skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"a defined syllabary of sounds"

Actually, that was one of the examples I had in mind. I was under the impression that the people interested in languages and sound had left linguistics in favor of phonetics, and as a result there was little interest in the interaction between the two.

My difficulty with the Chomskian method, as opposed to my ignorance about linguistics, is actually based on the "formalisms to represent syntax", since application of application of formalisms to natural language seems to be to be problematic. To quote the Wikipedia page you mentioned,

"Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g., starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealised version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis...."

At the time, my impression from more neurological reading was that the errors were rather more interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia).
What, besides asp.net, uses "<%=" as a print statement? Just curious...
Google Fiber Announcement in Kansas City, July 2012
Where the Creative Class Earns the Most
A college student should be putting every significant "side"-project on their resume. You need to show that you enjoy programming and problem solving and for a student showing off projects is the best way to do it.
It's amazing actually how many programmers don't concentrate on marketing at all. I've recently got a few emails from fellow developers asking if they need a blog/twitter/google+ account in order to get customers as a freelancer.

The answer is yes, yes you do!

The proof, 3 months in to my freelance career and I'm already getting customers, via blogging and Google search results. Heck I've even been lucky enough to get one customer as a direct result of getting front paged on Hacker News.

I have no idea whether I'm approaching "dangerous" yet. But I know for certain, I've still got a lot of marketing effort to go, and one hell of a lot left to learn.
BUILD 2012 to be held late October
Very, very cool looking. It makes me want to start running, just to use the app. Too bad it's not on Android ;)

Also: This is how to make a demo page. I didn't even have to enable javascript.
I use Shave.. and thanks.

What are you gonna do about Perian shutting down?
Never Go to your Mailbox Again. Ever.
Indeed. Windows apps are resolution-independent in theory, but not in practice. Even the OS itself has a bunch of tie-ins to ancient dialog boxes that have only been incrementally improved and break when you change the DPI.
Aaron rodgers jersey
Nice looking app, any support beyond 5k?
>Developers who simply do not have the resources to test in a wide variety for hardware, or to get their game just perfect for the first update

We're talking about the XBox. There's only one hardware device to test against.

Also, the first update is free.
While I agree that it is a good post, isn't it kinda obvious that if you are an idea person, can execute on that idea to make a product and also sell it, you are king of the world? I mean, you have everything except finding a way to repair your brain and body towards immortality (which I am still not quite sure if desirable)...
That comment was in the context of startups in general. As a gamer, I consider the game development practices of Zynga disgusting and if I hope that they fail, it's so that other companies are wary of trying to replicate their game designs in the future.
> today's liberal arguments take it much further. Something like the following: "Government invented the internet. And without government, NO ONE would have invented the internet."

The "free market" versions of the Internet were the walled-gardens of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. I'm not sure if you've ever used them, but I did and let me tell you - they all sucked compared to the Internet, even in 1994-95.
Dr. Abdus Salam - His Faith and his Science
Government funded the basic R&D; industry commercialized it. Has there been any real controversy about the history? It doesn't seem so. It's just that some ideologues don't like some of the facts.
Usually when people in Silicon Valley use the word "amazing", I roll my eyes.

But $0 internet is very amazing.

On top of that, $120/mo for cutting edge consumer entertainment is just a slap in the face to other service providers.
From the article: "I think the last thing they would intentionally do is unload stock when they thought it was about to crash"

It looks like at least one law firm disagrees:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/newman-ferrara-llp-announce...
> "You should use what is easiest for you to use"
I agree 100% to that. If you put some effort into vim or emacs, it actually becomes easy to use and more productive than conventional editors. Its the learning curve that people cant tolerate, not the real editors.
You can learn a lot of nuts and bolts stuff from guys like Rob Walling and Patrick McKenzie. It can take time for things to sink in, but nothing pushes it faster than creating your own product and trying to sell it.

If you have a commute, I'd recommend listening to some podcasts like Internet Business Mastery, Foolish Adventure, Lifestyle Business Podcast, Startup Success, and Startups for the Rest of Us. Find the ones that suit you.
"What people would be willing to use" seems like a more fertile approach. Open your eyes and spot repetitive, boring task that one has to deal with on a regular basis !

If you have users, everything else with follow.
Good luck !
Any 2011 15" MBP or newer will take 16gb of RAM, unofficially. You can check OWC for a full compatibility guide.
It's hard for me not to compare the likes of Mark Pincus, who has been 'taking money off the table' from Zynga since before the IPO, to old-fashioned owner-CEOs like Warren Buffett, who has never sold a single share of his company, Berkshire Hathaway.[1]

[1] See http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/dec2799.html . Buffett is donating almost all his shares in annual chunks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the remainder to a few, much smaller charitable foundations, so he will never personally cash out.
Can you point the way to some of these benchmarks?
" ... when we sort of put out a word that this was up for sale [...] there were spam sites wanted to make it a link farm, and a bunch of properties that would have really screwed things up"

Yeah, that would've been terrible compared to what actually happened.
EI is when you take existing large systems and you make them work together, and its really hard because the systems aren't designed to work together, and made harder because bigco internal teams aren't exactly known for the quality of their infrastructure.

Relevance is one famous company that staffs world-class engineers and does EI[0]. They also write databases[1]. and languages[2].

[0] http://thinkrelevance.com/clients
[1] http://www.datomic.com/
[2] Clojure
Parse must have an infinite number of engineers inside an infinity-sized office. They pump out new features and great tutorials like this at a much faster rate than anyone else in the PaaS space (except for AWS perhaps :-). Thanks for this! Cheers.
MS has pretty strict size restrictions on title updates, since they have to fit in cache for users with no real hard drives. This means you're not going to deliver new content through patches anyway - you have to distribute it through DLC instead. This leads to about a million other problems, primarily when it comes to compatibility between players online who may or may not have the DLC, duplicating content since you're required to not have dependencies between your DLC, and the fact that MS frowns on free DLC.
It’s Time to Get Serious About Exploiting Undefined Behavior
Here is a screenshot of the homepage: http://i.imgur.com/L3U72.png
Show HN: Anypic, an open source Instagram clone
I use ING Direct + Mint as well for all banking. I was interested in Simple because it seemed to be the combination of the two - with a drive to improve both formats. However, I was disappointed on not being able to find any details on how their banking works. I'd love to track my finances from within my banking website, but not at the expense of interest rates and multiple/joint accounts. (Do they offer that?)
The best part about being a developer and interested in marketing is you have all kids of opportunity to learn and tinker.

You can build a mobile app, submit to the app stores and see how it sells. Track your sales, dive into the numbers and find out what works and what doesn't. Does a good design help? What key words help your app get found? What about your UI? Do people love it? Hate it? Why?

You can build a static website and attach Google Analytics and see where your traffic comes from, how is your SEO working? What mobile users are on your site? What pages are they viewing? What's your conversion rate?

Build an e-commerce website and see what sells. Does the position of the items matter? What colors are people buying? What are your buyers preferences? Are your price points too high? Too low?

There's so many cool things you can learn when you start to get interested in marketing. If you're hacker, you can have a lot of fun and learn a ton of stuff just by creating simple things and seeing how the public/users react and use it. It really is completely fascinating.
Single sign-on: don't
I was concerned that you might misconstrue my post, and for that I am sorry, I should have made my point clearer.

I am not making aspersions about your motives. I am perfectly willing to believe that you are sincere.

I might even be convinced that the author of the WSJ opinion piece is sincere (I at least lean towards the likelihood that he's probably using evidence like the proverbial drunk uses lampposts, i.e. for support rather than illumination). That does not change the insidiousness of his piece, or your defense of his piece.

I have serious problems with revisionism (the WSJ piece) or efforts to downplay its seriousness (your post).
More to the point, the government is not horrible at funding basic research (although I think there's a case to be made that it leads to some academic pathologies) and it can occasionally even be good at building basic infrastructure. But this debate is in the context of Federal government spending, and research and infrastructure are only tiny, tiny parts.

US Federal Budget is dominated by 3 things: Defense, Medicare, and Social Security. The research arm of the DoD makes up a pretty small part of the Defense budget, and the last two, Medicare and Social Security, are both (inter-generational) redistribuions. So this whole argument over the internet is really just political stupidity, both for liberals who hold it up as an example of how effective Federal spending can be, and conservatives who want to re-write history.
Ah, I stand corrected. The last time I used Clojure (a few years ago), recur needed to be used with loop. That looks plenty close enough to the Scheme.

I disagree that the Ruby example is sufficient, though. Remember, SICP is intended as an introduction to programming. A chapter like this is useful to people who do /not/ understand TCO, recursion, and the stack already. Understanding it and using that knowledge to translate the exercises is different than having a shaky grasp lisp, scheme, and the "interpretation of computer programs"
Israel's Businesses Losing the Cyber War
I'd like to hear more about non-web marketing like direct mail. I would think small businesses would be more receptive to that. After all, they might not realize they need your tool until you put an advertisement in front of them.
That is true of languages, but it is in fact the case that there are algorithms that run in O(n) time when written impurely, but require O(nlogn) or such when written in a purely functional style, even in state of the art FP languages. Since FP languages provide impure facilities for use in the real world, you can still use the O(n) algorithms, but at the cost of purity.

So the relevant question here really is not "are functional languages inherently slow?", but "is pure functional programming inherently slow?". AFAIK, the answer to that question is not conclusively proven yet.
Twitter Down? Yes.
Yes, Twitter is down.
Screenshot: http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/6913/tttl.png (Yes, Twitter uses RoR and a template... duh!)

Twitter Status: http://status.twitter.com/post/28057350532/twitter-site-issue
I'd recommend getting a co-founder. Not bc the incubator is asking for it..but because it's better for you. The reason investors ask that you have a co-founder is because your chances of success truly are much higher if you're working with someone.

I can say with pretty much complete confidence that I would not be able to do a start-up without a co-founder. Dealing with the emotional swings, coming up with ideas together, brainstorming, sharing the burden... It's worth the investment of time to find someone good.
The App Store sells millions of cookies. You eat the cookie. You don't upgrade the cookie.

You're absolutely right about the lack of upgrade path. Wonder how Apple will deal with this when their Keynote/Pages/Numbers sales taper off? At some point they'll want to refresh those designs and finance a fresh major version, and they'll want to charge for it.

I bet you'll see the paid upgrade features (or maintenance features) then.

One thing to realize is that the entitlement system is critically necessary and inevitable. It's really a case of taking the pain now, or taking it later. Might as well rip off that particular band-aid now. It won't get easier.
Again, Apple doesn't really care what developers feel. What matters are the masses. Which don't care about these issues. The App Store is easy to use, accessible and allows them to download their apps on multiple Macs. It's a win win from their point of view.

Apple's thinking is simple: You (us developer) don't like it, PayPal is that way". Just that simple. And since The App Store is where most non-developer mac users get their apps from.. we have a simple choice.

Do I like it, hell no. Will I play by Apple's rules, yes.
I was nervous writing that sentence, because it's hard to be sure of the truth of any claim to be 'first'! But none of the examples you mention, to my knowledge, provide multi-key ACID transactions. A compare and set facility for an individual key/document/row/entity group/etc is a very useful feature, but cannot be used to provide atomicity or isolation for transactions that read or write more than one key.

We plan to write something longer talking about the different levels of support that various products provide for A,C,I, and D.
I would have been happy with things the same but simply a better "two legged" version to allow better interoperability with trusted services from native apps. Having oAuth 1 kinda bound to the browser has been a minor headache for my team. But for the most part I think oAauth 1 works well. It just needs some official specifications for usage in non-web apps to put an end to all of the inconsistent solutions that people are creating out of necessity.
I have 3575 music files on my current main hard drive, organized by hand into an /Artist/Year - Album Title/File.ext structure just fine. I don't listen to classical music or by genres, though.
I'm going to put this comment here even though it doesn't belong because I wanted to make people aware and there's nowhere else to put it. Some HN moderator is censoring stories about Twitter being down, probably the biggest tech story of the morning.

First, this story was on the front page and it got killed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4296416

Then this other story, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4296811, appeared briefly on the front page. But interestingly it wasn't killed it just doesn't show up on the front page.

If you scroll through the new story submissions you'll find a bunch of dead Twitter stories.
The Minecraft API Is Now On Github
> iOS and Android have no relevance in this discussion as they are not real OS'es... And that's how it will remain.

This sounds seriously shortsighted. So far, Android and iOS are focused on media consumption, but I'm already starting to see them used for 'work', like taking notes in meetings. Asus' transformer line (tablets with a keyboard dock) shows where the next step might be.

There's no rule that 'real work' requires a WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface. It's perfectly possible to imagine that in a few years it will be possible to develop on Android devices with some peripherals attached. There's no fundamental obstacle to it.

I don't think the PC is dead - there's still a lot of software and user experience built up around it. But it's quite clear by now that tablets/phones are becoming serious competition.
The ERB templating language uses it. ERB is commonly used with Rails.

Judging by the <%= reason.capitalize %> in the title (which appears to be ruby code... although could be something else) this part of the site appears to still use Rails.
Pincus brags on camera about how he got started by putting malware on customer's computers. Why is it surprising that he would pull something shady now?
Now On Android As Well, Moped Could Be The Hot New Messaging Platform
Don't you just love Photoshop defaults?
I thought the same thing as I was reading John Siracusa's review of Mountain Lion. My stomach sunk when I saw the default 'gatekeeper' options.

[ ] Mac App Store
[x] Mac App store and identified developers
[ ] Anywhere

Seems likely at some point down the road the third option will no longer exist. My next project is getting Linux to run on an old MBP. I still love their hardware, but OSX is getting fuckin' uppity. I realize that this is just an attribute on a binary that you can set and unset, but still, the direction this is going seems clear to me. The further iOSification of OSX is driving me back to Linux on the desktop.
Excellent point - a formal system can't have 'speed.'
Can't you just submit a manuscript to CreateSpace and get it live tomorrow?
They'd need to make a "developer version" of OS X, which would just be OS X with this hypothetical super-Gatekeeper shut off. Then the whole thing just gets silly.

I believe the PC will remain a PC. Take away its nature and you might as well just hand everyone an iPad.
Currently -r and -R are essentially the same flags, correct? And this new change would make -R and -r two different operations?
I disagree. If downstream investors decide that tech start-ups are a scam rather than a good investment the VC's will have no one to buy them out.
> In the late 1990s Windows developed huge market power. Whilst not strictly a monopoly the company had plenty of monopoly characteristics. Sure you could buy a Macintosh - but that market was so small that people did not develop software for Macs and hence Macs were for people who did not need a wide range of software.

So is this, in addition to careful attention to typography, the explanation for why Macs were big with designers? (Many designers do the vast majority of their work in a handful of programs, and one in particular.)
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany...

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1134069/0001209191120...

ouch
If you have that attitude about 90% of startups (or companies in general), it's unhealthy.

If you have that attitude about just one or two of them, I'd suggest it's healthier than that number being zero.

Not everything that makes money should be celebrated.
There actually could be a serious argument about firefighters, because they mostly don't fight fires anymore:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/fir...

Probably won't happen, though, because everybody loves them.
Updated Google Fiber Announcement
I'd like to call these marketers Growth Hackers. They're a different breed of hackers, and they're just as important as the engineers. A successful startup should have at least ONE growth hacker in the team for it to be successful.
Four 2 Letter .COM Domain Names Being Marketed for Sale
> Functional languages require infrastructure that
> inevitably adds overheads over what can theoretically
> be attained using assembler by hand. In particular,
> first-class lexical closures only work well with
> garbage collection because they allow values to be
> carried out of scope.

Inevitable is an overly broad characterization. For example, in this particular case, Manticore uses a combination of control-flow analysis and reflow analysis to inline higher-order functions in instances when we can determine that the free variables (if there are any) are obtainable in some other static way. This observation extends to the general allocation result; modern functional language compilers do quite a bit to get that under control (see my IFL paper on arity raising/unboxing/ripping apart datatypes, which provides a survey of the state of the art circa 2009) and, particularly given the additional register freedom when you're not wedded to the C calling convention, can do some real magic to avoid performing allocations, particularly in inner loops. GHC's is type-directed unboxing/type unrolling, IIRC, which in practice is on par (modulo separate compilation issues) with the implemented MLton work cited in this post.

So, it's less that poor performance is "inevitable" and more that it requires fairly insane amounts of work by the compiler developer. And, for example, I seem to remember that the Visual C++ team spent more person-hours on template compiler error message clarity in one product cycle than we will spend on the entire Manticore project in its lifetime. And yes, I know the "sufficiently smart compiler" joke.

A more fundamental complaint is that functional language implementations tend to provide _fragile_ performance. That is, without understanding some fairly gritty details of the compiler and runtime, it is difficult to understand why, for example, the second time you made a call to a non-inlined combinator providing a second function argument at the same type, your program became slower in MLton but not in GHC (YMMV; a representative but not authoritative example). A good way to see this phenomenon is to look at optimized benchmarks for OCaml or GHC (e.g. in the PL shootout) and ask, "is this idiomatic ML/Haskell code?" Many benchmarks for functional languages that perform close to C look suspiciously like the original C benchmark, with just a few functional sprinkles on top.

I don't know of a good answer to that performance problem without requiring users to become near-experts with the compiler, and that's not good practice.
Note: I don't really have a dog in the FP fight. That said, your statement makes no sense.

The ubiquity of C does not mean that it limits what can be accomplished. Clearly, it can can be made to accomplish quite a bit, but that does not mean that it has no limitations.
" They keep cheerleading on a clear conflict of interest, non-stop"

That's their business model: they buy and then pump the companies in hopes that someone will buy stake from them at a higher valuation later. The nature of the VC model precludes multi-decade investments and incentivizes quick exits even if they blow up in others' faces

FW replied to a similar remark i made: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068495
New Face.com API Alternative Ready for Your Photos
Startup Vooza wants to show people 'how the sausage gets made'
Thanks for that. Maybe he doesn't want uncultured people subscribing via email. If so, it's working :)