skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being anti-Monsanto is one thing...

but being anti-GM is being pro-starvation. The green revolution increased agricultural output dramatically last century, and we need it to continue if we're going to feed everyone. Its first-world boutique convenience versus third world life and death.
Present Like Steve Jobs Video
As does IE8 and Chrome. You can also download Opera Dragonfly.
During my software engineer internship interview with Google they wanted me to write code using Google Docs, but the interviewer couldn't even get it to work properly (what a great way to impress candidates). Here's to Etherpad showing them how to get it done :-).
This story is kind of more of the same and I'm sure a lot of the readers here have heard it before; if not about Joel in particular, than at least about ArsDigita and Razorfish and this era of the tech boom in general.

What IS interesting though is his mention of the Startup.com documentary. If you haven't seen it, and have any kind of passing interest in the startup space or starting your own web company, I strongly suggest you check it out. It's fantastic.
s/right/revocable privilege/
Then use SQLite, MySQL is overkill for this situation.

Or better yet, use any of the FREE versions of SQL Server specifically slotted for the desktop.
There's a nice bug in it I just ran into, too: it sometimes errors on XHR connections and actually breaks the pipe in the process. Very ugly stuff.

http://groups.google.com/group/firebug/browse_thread/thread/...
He calls himself a bum: https://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/Home/1--why...
Circle jerk? I was pointing out unproductive behavior - the tendency to simplify a problem such that it fits into a stock solution or counting on a miracle. Neither of these actually confront the original problem - just duct tape and wishes.
The eBay creation myth and other corporate origin stories
Lists or arrays?

Nature doesn't know arrays.
There's no index (which is the only real distinctive between arrays and lists), and the next atom of information can be (physically) more or less distant from the previous one, so: Nature only uses lists.

Think of it: arrays are only used because of faster accessing reasons, otherwise you never would even think of preferring arrays over lists.

Lists are perfect, because they already contain the previous and the after information bit, which is always crucial to us -- we all are enclosed in the time barrier -- and all of other memory alignment and usage, invented by computer scientists, were simply born out of the necessity of speed, and nothing else.

Lists contain the information stored in the simplest possible way, without wasting any bit of information (which would be necessary if you would care about an index).

Interconnection is the real reason why computers never will be able to substitute a human brain -- and this statement (or better: fact) will never grow old...
There's something about the stories told by Joel that always feel more down to earth than the typical sensationalist blog write up. Good read.
When you are trying out something new, being faced with a page of form fields is often the moment you think to yourself: "well, it's probably cool, but this is a lot of effort".

Making signups 'lazy' and 'gradual' means you never have to climb that wall... you step over the small amounts of work while playing with the app.
It rings a little empty to me -- I mean, it's one thing to say you screwed up, but it's another to make it right. Has there been any actual action taken or is it really just: "Sorry, we shouldn't have done that... but we're not sorry enough to undo it."
not surprising really, if that story was true, eBay would have never ended up with the corporate culture it has right now
FF 3.5 is sorta like XP to Vista upgrade! A lot of add-on developers have not created 3.5 compatible add-ons, even like compete.com (browser toolbar extension - gives site ranking) has not been updated and for me for SEO purposes it's annoying.

Also, FF 3.5 does not automatically zoom the text as 3.0 did. I'm probably gonna revert to 3.0.
and would you say that those are the 20 top web 2.0 businesses for the entire country? I just don't believe that.
used to be I'd listen to language tapes while driving.
That could easily have been me yelling at it last week. Took me ages to find the Ajax post requests were now in the 'net' section instead of console!
Undo what? Give people back their illegal files?
I actually think it is a textbook apology - short, no excuses and straight to the customers. I think having a quick apology is more important than presenting some kind of ten point plan as the first step.

But I agree that the end of the matter is the solution, not the apology, and we have yet to see how this ends.
Someone took the time to make this joke, but it doesn't make the search engine work any better for me. I like it when I find easter eggs in video games. I don't like it when I find easter eggs in tools I use for work.

edit: Since I'm yelling anyway, Google's highly-corporate, brand-spanning, massive April Fools jokes leave a bad taste in my mouth.

This is also the most annoying thing about Wolfram Alpha; except with Alpha it's easier to find easter eggs than the data you wanted.
You didn't say scam, but my original comment was in response to someone who did.

I agree that it's lazy and makes a bad impression for hackers, though I doubt 99% of normal people would notice or care.
When did FF 3.0 automatically zoom text? Are you thinking of NoSquint?

3.5 remembers your zoom settings (set with ctrl + / ctrl -) for each domain.
Under discussion here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720433
A nice read but a badly titled article. The truth is Web Consultancy is probably 10,000 times bigger than it was in 2000 it's just decentralized now. So yeah, if you're trying to make it in the bay area as a web consultant you probably don't stand a chance. But elsewhere there's about as much opportunity as you're willing to try for.

The truth is it's so big now that it (sadly) manages to sustain a fairly significant underbelly of complete incompetents along with all the qualified people.
Fanning the flames of the Git vs. Mercurial debate
Safari's Web Inspector is far, far better than it used to be, and has indeed gone a long way towards catching Firebug. The problem is that it isn't there yet; otherwise, I'd only be dipping into Firefox to test things.

The Web Inspector's major shortcoming is the lack of a UI to edit the some aspects of the DOM directly (you can do it in the JS console by running DOM queries). One can't remove existing nodes or add new ones via the Web Inspector UI; nor can one add new CSS styles (although one can edit node attributes and the values of existing CSS declarations).

All of this means that even for those of us with access to Safari (i.e. not developers working on Linux) there's still a pressing need for Firebug, so if they keep breaking it with updates pretty soon everyone will be reverting to 3.0.x and the older versions which, while they had a few niggles, essentially worked.
I prefer to follow the founders, not the corporate accounts.
Not like they are mutually exclusive
I got one of the free cue cats back when they mailed them to all wired participants. I remember that seemed like an incredibly expensive thing to do, I set up the product and scanned a few things but quickly became bored with it. It seems like there are so may other better ways to do something similar...
I got about 1/4 way down this and asked why I was wasting my time on it. No good reason. There is zero value in this.

Save your time, do something entertaining, useful, constructive, or just fun, but don't bother reading this.
My copy hangs all the time with "unresponsive script" errors. I just switched from 1.4 to 1.5 alpha, not sure if it's going to help.
why not?

any other website, they'd just remove the file from their store, to stop future sales, but wouldn't touch already downloaded files.

For all intents and purposes Amazon "hacked" their customer's private property
Hrm, I still see it on the Console tab. The thing that bothers me is now Firebug truncates long AJAX responses. I tend to work with heavy amounts of JSON data, so this renders the new Firebug useless to me.
protecting the customer from themselves
These inc articles are just re-hashing stuff that you can read in "Founders at Work" or even Joel's blog. It's a bit disappointing actually.
Google Latitude Comes to the iPhone (seems to be working worldwide)
I listened to this on the commute home. I think it generally aligns with how most hackers/avid users feel about the issue. More importantly, it is nice to hear it from someone who actually is part of the industry.
> why not?

Because that would be illegal? Amazon doesn't own the copyright to 1984 either you know...

The OP wasn't complaining about the handling of the original situation, he was complaining about how Amazon refuses to reverse their action. The answer: they can't.
FireQuery now works also with 1.3. I've backported it recently.

I maintain four addons built on top of Firebug (www.binaryage.com). It is very difficult for me to keep things working for different Firefox and Firebug versions. Especially when firebug authors are changing internals and extension points with almost every new version. And then come some people on mozilla addons and downvote my addons because they are not working for them when they first try. They even don't try to test different Firebug/Firefox versions, they just complain.

Maybe Firebug authors have same feelings about us Firebug users, or on the other hand about Firefox developers who are probably making their lives harder. I don't know. The true is that I've seen lot of criticism about broken Firebug since version 1.2
Very similar to Founders at Work. Might be some lifted or paraphrased paragraphs in there.
It's not about need, she bumped the RAM, Disk, and added the AppleCare Protection Plan because she felt it was a reasonable thing to do. Honestly, spending less than 3k for something you are going to use several hours a day for a few years seems reasonable to me.
There are plenty of Monte Carlo-based scheduling tools (including downloadable Excel spreadsheets) but all of them require the different project parts to be input separately (because they have no assumption of being hooked up to an existing project management system) which seems like a royal pain in the ass so they probably get downloaded and hardly used.

And probably Fog Creek's implementation is better anyway.
because Amazon sells the legal version of 1984, surely they can cover the cost to give the customers what they paid for

http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W/ref...
They are apologizing for using the capability the gave themselves but are doing nothing towards a real solution. They still have the ability to remotely wipe your books. I'm glad I never bought a kindle and will not buy one as long as it "licenses" me the books instead of selling them to me.
This post hits a nerve. I've relied on Firebug for a long time and it's been getting less stable for about a year. The problems are particularly apparent if you have largeish Javascript files (a few thousand lines). A lot of critical features intermittently stop working, things like breakpoints or being able to jump to the definition of a function. The Firebug project shows signs of having hit that disastrous inflection point where bug-fixing efforts create as many bugs as they fix.

I suspect the root of the problem is that Firebug started as a nice little ad hoc add-in, attempted to evolve into a production development tool, and is breaking down under the strain. That plus the personnel changes on the project would explain what we're seeing.

It's bad because none of the alternatives I've tried are an adequate replacement yet.
Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear. It's a marketing blog. Now that his customers are businessmen, he's telling them what they want to hear, in a forum they're likely to read.
I don't read Gizmodo because I had the impression that it's a completely tabloidish gadget blog. But their 1979 series (to which this post by BG ties) actually looks pretty great. At least the Golden Age of Lego gallery gave me that pleasantly piercing rush of nostalgia:

http://gizmodo.com/5318253/1979-the-golden-age-of-lego/galle...
Some of those companies are absolute rubbish. Though voices.com looks very cool. I browsed around and if I had a need for voice acting I'd go there.

ThoughtFarmer looked like a neat idea. Then I saw their demo and pricing. $109/per seat, 100 seat minimum. For $4K I can buy an Xserve from apple that does the same thing, better.

I can't wait for the second dotcom crash.
The day I knew things were in trouble was at a party in San Francisco (fall 2000). A recruiter for a "hot new start up" was trying to hire my friend, a history major, as a programmer that did not have to program, guaranteeing that he would make "75k" starting. If he hit his recruitment numbers, a big bonus was in store. He may have been drunk but was sober enough to give my buddy a business card and rough directions to the office.

One of my favorite stories from those days.
Not against GM food in general, but against some specific examples of who's doing it today: More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=706752
I found this post to be a poor attempt at shoehorning the notional of functional languages into lambda calculus. Sure, functional programming is inspired by lambda calculus, but it doesn't reduce to it, and, what's important, never has - from the very first LISPs on.

So, for example, Church's encoding of naturals is introduced, which is totally irrelevant to all practical functional languages. Despite what the author is saying, using computationally sane integers is not "nothing more than an optimization", but a fundamental part of the language (and don't get me started on floats). It's just that actual functional programming languages model a lambda calculus with atoms - basic objects, like integers, that are not functions. It's really OK - not everything needs to be a function! The fact that it's possible, in pure lambda calculus without atoms, to model integers using Church's trick is cool and has theoretical significance - but no relevance at all to functional languages.

Similarly, functional programming has always included languages with mutable data. LISP was mutable from day 1, and so was the even more functionally-inclined Scheme. There's nothing in "functional programming", as has been practiced for decades, that necessarily excludes mutable data. Now, "pure lambda calculus" is another story... but it really is another story, one that serves as a motivation for functional programming rather than all of its being.

The requirement that a functional language, in the author's opinion, must have tail call optimization, is weird (many LISPs don't have that), and its explanation is weirder yet: a functional language must have TCO because it's based on lambda calculus where everything is done with recursion, so you need infinite stacks (???), but real stacks aren't infinite, so "you need tail call optimization to allow the use of recursion for looping". Well, what if you don't use recursion for looping, just as you don't use Church's encoding for integers, because you are not after all writing in lambda calculus?

Overall, I felt that the author let his intuition of what a functional language could be settle too firmly on Haskell (with the understanding that static typing is optional), and is trying to redefine functional programming in accordance with this vision.
ok - she got used to linking stuff once she figured out she can link to a product and it will scroll to it (probably because it looks different than regular web stuff), since I got spammed with "look at this! look at this too! this is so nice, look at it..." :) firefox is 3.5. One major hurdle though, which you should definitely work on is to point out who are you buying from and where do they ship to - we live in europe for example, so we couldn't figure out how to buy stuff, which is - according to her - fabulous and cheap!
LoseThos 64-bit Operating System V5.10 Released.New Video
Undersea cable brings high-speed Internet access to East Africa
IPhone security “broken” - business users take note
hm. I think the article is somewhat unclear; I agree that all your customers can now see everything anyone has ever said about you, but that doesn't mean you need to (or should) attempt to close every sale.

Saying "I'm sorry, I can't help you right now." when you can't, I think is pretty important; You can't be all things to all people.

On the other hand, while loosing some sales is fine, pissing off those lost sales is not. Seth is right that all your interactions are now with people who are connected to all your other potential customers. I find that recommending competitors when I encounter customers I can not profitably serve results in those (non) customers saying good things about me.
Well not really, there are other solutions such as "have less people in the world" but I'm not sure how practical they are.
Really? Nobody?

It's an article about making up excuses. I was hoping everyone would chime in with their own excuses in the spirit of the article.
Dispel the magic by defining the semantics
I still have my CueCat somewhere :)

It's interesting the idea is sort of making a comeback with QR codes and cell phone readers. Perhaps CueCat was just far ahead of it's time (and flawed by not being portable)
When you make a purchase for the Kindle, you're not buying a book, you're buying the right to view the content of the book in a limited context.

Actually, that's what you do when you purchase any copyrighted work. Copyright law prohibits you from doing a wide variety of things with some things you buy - copying and creating derivative works being the big ones.
China's Green Dam and the cyberwar implications
Genetic Use Restriction Technology. (Called the "terminator gene" by detractors.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technol...
New details in Foxconn iPhone suicide
Say all you want about Joel the programmer, but Joel the writer is awesome.

Sadly, we're in exactly the same situation right now: after almost 2 years of exsiting life of self-funded young company in NYC, suddenly most of our customers did not renew, our recurring revenue is being consumed by medical insurance and rent and we're brainstorming on new business ideas... This piece gives me hope, because living off your savings in NYC is scary-scary! :)

BTW if someone is working on something cool in NYC let me know [see my profile].
Anyone who promotes Open Source Software is a zealot, just like anyone who says something good about Apple is a fanboy.
Learn from Amazon: Nobody Cares How Good You Were – Now Is What Counts
That's bullshit, they have many options -- sending a physical copy of the deleted book(s) is the least they could do at this point. Maybe if they did that and gave some credit to buy other kindle books, I'd think they were really trying to do the right thing.
You know, first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title of the news, before even opening it, was that I should post a link to teddy! This was a land before time of zbrush and mudbox. It was a land of new horizons with nichimen (ex symbolics graphics division) leading the way of the new technologies in modeling. That was a great time to witness. And to think of LISP being behind it all...

As far as OP goes - StudioTools has a more powerful workflow similar to this for ages - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ6Ij2-V_O8
Google Latitude. Now for iPhone.
That's a pretty bold statement. Care to be more specific? "Might" doesn't cut it when you're publicly questioning somebody's credibility.
The much maligned flashlight icon was totally my fault. I changed the old button with a label to a straight icon when I moved the tabs from the lower toolbar to the top toolbar. As far as I can tell, nobody has complained about the tab location being moved. But it's pretty clear that nobody loved the flashlight!

The icon was changed to the flat "box" design at the last minute as part of a larger icon re-design effort, and that happened when it did just because a volunteer showed up at that time to do it.
"Lets say you have two equal founders, one business guy and one tech guy."

You can do what RIM does and have two people share CEO positions. http://www.rim.net/newsroom/media/executive/index.shtml
Well, they actually can't fly very well--they bumble (sorry) about when you see them in slow motion. The myth, if that is what it is, was supposedly derived from some aerodynamic analysis.
Unfortunately there is no good alternative to Firebug, since it's been so great for so long no one has felt the need to make a compelling rival

What about Safari's Web Inspector?
I'm a web developer running Linux exclusively and I've recently started using Chromium, which works great and provides the webkit Web Inspector (right click, Inspect Element). Inspector isn't quite as good as Firebug, but Chromium is quite a bit better than Firefox, so it's not a bad trade.
Everyone's game sucks at first. You make it suck less by putting yourself out there and practicing.
Except a physical copy doesn't disappear when the person who owns the copyright decides the store you bought it from didn't sell it to you the right way.
That is such a bone-headed analysis, I'm not sure how to respond. If by index, you mean the reference we use to access an element of an array, that is just the physical location of that element in memory with the offset of the array subtracted. (High-level languiges do math under the covers to simplify things for the progammer, but that's basically it.) Lists use the exact same information., except they contain it literally.

Lists are perfect, because they already contain the previous and the after information bit, which is always crucial to us -- we all are enclosed in the time barrier -- and all of other memory alignment and usage, invented by computer scientists, were simply born out of the necessity of speed, and nothing else.

No , they were born because they are much simpler to implement and imagine than linked lists. They continue to be used be used becaue they are faster simpler, and use less space than linked lists.

Nature only uses lists.

No, Nature uses neither lists nor arrays. Atoms, generally are neither fixed in location (as in the case of arrays), nor do they conain the location of their neighbors (as in the case of lists.)

Interconnection is the real reason why computers ne.ver will be able to substitute a human brain -- and this statement (or better: fact) will never grow old...

Simply untrue.

The fact is that both lists and arrays are abstractions really exist outside of computers. One may argue wither whetehr the human brain is or molecules are more organized as a list or an array, but it's a dumb debate.
Rube Goldberg + Mass Customization: App Designs Tshirts Based On Twitter Inputs
Ask HN: Review my startup Weegoh
In short, weegoh is a social messaging utility with geolocalization. It lets users know more about what's going on nearby, where their friends are, what interesting events are happening around them, and to connect with friends while on the go.

On Weegoh users can:
Share their current location and find what is going on around them
Publish messages, photos, videos or comments to other services
Discover new places and people nearby.

On this version we have

A mobile and WAP site: m.weegoh.com
Updates via an IM bot
Updates via e-mail
Sign in with Twitter/Facebook

We have been in private beta for about 3 months, and we would really appreciate your feedback.

http://weegoh.com

Thanks!
There is no conflict. You can own the land, and only grow a single crop (as long as insurance is available).

It doesn't require massive factory farms, just that each area specialize in the crop that grows best there, and let global trade make sure everyone has a variety.
Walls Come Tumbling Down [slideshare]
Have less people? So that means what - poor people can't have kids? Lots of people starve? Yes, not exactly practical.