skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's undeniably true that Apple shipped the first good multitouch implementation on a handset. But there were lots of phones with very capable browsers, and a comparatively successful company (Opera) selling them for years before Apple started work on the iPhone.

Which of course is the whole point: ideas are items of trade. Someone thinks of something and someone else improves it. That's the way innovation works. Apple has surely done more of it than any other single company, but they've also, like everyone else, "stolen" far more than they invented themselves.

Claiming that they have some special ground with the iPhone is just a laughable, juvenile flame war. I wish these would stop.
Sounds like you are talking about self-diagnosis. I think the "health + mobile" market is really well suited to chronic care / ongoing issues, rather than one off or acute care issues.

If you know you have high blood pressure and your doctor has asked you to track your BP over time, an app to assist you makes a lot of sense.

We built http://dsharpdiabetes.com for similar reasons. It's not realistic to ask the modern smartphone user to carry around a pad of paper all day long for months at a time to track their stats.
That's pretty easy to say if you don't have ADHD and only anecdotal evidence and no real metrics.

"non-recreational" drugs work for me as well, but the side effects are much worse than "recreational" drugs. I take concerta with bupropion.
The old icon didn’t fit OS X at all. That’s not how OS X icons are supposed to look.

The new one fits perfectly. It’s awesome. And: not blue.
Wrong evaluation strategy, really. He uses “foldl” (lazy) but gives it the semantics of “foldl'” (eager).
Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple

Years before the iPhone I was carrying around an iPaq. Now it isn't quite the same, most notably because the original device didn't even function as a phone. Yet I would argue that the phone part of smartphone is by far the least important part (and the only reason it is so prevalent is that carrier subsidization allows people to stomach $700 iPhones). Really these things are ultra-portable computers and the phone thing is ancillary.

The iPaq wasn't multitouch. But here's the thing -- Apple bought that multitouch sensor. They didn't invent it. They didn't specify it. They didn't even initiate its creation. Their software used it brilliantly, but by the common narrative you'd think they had invented it.

Capacitive touchscreens evolved. Embedded processors evolved. GPUs evolved. Wireless technologies evolved. Batteries evolved. Makers like RIM pushed much of that evolution.

Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. Better in every way -- largely owing to those hardware improvements, all of which came from outside Apple -- but did it really invent an industry?

It's actually a bit sad how little credit RIM gets, given that they were the ones who pushed a lot of the innovation in mobile that made the iPhone possible. A distributed messaging, application platform, camera, etc...everyone just focuses on the damn keyboard as if it defines the platform.

Already I'm seeing many ascribing the iPad as inventing the tablet, forgetting so many products that came before (both real, such as Archos, and conceptual like the Crunchpad). Apple executes amazingly well, but their creations are seldom as out of left field as people imagine. They say that the victors write history, but it is sad if we're blinded into confusing commercial success with innovation.
It is almost laughable how soon people forget where they have been, how much national debt has has been piled to bring this meager growth in economy. The main reason the employers are hiring is the extension of temporary tax cuts. It is only a short term boost to the market for the time being.
Unix Goodies Part 4 - xargs
Sorry, I'd missed that link in your article. Although I don't claim to know him personally, I've interacted with him a few times and I know that he takes an interest in getting the mainstream tech. media to cover or correct popular myths (such as Apple pioneering multi-touch).
Next time around, drop him an e-mail. Never hurts to ask, although I know why Microsoft's PR might have turned you down :).
Turns out I don't seem to understand closures.

I mean I use what I think are closures in Javascript, but I thought they were to 'prevent the pollution of the global namespace' (a noble endeavor). I don't get how it relates to map, reduce(fold?) & filter.
Probably some phpBB somewhere. There are things that start out as a labor of love and a "look at this thing I made" post.
Dear Jim Gaffigan, Louis C.K. paid $35k for his website. We'll do yours for $0.
Show HN: If you write Markdown on iOS & need reference materials, try WritingKit
Shire doesn't make the generics, Barr does.
I love closures. I can't live without them.

And I never, ever, use them to replace a for loop. Approaching closures from the "because they can replace loops in great ways!" is IMO pretty boneheaded.

Let's take something from iOS land, where blocks (Obj-C closures) make my life easier than it ever has been before. If you want to hide an object, then destroy it once its hidden:

[UIView animateWithDuration:0.2
animations:^{
myObj.position.x += 10.0;
}
completion:^(BOOL finished) {
[myObj destroy];
}];

How would you implement this without closures? How much of a clusterfuck will it be? Will you have to install something that will poll for the animation to be finished? Will you write a big "animation manager" class that will throw around a bunch of function pointers and callbacks and marshall all of your animations for you? Will you have to declare a load of protocols and support classes just to implement said callbacks?

The biggest boon to closures, for "regular" programmers, is the dramatic simplification of async code.
The HuMn Wallet
Thanks for the reply. For what it's worth, my feeling is that if the old icon didn't fit in, the new one blends in too much -- in my Applications folder, it looks like some generic shareware utility at first glance.

What if you dropped the wooden lightbox entirely, and just had the sheet of paper with metallic rulers and the two markers? That might make the "it's for design" notion more obvious.
Come on, those are very minor quibbles.

If you want aliases, it's literally a matter of five minutes to find some (e.g. [1] is the 4th hit for a google search for "git aliases") and put them into your .gitconfig.

And I would argue that prefixes are more confusing than helpful, especially in conjunction with aliases. For instance, going by prefixes you'd expect "co" to mean commit, yet in hg/svn it means clone/checkout.

[1] http://gitready.com/intermediate/2009/02/06/helpful-command-...
Hopefully this is true these days: http://dearrichblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/can-we-republish-sp...
Not much real content here. Feels like a rather crass attempt to capitalize on the buzz around the Target story.
I kinda feel like any article that argues that "non-technical cofounders are inferior to technical cofounders" or "technical cofounders are inferior to non-technical cofounders" or otherwise tries to denigrate one group relative to the other, is over-generalizing at best, and flat wrong at worst.

And I'm saying this as someone who is very much a technical cofounder, working with two other technologists as cofounders... we'd love to have somebody on board who has experience with sales, marketing, dealing with distribution channels, business development, partner relations, etc. And there's no question we will need those skills eventually if we're going to succeed. The fact that we can all write code, and maybe even produce a great product, doesn't mean much if we build something nobody will buy, or if we can't figure out how to get it in front of the people that make the purchasing decisions, etc.

Of course we're a B2B enterprise software play, which is a bit different than, for example, a consumer facing web application. In that context, a "hardcore business person" maybe is actually less important. I don't know, because that's not the world I play in.

My feeling is that a non-technical founder in a technology company cannot be a complete Luddite who knows nothing about technology, but I don't think he/she necessarily needs to be a coder. Of course somebody who knows how to code and has the "business skills" is probably ideal, but how many of those people are there out there?
I am a programmer and at my last company there was a technical founder and a nontechnical founder. The nontechnical founder was just taking up space. He once looked over my shoulder at my code and said "Oh I get it, it's not that hard" I then pointed out to him that the code was the stuff in-between the lines that started with "//". He actually thought the comments did all the work. He could not make any management decision because of his lack of technical experience. He ended up just doing payroll and accounting work, while the technical founder worked 90+ hour weeks. He made some pretty drastic strategy mistakes, such as thinking the iPhone was a fad (it was a mobile company). I left because I did not have faith in his management.
Nothing personal, but is there something about the industry that causes you to be evasive and use weasel words? It doesn't seem controversial that giving a company a subdomain on your site implies an associative connection, not just "I suppose..." SRS Q.
Show HN: Real-Time Web Collaborative Code Editing
Ask HN: How do you evaluate yourself (or your employees)?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/opinion/for-teachers-shame-is-no-solution.html

Bill Gates has an opinion article on the NYTimes about how to evaluate teachers. I thought the points he made could be applied to how we evaluate ourselves (or our employees).
In Q/KDB:

/1 million random floats between 0 and 10

a:1000000?10.0;
b:1000000?10.0;
c:1000000?10.0;

sum each flip (a;prev b;next c)

/To do it in parallel

sum peach flip (a;prev b;next c)

Sometimes it is like living in a world where people refuse to use sheet music/clefs/bars and instead they read and write music by listing the notes, their frequencies and how long to play them for. And you can't tell them otherwise. People who recoil at APL because there are a few unusual symbols involved will gladly play a guitar and deal with all sorts of arcane symbols. If we really wanted to do a good job we'd go beyond ASCII.
"However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the car to reach that low level of charge."

In that case, Homer Simpson would never want one in his house. Also, why are they in the car business? I what their battery management system. It, apparently, can make energy out of thin air, to counteract the losses in the batteries.
Attention deficit is a conduct disorder, which means that its diagnosis relies entirely on assessment of patient's behavioural patterns. Since it's next to impossible to keep a patient under 24/7 observation, secondary sources have to be used. In most cases, the diagnostic process reduces to an "intake session" interview with a patient and a few multiple-choice diagnostic questionnaires.

So an AD* diagnosis is trivial to hack. Moreover, it's impossible to design a diagnostic process that's not easily hackable because, ultimately, everything will boil down to a subjective assessment of patient's behaviour, i.e. a "doctor's call". Furthermore, the more you restrict prescriptions and tighten the diagnostic criteria, the more you increase the risk of denying medication to "legitimate" sufferers. Since the guiding philosophy of the medical community prioritizes "helping people" over "prescription security", the problem of how to keep people from getting "illegitimate" prescriptions is ultimately intractable.
Yep, I had a smart coworker who would regale us with tale of starting out as a punch card clerk after someone would complain about an iOS misfeature. Sadly he recently passed. He was working on a startup at the time, and had not only written most of the iPad app, but had picked up rails Ina couple weeks to start the server side. He was past the retirement age, but still bangin on code.
Ask HN: Why do hackers work for suits?
Why do engineers and hackers work for non-tech people instead of the other way around? Sure this is changing a little, but why do hackers tolerate working for people who don't know jack about technology?
>"I don't think the ability to code something is as important as the ability to communicate exactly what you want to someone who has that ability. It's very easy to find someone who can code, the challenge is communicating to them what it is they need their code to accomplish."

Sounds to me like Jason Gordon gets it.

There is far more to running a business than being able to code. And there is far more to the business world than software.

Good ideas generally come from people working at stuff they enjoy and/or do for a living. That's pretty obvious, which is why, generally, software ideas come from people who can write software.

But you can't do everything in your company. So being able to "write code" is no more or less important than being able to "do accounting", or being able to "operate a forklift", or being able to "perform arthroscopic surgery".

A true entrepreneur can look at any operation and determine how to assemble the parts to make the business model work.
Check out [Colorgcc](http://schlueters.de/colorgcc.html). It helps more than you'd think.
I've been working on this app since June 2010, and just released a 3.1 update to the app yesterday. It's come a long way, and now very much stable for daily use.

Check out my homemade unedited screencast here for a taste of Writing Kit's text editing power: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5KgaL8LV2g&feature=youtu.be#t=01m00

Writing Kit is meant to give writers tools they need to finish their task: Dropbox sync, TextExpander, built-in browser, answers from DuckDuckGo, Instapaper & Readability access for materials, you name it.

iTunes link: http://bit.ly/getwritingkit
We're glad to announce cocode.io beta (http://cocode.io), our vision of collaborative real-time code editing. It provides a collaborative but not disorderly concurrent editing, integrated with GitHub and your development environment (using a simple http API). For more info please visit http://cocode.io/beta/about/

In our company we love to share our coding sessions on cocode.io. We started cocode.io as an experimental tool for our team and we implemented the features we'd like to use. Now we'll be pleased to know if these features are interesting for you too. Your feedback is very important for us and we'd like to know which key features could induce you to prefer it against other similar services (etherpad, stypi and many others).

We're looking forward for beta users. Feel free to request an invite!
> How many drivers have run out of gas when they are experienced and know better?

Not many, right? I've certainly never even come close to running out of gas, and I can only think of one time in my life where anyone I knew ran out of gas (and that was only yards away from the gas station).
I know this isn't directly answering your question, but unless you actually need to learn Django, I'd recommend sticking with Rails. I've done several projects with Django, and while I enjoy writing Python more than Ruby, Rails is by far a superior web framework. I would simply stick with Rails if possible.

If you decide to learn Django, nothing really beats the official tutorial. If you read the official tutorial, you won't have to worry about learning deprecated features or any of that nonsense. The official Python tutorial is quite good for learning Python, too.
Thanks, I appreciate your thoughts. Discussion of the icon isn't unexpected given:

- it is the first change users will notice

- the style is quite distinct from the old icon; even large software changes like the redesigned animation interface aren't as visually different

- software is a personal experience
How does a sysadmin debug a binary application for which he doesn't have any symbols?
They should recruit Bob Mansfield (Apple SVP iphone hardware) or one of his deputies and give them complete autonomy. Bringing the Google design touch to Motorola is not the answer.
Just to add to the list of previous art:

The Nokia 770 from 2005/11 and the N800 which was released (2007/01) around the same time that Jobs was announcing the development of the iPhone. (These were Internet tablets with the hints of the telephony stack already included. Eventually the N900 phone did come out, too little too late unfortunately.)

Android has much more in common with Maemo than Apple iOS.
Quite a few startups that I know are doing a rolling close ... So the early investors get a better valuation for coming in early without asking the perennial, 'Who else is in the deal' question. Investors who come in later pay a premium since the startup has been derisked (at least from a fund-raising perspective)... So I think often there isn't a single valuation for these rounds.
Left hand, right hand. The executive branch is very big. That case is about "security". This proposal is about consumer and business behavior. I'm not at all surprised that there's a philosophical disconnect between them, are you?
Clickable link to screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5KgaL8LV2g&feature=youtu...
This is hard to take seriously at face value after looking at the Obama for America privacy policy
http://www.barackobama.com/privacy-policy

If you go through the trouble of creating an account, you will find that the claim:
"You can view or modify information stored with your user account by logging in to your account and accessing the Manage My Account page."

appears to only refer to address and messaging subscription settings - no other information is available. They fail to meet the standards set for both transparency and individual control - and that's even before addressing the set of unlisted "third party vendors" (both suppliers and consumers).
Love it, very cool.
The article deals with non-technical people wanting to take their idea and turn it into a startup, but I'm wondering if anyone has any words of advice for a techie (i.e., me) who has little business experience.

If I set up shop tomorrow, I'd be the solo founder of my first startup. Given the amount of work involved (and how much of it would be non-technical), I figure it would be better to have a business-minded cofounder with me.

But how do I find one? Or, more crucially, how do I assess how good they are? Given that I have zero experience of running a startup on my resume, it's quite likely a co-founder would be the same. Am I better off just teaming up with my less business minded friend, whom I know very well and trust?
Out of curiosity, why did you learn Czech?
The Inside Secret of Why Network Marketing Will Always Work
It's because you'll eventually run into a suit if you go high enough in an established company. A company run by all tech people will not last as long nor be successful as one that at least has some semblance of a corporate structure.

The clue as a geek to find a place where your superiors are if not as technically adept as you are, at least trust you and your opinions and decisions.
Exactly. Picking individual feature to judge innovation is like saying Sydney Opera House is not interesting because the concrete, the flooring, the paint and window are pretty much the same as any one of the boring office buildings; and Golden Gate Bridge is just a bridge because it's still a bridge-looking bridge built with bridge-building materials.

Like design of any architecture, a consumer product is always a package of many components. Knowing what component to keep and what not to and tuning each to best please the user and work together are the art and the kind of innovation that is the most difficult to find.

And you know people are copying/stealing just by looking at it:

- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjetjep/4100430224/
- http://micgadget.com/8168/shanzhai-sydney-opera-house/
I don't know if crass is the right word. It's opportunistic I guess, but this is how the world of marketing works -- a story about something similar to what you do catches the Internet's brief attention, and you put your hand up and say, hey me too!
And I think the real point of contention was that Eric Schmidt was a member of the Apple board starting a year before that and as such had seen early iPhone prototypes. That in particular is what Jobs was angry about.
Thanks for the great post!!! It is really usefull
How much money is a 30 day supply?
Actually, you can't copyright all of a phone book. In Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (499 U.S. 340), the Supreme Court said that the "white-pages" part of a phone book had so little application of creativity that it was not copyrightable.
Firstly, given that gas contains up to 10% ethanol now, no, your engine will be seriously damaged if you leave your car with gasoline in it for ten years and then start it without flushing it first. That's because the ethanol attracts water, and water does not compress as easily as gasoline, and the attempt to spray a high volume of water into your cylinder and then compress it will likely destroy something along the way. Agreed though that what passes for gasoline in that tank is anything but gasoline.

Now, add further that all of the rubber hosing, if your car was built in the last two decades, will likely have dry-rot, and the vehicle is unlikely to run again without replacement on all of them. Should a rear main, or other important seal have been damaged, you'll be looking at around $1,000 in labor alone to disassemble the engine. How much was that car worth again?

I've had lifters separate on me while driving taking out the engine block, radiator, and several other components along the way - the cost to replace with a -new- engine and radiator exceeded 40% of what I paid for the vehicle. (Don't be confused by the pricing on a used, junk-yard engine, and a new crate engine. Gets even worse with a V8 - have you seen the price on a 6.1L crate Hemi?)

I still don't see what the big deal is - if I leave -any- electronic device with an li-ion battery in it discharged for a long period of time, that battery is toast. You think it's absurd that the battery in the car costs $40k? I'm sure mac laptop batteries would be even more expensive once you chained enough of them together to get to that level of sustained discharge capability.
Thanks for the feedback, and I'm sorry you found it crass. It is fairly speculative, but we thought it would be interesting to people interested in machine learning and curious about how Target might have approached the problem.
They really are all crap. Run leaks - playhaven, tapjoy, flurry, etc are all guaranteed to be there. They dont even run static analyzer, which find some of these.
I'd be curious if after some time you still hold that opinion, feel free to ping me in a couple weeks.

The good thing is Mac OS has always been great about allowing icon changes by copying/pasting in the get info window. I probably spent too much time as a kid redoing all the system 7 app icons :).
I checked out the Tesla sedan and would definitely buy it if I could afford it!
I have strong opinions about the politics of this (i.e. giving people power without accountability always causes problems, whether it's on this scale or the Department of Homeland Security scale), but since we're on Hacker News, I think it'd be more interesting to consider what this says about auditing, data access, and privacy. I noticed some comments already about auditing systems.

Can this story tell us anything interesting about audit trails we'd like to see in other applications - or that we should maybe implement in our own work?
UX Design for Non-Designers - Notes from my first Skillshare class