skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The success of the Mac is the only thing that will encourage ports to the Mac.

Developer familiarity doesn't seem to be a big problem with games. Most PC games are written in DirectX, which doesn't have a real alternative on the Mac side. Similarly, the real novelty of the iPhone is the UI. The Mac UI is fundamentally the same as the PC.

That being said, as long as Mac market share keeps ticking up a point or two a year, more developers will invest.
Yes, Softlayer prorates everything.
Here is a company that clearly never ate their own dog food ...
Beware Programming Language Requirements On Job Postings
Actually his oil empire is an immense boon to the consumers. He made oil cheap.

He did tries to run out his competition but he never could completely eliminate them. At one time, Standard Oil only fleeting hold 91% and 85% of final sale. So there were still competitors at the hieght of his empire.

However, by the time the federal government decided to use antitrust charges on Standard Oil, its share of the market dropped tremedously.

In any case, the government is itself responsible for creating legal monopolies such as patents and copyright. It was also supposed to break up supposed monopolies, which may or may not be true. With such conflict of interest and the law of unintended consequence in mind, I am very skeptical about such antitrust claims.

Don't take my word for it though. Do your own research.
Looks great and feels great.

But before you download, it says a subscription for full access to Times Reader is $3.45 a week.
As a Wordpress user (not power user) I find these plugins quite useful (although I tried just Nextgen gallery). But there are more: Lightbox, Pictpress, PixGallery.
Your point is taken. Making a billion dollars would not have made Elliot Smith less of an artist. But U2 is still a really bad example.
Newspapers should not look beyond quality. I value well-written reporting as a consumer and a citizen and want to see the NYT flourish. I really like the new reader.

Of the foci you mention:
Citizen journalism - I can get this on the local broadcast news. Except for breaking local news - no thanks.

User interaction - there are a great number of sites that discuss issues and they are filled with citizen journalists. I would rather the NYT concentrate on well-written reporting.

Personalization - RSS feeds and sub-reddits are better at this for me.

I miss the pure joy of opening the newspaper and discovering something interesting such as an in-depth investigative report on a unknown or misunderstood problem.
Ireland on the verge of extending TV licence to cover Internet
Duh, I just repeated what jodrellblank said, more or less. Oops.
They did this until they were the only 2 left.

The Standard Oil case you reference is widely misunderstood. Standard Oil's market share was dropping for a decade before the anti-trust case. And at the time of the case, 1911, there were some competitors you might recognize, such as Texaco, Shell, and Gulf already established in the market.

And at any rate, do you really believe that society would be better off if these so-called private monopolies (I'm going to exclude the monopolies created by government force here, such as cable franchises, telephone companies for most of history, patents, etc.), such as Google, Standard Oil, or Alcoa, had simply closed their doors? "You're right, we're a monopoly. The world would be better without us. Effective next week, we're all going home to tend to our gardens and take up piano lessons."

See also: http://mises.org/story/2694
"I also think that the way Rails is implemented (and to a lesser degree, the Ruby language) takes a little more experience and learning to understand in a meaningful way."

I think this has a lot to do with the person. Ruby and Python are almost identical technically (relative to other popular languages). I personally found ruby a lot more intuitive, and I used python for a year or two before I tried ruby. I'm sure this is a statement about me, not ruby or python.
Warning: opens iTunes.
How likely is this with Eric Schmidt being Obama's advisor?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?blogid=...

Talk about a conflict of interest...
If you don't know C, you are not going to be a great hacker. You might not want to start with C, but at some point, you better damn learn it.
I wouldn't want somebody like that on my team.

I would. Who is he harming by eating the middle of an Oreo? You imply that his solution to the problem is wrong because it's deceptive. But it's the testers and parents that put him in that situation. I definitely wouldn't hold it against the kid. I think the solution is more unique and out of the box than just sitting there waiting and getting all worked up over it.

Recognizing this behavior as clever and out of the box is similar to saying lazy programmers are good programmers. Everyone knows a truly lazy programmer is no good. It's the inclination to do work in a more efficient way that they are really after. So while the kid being potentially deceptive and stealing is bad, his inclinations and temperament may not be.

That being said I imagine I would have been the kid that ate the center of the Oreo and put it back... so I may be biased.
Where are the majority of these workers located and does that influence their pronounceability ratings?
This is a good analysis, but I'm still curious why Apple, known for excellence in every area, including customer service, has such a shoddy app review process. In my opinion, it just doesn't fit within the way they approach everything else.
An alarm clock with a numeric keypad so I don't have to sit there mashing the "down" button.
Regardless of how you feel about Twitter, the example is still applicable. To anyone who uses both, it is very obvious that the the latest version of the Facebook home page is very much inspired by the Twitter home page. Facebook has certainly added it's own touches to that concept, but it's hard to deny the influence that Twitter has had on Facebook.

With that said, I concur that Facebook does interactive design very well. They are a good source for inspiration for your own applications.
There was no punishment. Delayed gratification is quite a different beast. I think this is a critical point.
I hear you. Actually, if I can hijack this thread with something tangential, can you tell me why U2 gets no respect? You're not the first person I've heard to have a low opinion of them. I only know their singles, so I really have no idea why a lot of people look down on them as some sort of sell-out band.
Imagine you own a small cigar shop on a street. Then a large supermarket chain moves in beside you. However, everyone still buys their cigars from you because you are selling good quality cigars. So the big shop decides to declare cigars a loss leader, and sells them at a loss. You lose all your customers, and go out of business. The big store then sells cigars at standard price, and people now buy because there is no competition.

Big companies have the resources to compete unfairly against small companies. Oversight is needed in case they are actually abusing their monopoly power.
Along these notes: a recommendation engine for food called "WhatShouldIHaveForDinner.com" that takes all your favorite foods and suggests recipes and/or local restaurants (go to Crazy Ivan's Ukrainian Cafe and order the borsch), keeping dietary issues in mind.
And it's so much better to go "Oh, this is so much easier than C!" rather than "Oh, this is so much worse than Python!" later on. It also tends to be easier to learn a new, easier way to do something in a new language than figure out the harder way with the easy way looming on the top of your mind.
I do the same thing, and store them in iPhoto. I sometimes take screenshots of an entire page, if I like the layout of the overall thing, but I also frequently just take screenshots of individual page elements: comments, a sidebar, a well done chart, etc.

My iPhoto library is synced to my iPod Touch, so I always have that library of design elements with me.
I found it very interesting
This seems much better than the horrendous New Yorker digital reader.
justin.tv is great for sports broadcasts. I don't get cable but I want to watch the Lakers in the playoffs. So I watch it on justin.tv (I find the link to the game on atdh.net). It's very useful for me.
uh, Bono is a columnist for the NY Times.
That's silly. Imagine a country with a single oil producing company. However, this oil companies decides that it will sell oil at 3-4 times the standard price. There is no competition, so people have to buy at that price, making this oil company a huge profit.

According to your plan, these resources (several billions of dollars) should be invested by the government to create a viable competitor. But the other oil company will battle this every step of the way - it can poach all the quality people who work at the other company, it will sign exclusive deals with tanker companies and so on.

Oversight is not an option, it's a necessity. Companies should know that ethical competition is not just the right thing to do, it's also the law.
New D-Bus telephony API from Nokia and Intel
Give me a fucking break.

What's admirable is intelligent people making the world a better place.

Sad to see that modernist/postmodernist bullshit like this is taking over HN.
forget the functionality - I mean purely design. They have borrowed a lot of base-level design layout from Twitter.
I started with C, but from what I've heard, Scheme actually makes plenty of sense as a first language. There's a Marvin Minsky quote, "Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days." The "complexity" of Lisp comes from our preconceptions from different languages (Minsky presumably said that when Fortran was more in vogue).
Build Something People Would Pay For-  Here's a Good Head Start
In Tokyo, they hire an army of people to canvas houses and apartments and collect a modest fee (about 10-20 dollars) per household to support public TV. The general population just pays, but many expats make up some excuse or feign ignorance until they go away.

If Ireland really needs the TV license revenue, they will have to start charging per head, rather than per device. Per device sales, just mean that companies will stop selling neat things in your country and the black/grey market will thrive, at the expense of consumers.
> Scheme and Lisp programmers who are biased

Because we know what it is like to work in a medium that can be understood, behaves correctly, isn't peppered with inconsistencies, and does not force you to clutter your brain with pointless trivia. Call that bias if you will.

> the quirkiness of many compiler systems out there will drive good engineeers to simplify that process

There is no evidence that this is happening or will ever happen. Almost everyone shuts up, bends over, and spreads wide to accept whatever level of pointless complexity the system they are forced to work with has. Programming systems are continuously growing more Byzantine and idiotically laden with accidental complexity as feature is piled on top of feature. This is how we got Python, C++, Java, C#, et al.
It's useful only if you are using Wordpress blog software...
Because popularity == crap. By definition if it's super popular it can't possibly be anything other then a lowest common denominator.

Except that occasionally things which are much better then average become popular without comprising their art, and then people still think popular == crap, even when it's not.
What's wrong with a web interface to the home PC? Or would that be too simple?
If your customer wants to use your product for illegal activity, it's wise to avoid helping them.
I wouldn't have even noticed that it rhymes without the whitespace.
Yes, but only a small percentage of those are actionable... You would need to do a lot of filtering.

Very neat idea though. It's like using twitter for market research. If twitter could be intelligently analyzed for that purpose, I bet that's something people would pay for.
Can't say what the demographics are of the ones who completed these HITS, but of the people that complete the polls, something like 80%+ are US.
i do the same but save them in LittleSnapper http://pstam.com/i/66d19e0143126fadb748220c5c642ef1.png
U2 repackages cool for sale - they do not generate new cool of their own. Same as Madonna.

Also there's that business of Bono sheltering his own money offshore while campaigning for more aid spending from taxpayers.
They've done a great job porting this to Air. The Fl(ash|ex) platform has improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years, a kudos to both the NYT and Adobe.

Performance is a bit sluggish on my machine, but overall it feels pretty nice. There aren't many new features over 1.0 (having the crossword is great, and obviously cross-platform is super-important). I'm looking forward to future iterations.

(Full disclosure: I worked on the NYT Reader 1.0 back when I was at MSFT)
Now just think - if it was open source you could just examine the code, rather than making roundabout tests to conclude that it's probably a feature. Fancy that.
Bait much?

Isn't Arrington supposed to be a lawyer? Don't you remember the actual Microsoft case? It wasn't about whether MSFT was a monopoly. It was about the overt predatory actions MSFT undertook to maintain that monopoly. The MSFT action was a "when, not if" situation; MSFT blatantly strangled the browser market using their OEM monopoly.

The only fact TechCrunch has to marshall here is that Google is big and has commanding market share. But so does Apple in music, Microsoft in Office software, Intel in X86, Blackboard in educational software, Monsanto in GM crop strains, Bloomberg in financial terminals, several private health insurers in regional markets, and I can keep clicking through Google News results to generate more of these.
Ask HN: Review our startup, Browseology
http://www.browseology.com

Browseology is real time collaborative browsing over Twitter. You can
instantly connect to your friends and experts to browse and shop
together with no installation required for anyone. Browseology is
completely web based. And when we say collaborative browsing we mean
you're actually seeing what your friend sees in real time. When they
move their mouse to a product, you see it. When they type in a search
term, you see it. And when they go to a product, you also go to that
product. It's a really fun way to shop together.
One problem with orthogonal persistence is that the mechanisms it replaces (e.g. databases) are not purely for persistence but also for communication with other applications. But persistence is the only thing orthogonal persistence can do. If you don't examine how it is used, a database appears to be for persistence.

Don't look for the definition; look for the use.

You can't solve a problem unless you understand it. An important purpose of a prototype is to help understand the problem, not solve it.
Apple was the first mover in this space. The iPod was the first music player to use the 1.8" hard drives that changed music players from being either 128MB flash devices or items too large for one's pocket. Add to that the wheel and you just had a much better device. And others have still yet to match it - even if they're open.

Sure, Sony's backwards approach meant that companies like SanDisk were able to get ahead of them, but their devices just don't have the interface that Apple's iPod has. And Sony has been really old-fashioned in their approach to their devices recently. Where Apple has used new technology to create better interfaces, Sony just hasn't kept up.

The issue today is that no one (except possibly Palm with its soon to be released webOS) has been able to match Apple's interfaces, never mind exceed them. And with Apple's volume, it's hard for a competitor with a poor interface to undercut Apple on price. So you get items like the Dell DJ which costs the same, but isn't as well designed.

For Sony to regain its position in portable electronics, it really needs to figure out the interface that will make people's lives better than Apple's (or at least just as good). Palm might be doing that by equaling Apple's touchscreen design and going a little further with its "cards" metaphor, but that's a bit of hopeful thinking on my part (as much as I like Apple, I like competitive markets even better).
So far it appears that you and I are swimming against a wave of populism on HN. Oh well, this too shall pass...
Rationale and rational are different words. Just in case that wasn't a typo. :)
I agree that learning a new design application can be done, and is even a worthwhile activity. However, I don’t think that knowing a software suite equates to being good at design.

Knowing the tools is a part of the package, yes, but there is more to design than knowing how to use the software. A designer with an eye for aesthetics and an understanding of both your product and your target users can be a very valuable asset.
I tried them for a logo once (side-project). The candidates I received were, for the most part, amateurish and weak.

I'd worry the web designs coming from there would be the same.
China Plans To Send Police To Taiwan?
If you're interested in our actual traffic, rather than poorly scaled charts with cherrypicked start and end dates, please examine the real data at:

http://www.quantcast.com/justin.tv#traffic
It's a preview launch right now, and we have a ton of features that we're going to release soon, but we're looking out for your feedback to validate our ideas and give us suggestions!
I don't understand why a proprietary reader when the browser is the best reader out there and html the best format.

Want to allow off-line reading? Give the user the full version as a single html file so it can be saved and read anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Thumbs down.
So, why don't you learn assembly first? Better, why don't you start with logic circuits?
Abstract concepts are imperfect. Chip design isn't exactly programming because the final product requires fabrication, no matter how well you can fake it with simulators or FPGA's. (In situations where FPGA's are useful in deployment, I guess "chip design" would become "programming an FPGA" and you would get the benefits of quick building that programming gives you.) Likewise, we can design an airplane in CAD and put it through a computer simulator, which might allow a more programming-like design experience. But "engineering" implies that it's a separate step from manufacturing or assembly, whereas a programmer goes from idea to built parts within hours (not the whole system but definitely a subset of it).
No, the world wouldn't be better off without Google.

And since Google isn't requiring you to load an ActiveX control off their front page that resets your browser home page every time you try to do a Google search, we probably don't have to worry about antitrust actions against their natural monopoly.

When they do decide to add that "feature" to their home page, we aren't going to be asked to do without Google. Just the management team that decided to violate US antitrust law.
Yup, was literally a random idea I had after I said on twitter: I'd pay for " ". Maybe build a site where people can flag things and after x amount of flags it goes away or a moderator messes with it.
s/beaurocrasy/bureaucracy/g

I know it's nitpicky but it struck me as a really odd oversight in an otherwise very strong piece of writing.
Can we just conclude that the Ruby/Rails/Whatever community is just a big loose and move on? I mean, really guys...

I have no direct connection to Ruby (thank god). But the lead/prominent people seem super immature and mostly unskilled, and half of every programming news aggregator on earth is filled with ruby/rails-drama every 3 days. Just... "ugh"...

Can we all just use python or lisp and give up on these guys already? Ruby really isn't that great, frankly (reminds me of the worst, not the best, parts of perl, smalltalk and lisp combined).

Maybe I'm being too judgemental anout the language -- but at least invent a new Ruby-derivative called "Muby" :-), and put people in charge who (a) know how to write code and (b) are not drama-seeking children.
I don't know why technical interviews/recruiting are such a fascinating subject. I think it is related to the fact that they are such an imperfect mechanism for finding employees/partners.

Well known cliches like the 10x more effective programmer and the Microsoft/Google methods of recruiting add to the mysticism.

This particular article has some good tips though I'm not sure how practical it is. Modern recruiting uses extensive keyword searching. Unless your goal is to weed out some of that, this kind of job posting may not get too many hits.
Science fiction was not over-optimistic. Rather, we have lost the will to explore:

http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html
And that's one way of doing it that resembles engineering.

Just as engineering can resemble programming, programming can resemble engineering. But trying to imitate what engineers do limits what you can do as a programmer. Programmers also work on multiple levels of abstraction in a way that I imagine to be somewhat different from engineers.
Particularly the 'month' view (button directly above the graph on that page).
Who are you arguing with that says Google should be taken to court for charging too much or too little?

Microsoft required their OEMs to install and highlight Internet Explorer, their free replacement for a ~$30 startup product, and was then shown in court to have built a deep, complex strategy for exploiting their OS and licensing agreements to undermine their competition.

Even then, they might not have lost had they shown more respect for the courts.
BitTorrent is just a protocol. It's not illegal. It's just a protocol to transfer data. Also used to distribute linux distros amongst other legal uses.
OP here.. Thank you to everyone for the feedback.
This might be my youth showing, but to me, this looks like a browser customized to the NYT... nice, but why not let it be just another tab in Chrome?

Also, where are the social features? I want to solve the crossword puzzle faster than my friends, and post to my facebook profile how quickly I did it. I want to be able to share/discuss the stories with those friends, also - that's one of the reasons why I read them.

Aside from that, this is just a pretty redesign of the layout... not much to see, moving along.
Isn't your argument just a slippy slope toward anarcho-capitalism? The workings of the legal system are too complex and error-prone for us to regulate things? It takes a long time to litigate environmental cases too. Should Dow be allowed to dump carcinogens into our rivers?
And also clearly illegal, they don't have the rights for that type of broadcast. It can't be advertised against and is the only content that people actually watch, two bad omens for JTV.
That's called reductio ad absurdum.

Perhaps C offers a sweet spot of being able to accomplish something with minimal effort, but still gaining a deep understanding of what the computer is actually doing.
Basically the equation you are advocating goes as follows:

1. Larry creates something immensely valuable for the world.

2. Through innovation, Larry is able to sell it for a fraction of its earlier price, or even to give it away for free.

3. At some point, Larry decides he wants to put an ActiveX control on the homepage, lowering its value to you.

4. You advocate stealing Larry's company at this point, or using force to coerce Larry into doing what you want him to do, even though objectively speaking, you are still better off, even with the ActiveX control, than if Larry had never existed. Or at worst, he's done no harm to you, compared to the state in which he didn't exist.