy company changed their stance on a bill that the public is completely unaware of and couldn't give two shits about?

I think "the internet" is taking itself too seriously.

Meanwhile a nation-wide protest movement has at the very least succeeded in planting the issue of systemic economic injustice into mainstream public discourse on a daily basis. History may show OWS to be the catalyst for the resurrection of a real progressive movement in America.
I don't agree with wordpress. Wordpress is like a middle-ground with 'lots of features' vs 'easy to use for no tech people'. If you want something really simple to get started, tumblr rocks (You'll have something running in minutes). If you want to hack your blog with lots of custom features, just pick whatever blogging library in your favorite language.
Blogspot/Blogger is a poor choice. Original founders are long gone and middle managers destroyed the team.
They are not able to deal with spam efficiently, so they overreact and delete innocent blogs.
+ commenting requires CAPTCHA even for authenticated users, which is silly.
The webOS org had about 1200 employees before 600 hardware product people were cut.
The bursting lettering at the top was truly unexpected. Bravo.
i guess i was being incredibly unclear then because that was my whole point. :/

a lot of code is for rare disposable events and doesn't need to be built like a ship; more like a paper airplane.
After publishing a book through a publisher ("Design for Hackers"), I've had some other smaller ideas rattling around that I've considered self-publishing. Scrivener looks like a useful tool.

I'm pretty sure I would hire an editor, though. Unless you're a trained writer, it can be difficult to keep grammar and sentence structure correct.
Yes, the apps did take a bit of time to come up, but against that was the convenient multitasking. It was easy to just leave three or four apps running all the time. Then at least for those apps, the startup time was irrelevant; and switching between them was very easy.
Neither. You need both at some point or another.

FourSquare might have had some really awesome generalists build a really awesome site and architect a really cool platform, but ultimately, when they were completely down to a very complicated problem with MongoDB, they had to bring in a specialist.

I consider myself a generalist, in that I can build all parts of an application on a variety of languages, platforms or technologies, but when something really goes awry, or when I need in-depth knowledge of something that I either don't have time or prerequisite skills to learn, I bring in a specialist.

The pros of being a generalist is that it stays fresh, stays exciting. I can keep pace on something by switching gears. If I get stuck on a design element, I can switch to a programming task. Stuck on a programming task, and I can switch to tuning the infrastructure. Etc., etc. For me, it works well.

Sometimes it's hard to justify what exactly it is that I do though, to people who are used to something more easily pigeonholed. I generally just say I'm a "technologist" to non-techs or family, but if I'm chatting with my peers, it can become harder to explain what an "architect" is, or explain my strengths, weaknesses, etc.

It's often also frustrating when you have a problem in front of you, and you can't find the solution. Sometimes the "If only I knew more deeply" creeps in, or I find the answer on StackOverflow and the fix seems like it would have been really easy if I'd spent more time in language x, or whatever.

My brother is a PostgreSQL guy, and knows it REALLY REALLY well, and that's pretty much all he does. He's pretty much a badass specialist and has a substantial rate to match, but he doesn't necessarily always keep busy either.

To me, I feel like maybe it would get boring, but he knows it inside and out, and is quite obviously "the guy to call" when something isn't right. Any DB is certainly enough to take a good long while to master, and you might never get to know it 100%, but it's nice knowing there are people like him that know it that deeply.

The major con of being a specialist is that your skills are tied to the market for whatever it is you specialize in. If Postgres flops, or is replaced by something else, or the world stops fancying it, he's got problems. Of course, the flip side to that is that he's got time. Even if Oracle goes under (or maybe especially if they go under,) there's still a market for Oracle experts for a good while as there are companies still relying on it that can't switch over quickly.

So, TL;DR, The world needs both, and both can be fulfilling to a given person.
I use nanoblogger. (http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net)

It's pretty primitive, not actively developed, and has no native commenting system. On the other hand, its exactly as secure as your HTTPd of choice, unlike Wordpress.
Selling on other platforms: Not yet. KDP Select prohibits me from selling the digital version anywhere else. Unsure of whether this was a good decision or not, but I'm stuck for the next 90 days.

I did consider using Book Baby for distribution. I still might come march.

Physical copies: I'll be submitting the book to CreateSpace once the designer I'm working with finishes the cover.

Pricing: Pricing is a known unknown for me. $3 is as cheap as I can go while retaining the 70%. Below $2.99 and it goes down to 35%. Should I price it at $5? $7? $9.99? I'm not sure. Seth Godin has interesting thoughts on this: http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/12/how-much-should-an-e...
I think Occupy is the most interesting (and, yes, annoying, but that's part of the method) political development in recent history. This article, however, was very long, with little meaningful content, and I don't see how it's of particular interest to HN. Flagged.
hi thisduck - fred, pg, and douglas rushkoff are all direct supporters of what we're doing.

their quotes are used with their permission and they're all partners for code year.
It was more than that, you wrote your entire UI in NeWS's Postscript-with-knobs on, and communicated asynchronously with the server side of your app. Think of writing a desktop app as a tiny web-server with the UI in a browser, only all the UI is in PS rather than HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
more revenue stream?
FareCast used to do that for flights; It's been bought by Miscrosoft and integrated into bing travel somehow (although I can't tell which of the answers you get there are "organic" and which are "farecast").
cool. Thanks for the info. Where are this and other features nicely documented?
Critical Mass is a good example of how not to gain sympathy for one's cause. Blocking traffic, running red lights, and shouting at or kicking cars of people trying to commute home after a long workday does not endear bicyclists to drivers. In San Francisco, the riders are sometimes known as "Critical Massholes".
How can Techcrunch say "the group stole four cars totaling $400,000" and then immediately print a letter from the company saying "The total value of these cars was around $300,000"? Even though in this case it's ok if you read the letter, it is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I shouldn't rely on Techcrunch's reporting. It's really not a big deal but how did that happen? Why are the numbers different?
In addition, WordPress has a built-in updater, so it's incredibly easy to update, unlike many other platforms which require reuploading or obscure update steps.
Why You Should Write in 2012
You don't have to do things just for improving accessibility. Sometimes it's just about looking neat.
Not only that; what value is the middle man bringing in that situation, vs. "Hey, Bob, can I borrow your car for a while? Here's some cash."? Non-zero? Sure, but probably not enough to capture and survive on.
On Writing Titles Like This (and having to add an explanatory parenthetical)
I wonder if Rails has something like this. A message bus or atleast the concept of one is going to become more and more prevalent in Internet applications I think.
I've noticed this too. There have been several cases in the past few months where when reading TechCrunch I was like "Wait, what?".
Tried in Safari 5.0.2 and it's broken. Works great in Chrome.
Damages for single unauthorized download held to be cost of single license fee
The author:

1. Underestimates the superiority and effectiveness of the Command and Control of the police force

2. Overestimates the superiority of a mob vs a phalanx.

3. Makes generalized assumptions over why the police allowed them to stay.

4. Assumes that the police will not use their formation with calvary (automobiles, aricraft, and actual horses) as a means of denying the flank or the retreat.

This reads like someone who just went through a college course in ancient combat and has little practical experience in the matter of Command and Control or strategic thinking.
tomjen3 said "the way I want", not "any way I want". There's an important distinction. Just because some companies act like that doesn't mean all business owners - and particularly tomjen3 - do.

See chc's post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3393472
It works fine in 5.1
If you email your manuscript to peter@leanpub.com I'll have this done for you so that you can compare. Ideally if you can save it as HTML we can convert it to Markdown automatically. However, if this is a hassle, then send me whatever format you have.

The nice thing is that since you're publishing an in-progress book your approach lines up exactly with what we encourage authors to do. When you publish new versions your readers get free updates automatically, etc. We produce files that can be put in the Kindle store, iBookstore, etc and we also sell the PDF, EPUB and MOBI on Leanpub, paying a 90% - 50 cent royalty.

Email me if you want any more info...
Depends if you are engineering an enterprise system/product, or building a smaller one off project.

In the case of the enterprise solution that will be around for the next 10 years, I would agree with your tech lead.

Every time you make a code change for something that is out of dev budget, you face a budget overrun in the project that was interrupted.

If you choose to deliver something that just works and as soon as possible, your total costs tend to balloon over the lifetime of the system.

Question to ask is: how long would it take for a new dev (someone who has never seen the code) to change the tradeReference naming convention to include the asset type, or some conditional tag, lets say to conform to reporting regulations or even an expanded business mandate?

Interfaces do help here, because the new guy can make a localized change, write a small unit test, and commit the code to source control before you can say "rebuilding search index".

Keep in mind that you do not know if something is well architected until AFTER its been in production for at least a year and had features built into it for another year or two, and has added new members to the team, and has lost a few of the original team members in that time,

I believe that most people who are able to look back and claim that they have delivered at least three large projects (>500k LOC c++ or >200k LOC java) or product releases that meet the above criteria, would agree with your tech lead.
Ask HN: Do you use software for crowdsourcing innovation in your company? 
In this interview <http://tinyurl.com/7zn68qx > AT&T CTO John Donovan talks about his company innovation online platform where they crowdsource ideas. Do you have experience with software platforms that replicate this model?
And linguistic style reflects how a person thinks (so the theory goes). So when you mimic someone's linguistic style, you may find yourself succumbing to their way of thinking.

The theory continues that different programming languages reflect different linguistic styles and thus your choice of programming language can affect the way you think.

As an example, I do a large amount of text processing work using sed. Interestingly (imo), sed is a language designed by someone who had a degree in Psychology.

As a result, to some extent my way of thinking would probably differ from someone who uses, e.g., Perl as their preferred language for processing text.
Simplify Everything that Takes Mindspace
Thanks, that's really helpful. I hadn't thought of grammar explicitly, mainly because I was more focused on something like design patterns.

So far, the emergent grammar has been: equity and/or balance sheet, then an event or a profit/loss, then back to equity and/or balance sheet.

I'd like to see what people try to do with this before insisting on a grammer, so you're right, maybe calling it a visual language is overstating where things are at the moment.
I have a friend who gets paid to simply make Prezis for clients (large and small). The tool was designed for anyone to use and yet she still gets plenty of business.

There is a gigantic market for making stuff that makes other people look good. People are looking for something that is like Powerpoint, but a bit better because PP is considered boring. This, if refined and made easier to use for intermediary content creators, has enormous financial potential because it works on all devices.
For the record, F7 wants to resolve to Bb, not C.
My tablet is sitting here right next to me, I'd love to use a real controller with it and treat it like a mini game console.

This is possible, at least with Android. I have a friend who spends much of his spare time playing emulators on his Xoom tablet with his Xbox controller.
I forgot that still works on some computers. Honestly, I've never seen anyone else ever do that on a computer before. I don't even use it when I'm on my Windows laptop.
"... if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program." - Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel coding style (partly justifying why the Linux kernel style uses 8-space indentation)

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle
Well it's time to find good alternatives.

I'm personally using adsuck:
https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck

It's a caching dns server with 'sucking out' ads. It's very nice, but has some drawbacks. You have to kill SIGUSR1 the process to reread the file with blocked sites, where in adblock you just added an exception.
Agreed. No matter what happens in the publishing industry, editors will always have a place.

I'm halfway through Design for Hackers. The Kindle version is really impressive on the iPad. Whoever did the formatting did a great job.
How is this "self-publishing"? Isn't Amazon your publisher?
I felt worse for these guys until I read to the end of the letter and found out about the "HiGear girls". It's not quite as bad as I thought because they don't seem to "rent out" these models like they do cars; I guess it was just a publicity thing. But still, having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification.

FOLLOWUP (responding to comments):
I'm not concerned about the women in the pictures. They freely chose it, and made enough money to make it worth it to them.

But things that reinforce the societal ideal that women's value comes from being conventionally attractive is much more deeply damaging than most people realize. It leads to the body image issues that the majority of young women grapple with. Anything that makes it seem like numbers define how attractive you are is especially bad, because it makes it harder for people to accept their own non-ideal bodies as beautiful. It encourages young women to spend vast amounts of their free time learning about and working on being attractive rather than, say, tinkering with computers. To some extent, it leads to income inequality between men and women (Girls grow up with the message that pleasing men, by being attractive among other ways, is good, so they tend to up more passive in many situations. This makes them less willing to negotiate for salary, less willing to go out of their way to take credit for their work, etc. It also leads to other bad things like being less willing to say no to sex.)

I like seeing racy pictures of girls as much as the next guy, but displays of women like this, especially right next to and in the same format as rental listings, encourages societal ideals that are at the root of most of the gender-related problems in our society.
It looks like the links busted already…does anyone know of a mirror?
Rust, while interesting and admirable, isn't quite as low-level as C or Deca. For example, one of Deca's explicit goals is to not require a garbage collector or a runtime library. Rust has GC and a light-weight-threading runtime. So it's not quite a replacement for C, though it's certainly a good replacement for much of the application-level programming C and C++ are (unfortunately) widely used for.
That's the cheapest
Is this really a privacy issue? You just requested a list of ten links from Google; they know you're probably going to click one of them. This just allows Google to figure out which result you thought was most relevant so the data can be aggregated to give better results in the future. (And, it lets them give you a warning if they think the site contains malware, which is a much bigger threat to your privacy than Google.) Even if they didn't do this, you can still be tracked by ads and analytics scripts on the page you visit. And, you probably have software like a virus scanner or a malware scanner that tracks what sites you visit and what files you download.

Ultimately, the whole business of searching the Internet involves collecting a lot of information about what is useful and what is not. This is bad for privacy but good for being able to find information. The tracking links seem worrisome, but even without them, Google still knows a lot about you. (Does anyone ever complain about how much their ISP knows about them? They know even more than Google.)

Say what you want about Google and privacy, but I don't think this particular feature is the one to complain about. That would be Analytics, which lets Google track you when you aren't even on their site.