skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Native-ness isn't just there for look+feel, it usually brings speed.
I've used Chrome, it's just incredibly fast. It's not just the Javascript engine. Even on pages without Javascript, it's just the fastest feeling app of any type I've used.
(I love Linux, I didn't want to have a reason to be tempted to Windows, but it's that good. (Good job Chrome folks!))
Thanks, I never noticed this! It'll definitely keep me busy in between coding.
If your point is that the buttons don't behave the way they should on Windows, then clearly this is just a bug, and programs can be successful with bugs. I could make the exact same argument about accessibility "such and such program has no support for accessibility and yet still sells really well, so why do we need accessibility?" The idea is to provide quality beyond the minimum which is necessary to get you to use the thing.

If you could make a toolkit that was non-native, but behaved as if native on all its target platforms then obviously that would be key. Also, Chrome currently only officially exists for Windows, a platform whose users are less picky about native look and feel. You would probably have a harder time getting away with this on Mac OS X. Similarly, you can have a java app that runs pretty well on most mobile phones, but a straight port that didn't include native widgets on the iPhone would probably not be well accepted.
In Praise of Elitism
I'm not scoffing at a few hundred K, I'm just saying that if someone uses the whole money=happiness equation, then they'll want more than the basic things.

But if you think about it, your basic necessities are more or less taken care off once you hit middle class. Pretty much the only difference after that is the size of someone's house, the car you drive and the vacations you take. Everything else is more or less equal.

50K = Honda + Decent house + 1 vacation costing $3K

100K = BMW + Slightly better house + 1 vacation costing $6K

1mm = Ferrari + BMW, Big Mansion + 1 vacation costing $15K + maybe a yacht
The Pirate Bay has many clearly legal uses, as well.
I totally agree with the essence of the argument but I don't think "identity" is the right word here. I think tribalism is what the author was getting at. Tribalism separates people into "us vs. them" kind of groupings and the more tribal minded someone is, the dumber he/she gets, as the author suggested. Religion and politics are only 2 forms of tribalism but there are others like sports, or nationality. Someone's identity definitely contains all these but as someone else pointed, there are non-tribal aspects of identity as well.
If buying a toaster was like buying a video card
Actually, there are no branches in a democracy- all decisions are made by a vote of the people. What you describe, my friend, is a Republic. But your point is still valid.
It would be great, but it's unenforceable, and newbies wouldn't know about it. Besides, in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article.

We could probably do something, but it would require a lot of hacking, and wouldn't necessarily be worth it. Perhaps it's currently good enough.
My point is that you're using javascript pop-up boxes for the browser itself (like the save password prompt) that don't use the win32 code nor conform to its interface behavior.
Money == happiness when it buys me more time to spend on creative pursuits.
I think the social aspect mentioned would be key in differentiating the difference between the purchase of an object and an experience such as eating out, reading and commenting on HN, etc. As you say, it is a hair splitter and I'm probably stretching the theory behind the study and the conclusions way farther than can be justified.
Again, this is a matter of opinion and platform. Firefox had to do a lot of work to make their widgets much more Mac-like because this was one of the biggest gripes from Mac users, the fact that they just had some generic UI elements in their web pages that didn't conform to what they were used to. This is the sole reason the Mozilla Camino project was even started, and again, one of the main focuses of Firefox 3 for the Mac.
Keeping a keen eye on consumer behaviour
Converting between differently sized units of measurement is an everyday problem if anything is. I enjoy being able to do so by shifting a decimal point.
"This expectation that a new Google product will need massive adoption to justify its investment or be cancelled within four months, as was the case with Google Lively, will be a significant dampener new product launches."

That depends on how Google treats the people who are part of failed initiatives, and how many things are cancelled overall.

At many companies, sadly, people are fired for simply being on the wrong project at the wrong time. If Google doesn't set that precedent, then its employees will be less worried if their projects haven't taken off.

It's also important not to kill "most" things, because people can only take so many failures. The culture of innovation could die from attrition: how many times do you want to pour your heart and soul into things, only to see them die? Hopefully Google doesn't cancel projects too often, and has a well established "salvage" operation for parts of old projects.
The problem is.... Google's Chrome for Windows doesn't look native.

And which app does? MS Office doesn't look native either. Neither does IE. In fact, very few MS apps actually use their guidelines and default widget sets. Office, for example, has a completely different widget set and even has a different toolbar (ribbon).... not to mention a completely different window chrome and that big round button in top left. And many other Windows apps don't follow the guidelines either.

A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product - from the codebase to the user experience - and that to the end user it shouldn't matter what OS you're on.

Except that people today do use different OSes and nativeness does matter! Inconveniencing and annoying your users with an intent to make them aware that your app is somehow different is opposite from what you should be doing: conforming to their learned patterns of how their UI works and making the transition to a new app painless and 'invisible.'

I'm in complete agreement with Goodger on this one: none of the cross platform widget sets feel native on any of the OSes. Firefox still feels awkward on OS X and has a lot of deficiencies in the way the text boxes work, keyboard navigation for assistive devices. In-browser widgets like buttons and drop-down menus are just off when you compare them with native widgets (drop-down in particular) and feel weird.

They invoke that 'the uncanny' feeling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncanny They look like the real thing but aren't and give you that uncomfortable feeling.
Also faster iterative cycles: from beginning to end, a startup can fail faster than a scientific career.
Or they could sort the list by expected return. I.e. by the chance of selling a copy times the sale price. That would also maximize Apple's revenue.
First saw these in Github preferences.

Immediately groked the value.

Nice to see it put into context.
That number doesn't correspond to how much physical memory an app will use. Just see how much RAM is free or being used for disk cache during your normal workload, if that number is less than 500MB you would probably benefit from more memory.
Oh, git isn't slow when storing binary data on it.. it's slower to clone (because you have to download all that data again), but not to use.

However, unless you are building a game or something like that, storing binaries on git will really bloat your repo so it's worth avoiding it if reasonable.

If it's assets that you do need to revert to, fair enough. But there are many "compiled" binaries that don't really need to be in the VCS, imho... and if you can err on the side of including too few binaries, you'll save a lot of space.
Lisp is a Chameleon
I'm very happy that I upgraded my MacBook Pro to 4GB of RAM -- as depressing as it may be, it was just painful trying to do work with only 2GB of RAM, and 4GB is barely enough. The biggest memory hog is VMWare, but Eclipse, Firefox, and OSX itself take up a lot of memory. In addition, you really need your entire working set of documents in memory, so that means the source code of all the projects you're working on. Considering the cost of 4GB of RAM for the MBP, upgrading is a no-brainer.
any PHP API??
Sorry about that, my history and social sciences are a little rusty :-)
I didn't notice this very much. I mostly noticed it followed web-browser design patterns: ctrl-t gave me a new tab (like IE + Firefox). ctrl-f made a float-y place for me to type a word to find, etc.
Chrome is very different, I won't argue it probably broke some assumptions we make, but it mostly made me wish other apps were more like Chrome than the other way around (tear-away tabs, assemble new tab groups, wowza!)
Are you using Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter differently?
The problem is that any time a company trolls, they always have the risk of someone fighting in court. So a company having insurance won't really prevent them from trying.
I think the last statement would be more true if it read: "[people who hate Microsoft] for the most part only hate Windows for the sake of hating Microsoft; it has little to nothing to do with the overall quality of the Windows product. They just feel that they have the moral prerogative to spread hate of Microsoft throughout the world."
Ask HN: How to make a test suite?
I am building some software, which right now just works on Unix (no web stuff, yet). The code is a handle of scripts, mostly python and perl.

Can anyone suggest a good software package for building a test suite? I would like to simplify the process of creating and running sanity checks.
That requires expertise, not unlike, say, picking a winnig startup to fund. :-)
There's no proof of it

Proof is here: http://images.google.com/images?q=bible

Science is somewhere else: http://www.google.com/search?q=science+proof
in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article.

The article title is not inaccurate.
I never tried to be smug. Why don't you elaborate instead of down voting?
And what would you do with the rest of your life after retiring right now?
You're forgetting the "honor among thieves" that is present in every line of work. For example, book publishers don't plagarize from each other.

They only use patents to shut down new competition.
I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
Lisp is a chameleon. It has survived by adapting to changes in its surroundings.

I'd say that's a pretty bad analogy. Chameleons are pretty good at camouflaging themselves, but they're really not very adaptable. I'd say that chameleons are the animal equivalent to FORTRAN -- they can look like anything, but they haven't really changed.

If you want a biological example of being highly adaptable, go with bacteria.
While it is not a "core doctrine", my religion (LDS.org) teaches that God has populated other planets- a discovery of life on other planets would only affirm our faith.
Excellent. Now we know all the develoeprs who paid for their apps to be reviewed.
Are you running 64-bit? I wonder if the size difference is due to that. I've heard 64-bit processes are bigger, due to larger pointers and longs, but I wouldn't expect things to be so amazingly huge. I certainly couldn't have survived on 512MB if my computer were using memory the way yours is.

Also, have you tried using webkit nightlies? I found that they were much more memory-friendly than safari, especially with flash disabled.
The big question is whether in fifty years Lisp will still be a chameleon that lurks in the shadows, never quite getting out where the common people are. Like it has in the last fifty years.

It's interesting to see that while Lisp is superior in many ways, it's never been widely adopted. Why is that? I'm pretty sure it's not only because of pointy haired bosses, after all they take their cues from the fancy trade rags that are written by people that would at least know about the existence of Lisp. PHP reached a wide audience without the backing of a large corporation, so that argument is probably stale.

I can think of a couple of reasons:

- It's different. The syntax of Lisp is unlike any other language, which might turn people off.

- The Lisp community is not very beginner-friendly. Since we all start out as beginners, there will be no experts if there are no beginners.

- It's fragmented. There has been a history of a number of different dialects that are almost but not quite compatible. This might be a turn-off for people actually wanting to use Lisp for production systems where stability and maintenance of the distro is paramount.

- It's hard. "Lisp is the only language where you spend more time thinking than writing code" - I can't remember where the quote is from, but probably Stallmann, Raymond or PG.

- There are few libraries. Even though it's the oldest language still in wide use there seems to be a lack of libraries. This is probably the main reason PHP became so popular, along with it's friendliness towards beginners.

Unfortunately the (fragmented) Lisp community doesn't seem interested in addressing any of these problems, so my guess is that in fifty years Lisp will still be a minority language only used by a select few.
Or they could just sort by revenue rather than sales.
That is quite all right- confusing a Democracy with a Republic is a common misconception, one which I feel obliged to correct as often as possible.
Permalinks - What they are and why the don't work sometimes in WP
Ask HN: public code reviews?
I've been wondering if there are active online communities out there where you can conduct a public code review? I've been using pastie+IRC for a while, but I wonder if there's a better option.

Why? Because every time I pick up a new language or a library I keep wondering if I'm using it in a proper idiomatic way as opposed to (for instance) "writing C++ in Python syntax".

Lately I've been itching to have a jQuery fan look at how I'm using this library and make me feel really, really stupid.
I feel you. Things like Hacker News, and the internet in general, tend to masquerade as "productiveness" when you (think) you're learning from them. But in the end, it's kind of like watching the Discovery channel: you think you're absorbing and learning a lot, but in the end, you've been so overwhelmed with edutainment that honestly you take away very little. A philosopher professor once asked the class "name one thing you've learned from the Discover channel," and to my surprise, all I could think of was "tons of things"

As far as I can tell, there really is no substitute for hands on experience. It's one thing to obtain knowledge, but quite another exercise to apply it. That's where routine plays in; it's showtime. I afford myself some time each day (during breaks, warm-ups, wind-downs) for some "half-distractions" like Hacker News, and on rarer occasion, a "full distraction" like going out, exercise, whatever. But I really enjoy the grind of coding because it's where I can see my ideas come alive, and look back at the day with the feeling "I now have more tangible assets."

I went through a period of several months feeling like crap because I wasn't producing anything, only thinking of a gazillion amazing ideas that merely lacked implementation. That all changes when you start to produce. Your routine forms around whatever you're doing, and at this point, it's no longer a challenge, it's a joy. The bonus is, I'm definitely not lacking in the "thinking of ideas" category... it turns out that for me having concrete implementations of things only helps me think of new ideas, much more so than even spending the entire day brainstorming. This makes sense in some way... any new ideas generally come from existing implementations, and if I make my own new implementation of something, I can now think of even newer ideas that beforehand would have been such a stretch to come up with.

As per routines, and hours/week, I don't think there's much point debating anything about it. Who says I'm not working while I'm in the shower, or sleeping? I've caught bugs in my sleep, and spent the dream debugging them. I think what matters far beyond routine is finding something that you're excited enough to work on to have that routine naturally form.
>>> The AAA credit rating is in terms of US dollars.

>> Sometimes. Sometimes not.

> you replied that it is not.

No. I replied, "Sometimes. Sometimes not," intending to imply that it is not always defined in only one particular way, and that to do so would be to fallaciously equivocate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation_fallacy
I think that the best way to make a lot of $ on the iphone is to price your app $1 or thereabouts. Better to sell 1M people your $1 app than 5000 * $10.
You are so right.

Selection for Social Signalling Drives the Evolution of Chameleon Colour Change
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-docume...

Chameleon. Both the real thing and the metaphor are about change in appearance to become more "socially" acceptable.

Has Lisp done it the way Madonna has done it - always looking hip?

Fortran while looking newer hasn't outgrown as far as I know its original purpose - numeric computation, while Lisp has been modified to be a great tool in many dynamically changing fields.
32 bit. i don't have to try webkit nightlies, or restart safari, because i have enough ram. ram saves my time. which was kind of the point of the article :)
Nitpick: I think you meant ((24^2)*2)^(1/2).
One option: http://refactormycode.com
I think it all depends on the kind of app. If it's a silly little app that anyone could find amusing then sure. If it's a useful app that only a certain subset of iPhone users will find useful, then maybe not.
Twitter's Analytical Business Plan
I thought video cards just display graphics fast. There's a lot of options, but really it's just a scale from <i>slow</i> to <i>fast</i>. They're practically one-dimensional.

I think this conversation applies to computers in general, however, much more than just video cards.
Here's a possible explanation for why academic science is a tournament market. To have an effective scientific community you need to have people build on the work of other scientists. But if there are too many other scientists, all of which have equally obscure work, this becomes difficult. So scientists are all trying to push their own work to make sure it gets the attention it deserves. The ones who are successful become heroes; the ones who aren't are discarded.

Just a guess; I really know nothing about this.
I ran into this article while researching a Lisp imap library with ssl. It ends up John Foderaro (the author of the linked article) wrote the first verson of Franz's Allegro common lisp, the allegroserve webserver (which we use and enjoy) and Post Office (the program I'm trying to find an ssl extension to).

A note on the lisp community: In looking for the imap library, I also found mel-base http://www.cliki.net/mel-base and sent an email to their devel list and got an answer from the mel-base author, Jochen Schmidt, within about an hour to use cl+ssl (which we already use with cl-smtp to send email)

I sent John Foderaro an email about ssl with Post Office (we'll see if he answers - Post office has a really nice conceptual structure to it), but I will definitely blog eventually about a Lisp library solution using IMAP with ssl, even if I have to make the extension myself. It shouldn't be too hard using cl+ssl.
Thanks. Yes. That is what I meant.
Lisp is the only language where you spend more time thinking than writing code

That may be true for some people, but it's definitely not true for me. I'd say I spend on average 10 hours thinking for every 1 hour I spend writing code -- and I write in C.
I should have been more clear. My point was intended to be more general than just mobile apps.

Both MS and Apple have business strategies and practices that strive for lock-in and monopolization, which is their prerogative, but it clearly deprives their users of many freedoms to use their hardware/software.

Apple makes it look and feel more comfortable, but it's fundamentally the same philosophy. Differences between the two originate from Apple primarily selling hardware and MS software.
> The article title is not inaccurate.

So, the article itself says:

There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, ...

The title says:

Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

In the title we don't have any of the words "could", "might", "may", "possibly", or any other words indicating the uncertainty. To me, that means the title is inaccurate.
Philip Greenspun - he also mentioned SQL and I think ML.

The current generation of Lisp users is the last one. Python and Ruby have enough of Lisp's features that switching to a "real" Lisp offers rapidly diminishing returns. Haskell and F#/OCaml and Erlang are alive and well and gaining new users and taking things in a different direction. The argument "but it's too difficult for commercial programmers" makes Lispers feel good, but it simply isn't true. Commercial programmers once wrote vastly complex systems in assembly language. And anyone who can use C++ in anger is certainly smart enough to learn any language.

If there's hope it lies in Clojure but again, it's not entirely clear that Clojure offers significant advantages to someone who is already getting stuff done in one of those others (and the average Java programmer doesn't understand why anyone would use anything other than Java).
It is amazing to me how efficient of a society we have become. We can get as much work done in one day as what used to take probably months!
He seems to have more problems with his relatives than the education system. However if this sort of treatment is culturally prevalent I can see this easily holding back the whole country - humans are fragile and fine instruments and perform at peak only when maintaned with utmost care.
I think the point is that the editorial placement of stories is relieving you of a burden, not telling you what to think. It's like the ordering of stories on the HN front page -- to say "I don't CARE what other HN readers think; I want to go through each one and decide for myself" is to miss an extra dimension, somewhat.
I'm with you. Just warm up the starcraft!
Ubuntu's "strategy" is that they release every 6 months, and do a long term support release every few years. I am not sure those are the ideal numbers to use (6 months is short), but on the whole, I think I prefer that approach to Debian's "we'll release...sometime... if we're not debating how many GPL's fit on the head of a pin". Debian is excellent, and I started maintaining a few packages for it in 1997, but my involvement has waned to pretty much nothing, and these days I'm a mostly happy Ubuntu user.

"Use unstable" is a bad argument. Sure, it doesn't break most of the time, but it can and does. You can't base a business on that kind of thing.

Also, there is nothing inherently 'server' or 'desktop' about Ubuntu or Debian - the first may put some resources into improving the desktop experience, but the good patches eventually flow back to Debian, as it's all open source. And Ubuntu makes for a fine server, too.
NYTime does know how to scare people, that's for sure. I guess someone forgot to tell them that you can not have good without bad. You see we are not in heaven and we do not want heaven, perfection is boring, complete safety is boring.
"The current generation of Lisp users is the last one" Hmm, I guess time will tell on that. The future is much harder to predict than most people realize. I'm guessing, though, that more successful large Lisp projects will keep the language alive and cause the conversion of more programmers to lisp. Our little startup converted one Java programmer over, and I can only imagine the impact ITA is having with its Orbitz product. Also, the move to more "semantic" approaches may also spark more interest in Lisp. We'll see.
Use whatever Python/Perl give you.