skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was very shocked when I heard old Siracusa bashing ObjC in his rant about the dreadful HFS+ last month (in his terrific podcast, Hypercritical). I didn't know why he didn't like ObjC (I really like it), and I still don't understand why exactly. I've written iOS/Mac apps and am familiar with it. I don't think his critiques are on spot this time.
Go the F*ck Home [video]
Google Maps adds real-time traffic
Thanks for this tip.

It wasn't working in Firefox 6, but then flipping the flag fixed it.
The regulation and fee structure we're talking about is chump change compared to the transaction volume of even some of the newer payment processors. Meanwhile: PCI-DSS is an industry self-regulation scheme that I'd argue is an example of a failed security standard; to support that argument, I'd just go down the list of "PCI Certified" companies who had terrible breaches subsequent to their certification.

(It's funny that this comment was downmodded to grey on a thread about a breach at a giant payment processor who had one of the industry's best known firms as their QSA).
Most files and directories have 644/755 permissions by default, which means they can be owned by any user and still be accessible (readable) to any other user on the same system. What really matters is who can write to those files and directories, and there's no reason for anything other than "wp-content" to be writable by the web server. WordPress blogs get exploited all the time, so a bit of paranoia can't hurt.
This man does not lie...(we lived in Hoboken for 1 of our 7 years in the area). Some of us just can't stand Jersey, though! :-P
Game Publishers Are Obsolete – So Why Haven’t Developers Ditched Them Yet?
I feel like my biggest sparks come during times of stress. Maybe it's the brains way of relieving the stress. So a crazy week were I do 60+ hours of something I don't want to do, I'm yearning to work on that side project I've been neglecting.
Global Payments Confirms It Was Hacked
I'm not sure why people are afraid of Makefiles. I know an incredible number of developers who view them as this scary black box. They are not a heavy weight thing which justify making excuses about not producing.

Here's what it takes to make a new Javascript project:

mkdir project
cd project
touch foo.js bar.js
echo -e 'project.js: foo.js bar.js\n\tcat $^ > $@' > Makefile

Unless you're jQuery, you don't need minification or GZipping because clients of your library already have their own. You don't need your own linting because you can trivially run `jshint project.js`.

If you find yourself running the same command in your shell a bunch of times, add it to your Makefile. It's that simple.
Yes, the is: Really Static
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-static/
Colgate-Palmolive Pledges to Reduce Water Consumption 40%
Nonstartr
At ~500 million. Yes. What's a few dollars for the dream of crazy money? But normally, no.
I used to get nervous about NDAs. My programmer's mind was always coming up with arcane problem cases. In practice NDAs are treated pretty simply - when you're under NDA with someone you dont talk about their stuff.

My suggestion: find/develop a lightweight NDA that you _are_ willing to sign, rather than fighting a battle all the time. NDA's can range from impossibly restrictive to nearly inert with a few small wording changes. If someone insists on a weirdly restrictive NDA, they're probably a dick to work with anyway.

Nobody goes back to look up the wording in the NDA. They just store a single bit in their mind, "under NDA". And rightly or wrongly, that bit is pretty important to many people.
Rent prices have reached about par according to padmapper.com. Mountain View, a somewhat shabby and boring suburb, that wouldn't be costly if it wasn't for SV, is the same price as brooklyn.

Amazon Prime pretty much removes most of the price and sales tax inequality.

The tax difference is real. But then again, the tax difference compared to austin or seattle is also very real too.
"Major" credit-card breach reportedly hits Visa, MasterCard
Compared to other groups, conservatives have least confidence in science
Yes. The definition of "search" seems to be changing.
Exactly, just because google is adding a bunch of cool free non obtrusive features doesn't mean that they are stifling innovation in their main field. Google is a large company with countless divisions, it isn't just one engineer who can only work on one project at a time or anything.
Canabalt, QWOP, Steambirds: Survival Devs on Adobe's Premium Charges
One of the one bedroom units here in Stuyvesant Town is listed as $2820 (http://www.stuytown.com/view-availability.aspx). And if you've been to Stuyvesant Town you know the units are HUGE. And most people convert one bedroom to a two bedroom, two to a three, etc.

Stuyvesant Town may be the biggest real-estate default in American history but it is really really nice. We have our own reading rooms, movie shows, ice-skating in winter, gym, 24-hours security with video, etc. It's just worth checking out the website http://www.stuytown.com/.

Disclaimer: I live here with roommates but have no other affiliation with Stuyvesant Town.
It's worth pointing out that Adobe has only declared mobile Flash dead. They have yet to say anything to that effect for desktop Flash. That's not to say they aren't thinking it of course.
Alternating days hasn't worked for me. I end up way too tired the next day if I can't get on a consistent schedule.

And yeah, going to bed early and waking up early will definitely cut into time with the spouse. Even if all you do is watch TV shows together.
TweetDeck taken offline after bug allows access to hundreds of accounts
Well, did Box.net "rock the boat" by offering 50gb of storage for free? That's much more than any competitor, and frankly IMO most people would prefer Dropbox despite it's much smaller size for free users.

There are many ways to rock a boat, and just offering whopping amounts of free stuff isn't the only way. Creating something genuinely useful is much more important. Gmail's storage was genuinely useful because it mean you never had to think about deleting emails anymore.

We'll just have to see whether Google Drive will be useful or not...
I marked 10:00pm - 2:00am.

More generally, I feel sleepy all day until around 11pm, which is when I feel the most awake. I've always been this way, even as a kid before I did any programming.
There are services out there that provide the info. I once used these guys: http://quadinfo.com/Pages/Default.aspx.
I get absolutely nothing done between noon and 3PM or so. I try to schedule all meetings/interactions in those hours to compensate.

I write the best code when I first wake up. Combined with the above, it means my ideal work day starts around 6AM and I can get 3 90 minute sessions in before lunch and early afternoon lethargy sets in.
I quite like this side as a way to feed my pedantic side since nobody else will let me.

There's more criticism and less encouragement here partly because people here are just harder to impress on the whole.

The anti-humor thing can get annoying sometimes, although I'm glad it's not full of people posting "witty" variations on internet memes every other post. Sometimes you see a post that has an original and relevant joke or something that is meant tongue in cheek to just get downvoted to oblivion.
I'd be interested to hear if others agree with my assessment or not.
Do you have anything online about that robot? I thought of building a hopper/glider hybrid a few years back. It would basically work like a large grasshopper. Windup and release a spring to jump and at the apex of the curve release a small wing to glide. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It was to be an experiment in solar powered robots that would use the spring as energy storage instead of a battery.

Never built it; this has me thinking about it again, tho.
That's a good idea for a compromise in this situation. Do you have a sample NDA that you could share?
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

I was depressed for weeks when he died.
1) Yes
2) I think what you mean is the ability to grab the file without logging in from somewhere, and since you can currently do that from Google Docs right now, then it's most likely to be possible as well. Maybe you also mean to have canonical URL's as well, and I think that might be something that wouldn't be there initially at least.
It’s open STARTUP season in Chile
I've heard DC women are not as nice compared to the rest of the USA.
Instead of being encouraging, you see a lot of pedantic nitpicking and subtle criticism

Tip: if those nitpickers are getting you down, imagine that it's Sheldon Cooper doing it :)
The Girls Around Me App Takes Creepy to a New Level
You should do an introductory article for technical audiences yourself perhaps. Or maybe you already have one?
I'd recommend checking out The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: http://custdev.com - It's a very practical guide to the first part of customer development and complimentary to Steve Blank's book and Eric Ries's Lean Startup Principles. I recommend it to every entrepreneur that I talk to (which ends up being hundreds a year!)
You're describing recently introduced optional multi-finger gestures. The standard way to get to the iOS home screen is to press the hardware home screen button.
Wonderful! What I want you to notice, now, is how abstract every item on that checklist is.

As compared to really concrete, obvious privileges like: 450 free points on your SAT. Could that be the first entry on our 'Black Privilege Checklist?' What would be the second?

Now, let's imagine you design a sociological experiment in which randomly selected individuals of each race can exchange their privileges (and/or handicaps) - along with a payment to equalize the exchange.

Once again: who would pay whom? Or if we look at just one side of the comparison - what would be the market value of being legally black? What would parents pay, for instance, to purchase this privilege for their children?

Let's say we could restrict it only to college admissions. What would American parents pay to change their sons' and daughters' acceptance letters from Chico State, to Harvard? Then you'll have a fairly good price floor on the value of "black privilege" - this is obviously not the only benefit.

I welcome any thoughts on how one might perform the opposite experiment - that is, assessing the market value of "white privilege." Do tell, critical race theorists.
Is it just me or are these "considered harmful" articles becoming way too cliche? When I see one, I immediately become suspicious of it's content and distrust it as I've come to associate it with some sort of inflammatory headline or flippant way to dismiss legitimate conversation.
Steve Blank is shooting himself in the foot, I think.

He's said (repeatedly?) that he won't make ebooks versions of his books because he wants people to be able to write in them, and to highlight things.

I have around 800[1] books in iBooks. I own, literally, zero, physical books. (I live nomadically and all my possessions fit in a single bag.) I don't care how great the book is-- and frankly, this book is at the top of my "want to buy list", and prior to it, the 4 steps to the epiphany was at the top of that list for FOUR YEARS.

But his reasoning is mistaken-- these features aren't unique to physical books, in fact, they exist and even work much better in e-readers.

iBooks allows you to write notes about what you're reading, and highlight things for future reference. In iBooks your notes and highlighted text along with bookmarks also sync across devices, allowing you to read it on the iPad at night and then pick up on the iPhone at work. ( I don't know if the kindle reader has similar features. )

Here's the thing, this is the customer development guy who says "Get out of the building." Yet he's not listening to his own customers! His customers are demanding ebook versions, very emphatically, and they do so on every single blog post he makes mentioning either book, he gets dozens and dozens of comments from people asking when there will be an iBooks or kindle version.

For me, his refusal to listen to his own customers kinda goes against his entire business agenda. (I think this issue is just hitting a personal blind spot of his, and I'd have to guess that he's afraid the books will be pirated if he releases them electronically. I'm not saying he's a hypocrite, but he, of all people, should be listening to his customers.)

[1] Couldn't believe this myself, so I just checked. iTunes reports 794 items. I think about %10 are ephemera (like maps in PDF format, etc). Maybe %20 are newsletters I've subscribed to over the years that are in PDF format. But its shocking how quickly ePub is being adopted as a standard. I've probably actually bought less than 100 items from the iBookstore.
Almost all of Google's products work over the web. The whole "cloud" idea is kind of their thing. Google uses a single login for almost all products now (the same one that's used for G+). Why in the world would you think that they would somehow regress and create a separate login for this that doesn't require the browser?

That said, nothing Google's done has forced people to use G+ when a browser isn't required. So, again, why would you suspect that they would do something like that?

If this comes with a client, I seriously doubt it's going to require that you log into G+, but the login you use will be the same one you use for all other Google products I'm sure (G+ included). If it has a browser interface (which I'm sure it will), then I can assure you it will use the same login that's used for G+ just like almost all of Google's web apps.
Isn't that what Scala already does quite successfully for a while now?
Captain Cook Sails to China
Statistically you have a higher chance of getting struck by lightning, dating a supermodel, dying in a plane crash, and even being sentenced to death row AND then being pardoned than you do of winning the Mega Million.

Lotteries are a regressive (although optional) tax that tend to attract disproportionately high numbers of people who shouldn't be wasting their money on them. I'm not talking about buying one ticket, but plenty of people drop huge portions of their paychecks on them. Furthermore many lottery winners tend to go bankrupt extremely quickly due to no concept of how to manage their spending.

That said it's a double edged sword, since many states are able to use their lottery revenues to offer scholarships or other funding to help make up for greatly reduced budgets. I'm surprised that more states haven't gone straight up Nevada and legalized everything when you consider just how many are suffering.
Signals Show Facebook IPO Imminent
I'd be amenable to that.
AS AN UPDATE, PETERSON ASKED ME TO REMOVE THE LETTER, CITING COMPETITIVE SENSITIVITY. I have described more in detail on my blog. He can also confirm our conversation directly, and after i meet with him in NY in the next couple weeks, i can verify if the story checks out. Nonetheless, an interesting insight into methods used by power VC's to recruit candidates. Leave comment on my blog any questions.
What a great title. Completely impossible to not click on this and figure out what is going on.
> So there’s the trade off, I suppose. Stick with a publisher and gain assurance that your game will see some income for a few days, or go it alone in the hopes that gamers will see your show of faith of publishing independently and buying your game as thanks. Minecraft creator Mojang did this, and it’s earned millions and millions of dollars since the game’s initial release.

Not really. Notch built the game alone and went it alone until there was success. Mojang (as a company, publisher and studio) evolved from Minecraft so you can't use them as any example of anything. The only thing they prove is that if your game is good enough and has enough buzz you don't need a publisher, but doesn't everyone know that already?
I marked the 10:00pm - 2:00am slot, though, I've found that what really matters is if people are interrupting and bugging me. I've also had good success going to sleep earlier and going into a completely empty office at 7am and working for 3-4 solid hours before the stupidity starts.
First User Of Google’s Self-Driving Car Is Legally Blind
Enjoy the taxes, costs and restrictions! Plus, the movie talkers and the stench of public transit!

I did the reverse (East coast -> Austin) and could not possibly be happier.
Using remarketing to sell more software
That article is an incredibly useful warning against the temptation for casually taking code rewrites, but it's incomplete.

Sometimes full rewrites are necessary and good. The trick is doing it correctly. Rewrites are riskier, more difficult, and require more development resources than greenfield development. More so when you consider that you can't just abandon the old code until the new code is mature and has proven itself.

Most people do rewrites the wrong way, and they get into trouble, but that doesn't mean there isn't a right way. There are many examples of unsuccessful rewrites in history, but also many examples of highly successful ones.
Well the entire stack is open source so no one needs to port it. I'm pretty sure that people like it because, it along with cocoa, makes iOS a great platform to develop apps for. But as for spreading objc, most of the features it has have been in dynamic languages like perl for many years longer. Perl even has objc lib bindings and much better integration in unix, albeit not necessarily for making apps.

I think the popularity of objc is hindered more by the fact that people would be moving a step back, if they were using it for something besides what it's designed for (cocoa apps).
Robots that fly ... and cooperate
The Great Startup Prank War of Boulder, Colorado
Predictability
Quick(ish) video tutorial - Scala Typeclasses: Decoupling
Sass/Compass/SCSS, Less, Stylus...

Can you please decide for one and build a stable toolchain around it? Having less half-baked support for 6 variants of the same thing doesn't help anything. Kthxbai.
Word of caution: I left this open in a Safari tab without thinking about it, and soon found that my Mac's UI was hanging for ~20 seconds every minute or two. Took me half an hour to figure out what was going on.
Understanding the brain isn't only about collecting data, it is about our basic perception of the world around us, the way we arrange data into coherent structures. There's a fundamental barrier between code and its output - the brain's structure and our subjective experiences, our genes and our physical traits, DNA structure and cell differentiation - in order to relate one level of data to a different, more subjective, manifestation of it we need to find new ways of conceptualization, which might be impossible to do on purpose, and might be inherently related to the way we live our lives.
(getting a premonition YC decisionmakers will read this and weigh accordingly)

The thing that would keep me from joining (assuming my group didn't make the YC cut), like many other applicants to YC, is that I have a geographical disadvantage, and the modest stipend ends up making the relocation (and the dinners) possible.

A YCx would likely not provide that stipend, so colocating a group of founders for a dinner (and especially multiple dinners) would get prohibitively expensive outside of certain geographic locations where enough teams live (I can see a YCx in Boston, or LA, or Austin working out).

There's still probably 10 bay area rejected applicants per acceptee, so this is still a very worthwhile project.
And let's not forget Liam Stacey! We're skating on the edge here, neighbors - the very very edge. Big Twitter is in ur thoughts, making sure they "look good."

It could be that everyone is crazy. You and I together, comrades! If the 20th century doesn't prove the possibility of universal political insanity, what does it prove? Why is the English-speaking world somehow magically exempt from this general condition - appearing in all other places east of the Channel and west of the Pacific?
Start Small is not about 'Lean Startups' per se. It's more about making something that works for you, without having too much of an ideology/movement/whatever. Insomuch as he talks about customer development, it's mostly techniques to appraise a potential market.
> A flat licensing fee would be regressive.

No. It would be flat. A regressive tax would charge the small companies more than the big companies.
objC was common for a time in the NYC financial industry, because of in-house use of NeXT computers.
I even offered to do this book for free via LiberWriter on some blog post of his, in order to have an eBook version.

Perhaps the "problem" is that in business terms, it doesn't really matter: he's already set for life in terms of money, so he's simply not concerned about customers in terms of hustling for money. So he thinks the paper version is superior and is going to stick by his guns.
I don't think we'll see publishers go away, I think we'll just see the terms of the contract be a bit more favorable toward game studios/musicians/writers/etc. There's always going to be a need for investment money to bring new ideas to market, and getting loans will be much easier from a publisher that understands the business vs a bank.
That's a worst case scenario and things could be worse if they hacked your production code base.

All data should be 256bit ssl encrypted for point to point security and asset tampering protection. After that, i doubt stripes js lib is much of a problem, it communicates in a secure tunnel from the client to stripe.

They as well say you don't have to worry about PCI compliance then because you are never handling financially sensitive data directly, only indirectly.
I thought the processor was breached?
Interesting reading only I expected to learn more. It ends up with the simple concept of memories being mapped to cells, which I didn't know, but it also doesn't surprise me - the brain must store the information somehow.

And Jennifer Aniston is just an example of a memory, so nothing special about her.
A regressive tax charges small companies a higher PERCENTAGE of income than large companies, which is exactly what a flat fee would do.
we did a lot of documentation work for launch - the overview is a good place to start: http://documentation.fabric-engine.com/latest/FabricEngine-O...
This app just shows what we've known, or should have known, about Facebook and Foursquare. When you check in, people know where you are! and every public piece of data on Facebook is available to every frat rat and creepy stalker on the planet. Somehow the author realized that "normal" people don't think about it that way. The article isn't news so much as a PSA.

Odd that whoever wrote the headline decided to directly contradict the author's conclusion at the bottom: this isn't anything new.
Thank you for sharing this link, this actually helps explain a lot of stuff I've been wondering about for a while.
Insurance companies have been doing this exact same thing for years. Progressive had a huge ad campaign a few years ago around the idea that you can compare your rates between Progressive and other companies instantly- that worked the same way as this tool.