skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a former 5-year, very satisfied Blackberry user who switched to the iPhone 3G last June, I have this to say about the comparison:

For business use that requires lots of replying to email, management of large volumes of email, copy/paste functionality, and the possibility of integration with existing Enterprise systems, the Blackberry is a must.

If you mostly just need to read email and only occasionally reply, you have a moderate volume of email (< 30 per day), and you are more interested in a device you can have fun with on the train and use as a replacement for your iPod, then iPhone is perfect. The apps available on the iPhone are truly killer. Real, playable games that you can fully enjoy. Also, web browsing on the iPhone is beautiful -- sometimes I find myself using it in front of my laptop!

I've convinced both my boss and my manager NOT to get an iPhone and to instead upgrade their phones to either the BB Curve or Bold. They both thanked me afterward when they realized just how much they relied on easy email reply and the ability to "mark as read" multiple messages (come on iPhone!). The iPhone is definitely a more media-centric device, whereas the Blackberry has been refined for the specific needs of business users.
Eh, I see a lot of professional-networking promotion going on on Twitter, and FB has always been geared more towards personal connections, I think this may impact some of the userbase, but it's not a death knell. Given that it's trivial to sync your Twitter and Facebook statuses anyway, I don't see many users outright switching.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but Smalltalk is a lot older than that (think 1971). Which raises the interesting question of when the last truly fundamental innovation was.

Edit: it's an interesting enough question that I posted it separately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470927.
Woz just proves my point, though. He didn't worry about making money off the Apple I. That was all Jobs. Certainly, there are different kinds of genius. Jobs is a marketing genius. Woz is an engineering genius.

Tell me: How many post Apple I/II inventions of Woz are you familiar with? He certainly hasn't stopped inventing. He just doesn't worry about selling inventions any longer...
I think we’re going around in circles at this point but I would make two final points.

First, I don’t see an attempt to fix the system on his part nor do I see any significant movement over the last few years to abolish grades. I just did a Google search for one (under "Abolish grades in universities" and didn’t come up with any such organization. So obviously the people who have been trying for years aren’t trying all that hard.

Surely there has to be some distinction between trying to fix the system and simply deciding to ignore it. I think to a certain extent you’re projecting in that, though I still disagree with you, you’ve at least thought this issue out. I’m not sure you can say that about this professor (he didn’t seem to give an intelligent counter argument in the article)

Second, and somewhat related to the first, the one thing no one’s answered here is how this professor’s actions are going to change anything. Saying he’s trying to fix the system is contingent on his actions following some kind of logical progression that leads to a changing of the system? From what I can see his tactless approach has done more harm than good (since any teacher who agreed with him would now have to fear suspension). If this sparks any actual change in the future I’ll happily eat my words but I don’t see it happening.
Can you try fiddling with the properties in the following viewport ref? Unless one forces min/max scale values, the iPhone seems to scale on width overage to keep the full page in view, nicely.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/appleapplications/R...
You might already have some vacation time, it doesn't necessarily take a week, and it would be more worthwhile if you were talking about more than just a single filling.
How so? Let's take what most would consider a shallow action. Say a high school student start wearing a certain type of shoes because everyone else is wearing that type of shoes. In that example the crowd's motivation for wearing those shoes is to look cool. Wasn't the high school student who wore them because everyone else did also trying to look cool?

Or for a more adult example, take the last election. There were people on my corner holding up Barack Obama signs. Signs, by their nature, are an act of peer pressure (since you can't make a full, reasoned argument on a sign). So the question is this, would those people with the signs be happy if I joined them in holding up a sign but then turned around and voted for McCain? Of course not, because their goal was to get me to adopt their cause not just mindlessly follow them.
Eh, still not a reason as to why the basics of your theme couldn't be applied here, no?

Just my two cents. shrug
I sit here at 2:30AM with my hand on my head staring at the screen wondering why the hell I'm not sleeping when my eyes find the title of this post "Digital Overload is Frying Our Brains". Yes indeed. Exactly what I was feeling!

Are we Information Junkies getting hooked on ingesting new information as fast as it comes at us? If, as the article says, we are programmed to be interrupted, how does a constant flow of interruptions effect our ability to grow as individuals, form individual opinions, and be creative? How important is all this information anyway?
Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
This question came up in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470838) and got me thinking. Smalltalk dates from the early 70s; Lisp, APL, and Forth are all earlier. When was the last innovation that can truly be called fundamental?

We're not talking language features here. Obviously a great deal of refinement and elaboration has taken place since 1971. To qualify, an idea has to be deeper than that. It needs to have the paradigmatic quality that the above do. (Edit: I'm not looking for historical arguments so much as asking what ideas people feel have this quality.)

The only other candidate I can think of off the top of my head is Backus' 1977 work on FP, which certainly struck me as fundamental when I read it, though now I'm not so sure.

Others?
Functional doesn't mean Optimal.
Personalized Golf Towels
One last point. Again, having done a Google Search I couldn't find a page that even debated the issue as much as we have here.

So if there's no record of the issue being debated even as much as we have in the last 6 hours or so how can people claim it's time for drastic action?
Ask HN: Review my Craigslist killer
www.menkle.com

Our focus is on creating local marketplaces in small towns and neighborhoods (as opposed to large population density areas where Craigslist dominates). We accomplish this by using zip codes (or neighborhood or town names) as a primary location reference.

We are looking for feedback on the following:

How do we provide an incentive for users to post on our site when we have very few buyers browsing the site?

What are the best categories of second-hand items that we should focus on (ex. Electronics, Furniture, Real Estate, Services, etc)?

What do you wish you could do on Craigslist but can't?

What can we offer that would make us a better alternative than Craigslist?

What would you change on our site to make it better?

Thanks for your thoughts and comments.
I recommend an iPod touch and a Blackberry Curve, you get the best of both worlds.

I love Blackberries keyboard for sms/email and ipod for productivity apps (omnifocus)/games/music.
Here's an addition to the prior suggestions that shows scaling up and spacing out the voting arrows in the mobile CSS:

http://xavvy.com/news.yc/comments-arrows.html

In HTML, the up and down arrow A elements get classes; in the CSS, the IMGs are stretched and the down arrow bumped down a bit.

(And the last comment shows a failed experiment in using &uArr; and &dArr; in lieu of IMGs.)
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Wikipedia said 1980 was when it was publicly available, so that's what I went with.
When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a variant of such-and-such earlier idea."
thanks for your feedback. my goal was merely to show the progression of an idea over time, but you are absolutely right -- the post could have used more explanation about why the evolution occurred. i'll keep this in mind for future posts.
I can definitely see how that is the best of both worlds. In fact, I thought of doing that before I bought an iPhone, but carrying around fewer devices is more important to me than having a perfect keyboard.

Also, being able to listen to music (with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, btw) and not worry that I'm missing calls is invaluable (the call just interrupts the music).
If we'd truly learned something, all time values would be 64 bits. Which isn't hard: every major 32 bit systems supports 64 bit values natively in C and in only a few instructions.

Or do you mean we learned that planes won't fall out of the sky due to date problems, and we shouldn't overreact next time?
Great idea! Think there is a model for user-submitted "mobified" versions of 3rd-party websites in the future?
How to develop a Firefox extension
but ruby doesn't support tail recursion effectively? or is this something new in 1.9. Stack level is not deep enough in 1.8 :P
The question reminds of the notion of processes and channels in Occam with constructs for parallelizing based on Tony Hoare's CSP theory.
Fiddler On The Roof 
Fiddler On The Roof Duct & Chimney service is one of the largest, most respected chimney sweep companies in the Los Angeles. It provides customers the most reliable and professional chimney service
First screencast was good.

Seems sluggish loading the mobile versions (on desktop, not mobile). Especially images seemed painful, and they don't seem to cache.

Is it common that somewhere like grousemountain.com keeps a web designer on staff? I feel like normally a lot of sites are designed one-off, and updated by a receptionist/nephew/something. Anyway, my wild-ass-guess is that offering to do the mobifying for a few hundred $ (+ future hosting) would be well-received. [edit: oh, duh, didn't see "Expert Design"]

Looks pretty nice overall.

ps. good to see Vancouver representation (I'm guessing, given the samples on the main page :)
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I think that such transformational ideas, although possibly variations on previous ideas like you say, can have a certain distinct paradigmatic quality that the OP is referring to. I would offer up Miranda (1985) as an example: non-strict, purely functional.
Albertsons.com currently offers a "Beef Chuck Shoulder Steak Boneless USDA Select Max Pack" of 4 pounds at US$4.49 per pound:
https://shop.albertsons.com/eCommerceWeb/ProductSearchAction...

US$2.50 of raw shoulder steak is therefore half a pound of steak; you'll be grossly obese and get gout by 35 if you eat that every meal. I don't know if that includes delivery, but it's on their delivery site. On the same site, boneless chicken breasts cost the same amount but drumsticks are a quarter of that, and that's before the discount for buying with your Albertson's Preferred Card, or buying on sale, or buying in bulk at Costco instead of Albertson's. I can't find any packages of chicken breasts there that cost $9.00 for a pound.

Where do you shop?
Maybe all the people who were writing in C++ without using RAII switched to writing Java by then.
I know what you mean - Smalltalk was Lisp + Simula and so on. Yet even if everything's a hybrid, some hybrids feel plainly derivative while others seem magically deep. In order to avoid tedious arguments about historical primacy, perhaps a better way to phrase the question is: what languages (or language ideas) feel most fundamental to people? I've given my list. What strikes me is how there isn't anything more recent on it. This may just be my ignorance.
Browsing the Web with only a Keyboard
sleek and well done. like the fact you offer prospective users a chance to try out mobify via the site.
It appears that Turner has languages in this paradigm dating back to 1972 with SASL. Are there others?
I have an Android G1 and the site actually functions rather well for me. The only problem that I have, is that I can't log in. I don't know why.
In my view it's already legacy today, or very very close... There is a massive body of Java code that is firmly in maintenance only mode (in corporates I should add - and mostly fin services).
Why not just make HN work in any screen size? Then it will work on IPhone and any other device as well. You just have to get rid of things with absolute size and replace them with sizes relative to their container. Maybe the textarea im writing this into is the only thing that has to be changed.

And then testing is easy too. Just resize your window.
Your name strikes me as somewhat anti-semitic, but I wouldn't swear to it. Did you have gibberish Hebrew in mind for the name?
I've been generating revenue from online advertising since late 1999. It's pretty stable and growing :)

>> "it's an industry built on the back of ringtone scams and click fraud."

Sorry but this one is just ridiculous. How much have you used adsense, or any other affiliate network?
Math that's purely fun
Your site would be more useful to me if you listed any items in California. A search for California on the site shows nothing.
I think that something like this already exists for firefox :
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Patenting, is, imo, not a good idea. First, suppose that someone breaks your patent ? Are you going to engage a tedious lawsuit. Second, you should always be ahead of your concurrence. Third, you're already copying someone else's idea.
Unless you happen to have a couple hundred thousand laying around to actually prosecute an offender, a patent will do you little good.

You should spend your energy doing your thing. Simply having a good idea and doing it well is probably the best defense against those who would copy it. People who rip off ideas in the way that you are worried about usually do it so poorly that it doesn't matter.
The scientist and engineer's guide to dsp
Proving, once again: Get what works for you, not what is trendy.

//edit: I didn't mean this in a negative way. If a blackberry does what you need it to do in relation to whatever your needs are, then thats what you should be using. While hype is fun to get lost in, "Because its popular" is a poor reason to force yourself to do something in a manner that isn't beneficial.
It's not particularly useful once your company is going, but investors like to see that your IP is exclusive and protected. It's still probably not worth the money to pay a lawyer to write it, but you can file a patent or provisional patent yourself for next to nothing. Check out the Nolo Press books on the topic.
Beside the other URLs suggested may I point you to http://developer.apple.com/webapps/ ?
I often browse HN from my iPhone and it works great... not sure what else you need.

Oh, actually, just one thing - links in the message body. Since iPhones can't copy/paste, those might as well not be there. Otherwise, it seems pretty functional to me... I've browsed articles and comments, posted comments, checked my threads for responses... all worked absolutely fine.
I, at first, wanted to join in the bashing.

I scrimped and saved and paid off my home mortgage in about 6 years. I do coding/teaching/projects on the side and used it to pay off all my student loans and mortgages.

I think, much like the rest of you, that this person is a fool.

However, I have another angle. I used to work at a large bank. I have many friends who still work at the same large bank. Loans were set to fall below 5% (mostly commercial, mortgages are a different story).

However, this bank will not loan below 5%. Why? Because that what's the bank was forced to take from the government.

Yes, the government forced the 10 largest banks to take money at 5%. This in turn caused the banks (at least the one I have inside info on) to set their lowest rates of 5%. This caused major problems with their computer loan systems b/c their were set to follow prime/LIBOR etc. My friends had to tell a lot of upset customers that their loans would not be falling below 5%.

So the banks will not/cannot loan at below 5%, like this person is asking, b/c the gov't has gotten involved.

Now loans (commercial) and mortgages don't have the some source of funding (yet) but gov't intervention is pending in the mortgage market.

Now the new president/congress has promised to do something about it. How will they screw up the mortgage market? We will find out in the next few months.
As far as VMs go, I have a horrible suspicion that the x86 will still be with us in 2109. For a while it looked like we might be able to abstract it away, but EC2 and its clones seems to have entrenched it again.
Two things that I'd probably call just features of OO languages, but seem significant:

- Type-safe generic programming

- Introspection
Not to mention that she should be going out and working like crazy to make another deal instead of complaining about it on her blog. It's like that story of the plumber who went around and introduced himself to his neighbourhood that drummed up a ton of business that was on HN recently. There's always a way out of a mess (of this magnitude, at least), given enough brains, willpower and luck. Don't try to extort your lenders, make enough money that it's not a problem!

I've been at zero financially before (as in no money for food, although without debt or responsibilities), and the thing that kills me in hindsight is all of the things I should have done to pull myself up instead of moping around feeling sorry for myself. When you're an employee making roughly market salary, you can't just go and double your wage, but when you're a business owner with cashflow the possibilities really are endless if you take the time to look for them.
Link is broken, try this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/business/worldbusiness/15e...
Seems like it'll have great prospects. At a reasonable price many folks will likely go this route as it cuts through the pain of dealing with the current mobile state (which should become more management in the future as smartphones gain all the capabilities of the desktop).
One thing I wish Craigslist did but doesn't do is look good on the iPhone. I am not suggesting you do this. But that might be a strategy for you to beat CL: find a niche that CL ignores and target that.
How about if you allow them to import their postings from Craigslist and other places? Craigslist wouldn't like it but when you are small they probably wouldn't even notice. Just do it from multiple IP addresses or something.
Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit
Most really fundamental ideas are only recognizable in hindsight, after people have built other ideas on top of them. If I remember the early/mid 80s correctly, the hot language was BASIC because it came with most microcomputers and would supposedly enable a new generation of hobbyist programmers. (Which it did, but they grew up to program in C++, Python, and JavaScript, not Basic.)

There're a lot of really interesting ideas going on in the programming language research community right now. Subtext, Epigram, associated types, Goo(ze) (which unfortunately seems to have been abandoned), JoCaml, STM, etc. Unfortunately, it probably won't be possible to judge the worth of these ideas for another 20 years.
I would change the look and feel of the site a little. It looks like those spammy domain squatters. I would tweak the font a little, at least.
IT Revolutions: How Programmers can Shape a Company
ESPN - Entertainment and Sports Programming
I have flagged this as off topic and clearly just "link bait"
I think ageism sometimes shows in the assumption that the "rusty skills" phenomenon is so much more prevalent than the "untalented graduate" phenomenon. So, yes, I agree that interviewers need to be skeptical. But they need to be skeptical about their own preconceptions as well.
Did I just see an Atheist trying to convert an agnostic to Atheism?

I was barked at by numerous dogs. http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+barked+%22numerous+d...

http://kirtimukha.com/Krishnaswamy/Einstein/on_atheism.htm

The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. [...]

I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.
redo, in the Fibonacci example, is still iterative - it's presented as a third way, when it's just a cruftier way of being iterative. If you remove the cruft of the lambda and the redo, you end up with:

def fib(i)
n, result = 1, 0
while i != -1
i, n, result = i - 1, n + result, n
end
result
end

Cleaner, faster (by 10% on Ruby 1.8) and shorter, but certainly iterative.

(Separate to this, the fib routines shown produce incorrect results - my example above maintains this, just for comparison with the original code. fib(10) is 55 not 89 - it's one off in its input.)
Operational semantics has transformed language theory quite a lot in my opinion. It has set a new precedent for precision in describing programming languages. I would hope that more new languages began to pick that idea up. And then to use formal machine verified methods for verifying its meta-theory.
The ability to securely dynamically load and execute arbitrary untrusted code within the same address space as trusted code, ala the Java bytecode verifier. I'm not certain whether the creators of Java invented this idea, but they were certainly the first to popularize it.
I agree. I don't see how the value of her house has anything to do with the situation.

If she planned to live in it for ten years, then it's a sunk cost. If she could afford to spend a house that cost X and now she can't, that's a problem with her income, not the value of the house.
Thanks, that was funny to read, and I am glad to find out I belong to a school of thought :)
It's a good thing I read the thread before commenting because that was exactly what I was going to write!

Naturally you've got my vote.

Let me add a bit of history to reduce the 'me too' content: There was an interesting hardware development at the same time which was specifically tailored to these channels, the 'transputer' by INMOS.

The whole upshot of this idea was that processors and a bit of support structure would live on a small dimm like package that you could stick into a base platform to create a mini cluster on a card.

I think this idea was well ahead of its time and that eventually we'll see something very much like it as our future hardware architecture. After all the current trend towards clustering and miniaturization all point in that direction.
Ask HN: Why don't browser manufacturers support browsershots.org?
I always use browsershots.org to test websites on different platforms. For example Mac OS often has a wait quoe of half an hour or so.

Why dont the browser manufacturers run a couple of machines to support testing websites on their browsers? They should have a big incentive to do so, because they probably WANT software developers to test stuff on their systems.