skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "what? surely you just use the new features as and when they become available and always use the oldest API as a 'base level'? this is the same for all platforms... including iOS - if you approach backward compatibility as something you seriously want this is not even a problem. even given the quick uptake on updates in the iOS world, supporting just iOS 7 seems a bit nuts to me.... maybe i get the wrong end of your stick though."

In iOS often newer versions of the operating system make certain functionality much easier to develop due to the new API's that are added or existing API's that are extended or improved. I personally don't find backwards compatibility hugely important, I just want to provide enough backwards compatibility to serve 85+% of the market. I think in the coming months we'll reach that stage for iOS 7, so for the current app I'm working on will target iOS 7+, that is if I can convince our client this is a good idea.

Sadly, for Android I'm likely required to target versions 3.2+, which means some functionality might not work as well or look as great compared to what's possible in the newest versions of Android, especially if I find myself using the lowest common denominator of API's. I don't like to do extra work just for a small part of the audience, so that is something I'll try to avoid (perhaps some people will hate me for this?).
Each person makes his own decision about this, but some prefer to use "they". To each his own.

Everyone has his own reason for choosing a particular pronoun. Some people do it because they think it is less sexist. Some people do it because they want to be part of the in-group, and they see others doing it. Some people are personally offended by the generic "he" and want to refer to both genders so they use the singular "they" or the awkward "he/she".
Hey :)

Canvas one.
Brit inventors' gravity powered light ships out after just 1 year
If you look at history, I believe you won't be able to find any example of flexible automation that can replace about all kinds of manual labor at the same time.

Anyway, at all the examples of automation you'll find in history, you'll see lots and lots of people losing their job and starving to death because of them (more people the more prevalent is the change). At the long term, society gets into an equilibrium, at the short term, things are quite dark.
Someone else said that it wasn't a good use of a developers time to give up a day for interviews because the potential return wasn't good enough. I completely accept that. My take is that, in the market I operate in at least, spending a day doing an interview with someone who isn't really that interested probably isn't the best use of my time either.

If you're casually interested the aim shouldn't be to do a day long technical interview, it should be to establish what the real level of interest is and to either build that interest or establish that it's the wrong thing for you / us. Once we've done that we're either in a situation where you're keen on the role and we're looking at something where a day might be a good investment for you, or we've saved us both a day.

Making a significant time investment when one party isn't serious about the opportunity is the wrong thing to do for both company and candidate, and throwing money at the problem doesn't change that.

Ultimately I'd like to show you I value your time by not wasting it, rather than by paying for it if that makes sense?
They have a USB to Lightning since Lighting isn't that fast yet and the USB connector on the Mac side is a heck of a lot easier to plug into then the Thunderbolt.
It also brings the possibility to overcome ~4GB memory limit per x32 process. Which is nice.
Yes it was a sarcastic comment.
That's very interesting, thank you.

I work at Stack Overflow and we are very liberal in sharing our data when it doesn't involve PII. If there is any way I can help you, I am sklivvz@ our domain name.
I disagree. This is not good news for Bitcoin.

>3. At this stage, financial institutions cannot denominate services and products in bitcoin, cannot trade bitcoin, cannot run bitcoin exchange, cannot provide bitcoin related services, cannot store bitcoin for clients, cannot establish bitcoin trust or fund, etc.

I don't speak Chinese so I can't speculate too much, but by the sounds of the Reuters article this basically rules out any hope of a Coinbase equivalent emerging in China, allowing people to transact freely between their bank and their BTC wallet. Banks in China aren't going to touch Bitcoin, or BTC-related businesses with a barge pole now. Not only this, anyone else planning on starting a Bitcoin business will probably have trouble with banks. It's really not good at all for BTC in China.
I can't edit parent comment. So I'm posting an image here to illustrate the difference:

http://imgur.com/e3iCOoz
I think this was between ry/node and joyent/node, not nodejs/node and joyent/node.
The title should read "How one newspaper wrote about the Internet in 1988" because clearly, is article is an exception to the goofiness that routinely played in newspapers and TV from the 80 through the mid-90s.
Depending on how your memory is mapped, everything should probably be an address higher than the kernel (you can get your linker script to generate the right address). Sometimes the kernel is at the top of the address space though so you could start your heap at the bottom.
implies some definition of manhood and [therefore] demeans the reputation of the publisher

This doesn't follow by way of logic
Pandora adds Chromecast streaming in Android
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Disclaimer: I think both platforms are shit in their own way. I prefer Android, though I actively hate it every day.

> I don’t know of any three year old Android phones that run Android 4.4.

I don't know either (not saying there aren't any). But the (lack of) support isn't Android vs. iOS. It's Apple vs Samsung vs Motorola vs Sony vs ...

For example i own Goog, err.. Motorola phone about as old as iPhone 4 and the most recent version it runs is 2.2 (AKA unusable crap). I use 2.3 via CM and there are 4.x builds available. On the other hand, Sony phones from 2011 (perhaps only some) received update to 4.1. This is just two manufacturers, out of many.
> And what if I want to use Windows Explorer or Nautilus to just copy my files to the device without installing anything?

You don't like how the bundled Music app works but you don't want to install a different music app? You're setting up a no-win situation there.
Except 90% of jobs want to pidgin hole you. People have very little control over what they end up doing in their jobs. The market dictates. You can't just stop doing the stuff you don't like, and do the other stuff.
That is actually not only true for goldbugs, but for all financial bubbles. If you had asked someone about AAPL in summer of 2012, they would have told you that any specific news item was bullish. If you had asked someone about crude oil in 2008, they would have told you that any specific news would drive the price higher. It is the same pattern over and over gain. Once the goldbugs throw in the towel and admit that they were wrong, it will be a good time to actually buy gold.
> Correct me if I am wrong, but there doesn't appear to be anything linking the nullability of the return value based on the possible emptiness of the input value.

Sure there is. The second type parameter of Iterable encodes that, see the definition of Iterable.

> does "Nothing" satisfy "Null"?

Of course. Nothing is the bottom type, it satisfies every type.

> If so then I would imagine that it becomes harder to enforce the constraint, likely because the return type can still be Null regardless of input restrictions.

I don't know what you mean by this. An Iterable<X,Nothing> cannot return Null from its first attribute. Check the declaration of Iterable.first.

> Does this use extra type inference on the expressions inside the function to do the enforcement, for instance using the "exists" operator to perform type set subtraction between {Value|Null} and {Null} on the true branch.

Approximately correct. But "exists" is not type subtraction, it's intersection with the class Object. Cool, huh?

> This implies that if I re-write the max function to have a single exit point (`ret = Null; if (exists values.first) { ...; ret = ...; } return ret;`) then I don't get the same guarantees?

I don't follow. You can't rewrite the function to do anything unsound because the compiler won't let you. Our type system is sound.

> Also the fact that Null is referenced by the "exists" operator also implies that it is part of the language specification, and not actually definable in any meaningful way as a user type.

That's not correct. Go and check the definition of Null. It's just a regular class, as advertised. There is no special behavior defined in the language spec. Sure, the exists operator is defined by the language spec to mean "is Object", but that's just trivial syntax sugar.

I guess the problem here is that you're used to languages full of weird special cases and ad hoc behavior. Ceylon is not like that. Ceylon's type system is very simple and these fancy constructs are layered over it as pure syntax sugar. It's a very different approach to other languages. But in the end it's much more satisfying. You'll just need a little mental adjustment to get used to it.

> If I read correctly, that means that I cannot implement the same behaviour/enforcement with completely user defined types.

Wha?! Nothing is the bottom type! The empty set. You want to define your own bottom types? That's not possible (nor desirable) in any language I know of. There's just no reason why you would want to write a class with no instances.
I remember the days when for multiprocessing was the only option and multi-threading was only available on a few systems.

Now with the security exploits many plugins have exposed and the way a misbehaved thread can bring the whole application down, we are moving back to the multiprocess model as a better sandbox model.

Old becomes new as they say.
iconmelon, SVG icons library for the Web
Smallest false-color tiny FOV long exposure photograph from Val Thorens ever:
http://pilgrimbreak.com/sites/default/files/DSCF2027.JPG
It was my understanding that while Google has nap rooms in some offices, they are seldom used. The culture is geared around long hours and if you are seen to be napping that is seen as a potential sign of weakness. Of course I could be completely wrong (I'm just pulling this idea out of a vague memory of reading about it here on HN) so I hope a Google employee will correct me. However, it seems reasonable that a company would need to do more than just offer the opportunity to take breaks, work from home and work sensible hours. The culture of seeing hard workers as more valuable must be a difficult one to break.
DirectInput, for instance. Over-engineered and badly designed, then virtually abandoned (because who ever gets promoted for fixing bugs? You get promoted for features). Definitely not what anyone really wanted from an input API.
Are you referring to the median funded application or the median submitted application?

You had mentioned the day before the deadline applications are submitted at a rate of one per minute, which is bound to bring the median closer to the deadline, but only YC knows how many of the applications submitted during the last 2 days were funded. The median funded application could be submitted 2 months before that for all we know.

If it's the median funded application, shouldn't you be correspondingly alarmed YC-funded startups apply 2 days before the deadline? Would setting more deadlines (having more funding cycles) generate more YC startups?
breaks LastPass add-on
> A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.

Agreed, however one answer will help many developers, which should more than offset the initial effort

> The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation.

Documentation has not deteriorated, in my opinion. In fact, a point could be made that it is now much easier for small vendors to have outstanding developer support through stack overflow. A lot of open source project use it as the main support line.

> It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.

It is probably correlated to the time spent on the site, but the money saved is certainly not related, as users don't gain any reputation by reading answers or simply browsing the site.
China is not banning Bitcoin
Here is a human-made translation of the actual notice: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1s5hzl/my_human_tra...

Seems far less dramatic than would justify the price correction we are seeing...
On Data Horticulture
Honestly, up until IOS and Android there wasn't a large "cross platform" gaming market. Now there is and OpenGL is starting to gain more use...the good thing there is that there are more people writing, buying, and playing games. (Not that OpenGL is being used.)

These vehement kinds of slashdotty style articles about MS's being this controlling conspiracy...you would almost think that...gasp...its a large corporation doing everything it can to make money for its shareholders. I mean, if the roles were somehow different and Apple were the market leader for the most popular gaming platform they would be all sweetness and light and no one would have any reason to complain. (Oh wait...)

It turns out that businesses in that position tend to make "lock in" plays. This post kind of glosses over SGI's history with OpenGL as if they were only ever kind and loving shepherds of an open standard that was created to help children.

Don't use directx cuz "evil" is stupid. If you were writing an application that needed to be cross platform...like a 3D authoring environment...you would probably want to look at opengl. (instead of writing your own...) If you were targeting the windows ecosystem directx has some platform integration features that are interesting. Tooling and developer experience also matter.

This kind of breathless nonsense is boring and silly.
It's always been a better sandbox model, but message passing is still a pain to orchestrate compared to shared-memory data structures.
Hhhmm.. I'm not sure if it's a good deal.
Regarding luck, this was here on HN recently: "What if successful startups are just lucky?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6794612

And the top comment (by pg): All successful startups are lucky, but they're never just lucky.
Yes, the same way a widespread virus is said to have costed "billions in lost productivity" too.

That is, BS estimates of an essentially non measurable factor.
The last three years has been an interesting time for me productivity wise.

I started a new job, and moved from Perl to Python Django. The organization was fairly new and there were two of us in an office, so not much in the way of distractions.

My productivity went up an order of magnitude, and Django made programming more interesting / fun again. There was (and still is) a lot of work to do building and maintaining the database. I generally tried to focus on the 80% that takes 20% of the time.

A year later I get an extra boss (who knows nothing about databases). He likes meetings. He is pedantic, and focuses way to much on the 20% that takes 80% of the time.We now have 4 people in the office (previously 2). I am constantly asked to switch task, and fix Excels (I have been arguing for two years that we shouldn't be using Excel for data uploads as it is so error prone).

Anyway, I think my productivity is around a quarter of what it was two years ago, and my work is a lot less satisfying. And I am on HN right now.

So for me, productivity gains:
Working in a quiet office.
Getting to use language / framework of my choice.
Learning new interesting stuff.
Focusing on one task at a time, until it is finished.

Losses:
Two managers pulling in opposite directions. One cowboy coder quick fix king. The other pedantic and focusing on spelling mistakes over new functionality.
Busy office.
Tedious repetitive work (fixing Excels that are used for data uploads) - really kills motivation.
Too many meeting. I don't get many full or even half days uninterrupted programming.
Very nice indeed, I crash Firefox a few times a day from hitting the memory limit.

Granted this is due to AB+ and Reddit Enhancement Suite. Although imo.im leaking memory over time doesn't help! (I am somewhat annoyed that an IM client takes up 500MB of memory, I miss Meebo!)

Right now FF is at a fairly svelte 1.8GB. Heh.

The other problem is that performance degrades dramatically as the number of open tabs increases. Once I hit 50 or so tabs scrolling becomes horribly jerky. From the sounds of it, this change may very well fix that as well.

(For reference I am on an insanely fast home built machine!)
Might be this site:

http://www.zeropestsolution.com/mission.html

or another one just like it... :(
"Because the truth is, I can’t do anything."

I think this is a lie (but I share your feelings). All the oppression is driven by the greed. Me myself and I is the norm. Not only in politics but a lot of people are turning to the believe that the world is all about self.

The selfish world doesn't care about others. But I can tell you from my own experience that if you care about others (everyone included without exception) people will change little by little.

Some things I have to remind myself all the time to achieve this:

* Separate what people do from who they are
* First blame yourself then others
* Don't put yourself above others

People at the top are standing on the foundation of people at the bottom. I think both the people at the top and the bottom don't realize this all the time. This means that the top position is as strong as its foundation. And that the foundation can change what's happening at the top.

A small spark can cause an explosion.
Ask HN: What do you ask a potential employer
What questions do you ask a potential employer during a developer interview? In particular, I'm interested in what you ask to see if you're walking into a poorly-run organization or a bad codebase. I'm also interested in what you ask in terms of perks and benefits.

Some questions I ask:

What are the best, worst, and most surprising things about working here?

What IDEs are used here? (Preferred answer: Something from JetBrains, Reasonable people can disagree answer: vim/emacs/eclipse, Warning sign answer: Notepad)

Would I be allowed to work on outside projects?

How is off-hours support handled?

This seems like the sort of thing that would have been discussed many times here, but I couldn't find it using hnsearch or google. If you have the search-fu, teach me your ways.
The stats at your second link are based on apps that use mixpanel. I suspect that Google's statistics [1] are going to be more accurate because they are based on play store purchases and periodic update checks.

[1] http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
Personally I prefer message passing (over pipes).

Shared memory (be it shm/heap in same process) with associated mutexes, semaphores, locks and the like is a right pain to get right without introducing race conditions, deadlocks etc.

Go is interesting as it uses "micro threads" (goroutines) and message passing CSP style but I haven't found a use for it yet.
My biggest problem is dealing with people who act mindlessly.

Like people talking loudly in a common work room, people not noticing they make a mess, people standing in the middle of a common walking path - or blocking an entrance, and generally acting as if the sun revolves around them. People acting as if there are no other people around them.

I don't know what can be done about that.
This is in contrast to a lot of recent advice on improving cognitive skills, which tells us to do things that are hard, not those we are already good at (basically the old specialist vs. generalist debate).
I think you can learn not to react to the stimulus that makes you annoyed. Its a principle of the Alexander technique. You will also notice than Buddhist monks look very calm. I think it would be pretty difficult to get them annoyed.
Six Startups That Raised Over $1M Using Israeli Crowdfunding Platform ‘OurCrowd’
Lovely picture. Looks a bit different from the sky outside my house: that's what I get for living near other people...

Anyone used their iOS app? Is it better/different than Star Walk?
I wrote a blogpost on this exact topic last year: http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/5/16/assessing-a-company-q...

If you want me to elaborate on anything, just say the word.
Building a Community with Violins and Trombones
+1 ... between your comment and the one you responded to, both the "non-math" skills needed to solve problems in the real world are described.
Phonebloks Open Source Smartphone Vision explained
China bars banks from using Bitcoin.
To a developer, they are separate versions with api differences that are potentially significant.

To a user, the differences [1] are fairly minor in my view. Presumably this is why Google groups them all under the name Jelly Bean.

[1] http://technoblimp.com/2013/08/28/android-jelly-bean-4-1-4-2...
Obama can’t have an iPhone for ‘security reasons’? Shenanigans declared
Do Real Magic with Your iPhone :D
5 available phones from a third party Amazon seller is stretching the term "widely available" a bit.
Ask HN: Best Open Source Beginners Book for learning Shell
Hello, I am just a beginner when it comes to shell programming.

So, which is the best open source book out there for Shell Beginners.

Thanks.
I'm not a Google employee, but I once visited their Zürich office and was shown the nap room. Not only was it really cool, but there were several people using it (just after lunch).
Even Microsoft ships WebGL with IE11...

Perhaps they're getting the point?
Someone needs to make a utility which does a gpg check of the input before passing it on to shell:

curl ... | gpg-check-pipe | sh

Hey, that someone could be me :-0
Yeah, like for the Silk Road, until it bounces back with double its value in a matter of weeks. Bullish does not mean instantly bullish.
how do i know this isn't a scam for collecting e-mail addresses for spam purposes?
Show HN: Fiddlewax
Could this fundamental nature of bitcoin actually be used to create walled gardens? So that you take one bitcoin, divide it up and then have an official exchange rate between a restricted branch of bitcoin and everyone else. This would let you peg the value to something in the real world.
That would be a great perk :) . I'd definitely be more productive and be able to work longer hours if I was able to take a nap (not that I want to work longer hours :) ).
Got a new job. No idea about Java but have to use J2EE. What to do?
My new employer wants me to maintain an existing j2ee application but I don't have any idea how that stuff works.
I have very little experience with java but I'm quiet comfortable with python.
Whats the fastet way to get startet with j2ee w/o prior knowledge about java?
"And yeah, I remember that fill code. I always felt guilty because it contained a goto statement. I don't think I've written a "goto" since."

Loved this!

Glad I'm not the only one :-) My last goto statement was in 1984, rejected by Code Review.

I haven't written a goto since. And I haven't cared much for Code Review since, either.
Creeping China
There's definitely a significant difference in attitudes towards sleep and work between Europe and the US. Perhaps someone who has experience working in both can comment.
Thanks a lot!
I'll be sure to read them. :)
many of these are natural defense mechanisms. if we acknowledged to ourselves or to each other how shitty certain experiences are, how we treat each other / get treated... isn't not even clear there would be an outlet anyway.

the good news is: if we don't like what we hear, we can choose one of these many distortions to make the story fit our needs.