skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it boring to see an apple with a writing: "Eat it!". I guess I can figure it out myself what to do with an apple.

I think it's great to know who you are dealing with, I have a picture of me on my business card as well. Maybe you should concider it.
It depends on your definition of real language. I consider Ruby and Perl to be real, production level language, and they are both excellent as glue languages.

Python, on the other hand, would need some helper functions to make the interface intuitive. But you only need to define them once, and then off you go.
The story behind all 84 iPhone commercials so far
Way to answer a question without answering the question, or even knowing the answer. :)

http://blogs.denverpost.com/crime/2012/01/05/why-criminals-s...
Why? It may be common to get emotional, but wouldn't it be much better to get rational about a claim like that?
Clarify: Create & Send Instructions, Quick as a Wink
I tend to believe that it's important for a developer to pick up a couple of languages. But a point that I often see people miss is that it isn't so important to learn the language's libraries and basic syntax, as it is to learn the languages idioms.

There have been many times that I have seen Java guys learn ActionScript3 only to misuse properties (unecessary Java style setter methods everywhere, no closures, etc) and other features simply because they didn't learn the core values of the platform. I doubt that they really gained much lasting value from the exercise in the end, despite using it for a few months.

A few days with Clojure or another functional language in which they really focused on the core idioms of the language would have been more valuable from a learning standpoint, IMO.
Apple Shuts Down Push Email in Germany After Court Order
The desks of 37signals
Glaring Problem With Messages Exposes RIM's Broken Software Development Culture
Proview Brings iPad Trademark Battle to the States
You might be interested in

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
The main assumption that seems wrong to me is the idea that a massive energy weapon is even a good idea when it comes to destroying planets.

All you really need is a big enough rock to throw at it (apologies to Robert A. Heinlein).

A planetwide extinction event could be triggered with an asteroid just a couple dozen km in diameter. With a really big rock, say 400km across, you could boil off the oceans, according to Charles Cockell: http://books.google.com/books/about/Impossible_extinction.ht...

I imagine that even if a hyper-advanced Evil Empire wanted to vaporize a planet completely, it would be more efficient to push it off its orbit and into the sun than it would be to build a steel planet with a massive energy beam. And that's still ignoring all the other problems physics has in store for a planet-sized object that can be steered through space, enters other solar systems, and gets close enough to a planet to blow it up.
From an economic standpoint it's not inflation you need to factor in it's the reduction in cost of production over 500 years (assuming away any issues with the time scale the author presents). Also known as deflation which is in fact a good thing (sorry Chicago School, more for less is a good thing).

Over time advances in technology and increases in capital (capital defined as production goods here not cash) tend to dramatically reduce the cost of production.

Not to mention the insane decrease in the cost of raw materials once you start collecting from asteroids (again assuming we're 500 years out and can build a moon sized ship we can certainly snag an asteroid or two for materials).
These are great tips. Everyone should take note. When you have passion, it's infectious where everyone else starts sharing the same enthusiasm as you about your product.
To be fair these brands were dead long ago.
Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Special Edition Presented at Qatar Motor Show
Bugatti presented a special edition Veyron Grand Sport at this year's Qatar Motor Show which according to the company, continues Ettore Bugatti's tradition of experimenting with different colour schemes and materials to create unique cars.
Ruby Poetry
Microsoft to launch Windows Server 8 and Visual Studio 11 betas on February 29th
Some people do. /notme
They still put their SDEs, SDETs, and PMs in private offices. There are some cubicles on the Redmond campus, but they are the exception, and I've never talked to anyone who who had a cube.
I think it's an interesting point. World GDP has increased 200x in 500 years. That makes a lot of things possible that would've been fantasy back then, even accounting for technology.
We use it at work to collect point-of-sale data from our stores.

Don't ask me how it got there, I wasn't around when that happened, but yes, UUCP.
the demands of modern web apps

Hmm, let's see. What does a "modern web app" do? Well there is a screen with fields for users to enter something, and there is another screen where things that (other) users have previously entered formatted nicely for display. Behind the scenes, this data is exchanged between machines that do some other processing on it.

They were doing this in the '60s.
> Ruby Debug is impossible to get working in 1.9.3.

Ruby 1.9 ships with a debugger:

require 'debug'

Besides, I've often find Pry way more useful: https://github.com/pry/pry
I'm currently reading Founders at Work. Highly recommend it to anyone here!
BTW, this came off as snarky and I didn't mean it to sound that way. Apologies in advance.
Apple news: Apple halt iCloud and MobileMe push email in Germany
Branching is one of the big differences. I find Mercurial's named branches mostly useless; fortunately, with some care, bookmarks can be used to simulate Git-style branches.

I think, early on, the Mercurial community favored cloning as the means of creating feature branches, while Git used named branches to do so. But in many cases you want to be able to switch lines of development in a single repository (especially when using a workspace-based IDE like Eclipse), so the Git model becomes a win.
I agree with the argument you've laid out here, but i don't see that in the original post.
The funny thing is hierarchical databases were all the rage in the 1960s (IBM's IMS for example) and the world moved on to the RDBMS.

I chuckle to myself when kids who wouldn't know a "legacy" app if it jumped up and bit them on the nose, go through the same thought process over and over again.
I had the most interesting demonstration of the reality of this language acquisition period in high school. I was friends with a family of Vietnamese immigrants. Their oldest was past puberty when they moved to Canada, their younger ones were pre puberty. The oldest and the parents learned English, but never lost their accents. You could not tell that their younger children were not born in Canada.

That said, perfect language acquisition is not impossible for all adults. My brother started learning Chinese at 20. He learned it so well that people he first talked to over the phone are sometimes confused when they meet him - they can't believe that he's not native Chinese. (But he's been having to work to lose his Taiwanese accent.)
I feel that I've already wasted too much time deliberating with myself over which language to use. Sometimes the choice may be obvious (e.g., C for embedded devices). But when it's not obvious, most likely any of the languages you are even considering would get the job done.
Microsoft's services are so fragmented, any attempt to consolidate them is welcomed. It would be nice if they also worked on a consistent UI throughout all their properties. It feels like they outsource divisions to other companies with no UI specifications included.

The only unifying element is the Microsoft name in the URL.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/
http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

And you can't say it's because they're a large company with many products because Apple manages to do a good job.

http://www.apple.com/
http://www.apple.com/iphone/
http://www.apple.com/iwork/
https://developer.apple.com/
The article begins with "Microsoft appears to be killing off ...", which is quite different than the title here on HN ("Microsoft kills...". The article's original title is also "How Microsoft is killing off..." - which is a bit more honest: this is speculation/analysis. It might be correct, but it's not the same as "Look, we got an official statement from MS saying these brands are now dead" - Sad to see title tweaks for sensationalism on HN, of all places :(
Google’s Nexus tablet may enter production in April
This reminds me of a supermarket where I shop where the point of sale system's display was so crowded that the cashiers had to draw a big arrow right on the screen with permanent marker to point at the total price…
What kind of problems do you genuinely have with a dynamic language/duck typing?

Like, that you've actually experienced and said "You know, I'm not saying this just because I'm not used to it. This bit right here is a design flaw".

This is such a tired and boring argument by this point, but I'm willing to entertain it because duck typing is at the bottom of my list of worries.
LG Optimus Vu competitor of the Galaxy Note | GadgetMAG
"pb" means "problem"?
Google Talk becoming Google Chat, Chrome extension updated
James Gordon Letwin (born July 2, 1952)is an American
software developer and one of the original twelve Microsoft
employees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin
Why does 37signals show up at the top of HN everyday, no matter what they blog about?
The rhyme thing tipped me about the ending :-)
decvax was DEC unix engineering groups vax on uucp/usenet. I believe it was the first system to move email in realtime. Microsoft must have been linked through this vax.
Back in the 1980s, research showed individual offices for developers resulted in significantly higher productivity. [Peopleware has a good chapter on this, if I recall correctly.] This was a core part of MS culture until the mid-2000s, when overcrowding led to office sharing.

I intereviewed at MS as I was graduating college in 1983. My interview loop included Charles Simonyi and Steve Ballmer, who had just gotten a prerelease of the Tandy Model 100 mentioned in the OP and demoed it to me in the interview. It was definitely a programmer-centric world, in the best way; but people I talked to also had a very strong business focus as well. I turned down the job offer to go to grad school ... by the time I wound up there in 1999 after selling them my startup, it was a very different place.
Why does someone always whine about it, even when it's just an algorithm doing what it's supposed to do?
I'm not sure how much benefit Twitter/Facebook/Linked integration is. For most people, those are already channels they're familiar with and are able to easily reach out to, to find people to learn/study with.

You'll have a big list of people who are taking classes. A feature that suggests people to learn with would be helpful. The big challenge is bringing people together. If I'm studying the same course at the same time as someone I don't know, that doesn't do me much good, but if you can connect us, then you've filled in a big missing piece. I don't know that you need to build tools for that (I can chat, skype, email, etc on my own easy enough, but what I can't do easily is find others taking the same course at the same time).
Apple Acquires Chomp: Why This Changes Everything For App Developers
Its not just things like the GUI, its interoperability between MS formats, common "advanced" features like track changes, the lack of enterprise support, and of course the political will for organizations to switch away from the de facto standard to something a little hairier for the sake of saving $300 per employee, which is peanuts in all the places I've worked at.

When people discuss Windows or Office, we often dismiss the natural monopoly aspect of these products. There's a real level of momentum here because people don't want to bothered with things rendering funny or not having the same feature-set as their colleagues and clients. Every IT guy knows this because half the helpdesk tickets are "How can I open this .pages thing?" "They sent us the powerpoints but all the audio files are missing exentions!" etc thats common with basic OSX to Windows office issues, let alone a entirely different office suite. Sure hackers and computer nerds can do this stuff with ease, but remember, offices are all about the lowest common denominator.

OO and LO are nice for basic tasks and when interoperability isn't very important. Once you enter the realm of business, suddenly track changes needs to work and images not being aligned properly is suddenly a big deal.

LO and OO are almost identical products. OO has been at the stage its at now for 5 years. If it hasn't hurt Office by now it probably never will. I suspect OO is yet another "year of the linux desktop" that always 2 or 3 years away.

/ITguy
Because people up-vote the submissions.
Winners and losers of the gaming rat race
I don't know if I agree with you on this one. I think you're diving in too deeply on three words that really could mean almost anything. It's like the way people tear apart a line of poetry to make it mean something it may not actually be attempting to express. I would be careful not to make a mountain out of a molehill.
Or a smaller rock moving really fast. "The Killing Star" describes it well, here is an excerpt:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Rela...
my kids love it, 4 and 6 yr old boys saying "do it again Dad" now i need a second one...
I wonder how many people scrolled impatiently just to see dhh's desk.
Siri is now in the Mercedez Benz
London Escort
If you happen to want an exotic woman to show you around the city then a London escort is a perfect choice!
I'm not sure about "science," but: According to the OED, the noun form of "skill" and the obsolete English verb "skill" (to separate, from Old Norse skilja) are both related to earlier Germanic words for distinction/difference.

However, in Middle English, the meaning of skill varied a great deal, sometimes representing, for example: "a statement made by way of argument or reasoning."
@ the mobile data thing : data caps. I pay for 2 GB of data usage a month. I don't see anything wrong with my friend tossing me $15 and using 1 GB. If 50 people want to split it, I don't see a problem with it (though they probably will).
I like the stand-up desks. The first time I remember reading about such a thing was Michael Dell having a custom built stand-up desk in the early 1990s. I up vote the expansion of life expectancy.
Interview: Steve Wozniak
Just because you have simple rules doesn't mean you can't get complex behaviors. Multi-threaded applications using locks and mutexes have bugs that never happen the same way twice, which is why they're so notoriously hard to debug. Large systems with lots of parts (like huge websites with multiple backends) will exhibit failure behavior we can't predict even though at the very basic level, all computers are predictable. It's only manageable at that scale because we work hard to design it to be predictable.

There are a lot of complex and emergent systems that demonstrate this property of following simple rules but exhibiting complex behaviors. Conway's game of life, rule 110 in basic cellular automata, how ants work together, fireflies blink in synchrony without global communication are all examples.

And while none of these demonstrate that computers can produce consciousness, they give a hint that computers may be able to do so, despite it following rules to the T.
Got a small hosted EventSource service in beta. It's also available on Github for selfhosting. Handles browser fallbacks, reconnects and authentication.

http://www.eventsourcehq.com

[Edit, might be better to include the link :)]
The only thing being 'killed' is the names, the services are being 'unified' under more logical brand names.
I've always found working from a laptop to feel very cramped, I find it so much easier to work with more space, is there an unknown advantage to using a smaller display or is it just personal preference? (My setup: http://i.imgur.com/uKpyV.jpg)
> use logic to mimic consciousness

And AFAIK, we don't even know if it's computable.
1) Meh on node. I don't really see the advantage of using node aside from specific and well defined performance requirements. It's ironic to be saying this coming from Rails, but it seems like Node's toolset is somewhat immature. Is there a good way to use plugins in Node? There must be. Anyhow, server side? Meh.

2) That said, Javascript isn't going away. We will all be managing thousands of lines of Javascript because… that's where applications are going - client side. Good luck convincing all the browser vendors to swap.

Anyhow, I know you're just trolling but you have to up your troll game - 98% of apps fall in between "toy demo" and "twitter".
Ask HN: what do you think about this tumblr theme?
I am thinking to use it for my upcoming blog, http://pixelunion.net/themes/cobalt/
From what I got - they are replacing complex hardware with bare minimal hw. I would like to have such a thing that would connect 10 or 20 HDD together, cheaply, and have good speeds too.
"Now, Facebook has provided a new option for these big name Wall Street outfits. But Krey also says that even among traditional companies who can probably benefit from this new breed of hardware, the project isn’t always met with open arms. “These guys have done things the same way for a long time,” he tells Wired."

Maybe one reason is because they've been around long enough to know what happens with bleeding edge technology.

And as the (old) saying went, "nobody ever got fired by going with IBM".

But the truth is the reliability and "shit hits the fan" if a Wall Street system goes down (and financial loss) is much greater in a traditional business system then if the same thing happens for a free service like facebook. Or somebodies "Show HN what I built this weekend" app.

So of course they are going to move slower. And they should. They have more to lose.
Ten Common Arrogance Traps for Startups to Avoid
I hope everyone is catching on to what 37signals is doing: building significant brand awareness before the launch of a new product. Notice that they've been posting more frequently, with varying content (and of course a bit of Basecamp Next peppered in). Really subtle, but it puts them in the minds of a lot of people.
For a minute there, I really thought he has actually made a reasonable AI machine. Very interesting but disappointing if you were expecting something real. I am still waiting for JARVIS level AI.
Am I Ugly? The Harsh New Social Media Trend
YOU are pure logic and rules, come on over to my house, I will slice your brain up into disks a few molecules thick, and create a 3D molecular model of your brain. What I will find is not magic in meat, what I will find is vast arrays of interconnected systems, which is no different than had I sliced up your computer and made a 3D model of that.

I find your superstition disturbing.
I like the sound of SockJS. I wanted to use WebSockets in my HTML5-based app but shied away from socket.io because the library was so big (and my requirements were so small).

Once I implemented it I realised that Chrome and the iPhone browser use different versions of the WebSockets protocol, so it was impossible to debug in the browser. Sounds like SockJS might help with that.
How to Create and Use WordPress Custom Menus
WordPress 3.0 introduced users to a powerful feature: custom menus.
Now, without the need for plugins, we can exclude, include, and rearrange our page links at will, displaying a different menu for different pages, and with some code, even different users entirely.
Lake Worth build exterior cleaning
I think the one major thing that sticks out in these photos is that all these people work from home or some other remote location. Everyone's work space has a relaxed and zen-like feeling to it.
Wow, thank you 100 times for linking to this. The inspiration I can gather from this piece is life changing for me. Talk about an eye opener...
Are brains neural connections are equivalent to that of a computers software.

If our brains can produce consciousness there is no physical reason we know of why a computer can't be conscious.
How do you know if everyone around you is conscious? You just assume they are, because you are. In reality you have no way of telling.

The interesting thing about this post is that the robot believes it is human, because it believes it is conscious.
If it acts in a way that we recognise as conscious and tell us it is, at this point we have just as much evidence for believing the robot is conscious as we do for every human.
Demanding better from our public sector (UK)
Is this a sarcasm or what?
Is there any evidence that using a standing desk increases life expectancy?

I would expect people who use them take health more seriously in other aspects of their life as well thus increasing their life expectancy anyway...
I actually randomized the order, to get rid of any bias I may have had in choosing :)
Sports Bleachers For Sale | USA
It's fascinating to me how software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and others have had to push the hardware industry forward, because they often feel so loathe to eat their own children.

I suspect there's a huge correlation in there to the net cost of changing hardware compared to changing software code (not to mention the related margins in the businesses).
It doesn't span several servers. It looks in a directory called static4.scirra.net that is in the webroot of http://static4.scirra.net*.
Every time I hear arguments like the one linked to in this article, I counterlink to this: http://thepiratebay.se/search/terraria/0/7/400

Great game, indie developer, easy download (steam), quick install, cheap price, available for sale everywhere on the planet. All the metrics favor purchasing this game instead of pirating it. And yet it is massively pirated.

All the talk of it being about the convenience or about fighting the man probably contains a tiny little nugget of truth at the core, but it seems clear that most people who pirate do so because, hey, it's free and you won't get caught. I imagine if newegg.com had a sneaky "Just ship it to me but don't charge me anything, ever" button next to their "add to cart" button, that sneaky button would be getting a lot of love and a lot of 50 inch LED TVs would be on the next UPS truck, even if clicking it gave a popup that said "Warning, this is unethical and illegal! (but nobody ever gets caught). Proceed? Y/N ".
Have you read the actual blog post?
Nice setup. I think it depends on your line of work and personal preference.
I think the OP's argument is that a lot of reactive feature-building (irrespective of how they are organized) is a bad idea - especially in the early stages of a product.
While the title is link bait, the author has a point and I think it was best summed up by his use of the word RESTish. Absolute adherence to REST nouns in every application is similar to the old over normalizing in relational databases some times it does not fit the need. But that does not make the concept null and void it just means that it is a good rule of thumb, to be broken when the situation calls for a different rule.