skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that the best way to think of Android is to compare it to the world of Linux distros. (I believe Dan Benjamin of 5by5 pointed this out on one of his podcasts.) Yes, there's Linux, but there's no one Linux. There's Android, but there's no one Android.

So while Android is technically an operating system, it's really an open platform on which to build mobile devices on top of. So the Android device I buy is that vendor's take on the hardware and the software. Google has its own take, as does Amazon, as does Samsung.

When viewed in that frame, it's not so frustrating or confusing, or even an actual problem. Fragmentation can be viewed as a natural consequence of the open Android ecosystem.
People may create more value at a large company but most of the compensation will go to the founders and investors.
> What can Google do so that Android still supports many different devices from different manufacturers, but the fragmentation issue is dramatically minimized?

These two goals are in conflict.
University of You
I kind of agree with you. I think everyone is inherently curious right until the point when a smart-ass parent says "Because I said so, and now shut up and don't ask questions."

My parents did not do that. Even today, they pride themselves on the fact that when I used to asked them a "What would happen if..." question, they'd be like "Why don't you try it out". Sure I may/may not have got myself in a sticky situation, but the point is they didn't shut me down. Also, if I ever broke something (which was fixable) my dad would actually open that damn thing and fix it during the weekends, talking and explaining to me what the things inside do. Sure I may be only 7-8 or even 10-11 but hey that adds more to my curiosity.

At their angriest, my parents have assessed the situation to check if it's fixable by a human at my age/capacity and given me a stern "fix it" look. Boom, that was a blessing in disguise as well because now I'd be all like "Shit, how DOES this work".

[Note: I'm neither married/not have kids...yet]

The problem that I've seen with others/their parents/their children is that they get annoyed quite quickly. And when you shut down a 5 year old, you can clearly see the pained expression on his face.

They simply lose interest in everything and end up becoming drones. And they're afraid of doing anything new because they worry if they screw it up, their parent will come home and beat them up.
JRuby is the best option if you don't want to use virtualization, but the JVM startup time really starts to hit you if you use the rails command or rake tasks a lot.
Ask HN: How Should I Spend My Summer?
My summer officially starts in 9 hours (eff you finals). I'm a business major meaning I have 0 code experience. My thoughts took a 180 degree turn when the idea for my startup hit. Being a broke college student, I would be bootstrapping this to the fullest extent. Being only $20k away from having a team of hackers build my MVP, I am really considering the following two options (which is when you guys come in).

Do I spend the following 3 months building a strategic business/marketing/sales plan? And search for some startup cash?

or

Do I start teaching myself how to program (I believe Python/Django is the route I would need to go)?
Actually, he said that he 'would' argue. So he is not actually arguing, but informing us that if necessary, an argument could be constructed based on the view he presented.
https://www.readability.com/articles/jaxpl15i
yeah very true, we'll try and throw one up to show that a little more clearly
One major reason not to install Rails directly onto Windows is because of all the gem incompatibilities you'll run into. JRuby would have the same problem.

The problem is even worse when you're learning Rails because you'll see an awesome Railscast on how to use X and then find out that you can't use X with JRuby. That'd be terribly frustrating for a beginner.
It certainly would benefit recruiting agencies; 20% of a bigger $ goes right to their bottom line. Not that they do that, of course, but I'd be slightly skeptical of any #s that come out of recruiting agencies.
Except that's completely backwards to any "calories needed" calculation I've ever heard before.

For instance, I just tried http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/calories-goal.php (after googling it out of the blue) with starting weights of 300 and 200, ten pounds to lose both ways, everything else the same. The calculator suggested the 200 pound guy needed to eat 500 calories a day fewer than the 300 pound guy did.
I'll certainly take a look at that, but I remain unconvinced thus far.

The PS3 was demonstrably price-bound for its entire first few years on the market. The existence of the 360 or its early lead just didn't seem to matter. And the "needed to launch first" position has a habit of entirely writing off any negative effect of having poisoned gamers against MS Hardware quality. (Which to that point had a spotless reputation.)
Metacritic: Diablo III
You seem to believe that the mere fact it's a natural consequence makes it not frustrating, confusing, or problematic. Android's fragmentation drives away developers and gives users stuck on old, customized versions little chance of updates.
Check wp-config.php, look for $table_prefix =

that is normally wp_

then, in {$table_prefix}options, normally wp_options, two values contain the url:

select * from wp_options where option_name in ('siteurl','home');
That's one of the paths I went down before, got to a place where I had to sign into windows live, signed in, and arrived at a dead end. Robotmay's link above looks good though!
The Xbox 360 and PS3 processors are very similar, one main difference is the PS3 (ignoring SPUs) is single-core with two hardware threads while the 360 is triple-core with two hardware threads per core. I would imagine that if you locked the affinity of the two threads to the two hardware threads of one of the 360's processors you would see the same behavior. IIRC, The two hardware threads on those CPUs are essentially just duplicate sets of registers that each have their own instruction stream, but execute the instructions in a single shared pipeline (the benefit being that you have more instructions available to fill the rather long CPU pipeline and are less likely to unused cycles while stalled on memory fetches). As far as the actual executing instructions are concerned there would be a single stream of instructions and thus no opportunity for the memory ordering effects that you might see with two distinct cores/processors.
I just downloaded the latest beta and I'm really quite impressed. Everything seems way faster (or at least more responsive), scrolling is far smoother than it ever was before, and the new UI seems great so far.

Some changes I noticed just now while browsing HN:

- Double tapping now seems to cycle through 3 zoom levels

- Article/body text is automatically recognized and set to a readable size

- Comment links are much harder to hit, my taps seem to always hit the article links unless I pinch-to-zoom in very close
Carriers don't have veto power over Skype.

If they did, nobody would be using it.

Instead it is a worldwide success.

The US model of carrier subsidies for mobile phones is not only limited in its geographic scope, it is exceedingly vulnerable to disruption for the same reasons that cable and traditional phone companies carry internet traffic for a flat fee.
How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
The keyboard is fine. You are being hysterical.
Oh, I trust the current stable platforms to be the current stable platforms. My beef isn't with people who use them. It's with people who don't know how to do anything else, which was a plague on our industry for at least a decade. At least the people who get burnt on the latest fad will make new and interesting mistakes.

I agree that when we can find ways to let users serve themselves, that's best for everybody. I just don't think universal pseudo-English query languages are the way to do that, because the hard part isn't learning a little syntax, it's learning what the syntax represents in terms of machine operations.

Once the programmer and the analyst have found something stable enough to automate, by all means automate it. Reports, report builders, DSLs, data dumps, specialized analytic tools: all great in the right conditions. But people have been trying to build pseudo-English PHB-friendly tools for decades with near zero uptake from that audience. I think there's a reason for that.
Plagiarism, the plot thickens
Why does everyone pay so much attention to what people like Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have to say? Looking at Jeff's resume, he has had all of two jobs in his professional life, one of which was given to him by himself. Joel's resume is similar, a few low profile jobs (MS was not notable back then) then one given to himself.

From experience in the industry, it's pretty clear that programmers who stay in one spot for a long time are mediocre at best. Good developers move around a lot in order to work with a variety of people on a wide range of problems. Having an average job then starting a company does not automatically make one qualified to comment on anything.

In terms of the complexity of the software owned by the companies they respectively own, seriously? One is an average-at-best bug tracker and the other is a message board. I don't intend to scoff at people's achievements, please don't take it that way - all I'm saying is that the pudding contains too little proof, IMHO.

In short, I'll take Linus's or Shaw's opinion on a given software related subject over these guys' opinions any day of the week. They've produced valuable software and documentation, have worked on problems of a far larger scope and, IMO, are qualified to tell us what's better or worse.

The lesson to take away from this is that if you start a company, blog about your opinions, you will be considered important. Capitalize on that if you're an idiot, otherwise, go and do something useful for humanity.
This post makes way too many assumptions as to the causes of Jeff's post.
Reminds of psychology, complete reach-around post.
Jetsetter Chief, Co-Founder Stepping Down
The alternative isn't for all these devices of different sizes and capabilities not to exist. The alternative is for them all the be running even more disparate, vendor-specific operating systems. We should be thankful for the degree of unification Android's success has brought.
They really need to structure the OS so that the core components can be updated independent of the vendor ones. Then just ship updates regardless of what vendors do.

People act like Google is somehow unique here. Microsoft and Linux support a vastly more complex array of hardware configurations and still manages to support a diverse ecosystem above the core OS.
Well, I'll tell you why, in case you are the person in charge and can do something about it.

If I click through the links at the top of the page, there is no real indication of "staleness or non-staleness," until you get to Open-DO Conference, which has material from 2010 presented as if it's new. Then, the next link ("Forge") has "Latest News" from 2010.

Update: I did not even realize there was a blog, because you linked me to open-do.org/about/ instead of just open-do.org. There is no evident link to see a blog, so the assumption of the website designers must be (perhaps unfortunately) that you always enter directly through open-do.org. It turns out that clicking the title graphic will take you there as well, but someone who is initially linked to the "about" page would never think to click on that.
"Google" doesn't mean anything outside the name of the company and the services it provides.

"Googol" is the mathematical term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol
Does it? If so, I suppose the original Macintosh proves that assembly language is all you ever need, and the success of Windows 3.1 proves that truly nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM.

In my view, Facebook's success isn't proof that PHP is awesome. It's proof that they hired awesome people.
Very clean design and I like the purchase flow in a popup. Great work.

Are there plans or a timeline for search and ratings features?
Most of the compensation goes to the founders and investers in startups as well.
Can people please respond to the actual posts each other makes, and not just the titles of the posts?

This blog post battlefield is strewn with the broken bodies of straw men.
Did you consider Scala? From my POV it could fit your bill pretty well.

It has tons of data structures for pretty much every usecase, and even lists the complexity of various operations. All the data structures share the same API so replacing one with another is fairly painless.

2. — 8. are all no problem in Scala and running on the JVM means not having to worry about speed or stability anymore, while having all the superior tools of the JVM ecosystem for monitoring and debugging available to you.

9. Macros will ship as an experimental feature in 2.10, to make sure everything can be adjusted and fixed as necessary before declaring it stable.

10. Perl 5/6 is still ahead in Unicode, but judging from the Unicode presentation by Tom Christiansen the JVM is more or less on the second place, which fits with my experience.

Overall Scala is a impressively well-designed language imho, although some people really dislike that it doesn't restrict method names like Java does.
My rage trigger is:

1) person A, using free speech, espouses some (typically ill-conceived) idea

2) person B, using free speech, criticizes said idea

3) person A compares person B to Adolf Mao Orwell scuffing their jackboots on free speech.
Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point
Please, don't learn to code, learn how to model solutions to problems. Code and programming are just tools for solving these problems.

If somebody comes to you with a problem and the first thing you say is "Oh, yes, of course, just let me start coding." then something is probably going to go wrong with your project. Understand what the problem is, build a model, show it to the person asking, most of the time this person doesn't really know what he wants.

You are all misunderstanding Atwood's article. Think about this: a variable in a programming language isn't really a variable, it's a name for a certain space in memory. Variables exist only in mathematical logic. Mind blown.
Thanks! I'm using Nodeunit on the server and JsTestDriver on the client, for now. I prefer TDD-style tests to the BDD-style tests of something like Mocha.

On the client, I'm using JsTestDriver because of its excellent cross-browser/cross-platform testing support. In the past, I've used it to run tests against IE 7, IE 8, IE 9, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and iPad Safari simultaneously, with one command (and a bunch of VMs / slave browsers).

That said, the Javascript world is changing extremely rapidly these days, so I'll re-evaluate these choices after the project is funded.
>doesn't employ an army of electricians and plumbers.

But the whole premise of software eating the world, is its sooo prevalent, its not like hiring air-conditioning workers,
its like hiring literate workers.

Writing code will be like writing essays at college and memos at work.
> Well, these "weeder" courses actually make for intellectually lazy education.

I disagree. In order to do well at a subject in an academic setting, you need the upper classmen to be very comfortable with the basics. "Weeder" courses are always (almost always?) in subjects that are basic foundations for the field. The idea is that if you can't pass it, the things that build on it aren't going to make it any easier. As well, they ingrain a good understanding of the content in those who do pass it.

Since schools tailor content difficulty to the ability of the students, lower ability levels of the upper classmen mean that the class difficulty needs to be lowered. If you're in a competitive college that's trying to teach as much as possible, it definitely their call to only filter people with a certain level of ability. Unless you're at a hyper-elite very aggressive school, I doubt that the content is only designed for an ability level that comes only to naturals. It's generally just designed for "people who can do it well". (Obviously, naturals make up a decent portion of it.)
Another take: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3978488
But there is a huge difference. First, that desktop OS are ready for differences in hardware. As a developer, you usually don't care about screen size, or processor, or memory.

With Android, you have to. Some devices will not be capable to run your app, in some others your app will not even fit the screen... And, of course, because of different drivers, hardware and OS versions your app will not absolutely work on some phones because of some weird error. It's nowhere near Linux development.

I don't know if fragmentation is good or bad for the users, but for developers it's an infinite source of headaches. From my experience (I develop a Twitter client for WP7), even with a system with much less fragmentation than Android, every phone has unique features which can make your app crash for no reason, and you can only wait to be randomly corrected or get that specific model and debugging the app.
My first thought was green washing, but I do not know enough about Google to judge. Are they really this environmentally aware?
Learning to Code as a non-programmer who coded
It's both. It's a resource management problem.
By the way, thanks again. I'm not interested in the details of the sub-projects right now, but now that I have found the blog, my personal valuation of the site has gone from "encouraging" to "actually quite useful." I've already found interesting/relevant reading on the blog.
Why Tesla was the MAN
I don't know if I would keep up with a subscription, but I pick up a copy of the Economist every time I fly. I very much appreciate the information density that comes from articles not focused on breaking news.
But this isn't really a problem then. If the issue with people being hired away from startups is that startups create more value for society, then that's an externality, and we should care. But if it's a question of potentially higher compensation, then we can expect people to act selfishly, and so it's not really a problem.
But police would have a different outlook on that right?

I believe this to be so.
> By using the phrase "overproduction of food" he is using too broad of a statement that doesn't describe the problem in an addressable way.

Cut food production, food prices rise, people can't eat as much. It's an extreme solution, perhaps, and one with more political obstacles than I care to think about right now, but it seems "addressable" to me. What if we stopped some of the farm subsidies that don't make sense? What if we significantly increased taxes on unhealthy foods, which is probably justified since unhealthy foods probably directly lead to a rise in healthcare costs down the line? (Now I get to sit back and wait for someone to post facts from one or more of the localities that have tried raising taxes on e.g. sugary foods. I love the Internet!)
After watching this video, can anyone still justify the existence of Adobe Flash in this world?
Yes, relentlessly so.
The difference is Linux has its act together. Android doesn't.

Right now I can SSH into a vastly different array of hardware and update a roughly equivalent set of packages to get for example the latest rendering engine or security fixes. This is not possible at all on Android which is a joke. And I will never understand how people such as yourself can defend it.

Fragmentation is a huge issue for Android and it is only going to get worse unless Google does something about it.
In this case, a complex interface will force thousands or millions of sites to handle that particular bad design, while a complex implementation will force a handful of browser makers to properly implement it - something with which they have quite a bit of experience. There is no doubt that the feature could be shipped either way. Worse is not always better.
I very much doubt Square aspires to be bought. I suspect they aspire to being so successful they get too big for anyone to even consider buying them.
Honeycomb was not the previous major version. It was a version released only for tablets. The previous major version for mobile/tablets was Gingerbread (2.3).
The title says "Please don't learn to code". Holy crap, how can so many smart people be so incredibly bad at reading comprehension.
The ultimate question still hasn't been answered - viewing the page source reveals NO tags with og attributes, which one would expect in the search for life, the universe, and all facebook profiles.
Behind Opinion Polls: Fundamentals and Reliability
Very relevant to a number of recent HN discussions on sexism. The opening paragraph rings a bell:

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.
Push your back and forward buttons on your browser in the middle of one of the animations. That is seriously cool.
Couldn't that Chrome extension be considered malware if it serves ads and the user is not aware of this behavior before they install?
Adding to the list:

Singing

Dancing

Standup comedy

Story telling

etc.

So yeah, saying programming is the only field that we can create something from nothing is just hogwash.
An AK is an assault rifle, not so good for hunting. A nice Remington 700 will do you better. But if you really want to... who's stopping you?
It's just a calculator on the internet, based on some simple formula.

If experimental data says otherwise, the calculator is simply wrong.
Let’s make it easier to talk. And listen.
I've seen these show up on my facebook feed as well. I'm curious, did they cut some sort of biz-dev deal with facebook to keep the proliferation of spam going? It seems like app spam has all but dropped off of facebook recently, I'm curious how socialcam is able to make it through the filter.

Edit: This is anecdotal of course.
Both proposals are horrible in their current form.

The <picture> element is overly complex with its media query mechanism, and perhaps even worse than that, features an obnoxious piece of redundancy by requiring the legacy <img> tag AND a separate way to declare the default image at the same time. The srcset attribute has a highly questionable syntax and ridiculously expresses resolution hints in terms of multiples of the main image.

None of them are really elegant and simple, not even in a better-is-worse kind of way; none of them should have made it into the spec.
The title says "Please don't learn to code". The rest of the post is just more of that in different words.

Wow, alright I'm just going to stop replying to people who can't even read the title, but still claim it's not saying what it says.
I have to disagree with the sentiment that programming has anything to do with logical thinking. You can write awesome programs on feeling alone. For example, when I'm debugging, I don't think, I simply let my mind explore the catacombs and the solution bubbles up from my subconscious. The benefit which logic brings to the table is being able to communicate your ideas clearly.

Critical thinking is useful but it's not a golden hammer and, in this community, is vastly overrated. Balance between thinking and feeling, on the other hand, is of vital importance.