skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Other companies like ING and Apple get it, which tells me that There are no constraints, no laws, just people who zigged when they should have zagged."

Apple would die if it's design wasn't the best in the industry. They "get it" because their competitive advantage is precisely that -- design.

I don't know a whole lot about ING, but it sounds like they similarly succeed by being the counter culture. They are, in fact, so specialized, that they're willing to turn away customers that withdraw money from their savings accounts too frequently. The point is, they're experts at what they do, and that's how they survive, the same way Apple survives by being the design expert for devices.

AA has to reinvent itself to become an expert. There are, no doubt, a lot of obstacles, constraints and laws, but their desperation will lead them to success.
That's sort of what I was getting at, in other words, you don't really need to make a choice between silverlight and WPF because they are essentially the same thing. Maybe this is just another example in the litany of awful branding mistakes Microsoft has made around .NET?

As far as books go, I'm not surprised that there are more Silverlight books than WPF. Web-centric technology books are in general more popular than desktop-centric books, particularly in the MS universe.
It seems to me to be a little difficult to see whether 'a' or 'b' is winning, with the vote number in grey. Maybe the text size could increase with votes.
Am I the only one who finds pure math more fun than programming an actual robot to move?
I strongly agree with PJ's comment. Plugins like Flash, Silverlight, and Active-X complicate the process and lower the quality of the web experience.

- Users must install and maintain an additional piece.

- Less likely to work in all environments (mobile phone, etc.)

- Plugins bypass the authentication mechanisms built into browsers. Maintaining session currency requires sharing information between browser and the plugin - extra work to develop and many Flash/Silverlight/etc. developers just don't bother.

- Plugins may provide an additional vector for malware. They may not be harder to secure than native browser stuff but you have to worry about two things. E.g. Flash cross-site scripting attacks.

- Requires more than one set of development tools (e.g. Firebug can't see inside Flash or Silverlight objects on a page)

- Unnecessary most of the time: E.g., a lot of common Flash animation can be done equally well with native browser techniques like Javascript, CSS...

- Future browser technologies will make plugins even less necessary: e.g. Flash was probably the best option when YouTube came out but when HTML 5 starts to take over the video and audio tags may make it superfluous.

If your web app requires some plugin you WILL lose at least a small part of your target audience - Silverlight more than Flash. If you don't absolutely have to have the functionality a plugin gives you, why short-change yourself like that?
Startup Launch - Key Steps to Success
Anxious to try this out. I just get a blank list of numbers in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome on Mac. Firebug tells me you're making an Ajax request once a second, seems... odd?

Clicking Go! seems to do nothing.
Equifax I-Cards: A Service to Prove You Are Really You
Sure, libraries don't need to worry about hooks, but they do need to worry about providing sufficiently flexible APIs for use in different contexts instead. Sooner or later, you've got to connect up your custom logic to the library/framework's general logic.

I guess the distinction just seems rather artificial to me. It may theoretically be riskier to use a framework, in the sense that working around its limitations may be harder to do in the worst case. However, if you're working with bad interfaces and reluctant support, and the library is of any significant size and complexity such that you couldn't just reimplement it yourself in a worst case scenario, then you're basically screwed either way. Being only 75% screwed instead of 85% still doesn't ship your product. :-)
I'm not so sure I like the airy new iPhone-ified GoogleTwitterGrooveshark style of interface that much better. Maybe AA.com could add that as a front end for simple transaction and have an "Advanced" option to go to the cluttered kind that gives you all the options.

Does anyone remember the old SABRE interface travel agents used? They didn't need any colorful icons, just an IBM terminal and a few uppercase letter codes would get you there. Sometimes putting a simple interface onto a complex system is not right for everyone.
'release' is identified as an end. But web projects and businesses don't or shouldn't 'end'. It is a continuous cycle of invention, so at the 'end', you are really at the beginning of defining the next stage.
Well, if the guy in the article is looking at funds and banking no wonder he doesn't have a job! One has to look where the jobs are, not where they aren't.
Dia has layers too. See Diagram -> Layers.

[Says the Dia contributor :)]
Kid did a dumb thing, but from what I know of the facts (no malicious intent) this seems like a waste of public resources to send this to trial and possibly keep this guy in jail. Proportionality seems a bit out of whack here, a stiff fine seems fair enough.
NICE, NICE
It may be "evil", "counterproductive", "stupid", or "brain-dead". It may even be alienating to developers, despite the available evidence of their actions. But it does appear to be effective:

* There's been no Mac malware released through the App Store process.

* The App Store process has shut down at least one tethering application Apple actively didn't want to ship.

* The App Store process appears to have kept "backdoor" programming environments (like Flash) out of the ecosystem.

Apple is a business. I don't see how anything they've done with the App Store is irrational. There are people running the process, not robots, so obviously they're going to make mistakes. I don't see how that indicts the process that runs the most successful mobile application platform ever deployed.
This reminds me a bit of http://you-vs-me.com
Hm. Did you try clicking "Create a New Board"?
... but not as good.
I have a Lua binding to tinycdb. I hadn't considered Windows compatibility and this bug exists in my code. I've just committed a fix, thanks.
Because that's why there haven't been more regular computer users installing desktop apps written in Java: there was no single convenient place to get them!

Seriously, most regular computer users don't care what language or technology was used to make the app they're using, as long as it works well (which includes performance) and is intuitive, even for desktop apps.

I know pg said users do care about this for desktop apps, but they only care when the app does not look and behave in a way that is consistent with other native apps on the platform. If you break the user's expectations, they'll complain, even if your app was written with the same language as the OS.
Minor points in the comments:

The reason this doesn’t matter is that we don’t land airplanes with GPS really. We direct them down a path to the airport and then the pilot flys at minimum the last 200 feet with the runway in sight. If he can’t see it, he doesn’t land. Airliners are a different animal but they don’t use GPS for that either. (Mike C)

I couldn’t imagine anyone being silly enough to think that planes rely on GPS to figure out their altitude above the runway. (P)

WAAS-qualified avionics like Garmin’s 430W, 480W and 530W receivers are approved for precision instrument approaches based entirely on GPS. (Robert X. Cringely)

There's some truth mixed in with some misunderstanding there. While GPS is able to measure altitude, aircraft systems don't rely on it for a primary altitude measurement. They already have perfectly good barometric systems which measure air pressure and are adjusted for field conditions every hour (or so). On a GPS precision approach (that is, one with both horizontal and vertical guidance) the computer combines the (x,y) information from the GPS with the altimeter's data to produce ILS-type course and glideslope deviation indicators, showing how far from the desired approach course the aircraft is in the left/right and up/down axes.

So, while you can in fact fly an approach where your position data is based solely on GPS, that z-axis is still being measured by an altimeter. (Unless Mr. Cringely is certified to fly cat II or III approaches, in which case he needs a LAAS-certified receiver and suitably equipped airport, as unlike WAAS, it is ground-based: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Area_Augmentation_System)
Personal anecdote here: I've never had any trouble booking a ticket through AA. Furthermore, the state of the American airline industry is such that nobody flies a "preferred" airline, everyone just flies whatever is cheapest.

So, unless your website is actively chasing users away (which I doubt, it's not that poor), you'd be better served keeping your costs down than making some great Web 2.0 gesture of redesign.
The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters
Yes, I agree.

What I would do is I would make sure that all the "or"s on the page line up. Then, I would change each line from being one link to being 2 links, so that the "this" and "that" are both links; clicking on one of them would result in voting for it.

Once you vote, you can turn off the voting for that line (via js).
and now for the anti-pandering anti-pattern ;-)

I can not believe for once that this guy obtained hacking nirvana through Arc. Not once! Why? because the Arc documentation is so meager as to be non-existent. You will need serious feet-wetting with more established Lisp dialects before you can "get there" with Arc.

All the epiphanies he lists are easily experienced with most modern Lisp dialects; either he "got it" before and just needed to extend the credit to Arc, for some reason .. or he isn't there yet, at least not to its full potential.

It had to be said, as much as I hate to be rude and blunt like this :-|
Right.... There's a simple business constraint for airlines. People will put up with crappy websites, less legroom, fees for extra bags, whatever the hell we can dream up, because the primary driver of sales is price. Spend money on a website, while your competitor lowers their price so it's now $2 less than yours? Your sales decrease significantly. Ticket $2 less than a competitor's? Your sales increase significantly. Plaster "Sale" and "Lowest Price" in giant blinking gifs all over your site? Ditto.
Apple can certainly decide what is too obscene to be in its store. Christian bookstores aren't forced to carry Hustler either, because Christian bookstores find Hustler to be obscene even though there is plenty of sex, rape, sodomy and other such in the bible.

I have a hard time listening to arguments from people who don't understand the difference between a private corporation and the government and applicability of the Constitution.
Part of the problem is that too many people are going to college. (Why does a bank teller need a college degree?) And then when they have a degree they expect a job that pays very well and offers full benefits. There are jobs for college graduates, but they may not be "dream jobs."
This is why I stopped reading C.L.L. - The notion that it's inconceivable to genuinely like any other language than Common Lisp. It's a bizarre idea, and one that carries much more fervor than I think CL has earned. If this were still 1990, then I suppose it would have a stronger leg to stand on.
nevertheless, many use it in this way...
>> "The second half of the book is how to apply the principles to Java code. Which is horrendous! Not the book. If you should be so unfortunate to be stuck trying to write good code in Java, the book is a great, lucid description of how to do so. Yet in Java, it’s hard to get anything shorter than ten or twenty lines of code. See some code duplication, and by the time you’ve written the classes and interfaces and methods you need to write to remove the duplication, the code is just as long as it was before."

Yeah you're doing something wrong there. I know it's fashionable to bash Java and say how lame and verbose it is, but it does wear a bit thin. I actually enjoy writing Java. Perhaps due to me having grown up programming assembly - I don't mind verbosity. Java is an extremely solid fast language.
If we're going to be thanking people...

Thanks Anarki and arcfn.com!*

They were both tremendously useful/helpful when I last used arc.

*All creators and contributors.
No comment on available applications, tethering or battery life (particularly w/r/t multitasking). I also don't need multitasking so much as a background app for IMs
Thank you Mr. O.
I disagree with you; to me, censorship is evil until proven otherwise, and the burden of proof is very high.

But I think that the Kama Sutra is kind of beside the point, here. It's just a data point indicating a larger 'evil' - that Apple as an organization has put a system into place where a developer can be completely screwed with no transparency into why. We're left assuming this particular case is just some over-zealous asshole reviewer, or an unfortunate quirk of some automated review software, or whatever, but we actually have no idea, and that's the real problem.

Evil is asking people to invest a bunch of time developing for your platform and giving them no way of knowing if they're actually going to be allowed to sell their product, no real recourse when they're rejected, and no transparency into the process. Evil is making arbitrary and inconsistent decisions that directly affect a person's ability to make a living.
I haven't mentioned Common Lisp by name, and if it makes you feel any better, every CLer has a pet-Lisp trapped inside him, including yours truly ;-)
Try publishing apps for another phone platform.
Bharti, Infy, TCS, Wipro among top IT cos
Do hardcore Christians even support this decision? You might as well ban air.
I ain't no CS theorist, so I have to ask: what does it mean for a result in TCS to "relativize"?
Interesting, but low on information. I would have preferred a podcast of the presentation.
This question is the reason I went into engineering.

I learned calculus by correspondence in high school. Solving this problem transformed calculus in my mind from just some abstract problems to solve into something useful. It was a big turning point for me, and focused my interests in areas of applied math.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Common Lisp (well, all I've ever played with is SBCL, so maybe I would like another variant more or less). I just don't see why it's impossible for someone to actually like Arc, or Clojure, or PLT Scheme or any other little-L lisp instead of Common Lisp.
Copyright © 1995
Can you please take the time to understand what's going on before letting us all know you have a hard time listening to arguments that nobody's actually making?

Eucalyptus doesn't ship the Kama Sutra. It's just an e-book reader, with the ability to search Project Gutenberg. If Apple were being consistent in the application of some policy, they would either allow this application, or they would have to reject a whole slew of other apps, including their Safari browser that ships by default.
And a big part of the value proposition of Clojure is that it gives you Lisp's ability to eliminate almost all duplication with macros alongside most of the benefits of Java.
Where are the jobs for college grads who are not CS majors?
This is an absolutely terrible idea. A couple problems:

1) It creates huge concentrations of counterparty risk. Let's say you're the firm that invents the credit default swap. For the next five years, you are the counterparty for every single CDS transaction. If you go bust, the whole market explodes and everyone is in for a world of hurt. Participants can't spread their risk around by trading with different counterparties. In the current environment, we should be doing everything we can to decrease counterparty risk.

2) What counts as a "new" financial instrument? Let's say it's 2004 and you want to start selling credit default swaps on asset-backed securities. At that point, CDS had been around for 10 years and ABS for at least 15. So is CDS on ABS a new product? Can you get a patent for it? For another example, let's say it's the mid-80s and you work on the CMO desk. (CMOs, collateralized mortgage obligations, are a type of mortgage-backed-security where the cashflows from the mortgages are restructured to better fit investors' demands). Everyone's doing sequential deals, and you do the first floater/inverse IO deal. CMOs aren't a new product, but your structure is completely original. Can you get a patent on that?

3) The products that are at the core of the current crisis weren't really new! Mortgage backed securities have been around in one form or another since the late 70s, and credit default swaps were invented in the early 90s. Any patents would have long since expired.

4) You'd be handing huge profit margins to the bank that invents them. For traditional physical products, the idea is that this government-granted monopoly encourages companies to spend time doing capital-intensive R&D which they wouldn't otherwise consider. But we've seen that banks, hedge funds, etc. have been willing to innovate without government-granted monopolies. So why give them a monopoly now?

Ultimately, this isn't much different from software patents. If software consists of an abstract idea instantiated in code, financial instruments are an abstract idea instantiated in legal documents and markets. The case against software patents applies to financial instruments too.
I think all you need to do is go back to look at the conferences in the past and see who launched.
Here's TC50 from 2007
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2007/
You'll recognize a few names who are doing very well now,
However compare that to last year
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/
and I don't recognize a single company their as reaching a critical mass in the last year.
Java is an extremely solid fast language.

You mean "the JVM is an extremely solid fast runtime" - languages by themselves aren't fast or slow ;-)
Those draconian rules are affecting the developers, not the end users, at least not directly. One could argue that every time a developer D cannot publish an application A, it affects the end users, but it seems that the impact is not severe enough. As long as the platform itself is popular enough to present a lucrative market, most developers won't abandon it despite Apple's behavior. And as long as the platform has lots of developers releasing new stuff for it, it will (barring a snafu on another front) remain popular.
I'd love to hear what the difference is between arc macros and scheme hygenic macros that makes one effortless and the other unhelpful.
Who argued that it wasn't effective?

And what are you suggesting? That when obvious problems with the process come to light, nobody should speak up because Apple's a successful business? Successful businesses are infallible, or can't respond to feedback?
I have achieved hacking nirvana through Arc because I like Arc more than I like Scheme or Common Lisp.
I intend to, but not in protest. I will still develop for the iphone, and if my apps are rejected, there is always cydia.
I haven't used arc in a while, but if I remember correctly it has a Common Lisp style defmacro that anyone can figure out:

(defmacro foo (args go here) `(code goes ,here))

On the other hand, Scheme has this monstrosity for defining macros that I can't describe because I never managed to keep straight in my head how it was supposed to work.

Hygiene is a red-herring. It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms.
I disagree, as an end user I had to return my first iphone in frustration. The potential was obvious, but the draconian rules meant I couldn't do what I needed with the hardware I owned.

Now that the jailbreaking community is thriving, I bought another iphone, and I'm more than happy with the progress of efforts like cydia.
I apologize, it was not my intent to bash Java.
David Mackay, the Cambridge University physicist, has published a really nice quantitative exposition of the sustainable energy problem.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

The chapter on renewable energy considers current technology, breeder reactors, and extraction of uranium from saltwater. His basic conclusion is that we have at least hundreds of years of Uranium at near-current consumption levels... which is probably enough time to develop fusion.
He does say that he has long liked Lisp, and that he generally liked Scheme, so he already had his feet wet. And although the documentation is, well, scarce, he did read through the source code file arc.arc.
I like to explore my ideas verbally and wish I had a better way to refer back to those audio brainstorms which I sometimes record. One problem is that the audio file is rarely "tight" in terms of signal-to-noise, which makes review tedious. It would be nice if I could cheaply outsource that work to a secretary type who would listen to my rantings and just return to me the salient bits, eliminate the pauses or maybe just transcribe what I say. I've looked into CastingWords but can't justify their prices (~$120 to transcribe a 90-minute recording, 2+ weeks ETA). I think there are strong opportunities for service developers in this space.
Funny, I just finished reading Charles Stross' novel "Accelerando," where the concept of a Turing oracle is mentioned more than once. I get the feeling that's the only time these things appear in fiction... see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/accelerando.html and search for "oracle."

Very fun book, if a little far out. If you're itching to read a fictional account of the Singularity, you'll probably enjoy this.
TextMate bundle for DB2
Pony Fail: Why Java App Store won't take off
Parental controls are one of the big features of the next version of the iPhone OS.
The problem is that college is too accessible. Kids are expected to go to college no matter what, there is no longer even a question of whether or not someone needs a college degree, they are expected to go, no matter how crappy a school they get into.

And for kids they aren't making the decisions with their own money. If they had to pony up their own 30-40K, instead of getting "free money" from loans, they'd think twice, whether or not that Communications degree from some crappy 3rd rate college with no name is worth 60K.
Yup. Nothing happened.

I've never got Linux to work with the wireless on my laptop, so I'm booting into a secure(ish) version of Windows. I'm using IE7.

I wonder if it would work with Firefox or Chrome or something else. It's not working for me with this setup.

I'll try it later with a proper browser.
Right - Java as a word is heavily overloaded ;). For me, that's the bit that matters - the JVM. Java is just something I use because it's easier than writing bytecode :/

Java as a language, the syntax, is for me sane. It gets a lot of things right, and some things wrong, but on balance, it's sane enough to use. Just like English as a language is sane enough to use, whilst having lots of stupid inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation etc.

And it's likely to be the fastest/most optimized of any JVM target language.
As someone mentioned up above, the author probably didn't tune the bucket number appropriately.
Err, no, my objections are not purely political, and yes I do think radioactive waste is a pretty significant issue.

Further, I would love for you to explain how it's anti-capitalist to suggest that we shouldn't use government subsidies to build new nuclear plants? (Because that's pretty much all I said in the parent comment, and nuclear plants certainly don't get built without massive subsidies.)

I think that if the government is going to help fund new power plants to reduce our carbon output, then we can do better than nuclear. You disagree? Or would you rather argue with your straw man hippie stereotype?