skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Put in its correct perspective - i.e., computers were less ubiquitous during its heyday

Now this is some historical revisionism. Palm's "heyday" was the late 1990s through the early 2000s. Computers were already extremely ubiquitous at that time. Laptops weren't quite as common, but the dream of "a computer on every desk and in every home" had long-since been achieved in developed nations.

> the Palm Pilot and its successors were a massive hit.

Relative to what came before it, but not what came after. Palm's PDAs were very much still a niche market when smartphones came along and made them irrelevant. In 2003-2004, PDAs (across all brands) sold about 2.6 million units[1]. This was probably the peak, but I can't confirm that. Three years later the iPhone launched and Apple sold 6.1 million units of the 1st generation[2]. Just last quarter they sold 47.8 million iPhones[3].

> It's a clear case of revisionist history to say that the iPhone is the "first comprehensively successful attempt to create a mass-market, consumer-friendly, always-on, pocketable touch screen computer".

No, it's clear that the iPhone's sales absolutely dwarf those of Palm. Relatively speaking, Palm was not a "successful attempt to create a mass-market ... touch screen computer". Even current BlackBerry sales absolutely dwarf Palm's best-ever sales rates[4].

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004592

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(original)

[3] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/01/23Apple-Reports-Reco...

[4] http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/research-in-motion-r...
clang already supports the doxygen/javadoc commenting itself. At least, it has a warning named -Wdocumentation in the latest release from Apple that tells me that in my documentation I have a variable that is not anywhere in the function signature!
This is quite possibly the least cost-effective way to dodge taxes. Most companies only need a tiny office.
"Is it a bad thing that AIX and Solaris fell by the wayside in a rush to Linux? I don't think so."

Note that Solaris innovated with ZFS, which helped spur Linux to implement btrfs. Competition matters, even in OS kernels.
I'm late to this thread but I do know Google has a very large technical support team for businesses using Google Docs.

Not only that but, don't forget Google does get audited annually, which their "customers" [businesses] do see, read, and determine whether or not they feel comfortable continuing to do business with Google.

[I'm an IT auditor]
Go to reddit.com/r/design and post the question. They will guide you better.
This is the second house in the neighborhood that's been offered to founders rent-free. The first [0] is home to some people working on an API for 3D printing [1], an app for online jam sessions, and a couple of other projects.

Down the street is another house shared by several more startups working on things like real-time search [2], retinal authentication [3], etc. There are other similar endeavors scattered nearby, plus some web-dev shops, etc.

0. http://www.homesforhackers.com/

1. http://threed.ee/

2. http://leap2.com/about.php

3. http://eyeverify.com/
shameless plug: client-side (or node) html > markdown, like actual conversion

demo: http://leeoniya.github.com/reMarked.js/

repo: https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js
How are my neighbors and I going to make enough natural gas to heat our houses in the winter?

Most importantly if automation and efficient manufacturing are so widely dispersed why would someone else accept goods they can just as easily make themselves?

You forgot to answer how I will save for retirement.

EDIT: I just saw your revision. You seem to assume that society will decide to give up currency go back to a barter based system. Why will we go back?
What's your point? There's also Trident (IE) and Gecko (FF), just like there's NT and BSD.
You are absolutely right. We are trying to start by helping fellow Rails developers first, more frameworks are coming soon.
That was definitely the most impressive bit for me too. I thought, how on earth was that done? Very clever.

It's a shame it doesn't work for copy-paste, but honestly, it's probably even easier to write a reverse-markdown script than to figure out how to do it with CSS!
Firstly this is awsome!

As much as I like kittens... This adds the markdown for images too:

.markdown img {
display: inline;
content: "";
}
.markdown img:before {
content: "![" attr(alt) "](" attr(src) ")";
display: inline;
color: #333333;
}

The trick to make it work with images is the `content: "";` on the img element to stop the browser from treating it as an image.

EDIT:

See it here: http://jsfiddle.net/F2mjs/

Anyone know how to make the link clickable?
A decent list of file syncing alternatives is available on wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchronizat...].
"How to make a Facebook page VIRAL in 3 days?" - REVEALED
C wasn't bad for making that design decision in 1973, to include syntactical space for octal numbers. Programmers actually used octal notation then. It made sense in an environment where contemporary tech included the PDP-8's 12-bit words (four octal glyphs) and displays of seven-segment numeric readouts (where octal is useful, as letters for hexadecimal can't be displayed and base-10 needs conversion logic.)

Javascript was bad for making that design decision in 1995, when nobody seriously used octal for anything, so the leading zero was vastly more likely to introduce a class of WTF bugs instead.
Don't need to be embarrassed or ashamed. I think you'll find there's a marked quality difference at 10x cheaper, just because the economics wouldn't work out if you used higher quality materials and design and sold for 10x cheaper.
That "strawman" was exactly what the original post was claiming. It may not have been what you said, but it's certainly what the original article was claiming.

Modding me down won't change the facts, either.
Well, with CLOS you really define your verb behaviour on tuples of nouns (methods) and the verbs (generic functions) are separate and you can, if you want, get as creative as you want as to how your methods get invoked by your generic functions.

[Mind you, it's been a while since I developed in CLOS, so apologies in advance if this is incorrect].
"then ordinary everyday cars could run it today"

Serious nitrogen oxide issues make life difficult on the exhaust catalyst. If you rip out the cat conv you can never run gasoline again. Fundamentally the flame burns too hot/fast creating nitrogen oxides. If you must burn a gas try butane, there's tons of it dissolved in winter gas right now. Propane is even better.

If you absolutely positively "must" use H2 for marketing reasons or whatever then pipe it into a fuel cell and top off a battery, either pure elec or hybrid ICE.

The biggest problem is H2 solely commercially comes from natgas, and it turns out that natgas is a great automotive fuel with a huge (mostly non-US) deployed base. So there is no practical advantage in turning natgas into H2 and then inventing a whole new infrastructure for H2 distribution and all new vehicles, when there's already an excellent system for natgas.

The fundamental problem of H2 is how do you intermediate yourself if you're not wanted, not needed, and add no value? Outside petrochem, this is a good startup question that always needs answering. You could purchase govt regulations, or do some vertical integration trick, or ...
Cost of flight to AZ + Cost of iMac + Cost of Imposts was a huge discount or just the Cost of iMac + Cost of Imposts?
You are probably not their target demographic then. :)
This letter was not written for an eight-year-old. The real eight-year-old is used as an angle to garner sympathy from us, the intended audience, but the hypothetical eight-year-old is a MacGuffin.
Oh no!!

Its actually far less effort and risk to simply buy and hoard bitcoins periodically during price dips. I gave up mining bitcoins in 2011 and sold off my six card 5770 rigs.

I believe that bitcoin hoarding has the same place in a diversified investment portfolio that gold does - namely some small percentage so that one can ignore short term price volatility.
It is probably the most entertaining of all Yegge's articles. And I think it actually gives a really useful overview of the alternatives that are available.
dang... was really hoping it was what the title says it is. If there ever was a case for the mods resetting the HN title, this is it. I DO have my own server... but it runs linux and that does me no good with this app. :(
If they are using WebKit, Chromium, and V8 -- what areas can they add uniqueness to so that it's not just a Opera-branded version of Chrome?
There are a whole other set of stereotypes males in traditionally female roles have to overcome. They don't match your set, but they exist. For example male flight attendants and hair stylists are assumed to be homosexual, and male nurses are taught to be embarrassed of their profession (male nurses often say they are "RNs" or "medical professionals" out of this stigma).
The product is awesome and I hope every restaurant out there kills their Flash-based site and replace them with this. Nothing more frustrating than trying to navigate 90s websites with your phone ...
Avaaz now allows anyone to create a petition
Social Authority: Our Measure of Twitter Influence
This is a really great development for PHP. A bit more background on this for those not familiar with Zend Optimizer+ and PHP. Zend Optimizer+ is an opcode cache, and using an opcode cache greatly improves the performance of PHP. The improvement is so significant, that it's generally not practical to run PHP without using an opcode cache.

Despite an opcode cache generally being necessary to use PHP at scale, one has never been included in the core distribution. There has often been discussion about including APC (another opcode cache) in the core. A suggestion [1] to ship APC with PHP 5.5 was proposed recently, and after some discussion, an alternative was proposed [2]: Zend would open source Zend Optimizer+, and it would be included in PHP 5.5.

No definite decision has been made yet on whether Zend Optimizer+ will make it into 5.5 (or the next release), but the consensus so far seems to be that it will. For more information, see https://wiki.php.net/rfc/optimizerplus

[1] http://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=135909498705904&...

[2] http://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=135913119321197&...
"white american males working as computer programmers are not privileged" - It may be hard for you to see privilege as in general everyone you grew up with grew up with the same privileges as you, and now that you are a computer programmer your peers are also equally privileged. But I can rest assure you.. that you are privileged..

I am a hispanic male working as a computer programmer, and maybe because of that it's easier to see the privilege my occupation affords me as my grandmother lives in a country where the median income after tax is 500 american.. Where every so often the police, and army decide to shoot it out in the streets.. Where 51% of the population is beneath the poverty line..

Maybe it's easier for me to see privilege as I went to a highschool that was a minority majority school in the poor part of town. Where some kids weren't worried about there health care from the flu, but there health care from a flying bullets within there apartment complex. Where the kids in the cafeteria line that had white slips are getting there only meal of the day because it's paid for by the government.

Not only do I think it's important to understand we are privileged; I believe it is also our responsibility to act on that privilege to make sure all are granted the same basics our life affords as engineers (job security, food, health care, personal security[violence], time off to vote, etc). Only when the general public is granted those basics will I even partially not think of my self as not privileged.
> Implies that...

It doesn't actually imply any of that.

No one's saying Opera hasn't innovated. Only that it's not very popular and that, in addition to their innovations, they follow trends. That's not a passive aggressive statement.

> They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.

The commenter was suggesting that Opera is now choosing to be "standards compliant" because the current most popular browsers are, as opposed to Opera's choice in the past to be non-standards compliant to copy the top browser of that time, IE. If the top browser is standards compliant, and you want to copy it, what would your browser end up being?
I'm working on an OS with a hybrid approach: http://www.projectmeadow.com

(The site isn't as fine tuned as I'd like yet...but interested in your thoughts. Thanks!)
Yes, he has a few all tied up.
sign up and you will get the list - it was about 600 quid - worth it IMO
Of course it matters. The "standard" becomes driven by the peculiarities of a specific implementation, rather than the best thing for the base of customers that are served by the standard.

I think it's fine to have a reference implementation, but we need a broad set of implementations (with actual users) so that the standard doesn't get blinders on it due to an implementation decision made on a de-facto standard.
I agree with the other commenters - RailsApps is a fantastic resource for the community. It's a great way to have a peer reviewed and curated set of high quality examples to learn from.

At the same time, I do agree with many of the points in Tammer's article. I think the danger with Rails templates, scaffolding and even Daniel's work is that it's very easy to take it and use it part and parcel without understanding what's really going on inside, and why certain decisions were made (this gem vs. that gem, or this code technique vs. that). I think there's a lot of value in starting from scratch (Daniel's option #1) and adding things step by step. As Tammer pointed out, this can lead to a positive team discussion and learning dynamic. And I don't mind the extra typing and time required.

The next time I start a new Rails app, I'll probably:
- Look for a good example to learn from in RailsApps or elsewhere.
- But then step back to "rails new" and add in the recommended gems bit by bit, with testing along the way.
- Hopefully contribute back to RailsApp if I learn anything new :)
I imagine it's easier than you think ;)
He says he is not a lot of things, but OR person isn't one of them. In fact, what he does do sounds very much like OR to me. Do you think OR is a scary term for the masses? I find saying I do Operations Research works with many people.

It is a good time to be in the IE/OR job market. Predictive analytics is very big, even as supply chain has decreased a bit since the glory days. One firm I consult with is hiring a person like you, for example (http://www.firstfuel.com/home/staff_scientist).

That's quite the search query by the way.
Because that would be a terrible analogy. Using linux as an example actually goes against your point. We do have "20 different unix variants". Just because you live in a linux bubble, doesn't mean there isn't a world outside of that bubble. Almost all software that runs on linux isn't using the linux api, they are using a gradually munged up collection of APIs from over the years, including posix, bsd and sysv APIs. That software works on on dozens of different systems. Software written to a common API that is implemented by dozens of different systems seems a lot more like an argument in favour of more rendering engines implementing a common API.
3-2-1 ShmooCon Sunday Recommendations
The fact that a currency like bitcoin with all the shortfalls you are describing has any traction is more indicative of the feeling we have about our current options.
This is the key question. In an ideal world it would parse Doxygen-compatible comments and output to the Doxygen XML file format so it can then be rendered by Doxygen's HTML generator. Keep this tool focussed on the parsing etc. and let Doxygen continue to do what it does well.

In my mind Doxygen is a fantastic tool and its only drawback in my experience is its slightly simplistic parsing engine which means it's slow to adapt to new language features.
How would you like an open data platform to be?
With the rise of open data, lots of open data portals appear here and there. The fact is that with more portals, it will be more and more difficult to find what you really want. In addition, if you want to work with data from different organizations, it becomes a little tricky.

So as a developer, how would you like the best open data platform to be ? Give us some thoughts.

Thanks
Software developers expected to see the highest IT job growth come 2020
Laws shouldn't have copyrights, they are facts.
Just curious, but what version of Opera did you get `:before` & `:after` working on? I was just trying this out on the latest Opera and couldn't get it to work.
Forking WebKit is effectively the same as writing your own browser, with regards to standardization. At the end of the day you want to get everyone to agree on the standard -- having an implementation that everyone can use only helps to sweeten the deal.
Apparently, if it happens on/over the internet, it's in the Cloud these days.
Is it a hosted service? Or something I run on my server? What server technology does it use?
EA's CFO spills the beans on its next-gen plans
There is going to be a big battle with International Code Council (ICC), National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), ANSI, I could go on and on. They all have a vested interest on keeping their standards locked down.
I think that folks driving into the city from the countryside is really a very minimal part of the issue. No offense, but on any given day y'all are a drop in the bucket. It's really about the daily commuters who drive in from outside the city. The amount of space that needs to be devoted to accommodating them can really be quite impressive.

Here in Milwaukee, for example, the downtown area has essentially been choked off - there are office buildings, there are some hotels, there are a few eateries and pubs which specifically cater to the office workers and business travelers (many of them aren't even open on the weekends). And there is. . . parking. Lots and lots and lots and lots of parking. If you ever go down there at night, the parking is really the most noticeable thing because of the sense of void it creates. All these great huge swaths of the very core of a major urban center that are just completely empty. The feeling is downright oppressive; it's like being in a shopping mall where 30% of the storefronts are vacant.
Note, it's not 14k but 'only' 1.4k
Wow. Was just looking into this myself. Great find.
i see what you mean yes, that does make sense. to keep it honest so to speak.
You're using opera, right?

This was already in my code, but I commented out, maybe I should just let it be in there real quick before opera changes to webkit:
https://github.com/mrcoles/markdown-css/blob/016bf0863867aed...

If not opera, lmk what browser you're using.
The problem with verbs is that they are black boxes. With objects you can subclass and override methods - do stuff like the Universal Design Pattern - basing something on prototypes that you tweak here and there. Functions you can only apply, objects have parts that have names.
And that's bad why? So the web only works with one rendering engine. One rendering engine that's open source and can be used and modified by anyone for any purpose.

Standards are great for things like protocols (even languages), but an entire web browser is a tad more complicated than TCP or even C++. No two browsers have ever implemented HTML/JS/CSS perfectly and they never will. If that's the case, then what's the point of a "standard" anyway?
CLOS is really required in about 5% of very specialized tasks, such as simulations.
You and Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Well, maybe you want the HTML formatting without the styles or all the CSS classes. Say you wanted to do something like grab all the docs off a website and then apply your own styling or put them on an internal reference. I can see that being a good use case to allow that for open documentation.
This is working in Chrome 24.

Oh, yes it is. Its in the .less file, I had not spotted that.

EDIT:

You need `content: "";` in the less file and it should work.
Yep, it's fair enough that you probably can't compete on that, so strengths are probably a better way to go. The second one especially, that's really cool - and advanced permissions are probably where you want to be to top Bitbucket's team features. I haven't really used CI, but I've seen a few repos on Github using it and it looks like a neat thing to integrate.
"We'll either move toward this or have a living hell where most people have no jobs and nothing to occupy their time. We seem to survive these transitions well enough, so I like to think someone will come up with the answers."

Look, I understand that you think the transition will be tough. I'm curious why you think we will make the transition.

EDIT: You have edited your post again.

"You seem adamant that currency will still have value when most people don't need it"

Why will people not need to store wealth in order to take care of their needs later in life?
... or use SpiderOak
Obviously they enjoy relative privilege. I am a brown person, I was one of three such in my high school, I assure you that I appreciate how privileged it is for me to be male and middle class and have educated parents.

But all the same, I'd prefer to say that they are "less under-pivileged" in an environment where they can be fired for what they do on Reddit in their spare time, leaving them unable to provide for a wife with medical issues.

In the case I am thinking of, many people said that the privileged person in question shouldn't have been doing unpopular things if he had a wife to support. Which really underscores my point.
You're coming off as combative. I don't want to continue this discussion with you.