skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
apple isn't doing their own manufacturing, they outsourced that years ago.
Apple is a design & marketing company, much like Fisker. (sure they have some of their own 'flagship' stores, but I doubt the majority of Macs/ipods/iphones are purchased through these outlets.
The syntax for this is quite nice.

call_me(^int (int x, int y) { return x + y; });

I like it quite a bit better than the proposed c++ lambda syntax.

[](int x, int y) -> int { return x + y; }

The ^ is very ananogous to *. You could declare the above function call_me() with something like this

void call_me(int (^fun)(int x, int y))
{
fun(fun(4,5), fun(3,6));
}

which is quite "C like".
Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Create An Ebook Today
Ebooks are a popular type of web content which Internet surfers like to peruse and buy on a constant basis. They come in many different forms and are written about almost any topic you could possibly think of.
Wondrous, curious, and bizarre locations around the world
FriendFeed Blocked In Iran, The Service’s Most Active Region
You entered a fake username and password in the registration form?
There was a time when nobody but the IBMs of the world had use for computers.
Google can afford to pay for them. That's the reason the artists are pissed.

It's like a millionaire asking a homeless bum for change, claiming that the "exposure" of being a nice guy will earn the bum a few more donations.
>The front page is filler.

They should change that.

I filled out some questions and then when I signed up, my history was lost. Disappointing.
Gosh, what a total content-jack. might as well link directly to the source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/15/take-your-design-...
Do you mean as founders or employees? True, most founders are men, but I know plenty of women in the tech startup scene. In fact, I've been going out of my way to meet women not in the scene because they have a different perspective.
This post has nothing to do with bashing women in startups or tech. I AM one! Tara and I represented our views and desire to see more of a collective voice of women in startups especially in Boulder while we also said, we are a powerful and amazing group.

Whenever I spend time with other women in tech the level of support and comradery feels good--so why don't we have a medium or forum to continue this support?

Whenever I attend a tech event (which I'm sure to make time for out of my busy schedule) I notice I'm part of the small percentage of women that show up. This says something about the community and I'm glad Jo was able to highlight that and begin an interesting dialogue.
I'm torn. I hate those annoying quizzes, but at least this site is doing something useful with the results. They are collecting demographic information, building statistical models, etc. To me, it's kind of like reCAPTCHA. If you're going to have a necessary evil (CAPTCHAs or people addicted to silly quizes), you might as well "help humanity" in the process...

I'm also quite impressed with the presentation. It seems like a really solid app.
Twitter Usernames VS Email Addresses
Telling users to use a different browser is pretty anoying. When designing websites I try to get the design as close as possible in IE6.
If you really want to tell people to upgrade, I'd suggest Pushup:
http://www.pushuptheweb.com/
Catch & Release (another city recommendation guide)
I was kind of curious about the T400 so I tried to spec one out close to the MBP 15" and I have to say Apple's machine holds up surprisingly well. I was expecting a much larger price delta but if you match the two machines it's about $100-$150 difference. T400 obviously wins on customization and, IMO, the MBP wins on design and software. (Vista Business + Norton AV // OSX + iLife)

Back to your core point though of this reviewer ignoring the competition I think part of that may simply be that Lenovo does a really poor job advertising their computers whereas Apple does a really good job at it. I kind of doubt it's any pent up Apple bias simply because this site primarily covers PC hardware. Most likely the reviewer just had no clue the T400 could be configured to, more or less, match the MBP 15"
Spoken like someone who's been there. My first business had fantastic NPVs and enjoyed great economics. Only problem was that it took 6-8 months payback period. That put some serious hurt in our growth. The business is doing nicely and makes money but I will never look at acquisition costs the same way again.
I have homeless 'neighbors', and in my very limited experience, they are mostly alcoholics. Some of them may have been pushed into the situation by circumstance, but they don't seem to be too anxious to change. I've spoken with one of them about changes he could make to improve his situation, and even tried to give encouragement and help, but he never seems to take action. It is all very sad.
The only reason Tesla is still in business is a massive $350 million U.S. government loan. Tesla is just as bankrupt as Chrysler and GM but has better PR and lobbyists. They are exhibit A in America's new crony capitalism-- US taxpayers give a loan while a bunch of millionaire investors and Daimler get all of the upside.

http://www.redherring.com/Home/25831
exactly -- and what self-respecting person would "run" Detroit in any other way than by leading his company to earn market share?

Sounds like he's begging for a cookie.
The companies as a whole, or the accuracy of individual parts of their self-description? It would be very interesting to have the latter.
Not a billionaire yet (I think the NASA deal with SpaceX will help):

Elon Musk — Net Worth: $328 Million
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk - More sources »
Statistically speaking what statistics are you referring to?

More on point, though, because it's "been argued 1000 times before" are you suggesting that it's best for consumers to just shut up and take it? How about you speak out when you're unhappy and encourage others to do the same. Whether or not you're going to change an AT&T policy is not the point. There are other ends that are just as good. If apple felt that more iPhones would be sold, and at a higher margin, if they opened it up to an alternative carrier in the US market, they'd do it in a second once their initial AT&T contract expires.

Further, you can buy a data card for your laptop. It's not like nobody is using their networks to connect to the network. And my point is that they're doing it right now, this very moment, and they're blocking BT and restricting other traffic.

Their policies make it very clear that they don't intend their laptop connect cards as a users primary connection, even if their marketing doesn't.
Carrier restrictions are enforced at the platform level, though. If you have a data plan and the OS lets you push bits from your PC thru your phone, it all looks the same to your carrier.
Shudda, wudda, cudda, bokonist. (ie, counterfactuals and supposition are a poor-man's way to argue history) What if my grandmother had wheels? Would that make her a trolley?

I'd love to go down point by point with all of your earlier examples. Sounds like fun. But we're already 47 levels deep in this thread, and we're probably the only two who care about it.

Suffice it to say that you have basically two choices. You can argue some line of Hegelism, that truth is relative and over time the dialetic of history advances certain societies that are more fit. If this is the case, then the proof is in the pudding: looking back over the last couple of hundred years should give you the survivor/evolved societies, which are, badda boom badda bing, the democracies.

Or you can argue some line of reductionism: there are true things that don't change. Societies that are based on these truer things do better than those which aren't. I believe this is more of both of our lines of argument. But even in this case, we're still back to survivorship: no matter what their great qualities, aristocratic societies have consistently underperformed in national defense. Indeed, if anything European history is a prime example of the various wars and conflicts all caused because somebody's cousin claimed a title and somebody's uncle didn't want them to get it. Thomas Paine did a wonderful job of demolishing the idea of kingship.

There is no doubt that some people would naturally be able to do certain things better than others. This is self-evident. Where we cross paths is the idea of a stratified society in which a ruling class assumes those roles for life due to blood relations or other unearned criteria. In my opinion, a rotating system based on popular support carries all the benefits of both aristocracy and democracy at the same time. That old representative republic idea still makes the most sense. If you want to add a layer of quasi-permanent public service bureaucracy, on it fine, but we're just splitting hairs at that point.
yeah charset conversion would also break dkim/domainkeys
Free Business Idea:Time-based Barter Economy Targeted at Entrepreneurs
The overwhelming majority of users never replace the battery on any system anyway, hence as I said it is not really a downside to them. The minority that do is perpetually shrinking as individual battery life increases.

You can not get more runtime by carting around batteries

If you insist on the batteries being internal, then yes, but if like the parent post you are already willing to spend the money and cart around the weight, you can just buy one (or more) of the many external battery packs on the market. The portion of users for which even this is unacceptable compared to carting around 2-3 spare internal batteries must be staggeringly small.
Definitely an idiot. This was way back in the 90's. Windows was simply not an acceptable substitute for a server operating system back then (though it might be today, for some classes of problem). I'm actually not able to find Max Levchin's deeper technical discussion of the issue (which I remember being a pretty compelling case, and I read it a couple of times back then), but I did find several references from others discussing it, including pg:

PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows—even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead. - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

I think what is simple is that Musk ignored technical reality based on a personal whim, and seemingly let personal conflicts get in the way of sound technical decision-making for a multi-million (soon to be billion) dollar business.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516276
How To Improve In Digital Photography
And the twitter feed is here: http://twitter.com/aliceandkev
Two comments about this:

1) I have one of these "minimalist" business cards on my desk. From a recent tradeshow. It has a name and and email address (maybe a phone number, it's on my desk at work). I have no clue why I have it or what the relevance is. I looked up the domain name, it's a personal site I think (I was doing this last week). No idea if this guy wanted a job, was a consultant, had $1M of business waiting for me. I'm also not going to take the time to call or email and ask "who are you and why do I have your card again?"... IMO, unless you're a fucking spectacular dude, put some info on your damn card.

2) The difference between domain names (and thereby email and websites) is that you can own and control them. I'm not putting my Twitter ID on my personal card because I still have no guarantee that Twitter will still exist (or that I will still care about it, the novelty of Twitter is fading for me) in another year. I certainly don't see the value in directing someone to a 3rd party site out my control for them to contact me. And the process of someone finding me on Twitter, following me and/or "@"ing me, me seeing the message, having a meaningful conversation in 140 car burst, etc, just seems like a clusterfuck to me.
The carriers state that tethering increases data usage, that's the logic behind preventing users from doing it without permission.

O2 stated as much in plain english recently. http://twitter.com/o2/statuses/2088467994

That's why tethering plans are commonly sold with a GB limit and phone only plans are not. But really it's common sense, you're much more likely to consume bandwidth heavy stuff on your computer. Also many of the same services will use more bytes on your laptop. YouTube on the iPhone is low-quality and low-bandwidth, visit on your computer tethered to your iPhone and you're using way more bytes.
Please do use lightboxes _if_ your site will not work on that browser. A perfect example of when you want to interrupt the the natural flow! I've found ie6-upgrade-warning works well- http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/ for what you might be trying to do.

Most importantly, look at how many of your users are using IE6, or anything other than FF. Will the better experience for your FF (or simply IE6+) users outweigh losing almost all of your IE6 users? Keep in mind that many people who use IE6 now simply can't upgrade because of hardware or administrative constraints.
I wonder how this will impact the rtmpdump DMCA issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622294
allowing large influxes of low IQ people is detrimental to a socialist economy since producers have to pony up for each one. In a capitalist economy where people are expected to pull their own weight, sure it would work.
Well, right. That's how you go about creating an organism.

The fact is, there were no bacteria that did what his bacteria does (degrade plastic quickly.) Now there is, as a result of his intention and actions.

I'd call that creation.
If there are no features and no GUI to explore without having contacts added, how are you going to introduce and retain new users? This idea appears similar to something I have been working on. Does the service compile data and statistics for local events, activities, and locations? Perhaps new users could explore this aggregate data before adding contacts. The services you mention such as Twitter and Facebook both allow users to explore the application without adding contacts.
Often after a restore, update or jailbreak I've seen visual voicemail not work until I've dialed in via phone (hold the 1 button on the keypad) and/or left myself a voicemail. It's always come back for me, though.
Curious why so many products are crappy?
New is extremely important in art. If people weren't willing to give something a shot because it's the new, it would be impossible for debut art to get a foothold, and as a result the old stuff wouldn't be as good because we wouldn't recognize and reward new artists.

Processing new releases into our culture is the way that we form that culture in the first place and make progress.

If we don't keep an eye out for new voices, we'll be stuck with the old ones forever. It's really hard to break through as a new arrival, why would you want to make it even harder?
Centralized systems scale up.

Decentralized systems scale out.

There is a very big difference that must be understood.

I've used Perforce and Team Foundation Server (which is a re-write of Source Depot which is based on Perforce). Each of these systems handle gigantic source trees with ease, but at what cost? No, it's not the local history or branching (as the author points out). The problem has much more to do with the cultural implications.

Most open source projects can be downloaded, configured, built, and installed with a series of commands resembling `wget`, `configure`, `make`, and `make install`. Giant proprietary trees usually grow crazy custom processes with makeshift tools and lots of domain specific hacks. Giant open source trees instead develop package managers and powerful overlord processes.

Google provides some excellent tree-wide tools in this vein (`gcheckout`, `blaze build`, etc). However, acquisitions and constant growth are assaulting the integrity of their beautiful master tree. Oh, and Google's entire company-wide tree is only a fraction of the size of Windows, or Office, or DevDiv (Visual Studio, .NET Platform, Etc). My understanding is that many individual developers and teams at Google are using Git on their directories until they need to feed back in to the rest of the company.

What we need is MORE decentralized tools that work better together. We need to develop tools which, by virtue of their nature, encourage componentization and separation of concerns. Bug trackers, code review tools, build servers, test servers, deployment processes, etc. need to support decentralization. GitHub is a PERFECT example of how to do this: it's a centralized tool but that tool really is just a giant powerful overlord for a decentralized tool. It gets the best of both worlds while encouraging a culture of scaling out. Decentralized tools typically cater to the open source folks, but you need to cater to enterprise needs (which implies a minimal level of central control) to earn mass appeal.

Git forces you to have a small tree, so you are forced to build things in pieces. I think that's a good thing, but people who have big trees now can never ever get out. It's pretty much impossible because they, by definition, have too much code.
I'm surprised that the author of the article managed to make an entire essay without once referring to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Perhaps the simplest explanation of the SWH is "language cuts the grooves in which our minds move."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Lakoff has made this more popular and accessable to non-linguist with books like "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" (which I recommend reading, and the author mentioned briefly).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
Umm... I don't mean to be insensitive; but do these users use FriendFeed in English? Or is there already a Farsi version of FriendFeed?
I like continuous deployment and want to use it on a few websites I run.

However, it seems to depend on a large user set in order to "test deploy" the application to a subset of the user base.

Any thoughts on using this for projects with a small (< 1000) user base?
Think It,Act It,Become It - Startup company from 0-$100 million
I signed up and that appears to have fixed it.
Use a Windows Mobile phone?
To see whether you optimized your expected utility throughout your life.
A Plant That Thrives When Used as a Toilet
In the land of the bankrupt, the one-pennied man is rich.
I'd say it's pretty good considering how long it's been up. It'll only get better. I typed in 'price of fish' and it came up with a list of fish & chip shops. So not totally useless.
I actually don't have that much experience with Rails. I prefer Ruby over Python because of its flexibility -- Ruby doesn't force you to approach problems in a specific way just because the language designer decided that was the only way to do it.
It won't.

"To benefit customers who want to protect their content, the open RTMP specification does not include Adobe's unique secure RTMP measures, nor does the license that accompanies the specification allow developers to circumvent such measures."
I believe Friendfeed supports Farsi

http://www.webolobby.com/2009/05/friendfeed-is-now-available...
The ecological imperative of the one-child family is also better for children
> Lose points for misreading and putting words in my mouth. I said that, "engineering quality, not greater mass, would be the dominant safety factor for the buyer." It is the prevalence of large passenger vehicles that makes greater mass an issue in North America.

Lose points for continuming to assert something after being told of counter examples.

Trucks exist. So do overpass supports. All other things being equal, mass and distance helps. Bigger vehicles provide more of both.

But, let's not stop there.

> I wouldn't see so many small single women driving around alone in Suburbans, Expeditions, and other SUVs if there wasn't an on-road arms race here in terms of vehicle mass.

You're assuming something about them that's false. The fact that someone is driving alone doesn't mean that said someone always drives alone.

Do you really think that they should drive the kids to {wherever}, leave the car and take the bus home and then take the bus back to pick them up?

Besides, I've shown the arithmetic - it rarely makes sense to buy an extra car to save gas - the other costs dwarf the savings.
"On Han unification: the Japanese reluctance to this is partly because they're being told "Some of your national literature needs to die so that our data standard can live. Deal." and partly because they're being told "What's with all the resistance, you xenophobic bastards, get with the effing program already.", generally by people who they perceive as not quite getting the issue."

As I understand it, the story of Han unification is quite a bit more complex than that, and not nearly so one-sided as you make it out to be. See this article (which seems rather balanced in its treatment) for an example:

http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html
I volunteer for a homeless shelter. The sad thing is many homeless share the dual burden of mental illness.

This is an old but good News.YC thread on the situation of homelessness:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116079
Markdown in webpy templates
Apple’s WWDC-Closing ‘Fuck You’ to iPhone Developers
article says

> changes that school districts quietly made to encourage student participation, often involving grade-based incentives

so this is cheating but by local districts not statewide.

they are making their kids look better to colleges, when equally skillful, intelligent, and hard working to kids from other places.
Ah, but then he probably used to be. Source: the opening line in this interview claims that he's a billionaire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onajosm9PWo
"The data show a much sharper rise in Virginia than elsewhere. From 1995 to 2007, the average high school GPA of enrolled freshmen in the commonwealth rose from 3.27 to 3.56, an increase of 9.9 percent, or 0.79 percent a year. In the national sample, by comparison, the average GPA grew to 3.49 from 3.28, a rise of 6.4 percent or 0.5 percent a year."

I'd be interested in seeing a table of all states rates of GPA change for the given period. I checked the paper, but it doesn't provide it. Without that, this information is impossible for me to evaluate.
Well, my classical music (e.g. Beethoven 9th, Mozart Magic Flute that kind of thing) is too exciting, actually. What's yours?
Agree to 2) - also see our recent blog article:

http://iwantmyname.com/blog/2009/06/i-want-my-name-or-how-yo...
Ask HN: what opensource tools (bin or web) do you use to manage your expenses?
Feature boasting and clever ways you use your solution is encouraged for discussion.
in this vein

Up vs. out -- once again, software is not only a technological artiface, but a cultural one as well.
I wouldn't surprised if visual voicemail alone has saved me enough time to justify the cost.
> I'd like to start programming. What starting points

The only starting point is writing a program.

There are two important factors in writing a program.

(1) How easy is it to write said program and (2) How much do you want to write said program.

Most of the comments are centered on (1) and they're all good.

However, (2) is what makes the difference.