skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Context: I have been doing iOS app development, both native and with massive amounts of mixed in HTML (using a home-grown mechanism similar to, though I will personally claim nearly infinitely better than, PhoneGap) since early 2008 (yes: half a year before the SDK existed).

The day you realize that what version of Xcode you were using when you compiled the application (in addition to the version of the firmware installed on the device) affects the behavior of UI classes on deployed units, and that these effects are not documented (and are in some cases /insane/) is the day you realize that no: it is just different.

To describe this another way: yes... Apple seriously implemented a kind of "quirks mode" (I believe that is the most fair, accurate, and descriptive term to use to describe it, by analogy to web browsers) in the UIKit framework on the device; they will change the behavior of the library slightly, and then do runtime checks to determine "could you have known that we did that".

To be clear: this is not due to compiler bugs; they do it with a runtime function called UIApplicationLinkedOnOrAfter() (to be clear: which looks at the date of the UIKit library used, not the date of the link). I discovered this after spending an incomprehensible amount of time attempting to debug a serious UI issue that only occurred when /some/ of the developers working on my project compiled it: I sat around disassembling and tracing and then... "woah".

The places where I have seen this stuff used, while attempting to maintain an application not over the course of a few months but over the course of now over four years, has been sufficiently "wtf" that on iOS 4.1 I finally wrote a tool that disassembled UIKit, found all of the calls to that function, and attempted to document "for what version it is being compared".

(I intended to at some point even write a detailed blog post about this, with examples, and a chart of all of the usages, but I've never had time. I really wish I had more time to sit around writing blog posts, but the really good ones of those take days to put together, if not even longer ;P.)

In contrast, the stupid WebKit bugs in or changes to iframes and multi-touch that seem to get traded around in every version of iOS are actually tame in comparison: they simply have not caused the kind of debugging hell and frustration that the simpler native components have caused. I have only once been "I upgraded to the latest version of iOS and all of my content disappeared" with HTML (iframes with height=0 stopped auto-sizing: changed to height=1: irritating as now an iframe cannot autosize so small as to disappear), but it has happened four or five times with my native code.

So there: just another set of anecdote to throw in the pile of "irritating garbage" and "debugging hell" that people like to throw around about everything they do. Personally, I find that I'm happiest when I switch back/forth between doing Objective-C, HTML, Python (server), and assembly (reversing) a lot, so that no specific one set of irritating problems ever becomes so depressing that I throw up my arms and quit (which has totally happened a few times).
I've had success finding gems with Blekko that never appeared in Google results, so I'm not surprised with their success.

Google is a habit, and not a healthy one IMO. It doesn't always produce the best search results.
Another good read is An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus, http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg/books/
Why the IRS Wants the Right to Seize Your Passport
Now you can take all the semi-colons from your javascript and re-use them elsewhere! Genius!
According to wiki Hotmail has more users than Gmail [1]. You and I might think they are just tools and they don't know what they are doing since gmail just blows hotmail out of the water in every respect, but it is popular. I don't think there is any other Google product that would be as popular as gmail.

Office does run on the phone! It's not full featured of course but you can do basic editing and reading... see [2] for early version

There are plenty of games on the phone which have some connection to similar games on xbox through Xbox Live - achievements. I think that Microsoft could do more to improve the standing of WP7 in the Xbox live - it's available on other platforms and some games are released even first for iPhone and then for WP7

But overall I think WP7 has quite some association with the ecosystem.

[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail

[2]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drbjT2dUtQA&feature=fvst
It's a balance between the benefit of the recruiting/retention edge for making a commitment to your engineering team, vs. the loss in patent value for an acquisition or to stop someone who's really ripping you off later (the latter obviously being a huge gray area).
Pud - First of all congratulations. 404, 772 users is serious business!

You already have a nice platform for musicians. How about connecting those musicians to help them form bands? As a drummer, I'm constantly looking for new people to jam with and would love to find a kick ass lead singer. It's really hard to find people outside of your social circle, and that enjoy the same music as you. Your site seems like it could really solve this pain point.

I'd love to be able to create a profile where I can tell people "Hey, I drum, I like metal, I can jam these days, I live in this city, lets play some music". Metallica was created when Lars / James put an ad in the newspaper, the other answered, and the rest is history. Now imagine, this sort of connection on Fandalism.

In terms of monetizing, I think you could use a sort of 'first look' approach like American Idol. If a band forms via your site and continues to use your platform, you could offer to sign them to your label, and give them more exposure on your site.

Another platform that comes to mind, is online Karaoke. American Idol, in essence, is a giant Karaoke fest. Nobody's singing their own songs. If you could create a platform where singers choose a song, and have the lyrics stream across the screen while they sing, you might be able to find some great new talent.
Where are the duke nukem strippers?
PyPy keeps making amazing advances. Exciting times.
What's flexibility good for? The government needs a certain amount of tax revenue to run; either they don't get that revenue, or the average tax rate is at a certain level, after all the "flexibility" is taken into account. What's more, the amount of tax revenue the government needs is lower without the deadweight loss of a good portion of the IRS's 106,000 employees, and the economy doesn't suffer the churn of seasonally employed accountants.
Change Your Voice With Free Skype Voice Changer
I pretty sure that is Search Plus Your World customizing the results for you.

pushover.net is number 10 when I search in an incognito window.
I found this trivially easy to set up, as long as I followed all Clippy's steps.
Using Origami to Mockup Gestural Interfaces
Ask HN: Fuck Itunes?
I am a web dev with a business partner who's already built a niche web based music store for a country specific genre of musicians to sell their music online. We make about US$3000 per month using subscriptions. We were in the music biz and personally know a lot of these musicians.

My question is, would we make more money just charging these musicians to get on iTunes / Amazon /CDbaby as well as our site or should we continue distributing the music ourselves?
I'm sure that's what he was talking about, if he wasn't being sarcastic. But there's a difference between releasing a bit of code on the periphery of your walled garden and being a "role model".
Count the hours till somebody makes this with CSS
Papermill? http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/23/2897938/papermill-is-the-f...
Indeed, signalling concerns apply to every round, but perhaps they are more important for the seed-to-A transition than for later rounds.

It seems that most companies that raise a seed round (and survive) go on to raise a series A before an exit, but many companies that raise a series A can get to an exit without raising subsequent rounds. (Admittedly, I don't have solid numbers; this is just based on casual observation) Thus, future signalling worries could be less important during the A round if you aren't as concerned about ever having a B round.
Completely agree. So were the Mars rovers (and for that matter most of NASA's robotic/probe missions since inception?).

Looking at NASA from the outside in, I wish they'd pivot completely to robotic exploration in space for the next few decades, and energy/propulsion research on earth. Send robotic missions to Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn, and use other robots to test new propulsion systems in space.

Use these exploratory missions to inform planning for eventual manned missions, especially to resource-rich destinations we might be able to mine and harvest to better fund them, all the while sending back brilliant (live?) video and images of other worlds (or the universe in cases like HST's Deep Field camera). Both the scientific and PR ROI of robotic exploration is very high.
Why Read It Later/Pocket Went Free
What fraction of tumblr content (by byte, blog, post, whatever) is porn?
"We view design as an ongoing and continual process - not a phase." - Boom! Wish I could do more than just one vote up.
I know. All that is nice, certainly better than many companies. But that doesn't make them role models. I'd like to think we can shoot a little higher in finding role models than companies that utterly lock down their platform but throw us a few scraps for free.
Maybe for software startups.

But for hardware or biotech startups? Licensing patents is oftentimes a startup's business model. And licensing doesn't work if people can use technology without paying (which would be the case with a purely defensive patent).
Not only have they been buying fiber - they have been actively installing it in various cities and residential areas....

Remember that AT&T commercial from 1997 where they said "and imagine all these services coming to you from one company" and it should a data jack - implying that you would get everything from that AT&T cable... well -- google wants to be that port.
Apparently I am either horrible at explaining myself or you are being deliberately obtuse. The argument about intermediate data size is a sufficient but unnecessary argument to prove the author has no point to make.

First, let's show that I can write a job that can produce more data that it inputs. I have a map of user to score, and want to compute pair wise summed scores for every user pair. This is clearly O(n^2) outputs. Computing pair wise
scores is a common algorithm for recommender systems (I realize in practice you generally do not compute the entire space because it will be too slow. However your output will be closer to n^2 than n, ie, it will be much larger than your input.)

Now, this is a complicated example. A simpler example
is "I want to compute aggregations on all the fields my log file." If you have N fields, hadoop is going to sort the data N times. Ie, you will be producing lots of intermediate data, almost certainly more than the input size, just by using map reduce (the code doing this merge sort is not your code, it's hadoop.)

But again, the point you keep missing and conveniently ignore when you quote my posts is that the point of map reduce on Aws is not about data locality (obviously) but about downstream flexibility. I can run 100 jobs, in parallel, on 10k machines, and output much more data than I input, without running a cluster of my own and I get to pay by the hour. I am isolated from other devs and spin the machines down when finished. If you buy the argument that this is a useful feature (as any EMR customer would attest too) than this too is a separate more pragmatic reason why the author has no idea what he is taking about when he says all EMR customers are a cargo cult.
I hope I don't fuck this part up if I have kids of my own.

The hard part is the "thing to learn" may not be computers and programming, it may be something entirely new. That's why your elders seem like they were out of touch- tech was so new and all. It looks like a great choice from 2012, but from 1990 it was more of an unknown, and there will be similar developments in the future in other fields that challenge new parents to allow their kids to explore fledgeling prospects.
another reason to avoid VCs in the seed round - those VCs will know they have leverage due to signaling issues and offer worse terms. That matters when you're selling 20%+ of your company.

Angels are on your team when they have 50k in you, but VCs are not. They are not truly om your side until they have a few million in you.
Silly as may be, could be interesting to replace the goofy ; stuff with sensible keywords and have a nice, simple language to work with.
Can't really tell you how much an actual homepage might cost because there are too many factors. It is a one page website? Do you need front-end development with it? etc.

I do want to give you a word of caution, sometimes after paying 1,000 USD for a logo, you might not get exactly what you imagine or want. The best way to approach it is have a good idea of what you want or better yet know exactly what you want. For instance: I want a cute panda mascot that's chewing on bamboo would be much better than "we are a social networking website that wants a clean and minimalistic blue logo." The latter is so vague.
> decimal numbers are just a subset of fractions

If you're talking about general decimal numbers, this is provably false. Pi, for example, cannot be written as a fraction.

If you're talking about floating-point numbers on a piece of finite hardware, they can all be written as fractions, and, depending on whether you use multiple-precision math, you might be able to represent all the fractions your computer can work with as decimal numbers.
Kickstarter game projects: Where does the money go?
Agreed - the transition is really seed to series A.

By the time you hit series B or C, you have investors who own a large part of your company already (and in most cases won't do an "inside round" - or if they want to do it, the entrepreneur does not).

So the dynamic post-series A becomes the VC helping you more in raising a B, but not competing for the series B. Since they are not competing to lead your B (they just pro rata), there is no signal (unless they do not want to pro rata, which is a very large negative signal).
Is it still possible to make a living as a web developer?
I really like developing for the web, but when i look at all the job listings, its all ios. i went for a checkup and all he used was a tablet. Even when i look at the newest batch of yc companies, its like 30/42 mobile. my sister doesn't even use a computer at home, just her phone. For someone trying to break into the industry, does it still make sense to focus on web development?
Belgium has had this for a few years now. In my case everything is prefilled, even the deduction for charitable donations. Basically this is a US-specific problem.

You can see a flash demo (in dutch) of the belgian tax-on-web app here: https://eservices.minfin.fgov.be/taxonweb/static/nl/demo_v2/...
“It’s just a job.”

It's just 8 hours a day. 5 days a week. Roughly 25% of your life. Another 33.3% is spent asleep. Maybe you commute to work; maybe that takes you 45 minutes each way. That's 4.4% of your life spent driving, walking, on trains or buses to get to your job. You're going to spend a small percentage of your life on the toilet; another small percentage in supermarkets buying food, in a kitchen preparing it, or in a dining room eating it.

All the 'big events' in your life will be squeezed into the precious little time you have left after survival's necessary subtractions. Going to school. Getting drunk. Being hungover. Getting married. Buying a house. Attending funerals.

Perhaps we were thinking in similar terms. You took those thoughts—nay, facts—and channeled them into a manifesto which guides your relationship with your employer.

Here's what I did with the same facts. I decided I'm not spending over 25% of my life (37.5% of my waking life) doing something I don’t LOVE. For comparison, if I find a spouse, it's likely I won't spend 25% of my life in their company. So if I'm going to spend more time at work than I will with my future husband, I need to love my job at least as much as I do him. That's the conviction which caused me, just a few hours ago, to hand in my notice of resignation to my current employer. Because when I find myself watching the clock waiting for 5:01, I must concede that 25% of me (37.5% of the waking me) has already died.

This isn't a judgement. I respect you for your decision. There's probably some pity in there too, but honestly, it's mostly respect.
Do any reading apps have pinch zooming? I don't see how pinch zooming would work with reflowing text well.
Job Posts That Sell
Good point. Irrational perception makes a big difference in both positive and negative directions for an entrepreneur. See e.g. Color.
> Why not just buy an android phone?

> I don't think I've ever advocated Android
If it's anything like TurboTax, they just pull from ADP, which produces W-2's for many major companies.
The industry is moving towards plain kanban without the sprints. I like this idea with smaller groups, especially groups with lots of support work on existing code, but for larger projects creating something new, using sprints, having a fixed point of coordination for a lot of different stuff, works much better.

I mostly don't work with organisations of that size, but the technique I hear people use to get around that coordination issue is to have events that happen on a regular cadence, but don't have them tied to delivery in the same way sprints are.

So you have stories flowing but also schedule fortnightly planning meetings (or whatever) on top.

This fits with my experiences on smaller kanban style projects where we have regular cadences for non-flow things like usability testing, backlog grooming, etc.

[Edit: Which is what the OP folk are doing "The ideas on this board are reviewed once a week during our Inbox Review meeting"]
Ask HN:  Anyone using Vertx(Node.js inspired for the JVM)?
I saw mention of vertx in an earlier thread regarding Node.js and VoltDB but this was the first time I've heard of the project. The creator of the project apparently is Tim Fox known for the HornetQ messaging project. Any feedback on this?

From the site( http://vertx.io/ ):
What is vert.x?

Vert.x is the framework for the next generation of asynchronous, effortlessly scalable, concurrent applications.

Vert.x is a framework which takes inspiration from event driven frameworks like node.js, combines it with a distributed event bus and sticks it all on the JVM - a runtime with real concurrency and unrivalled performance. Vert.x then exposes the API in Ruby, Java and Groovy as well as JavaScript.
I'm somewhat disappointed - I expected the implementation to be written using ASI keeping semicolons to a minimum.
I don't think it's wordpress compatible... it's basically a site that matches guests at business events/receptions so they know who may have common interests, etc. Companies could then access this data and use it for an all around event hosting tool
JQuery for Android, or AQuery | Do away with boiler plate.
Riots 'could have been predicted via Twitter'
Beware answered prayers.

I don't understand. Are you saying that your scenario/reality is a bad thing?
Cybercrime loss estimates about as reliable as piracy estimates
EBooks are the future. Let the past go.
Isn't every successful Kickstarter project a counterexample to your point?
It does apply to later rounds, but the situation in the seed round is much different. In a seed round, you have the option of raising from either angels or VCs, including potentially many different VC's. This gives you some control of the situation and changes the signaling risks as compared to raising a series B.

Even more importantly, as Elad mentioned a VC firm can do many, many seed investments per year without much cost to them, but is very limited in the number of Series A investments. The rate-limiting resource here is time more than money; a VC can only sit on so many boards. While this makes a Series A investor passing a worse signal than a seed investor passing, the former is in practice much less likely to happen because of how resource constraints work.
I believe this will revitalize the semicolon industry. There were serious sales shortages in the last few years with the rise of languages like ruby, python and even haskell, not needing this resource. In fact several major semicolon foundries were mothballed since the housing crash - the legalese markets were just not there any more, and lack of derivative generation really hurt the suppliers. The latest round of ASI abuse in javascript was hailed by some pundits as the nail in the coffin for the flagging industry, sending it to a niche role for legacy code and industrial/embedded systems support. With the release of this language, some analysts are suggesting a surge in semicolon production, and the commodities markets show q4 semicolon futures at the best they've been in 14 months. Expect to see a large push from advertisers in the form of articles like "why I like semicolon" and "can your language do this with only 5 characters?". Pessimists however are speculating that it is too little to late, and are advising shorts on semicolons in 6-10 hours, after the initial news leaves the front page. One pessimist says "This is just a pathetic showboat effort from a dying industry". Other suggest rumors of lobbyists pushing hard for the DoD to adopt this as the new standard language. More on this story as it develops.
I like the simplicity of the whole thing. There are some navigational issues which would make it more intuitive. Like if I'm browsing an item within a project, clicking on the project name at the top should take me back to project root.
Get All Wordpress Navigation Menus
MapBox releases iOS SDK
I think that now is a good time to learn a whole bunch of new technologies because it seems most of them are within reach for any developer who wants to learn. But I would not call web dead, the web is clearly still alive and will not go away soon.
I wonder why they don't use "...in YOUR Pocket" for the copy.
Your understanding is quite wrong, frankly... I wouldn't even know where to start, but I'll just drop that obviously homophones are not written with the same characters...

Kanji were fitted upon Japanese as much as they were upon Chinese. Kanji is a writing system that doesn't depend on phonetics in any way, the correspondence is one-way only.
The Kinect Accelerator is now in session
Thanks for the feedback and good luck. I am actually planning on offering an all-in-one name-logo-business card package, which seems to be more substantial.
That wasn't advocacy.

I really wanted to know why the original commenter was talking about suing Apple, instead of just buying an Android phone.
Banding is fundamentally a problem with Bayer Filter sensors. Bring back prism spectral modulation 3CCD before you are considered cinema quality in my book.
Seems to be handling the traffic better now. Sorry about that.
Whitespace is too slow for big systems. The non-implicit nature of semicolon will really allow for prime-time server stacks. I do think though that whitespace will retain its market share on the front end.
There are already a number of merchant processing systems for Bitcoin including MtGox's payment api and Bit-Pay. Neither one supports instant transactions coming via the Bitcoin network (MtGox is instant if buyer and seller both have funds there), but the cultural aspect of helping Bitcoin users sell their wares easily was also an attractive one for this project.

Still, it's a great suggestion and will be considered for future development.
Question: Are all HFTs only market makers like this, or do some of them use other strategies (front-running?) that actually make transactions more expensive for others, or move markets a lot (especially in small caps, I would guess)?