skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Automatic upgrades stop is only one switch in preferences away. I use it to preserve iOS versions I have to test with.

About rollbacks, I'm told that this will leave the baseband modem (not downgradable) in a version not tested with main OS. I can imagine Apple (or any corporation) not willing to support it (if it's true, it seems reasonable, but I really don't know).
It can be done, btw, only it's not easy, not for end-users, and, AFAIK, must be planned before upgrade (I know many people that did it).
I'd still say the syntax is C-like, the same was I would argue python has a C like syntax. Braces, and semicolons are there for the parser not for people.

I'm curious to see how much traction this gets. Its certainly more appealing to me than rust, or even go. Hopefully usage of C libraries is pretty easy, since I feel like thats always the missing piece in a new language.
Agreed on this. Lou Reed had a greater influence on our culture than most people on HN will ever know. This wasn't just a celebrity dying. This is on par with Steve Jobs.
Assimilation means buying an iPhone 5s or 5c, not upgrading an old one.

Geeze, that was easy.
There's also a cool, recent exploit in Super Mario World speed runs that uses similar RAM corruption techniques to "beat" the game in less than 3 minutes. (more details here: http://minimaxir.com/2013/03/127-yoshis-in-slot-6/ )
Unit tests can go a long way to helping both gain and retain understanding of what a codebase does. Context switching topics is an important life skill. A work place that's free from distractions would be good, but that's not always possible.
Given the state of today's technology, I'm kind of surprised that this viewpoint would be expressed in such absolute terms. Here are a few companies I can think of in which "build first" seemed to permeate the enterprise at the very start:

- Google

- Facebook

- Twitter

- Chatroulette

- Minecraft
Suspicious that this made it to the top with almost no comments.
Great article! I especially like the comment below which is very true in our experience (W '13):
YC: What’s been the most surprising thing about YC?

"How much everyone really cared about us. You have a lot of mentors and friends and supporters who are all helpful, but the YC partners had this astronomical degree of kindness toward us."
From what I've heard, the overlapping technology was there as proven by its use in drop-down menus; the designers of the first version of Windows just thought tiling was a better way to go.
Apple has started to do that with iCloud [0] and to a lesser extent, AirDrop [1]. But aside from Apple hardware, iCloud only supports Windows laptops and desktops — no official Linux, Android, or Blackberry support.

[0]: https://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

[1]: http://www.macworld.com/article/2048737/get-to-know-ios-7-ai...
FizzBuzz solved using only bit twiddling
A thought to that might be to overlay dragons, fairies, etc... over the image from kids. (taken from a webcam?)
That does not make any sense. How is Gecko a plugin?
This is such an asinine argument against loanable funds theory and is equivalent to saying, "Actually, it's the other way around. People drive their cars first. Only then do they worry about the amount of gas they have in their tank." You see the same kind of nonsense from MMTers who use their confused understandings of accounting identities to justify their policies. In addition, the notion that entities that have excessive amounts of wealth, ie they have accumulated capital through successful investments, would be less likely to put their money to good use is silly. It's not capital accumulation that leads to bubbles. Historically, it's been caused by an influx of money not supported by production due to currency debasement, precious metals stolen from the new world flooding into the Holland, various precious metal rushes, excessive printing of paper currency or bank money, or suppression of interest rates.
>maybe this is a good excuse for me to learn some Haskell

I'm already learning Coq, so this is kinda the thought that went through my mind.
Complaint #1: Colleges are not training for the skills that I need. Everyone we hire comes out of college completely lacking the skills we need to be successful. Colleges are failing at their jobs.

This is a serious problem, badly exacerbated by the typical programmer hiring process. I think it can be summed up like this: employers want people who just graduated from college ten years ago.

Two huge factors here.

First - employers want the kind of skills that typically take as much as a decade to develop even in entry level hires, but programmers are often hired based on whiteboard interviews that essentially amount to an oral exam on data structures and algorithms. The way this is handed in reality is that experience programmers typically need a few weeks to re-load this information in "exam ready" memory prior to interview. Essentially, we periodically study for exams when we look for jobs.

Second - if you get through your CS degree very quickly, with no time off, no graduate work, no stumbling and finding your career path, you'll be in your early 30s by the time you have this decade of experience [1]. Account for the more common winding path of life, and you're in your mid to late 30s. At this point, many programmers feel that their days may be numbered as technical workers [2].

[1] of course, you gain this gradually and become more valuable at each step - it's not like a light switches on at a magical 10 year mark.

[2] I've heard a lot that makes me worried and not all that worried about this. I think the attitude that people shouldn't be programming after 35 or 40 may be fading. Hope so.
Optimization by accepting side effects
I was watching that video and expecting an explanation along the lines of "If I tap the c-pad, then b really fast at just the right time" and being met with an explanation that shows an intricate working knowledge of the game....it was impressive to say the least.

Wow. That guy is a hacker. Maybe he is only a hacker of this one game, I don't know. But, this is a video that deserves to be linked by HackerNews.
Dujiangyan Irrigation System
Wasn't Dileep George part of Numenta?
What if morse code became a programming language?
Very cool stuff. I'm personally more interested in functional languages these days, but there's still a lot that imperative languages have to offer (duh).

As a huge fan of C, I nonetheless am not a huge fan of its syntax, outside of C itself. I'm glad that there are some who have realized that you can do efficient imperative systems programming in a language without curly braces :) Not that that alone is a reason to use the language, but all in all it seems very promising.

Between this, Go, Rust and D, there seems to be an excellent crop of new-breed imperative languages which are simultaneously emphasizing efficiency, safety, ease of use and productivity, to varying degrees. It would be great to see these languages mature into legitimate alternatives to C/C++.
"a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine"

For your own sake, I hope you get more real-world experience before making investment decisions or building technology to sell. To you, somehow the existence of a massively profitable, multi-billion dollar company must be evidence of people's irrationality and not an unmet need.
I've seen it happen quite a bit with some of the more popular bloggers here, but this one definitely seemed a little suspicious.
and how many build first and solve a problem no one has?
Is this really a one-size-fits-all advice because I always seem to be presented with it as being such. Clearly there must be edge cases where this advice doesn't apply (?).
“Microsoft made preemptive multitasking a core feature of their flagship operating system in the early 1990s when developing Windows NT 3.1 and then Windows 95. It was later adopted on the Apple Macintosh by Mac OS 9.x” [1]

You’re right about Win95 (and Win98 and ME) not having true memory protection, but when comparing MacOS and Windows back then MacOS’ lack of memory protection was always mentioned.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking#Preemptiv...
Cutting real wages is in no way the intended desirable effect of inflation. Inflation is a disincentive to sittin on imaginary cash, am incentive to productive activity/investment.

In an inflationary stimulus theory, wages rise with inflation, and cash-rich spend cash to move a worker to produce.
I like Yahoo.

My ISP uses their mail service as their web mail access. Through many updates to Yahoo's web mail app, I always neglected not to update and was able to continue using my more than 10 year old mail interface, until recently when I finally decided to agree to update.
Don't give up on DNSSEC just yet. You can use DLV (DNSSEC Look-aside Validation) if your registrar doesn't support it yet:

https://dlv.isc.org/
All the other companies I listed have had either successful exits, large fundraising rounds, or a successful IPO. David's company is much newer and doesn't meet that bar yet.
Dear Employees: We don't actually think millennials are lazy and spoiled. But employing people is hard, and we make mistakes too. It would be great if there was a way forward other than us firing lists of grievances back and forth at each other.

We agree that a fix to this pain point would be valuable. Create it and maybe we'll come work for you.
Another way to look at this is that iOS is the least hacker friendly platform.
Probably Scala/Play, but I would spend time learning and using both.

Here are job trends for these languages:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Groovy%2C+Grails%2C+Scala&...
Sometimes you need a demo to gain customer attraction.
Apple offers two streams for any product - "good" and "perfect".

Tech support over a forum is "cheap" or "free". So they don't do it. This behaviour is perfectly consistent with everything else Apple does, and it protects their brand image that way - with Apple, you either get The Good Stuff or it doesn't exist. Forum-based support? Doesn't exist.

Which is one of the many reasons that I don't buy Apple products. Want Apple support? Pay for Apple Care. Don't like that kind of arrangement? Don't buy Apple.
Tons and tons of things make it to the top with no comments, I'm always curious as to why they are there and have 20 points (not sure of the accuracy of that) within 8-10 minutes but no comments.

Though this is just a delicious linkbait-y title so that probably helps it...
So you randomize instead of doing first come first serve. Everyone who got there orders in by the deadline gets an equal shot. You do verifiable randomness to prevent the exchange from messing with trade orders.

If you do a simple two phase system, you don't have to worry about the exchange leaking orders. You send in a cryptographically binding commitment to your order(this hides the order now, but prevents you from changing it later). After the time period is up, the exchange publishes a commitment to their randomized order of trades , then every party reveals their actual order. Then trades execute.
The iOS 7 progress bar looks like Hitler
A lot of successful things have been built before there was customers. Some people just enjoy building cool things and when they start don't really care about customers; Minecraft springs to mind.

Also, the quick rise of this is a bit suspicious.
Another comment pointed out that a lot of the js [1] has blocks like:

> DEVELOPED BY SURESH PALDIA

A quick search tells me that someone with that name works for Deloitte, so if I had guess, that's who KY contracted.

[1] https://kyenroll.ky.gov/Scripts/HBECommonUtility.js
POST geo/place endpoint deprecation
Really depends on the type of product, if you know it's something that the whole world would benefit from then maybe build first makes since, but if your targeting a niche market then for sure you want to get a barometer if your product is going to be needed and what the biggest pain points of those who would use it are.
Why would you want to keep your data "in the cloud", if the government uses the argument that as long as your data is on a 3rd party's servers, then it's not yours?
I never stop being surprised by just how far south everyone lives in Canada. London gets about 7 hours and 50 minutes of daylight on the shortest day; in Scotland it's less than 7 hours.
I know its a typical blog post... but this is the Lawrence Lessing. I hate to hype him up (especially since this post of his is just a "humble blog post" about one annoying issue), but Lawrence Lessing has a huge following.

Creator of Creative Commons, Rootstrikers, friend and lawyer of Aaron Swartz... Lawrence Lessing is a name that should be respected in every online community.

Again, this seems to be just one of the low-key blog posts that he makes, so don't assign it too much. But for those wondering "who the hell is this guy?"... well... you definitely should know him.
1. Pick an arbitrary financial ratio.

2. Compare today's median value at IPO to median value at IPO in 1999.

3. If today's median value is less than 1999's median value, there cannot be a bubble.

Interesting approach, but one that I would inevitably expect to create more pain than profit.
The speed demos archive has a lot of excellent speedruns: http://speeddemosarchive.com/
I think you mean semantics. Like nearly any imperative language, the code is structured as blocks of statements which are evaluated sequentially. This is semantics, and python and C are largely the same in this regard. However, syntactically, they are not the same.
People who, unlike a successful drug dealer, actually want to use their own product? I agree that if you are someone with desires not shared by the rest of society, you should probably go and talk to people and see what they desire...but it's also quite possible to think of something you and maybe some of your friends would use and have that be the guiding force in development. The problem with asking other people whether they'd like it, well [insert apocryphal story about Henry Ford and people wanting faster horses].

It's not either-or, it can be a mix. But it's not beyond the capacity of some hackers to hack on something they care about and, at the same time, have it be something that others will care about, unless all they're doing is trying to make a quick buck in the startup rush.
Right. If someone slips on ice on the sidewalk in front of a store, you don't ignore them and think, hey, the store owner is on the hook here; not my problem.

You help that person get up.

That doesn't absolve anyone of their rightful responsibilities, but it does make for a nicer world.
Didn't take long for that website to 503...
Lots, but at the end of the day it shouldn't mean that nobody should build first.
When they zoom in using the touchscreen - isn't that the digital zoom, not optical? If so, the last x10 seems not legit.
And why PasswordBox instead of 1Password?
It would, perhaps, but the problem is deciding between millions (or billions) of people -- if you recognize people by doing pair-wise comparisons, then even small error rates can quickly add up.
Not sure which part you mean, but the important bit for this thread is that even basic Excel formulas are black magic to non-techies, and that basic hacking skills can drive real business value. There are things you can do rather trivially, such as "Add 3 calendar months to this date, and if it's later than this other cell, color the cell red," which would be a) extremely helpful, and b) otherwise a task they'd have to hire an intern to calculate each week, for many companies in the $1-20 million a year range.

And this is just Excel formulas, let alone the ability to write some VBA that does calculations and draws a chart, or a script with a regex that cleans data files, or a basic app for data entry...

If it was the ISO certification you were interested in, there are many certifications related to manufacturing, food & drug, etc. These certify that your company meets various standards, regulations, quality procedures, documentation policies, tolerance assurances, etc. These can result in a ton of additional business, since many customers desire or require them, and losing them is also a big deal. The certifiers audit companies regularly, and having some pretty spreadsheets that show how you are continuously improving and ensuring your adherence to the regs can be very valuable!
Fun to see Cosmo on Hacker News. He's been getting a fair amount of attention recently, including an article on Yahoo!. If you're interested in seeing him exploit more video game glitches in the name of speedrunning, you can watch him on Twitch.tv at <http://twitch.tv/cosmowright>. He is one of the (and occasionally the single) best Wind Waker runners in the world. Right now he's concentrating on The Wind Waker HD.

If you liked the video in the article, you might also enjoy his commentary on a full Wind Waker run (nearly 5 hours):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u3djy6Ednc
Yeah, I don't think it's a one size fits all. However, if you can present a solution to a person's problem, and that solution does instantly resonate and it becomes obvious that such an app/website can exist to solve it, people will want it badly. -- and that becomes obvious.

I basically think it ties back to becoming an expert on the problem. Instead of the solution.
As others have pointed out, this isn't anything new. Apple has never been comfortable with public feedback and has pruned comments (and sometimes entire threads) from their discussions for as long as I can remember (and that's a pretty long time). Even when Apple was on-the-ropes in the mid-to-late 90s they behaved like "the Borg". Nothing has changed.
Always writing code will also make you a better developer.
How exactly does that contradict the headlines:
"Silicon Valley: Feel the Froth: Tech Valuations Stir Memories of 1999, but There Are Some Differences"?
I know it's a profoundly different area of the industry, but it's reasonably common practice in videogames (PC gaming, at least) for official spokespeople, even designers, and very occasionally developers, to engage with the community, on at least the general zeitgeist of its concerns.

ex: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/blizztracker/

And even in more "traditional" and supposedly conservative industries... I could find some references for you but I don't think I'd need to given how widely-covered some of these have been, of the customer support PR coups that have been achieved over social media in general (primarily Twitter and Reddit; at least in my personal experience). It is obviously less structured than an archived, time-ordered, hierarchical, and easily-searchable forum designed for permanence, and I don't have the slightest sense of the proportion of customer issues that go /un/-addressed in this manner.

But viewed through this lens... customer support is public politics. It's totally understandable that Apple would want to both maintain their image of aloofness from non-visionary matters, and deliberately avoid validating the existence of problems with their products in a public forum, which would also contradict a decades-long and painstakingly-crafted image. But it's also totally okay if the community or some segment of it makes a stink in the hopes of shifting the PR calculation.
Facebook wasn't "build first" in any appreciable sense. The prototype features were outlined in a well received editorial in the Harvard Crimson in December of 2003.

There was widespread outcry for the administration to build what Zuckerberg realized he could build faster.

Further, there were existing prototypes in house facebooks.

Source: user number under 10k
As we move more and more into a cashless society, ideas like this are just going to get more important. It's also very interesting explicitly turning giving money to the homeless into a personal donation, which seems to me has a different connotation than just giving somebody a couple of bucks.
And there’s not even a version in Google’s cache due to a restrictive robots.txt.
German court rules SAP Permission not requires to resell software
For every five or ten successful build-first companies, there are 10,000 failures. Please keep things in perspective.
Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality?
I understand that Hacker News is mostly targeted towards the startup crowd, but asking _hackers_ to have a business model before they write anything is completely backwards to me.

Hackers don't write code because they want to make lots of money. Hackers write code because they are hackers. Building a viable business on top of that code may be a nice side effect of this.
> Do you just mean "shared natural resources" as things like rivers, oceans, air, fossil fuels or does the argument really mean everything in existence because it presumably leveraged those things?

Generally, the theory behidn the argument you refer to is that everything in existence consists of two things:
1) Shared natural resources, and
2) The application of individual labor to shared natural resources.

So, everything that is constructed as "property" has at least has a component of shared natural resources being withheld from the commons, for which some duty is owed back to the commons. Even if the shared resource has little use value in its natural state, the act of denying others the right to apply their labor to it has a cost to the commons.

> For instance, suppose I pick up a rock which everyone agrees has almost no value. I chip at it with another rock for a week until it now is in a shape of some useful tool, furniture or art. In your ideal system, who owns the value created through my labor? Do all people have equal claim to the item because it started out as a rock which was a shared resource? Do I own it? Something else?

In any system which recognizes the existence of an extraction of resources from the commons as described previously, "ownership" trends to be qualified. Most likely, you would be (presuming that your extraction of the rock was within the rules governing the use of resources from the commons) the "owner" of the tool, but you would also owe a duty in exchange for both the permanent effects on the commons of altering the rock and the temporary effects of withholding the item from the commons. There are many ways this duty might manifest, but the most common would be various taxes on value or produced income.
Nice but where's Dark Castle? My disk won't fit in the slot.
I've always been mystified by the oddly specialized approaches that come across as a "one size fit all" claim.

Just like pure Agile, Waterfall, etc methods aren't complete solutions, we seem to have the tendency to try and redefine "good software development" every other month.

The most important thing is to do what works the best with your team; and even this varies from project to project. Sometimes coding out a half baked idea into a POC is better than spending hours on a whiteboard, just to get stuck at some unforeseeable roadblock as soon as the code hits the editor.

Sometimes, you need to hash out a problem on paper before devoting coding time. Proclaiming absolutes as gospel is a little dangerous.
Low comment count is frequently an indicator of quality on HN.

Contentious, heat-generating (as opposed to light-generating) discussions, often political and / or emotional in nature, tend to produce the most comments, and are the least useful to read or get involved in.
While I agree there are some bad examples of TLD abuse, the British Indian Ocean Territory is not so much a country as a military outpost. The native inhabitants were forcibly removed decades ago, and in the very unlikely event they were ever repatriated I think it's unlikely they would stick with the name "British Indian Ocean Territory". The TLD .io would essentially go unused if foreign registration weren't allowed.
That's not usually the best way to think about charity overhead. Check out this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...
He has some good points but the general tone is a bit too harsh imo.