skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the control issue does have some relevance, I think that Omaha is definitely a step in the right direction. I typically put off updating any of my products, simply because they notify me about it instead of just doing the update in the background. I always want the new versions, especially since so many of my browser/OS updates are security updates, but because I'm always notified about it when I either start the application, or when I close it, I never want to do it and spend extra time waiting while it does the update process when I had something in mind I wanted to do.

Making it open source is definitely the right direction. If it gets modified so that there is a control panel of sorts so that you an control the updates I think it will be considerably better for people.If it is set up as it is now (Updating at some time of low computer usage), with options that can be changed to only update through a specific connection, to only update when the computer has been idle for X amount of time, and similar times.

Look at the recent Conficker worm. There are estimates that over 10 million computers were infected with it (and are now having that annoying fake antivirus software downloaded onto it), because they hadn't installed a security update that was published in October. If they would just push the update after 1-2 months (Assuming that no major problems have been reported) to all Windows computers, much of the spread and potential damage would have been avoided. Since you use a Mac, you might not be used to this kind of problem. Windows always has some sort of a security hole, which is constantly being exploited. Anyone in IT can tell you how much of their time would be saved if Microsoft would stop nagging users about the security updates and just install them after they've been verified as stable. At the end of March we lost quite a bit of time having to scan all of the machines, and then going out and removing it from the one that had been infected, all because a higher up had heard about Conficker and was worried about what might happen on 4/1.
Who says S&W is "the rules"?

This is a difficult question. As far as I know, there is no organization that defines rules for English language. Unlike, for example, Russian language that has rules defined by the State Academy of Sciences. "Rules" and words for English language are stated de facto -- e.g. Oxford dictionary has "blog", while in Russia we still argue about "coffee" (is it "he", like official rules say, or "it", like people say?).

Since there are no official rules for English, here I suppose that S&W is a commonsense summary of what good English is.

Which points of Pullum's critique, exactly, do you claim fail to apply to American English?

Um... That was a joke.

Sorry about readability, I had to do that "what he wrote/what it really is" thing to get readers some context.
You're right, it definitely comes from Smalltalk. For those who aren't familar with Smalltalk, you can use the ';' operator to send a sequence of messages to the same object. The example in the article would look something like this:

mainFrame := JFrame new: 'Hello World';
add: label withAlignment: BorderLayout.CENTER;
addWindowListener: MainFrameListener new;
setDefaultCloseOperation: JFrame.DO_NOTHING_ON_CLOSE;
pack;
setLocationRelativeTo: nil;
setVisible: True;
yourself.

(The result of a chained method expression is the result of the last method call, thus the 'yourself' message at the end so that the object itself is stored into mainFrame.)

Sigh...I miss Smalltalk.
>> Not condoning Microsoft or anything, but perhaps someone needs it. :)

I really don't get why people are afraid of "condoning" Microsoft. They're one choice in a sea of thousands; to each his own. That mentality really bothers me.
It sounds reasonable to me.

Basically he's saying that effective caching is usually better than organizing data in columns instead of rows. Then he said that organizing data in columns instead of rows is not a new idea.
Whoa, I took a look at your website and saw "Game Programming for Teens". It was a book I bought back in high school for fun.

Good luck on your search.
Expert Advice Shuts Your Brain Down
here I suppose that S&W is a commonsense summary of what good English is

Exactly, which makes your defense of it entirely circular.
I completely agree (and the list doesn't stop there of course; it's pretty sobering when you look at just how many great books he has co-authored). Every single one of them is a great example of crystal-clear and concise writing.
Far from 'crackpot-ish'. The author belongs to the hardcore DB-side hacker party. He's putting forward the idea that SSDs (solid state disks), by upsetting the memory hierarchy applecart, may have deep effects on our work with storage.

(apologies for picking a provocative quote for the title, but it seemed to me that the front page was lacking its recommended daily dose of hacking.)
Wow, he's wordy.
Good point. One way to do it might be to reify the object instance pointer to a first-class argument (usually the first.) Another way is with a dynamic variable self (might be preferable, since you don't have to break function signatures.)

Yet another option might be with a custom method combination, which is overkill :-P

Any other ideas? or am I too off the ball park?
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Bandwidth is decreasing, but resolution is increasing. They'll push as many pixels as is feasible, so I'd expect costs to be static.
When I read this title, I imagined a camera that could go back in time and take a picture from BEFORE I pressed the button.

Maybe that's only because in my head, time machines let you travel to another point in time rather than move slowly through time.

(I imagine that an actual time travel camera is doable. It's just an always running video camera that saves off the last N seconds when you press the button.)
Yes and no. I didn't argue about the language in my comment (since I'm not a native speaker). My first point is about words taken out of context. My second point is about joke in S&W. My third point is about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557978
Being knee-jerk anti-Microsoft is so 80's....
My replies:

1) Obviously. But whatever laws are passed in the U.S. are not going to be enforced outside the U.S. (of course). The president of the U.S. can exercize his influence abroad but he can't exactly force other countries to do what he wants, unless he threatens with penalties (not limited to military action), which would help denigrate the image of the U.S. abroad even more. Obama's administration can pass whatever laws it wants. Financial institutions will always find a loophole to be exploited. Regulatory arbitrage works wonders...

2) Defining "world's capital" is admittedly a childish game. One possible definition of world's financial capital would be to count the number of hedge funds in London and the number of hedge funds in NYC.

3) Of course the concept of decoupled economies is false. What I was trying to argue is that the correlation between the American economy and other countries' economies is not 100%.

America is still a great country, obviously. Just don't expect the post-WW2 status to last forever. Things change.
And Pullum don't actually make any suggestions for better book. It's fine to criticize and dwell in to your loved subject as deeply as you want, but the rest of us need help.

If the Elements is not a good book, then what is, and if there is none, then maybe Mr. Pullum should write one.
ning?
I wonder if they could build into Chrome a P2P video streaming client?

Utilize users bandwidth.
Well, he wrote a book on this topic http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

Edit: and they're kind of shy:

"Our aim is to describe and not prescribe: we outline and illustrate the principles that govern the construction of words and sentences in the present-day language without recommending or condemning particular usage choices. Although this book may be (and we certainly hope it will be) of use in helping the user decide how to phrase things, it is not designed as a style guide or a usage manual."
Lead acid batteries are cheap, dense, high capacity, and can handle deep recharge cycles and high drain reasonably well.

They're the obvious choice when you don't care about weight. I'd be surprised if Google didn't chose them.
I don't understand this, the guy seems to be bashing Li-ion as a technology of hype because google uses lead acid on battery backups.

I don't know of any company that would use lithium for that purpose... it would be far too expensive (both in battery cost and additional circuitry). But that does not mean that lithium is hype, its all about energy density, good luck trying to drive an electric car with lead acid cells in the back, it would weigh a ton.

Maybe he should use a lead acid battery... in his cell phone.

Lead acid is great for many purposes: cheap, ridiculously easy charging circuity, good enough energy density. But li-ion certainly has purposes where energy density is a concern.
This article was about religion, not hacking.
This is a great article. And thanks to jey for posting this. On a side note, reading it I found out that Sanjay is based in Toronto currently, which is where I am, so I just reached out to him and would be chatting with him a bit more about startups, immigration, etc soon. Small world, and thanks HN! :)
You can make a list like that about any language - there are plenty of things wrong with Java too, such as the amount of boilerplate code required for EJBs, or the fact that the fragile superclass problem still hasn't been solved, or there are application servers with stupid licensing. I can't see COBOL being much worse than Java for any real-world project.
If you're asking the question, then you're too young to decide against college. Keep your options open. It won't hurt your web development career, and if you change your mind about your career (like most people do between the ages of 18 and 25) you won't be stuck playing college catch-up.

You really don't want to go to college when you're years older than the other students. All the kids will think you're a loser, and they'll think you're creepy if you try to hang out with them. You'll think they're shallow and irresponsible, and you'll resent it when they do as well in class as you. No, thanks. Now is the time. Just go. If the obligatory college pastimes of drinking, socializing, and watching foreign films sound silly to you, I've got good news: you'll have LOTS of free time at college to work on your web development skills.

P.S. He got a variety of responses and a lively discussion among people who are still interested in web development. The answers would be much more predictable if you could ask the people who entered college as programming freaks and developed an interest in economics or anthropology. I think that consideration settles the issue pretty well.
IPhone devotion blinds Silicon Valley app developers
Could you roughly explain your idea here? All the links are obviously no working at all.
Peter or Steven -- make up your mind! :P

It's Steven.
Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million
I have a spare MacBook Pro that I turn on twice a month or so. Every time it starts up, I see Google Update asking me to confirm installation of updates. If I click Cancel, it will ask me later.

Firefox updates on start up may be bad, but Sparkle handles this better -- it asks me to update the app I'm using, and downloads it in background.

By the way, Google's update framework for Mac has been there for a few months: http://code.google.com/p/update-engine/. But -- please -- don't use it.
Splitting hairs, he was specifically referring to the deflection-style "what about" argument, as if the sins of others justifies one's own.
Well, the conclusion I came to was that trying to make Lisp less nested would be like trying to make the North Pole less arctic. If you don't like programming that way, you probably aren't using Lisp in the first place. There are a few exceptions, of course (I like loop quite a bit).
University has never really been about real world application. The professors and lecturers that i've encountered are really smart people on the cutting edge of thier fields, if they wanted to lecture about these technologies tey would have no issues.

University is really about teaching you the principles which rarely change much, then depending on your course building up to more real world situations.

Theres no point focusing a whole course around the newest technologies then having someone not have the flexability to adapt to new changes or work in an older area.
"Youtube Is In Trouble" is one thing, but "Youtube Is Doomed"?

There's linkbait and then there's businessinsider.com
It's also idiotic because there are so many variations, and people can change. There are C players who have the talent to become B players in 6 months, and A players after 5 years, and B players worth having because of their other abilities (management potential, mentoring). There are also A players who will flame out, or become discouraged upon meeting the wrong challenge. Humanity does not divide so neatly.
greed is downvoting you
"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute it to Voltaire."

-- Voltaire

(Seriously, though, YouTube as a company may or may not prosper, but YouTube-style streaming online video isn't going anywhere. So for most of us, the whole issue is moot.)
I suspect bandwidth costs are decreasing at a rate that's faster than the increase in resolution of display devices though, and there's no point pushing more pixels than the best display has.
It looks nice and clean, but it just seems like a homepage for an iPhone engineering/consulting team. Is that right?

If that's its goal, it works fine for that. If it was supposed to lead me to do something other than browse your iPhone apps, it didn't happen. It's not common to get homepage review requests here (usually it's web services), so I want to be sure I didn't miss the point.
I can't imagine either of them or the originators of this idea, but I prefer the way Hitchens put it.
Well, they have that freedom in India, of course.
"I had a conversation last weekend with one of my friends who always struggles to find good Ruby engineers ..."

Well then, doesn't it see that perhaps he is creating his own limitation by focusing on Ruby?

Just because a particular language may have too few experts in the USA does not mean there's a shortage of qualified programmers in other languages! I'm an exceptional programmer in the language I know best, but it is not Ruby. Your friend would not consider hiring me because of this too I'll bet -- yet I could probably build his site twice as fast as the best Ruby programmer.

You live with the limitations you impose upon yourself.
Is VOIP really that competitive? I know there are a lot of SIP providers out there and that their services are incredibly commoditized - but a SIP provider Skype is not.

Name a single other app/service with a well-established and globally-known brand name like Skype, where you can download an app, chat for free immediately with nearly everyone online, and also make land-line calls with a really hassle-free purchase process.

Skype is already considerably more expensive than a lot of other VOIP solutions out there - but they succeed much like Apple succeeds, by offering an easy-to-use product tied to a well-known brand for a price that's fair to consumers (but far from cheap). They don't need to race to the bottom like other undifferentiated SIP providers just to get customers.

There's a lot of value in user experience and branding.
I think its a good start, but honestly I don't think this is ready to launch.

Mostly, I'm not clear on the goal of your site. Are you selling iPhone apps or iPhone development services (or both)? I ran out of content quickly and was left a bit confused.

Also, the 2 secondary tabs don't really have any content, so why are they there? If you keep them you need graphics, even on the coming soon tab.

All that said, the iSk8 app sounds like a cool idea, and kudos for partnering with DSC.
Hey now, telecom isn't boring.

</telecom-related startup founder>
Well, part of the reason for my tone is that I very much don't want this to become reddit, and one of the things that characterizes reddit is that the best quality comments are often halfway down the page because so many people upvote irrelevant rants and one-line jokes.
Sounds like common sense to me, but believe it or not, some people disagree. Check out some dissenting opinions from the article:

"A class I took in 2007 taught how to create a website with tables. I found out this year that they are finally teaching table free websites. Being a few years behind is definitely not smart, especially when you're paying so much to learn this information." (If you think the point of paying tens of thousands of dollars per year for college is to acquire knowledge whose shelf life is shorter than the time you spend there, then it's no wonder you think it's a bad idea.)

"[Students] don't know, yet, that they need to be constantly monitoring blogs and twitter for the latest information on the industry." (Methinks this person is confused about what "web development" is, thinking it means self-promotion and getting blog traffic rather than developing good web sites.)

"I think I learned more on my co-op at the time on web development then I learned in the class room. Only the concepts were relevant in the classroom - the languages and the techniques weren't." (Silly colleges teaching concepts instead of specific technologies!)

It's funny how so many web developers think that having the latest technology is absolutely required, instead of thinking about the costs and benefits of staying up to date. The only aspect of web development where fashion is a driver is UI design. Cutting-edge UI design sometimes (not always) requires cutting-edge UI implementation technologies. For the rest, hell, every site has its own needs, and your site's needs might have been technologically solved years ago. I think these kids could benefit from taking a calculus class and realizing that the concepts and the notation are older than their parents (hah, didn't know there was anything that old, did ya?)
> my IP is inevitably transmitted to them.

I agree with your overall point that Google went about this wrong if they're trying to be on the up-and-up. The same thing happens with Firefox on startup. I don't think people really consider the implications of that either.

> Any software that adopts this Omaha crap will be blocked from my machine as well.

Well, it looks like Omaha could be made to be a lot more up-front and has some modular bits that could be pretty handy. Don't penalize people who use parts of the code (I'm considering it for pieces) unless they do the same sort of disrespectful practices (e.g. hidden inclusion).

The one thing I can say is that I'd rather see Google open source this than not. It's a step in the right direction of making this less opaque and less mysterious, even if it's insufficient to pardon their behavior.
This is becoming the coolest firefox extension I use. Works great on sites like google and flickr too.
Warning: Twitter Hit By StalkDaily Worm
I agree with robryan's point.

I also wonder if teaching leaves professors too busy to keep up with the latest trends. Web _design_ might actually be a good course to be taught by a part-time professor who is also freelancing and staying current.

Web _development_ is still tied to programming principles and practice. One of the point made in the article is that of the need to keep up with ever-changing technologies. Learning these technologies can often be done in your own time, and I'm not sure that university is the place for them.

Last year's course on Django could be this year's course on Seaside. Developers with a good computer science background should be able to choose and learn the new technologies on their own (and they do).

Same for designers - the principles of design are fairly static, while CSS tricks and trends are almost better left to Smashing Magazine and A List Apart.
BestBuy Sells 9 Year Old Discontinued Hard Drive As Brand New, Refuses Refund
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoplasmadynamic_thruster

We also have these; it's probably more practical, but it still requires a powerful onboard reactor (in practice, probably fission or fusion).
If the law of supply and demand also applies in this market, the boys-girls gap in the next generation would be smaller.

However, given the thousands-years cultural norm that prefer boys over girls, it's likely the gap will likely persist for a long time to come.

Anyone has some ideas on what to do with this problem?
It seems that there a few broad problems with owning/using legacy COBOL:

1. It's usually run on a big, expensive mainframe.

2. Good developers run from it, so you're stuck with the coders left over from adverse selection

3. It has questionable modularity/maintainability and integration with more modern stuff is hard.

What opportunities are created by these problems?

My limited experience is that Mainframe COBOL systems (I know nothing of Microfocus) use either a database (DB2 usually) or large, random access flat files for persistence. COBOL programs are much like scripts run from within a transaction monitor. [Please correct me if I'm wrong here!]. Why has no one done a WINE-style implementation of the important APIs along with an interpreter so that existing code can be run on a horizontally-scalable platform? Mainframes are really expensive. Not only does IBM charge a lot, but you end up buying 3rd party software (ABEND-AID, I'm not kidding...) just to keep the lights on. Perhaps a distributed flat file implementation could be built to mimic 60's era data storage models. Does anyone do this? It seems like a great Open Source business as COBOL users are accustomed to paying for support and services. What do I not understand about this?
I would recommend iUI, which is based on the code originally developed by Joe Hewitt - the creator of Firebug.

I have developed a pretty advanced iPhone webapp with it (online food diary searching while you type). The only thing was that I had to disable page transitioning emulating sliding screens, as the animation was quite slow and unpleasant.

Since then, Apple added support for proprietary CSS extensions providing access to "native" animations, but due to the availability of native SDK, I don't think it is widely used and on a first glance this is not supported in iUI.

For reading and reference I would recommend Apple's Developer Connection topic http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/referencelibrary/G..., which provides several "entry" points to documentation, guides, and samples. Still, for development it makes a lot of sense to save efforts and build on top of an existing library, such as iUI, which provides you the app structure, pre-built JavaScript for iPhone-specific manipulations, and images.

I would be careful with iWebKit since it seems to use GPL, which may result in issues with non-open source use.
I wouldn't be surprised if China started to become more aggressive militarily as this generation enters the proper age. An imbalance of men that don't have mates has caused problems for societies in the past, and they solved those problems by putting all of this pent up aggression to use.
Stonehenge Solved: Moving Big Rocks
Here, "covered", an active, transitive verb taking the direct object "ground", conveys vividly what the verbose and pale construction "were lying", coupled with the repositional phrase "on the ground", does not. Pullum's fussiness about the meaning of the word "passive" obscures S&W's point: vividness and brevity come together nicely in the active construction.

Pullum's point here is that neither phrase is passive construction, so you cannot point to the second one as better for that reason. The second sentence is better for the reasons you argued, but not because they eliminated the passive voice.