skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hard to fully explain it in the title. You program a CNC embroidering machine which creates custom tshirts, using a programming language called "pa++ern" via code sent through Twitter. a fun, if circuitous and bizarre, UI
The Future of Gaming Is Selling Sin, Says VC Tim Chang at Casual Connect
And pacemakers, perhaps?
What is Bezos apologizing for?
This is silly.

They were doing something similar in Nevada, where they brought in salt water, and planted salt water species in for bio-fuel and fodder.

The thing is, the natures process turns organic matter into a salt binding agent on decomposition. So, salt levels end up going down as organic matter (like leaf fall, etc) is added. I've studied with this man before, and he's extremely knowledgeable in this field. I've linked to this video, and I'll link to it again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk

The technique in the article is riding the problem, not fixing it.
"Applications written in higher-level, dynamic languages (like Python and Ruby) are always going to be more ‘intelligent’ than those written in low-level, static languages (like C and Java)."

He positions this as a given, and moves on with his only justification being that websites feel "smoother to use" when written with Django or Rails.

"One has nearly 10 times as many files, and 10 times as many lines of code as the other. Can you guess which one?"

In addition to being snarky, I think the lines of code written as a metric for software quality is as about as useful as selling software with "smoother to use" printed on the box.
"the next atom of information can be (physically) more or less distant from the previous one"

Not true, at least with something like DNA. When something like RNA polymerase goes through DNA, it always goes to the physically closest nucleotide. Sure there is a "link" between bases in the form of molecular bonds, but this bond only works between nucleotides right next to each other. No nucleotide can bond to a nucleotide farther away, and have a polymerase follow that bond.

If DNA were a linked list, it would basically be one where every element is adjacent to the next one in memory. The whole point of a linked list is that they don't have to be like that, one element can point to another 4, 12, 32, etc bytes away. That way insertions and deletions are much easier.

DNA works much more like an array. The "index" for a gene is the promoter sequence at its beginning. A protein complex forms there and polymerase runs down sequentially from nucleotide to the next physically closest nucleotide.

Also, why do you say computers will never substitute a brain when linked lists can quite easily represent a neural network?
That's how I define luxury also. To solidify it a little, I'd say that a luxury is something that may or may not provide utility but that isn't a commodity. Once it becomes a commodity, it's not a luxury anymore. Consider the evolution of telephone features:

1 you can just dial a number, you keep a hardcopy list
of phone numbers of common contacts
2 phones get the ability to show caller ID, just the
number, not any associated name
3 as part of becoming portable, phones include a simple
contact list showing names and numbers that you can
select to dial
4 the contact list is used, along with caller ID
functionality, to show the name of the caller
5 the contact list gets the ability to store address book
style information also, which is not directly related
to any other feature of the device (the phone).
6 the contact list is maintained portably outside the
device, allowing integration with additional services
7 the phone gains the ability to communicate via IM
8 the contact list is used to store unified information
for all contacts, IM and phone, and not have separate
lists independently in each phone feature.

At any earlier stage, the later stages seem like luxuries until the majority of devices have that feature; then it's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity. Who's going to buy a smart phone these days that doesn't have some kind of unified contact list? Not having it would be a major hindrance, but lack of hindrance, utility, doesn't make it a luxury or not.

There's a pop culture definition of luxury, as you point out, like dangly watches, that serve no purpose other than to show off. That's the most baroque kind of luxury. There's also a more pragmatic, utilitarian luxury that is not absolute but changes based on the market and availability. Few people would consider the utility of an indoor outhouse to be a luxury, despite the fact that its main purpose is also served by an outdoor outhouse.
The immediate problem all those consultancies faced in 1999 and 2000 was that, like ArsDigita, they couldn't find enough great software developers to handle all the new business they were bringing in, so they had to turn away clients.

I thought the trouble was that they were hiring so many people that they couldn't keep the same company culture and in the end the software devs became outsourceable?
Booklets printing
Most people won't notice. The ones who do notice will probably find some other excuse.
Simple Web Design: 75 Sites Featuring Minimalist Interfaces
I bet you're a blast at parties.
I disagree.

If I can grow avocado's locally, and it's not the "optimal" place for growth but produces perfectly good avocado's... why wouldn't you?

If my area was a desert, and required an obscene amount of water to grow the avocado tree... that is obviously a no-brainer... don't grow the avocado. I'd grow date palm instead.

However, if I could return more water to the ground using water harvesting techniques, and am able to passively water the avocado, I'd would definitely do it.

The water issue is farmers tapping the aquifers for mass watering, and doing nothing to help replenish what they've used. Aquifers take a looong time to refill.
I got a bunch for Radio Shack and got bored with them quickly.

I think that was around the time the i-Opener came out the $99 Internet appliance that people noticed had a hard drive header and accessible bios:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
Actually, the justification is given later on: tools like these, which do a lot of the commonly-repeated work for you, make it easier for you to focus on the purpose of your application as opposed to overcoming the limitations of the tool itself.
Yet I've never seen a device in which they aren't removable...

Even if it was integral to the device, it would still have to follow the standard interface, and potentially be cloned onto a standard removable one.
Nonetheless, it's just VCs doing what's in their best interest. Hsieh, if he wants to continue on independently (which is still only rumor) only wants to do so because he feels it's in his best interest.

Why is the entrepreneur acting in his best interest correct, and the VC doing so wrong?
What makes me angrier is that they'd still put ads in somewhere, eventually. I hate the amount of advertising that precedes a movie that I've paid to see.

Trailers are often amusing, and I like to know which movies are coming out, but the rest feels like I'm watching TV.

(I would consider trailers acceptable because they are at least appropriate to the context. Still, the number of trailers would have to be low.)

ed: clarity of wording
I had no idea Jeff Bezos had a real Amazon account which he used to post reviews (guess that shouldn't come as such a surprise.)

Always entertaining to hear a man worth $8 billion call something expensive. :)

http://www.amazon.com/review/R11KACPP85PGCA/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...
How is CityDesk part of the dead industry? I thought it was basically blogging software. That industry was just being born at that time.
Comp them one of the many legit copies for sale on his site?
If it's not "optimal" then you are wasting. Either water, or energy, but you are wasting.

It could work - it might even be profitable (if you only waste a little), but if your goal is minimizing resources, it's not the way to go.

In your example, grow the optimal plant, and still do the water techniques you suggest.

(The optimal plant, is not just one plant, usually there are many options available, which is good since you also don't want to grow to much if there is no demand for it.)
AT&T: iPhone Exclusivity Won’t Last
Lines of code is not an absolute metric for quality but it is a good rule of thumb (unless raw speed us the characteristic you are optimizing for.) Less code means the program or routine will be easier to read and understand and have fewer places for bugs to hide. Of course, this means lines of code in the syntax and standard libraries of the language: a program that calls a third-party library should be viewed as one that counts the lines in this library as well.
Is it silly? There is a problem already noted with rising ocean levels increasing the salinity of fertile soil in many coastal nations. In fact I remember reading a story about rising storm lines killing rice fields and the search for more saline-resistant strains. So yes, doing this in order to turn Nevada into arable land may not be the best idea, but there is merit to the research.
I'm not questioning anyone's credibility. I made a statement about the article's redundancy with a work that many HNers might read or have read. It's the same guy talking about the same topic, so he could reasonably be expected to say the same or very similar things.
I got a job offer from aD back in the day... went for a walk w/ Greenspun + Alex to talk about it. I didn't like how everyone at the company's ego seemed to depend so entirely on programming ability (I was fresh out of college and cared about these things a lot).

His response? "At least it's a meritocracy!"

Not a bad answer, really. I am glad to have participated in that time (1998-2000) + place (Boston).
Well, git is written for speed.
The iPhone may be the SmartCar of computers, but it's the Mercedes of phones. While we'd all like the believe that that highly capable phones are really full fledged computers, that isn't yet the case and Apple doesn't even strongly market it as such (there's no "replace your desktop computer with an iPhone" marketing).
I don't think you can blow the stack. They do Tail Recursion Optimization, meaning they don't maintain a stack of previous web pages since the information isn't required anymore.
Lisp was by all accounts an attempt to make a working lambda calculus[1]. However the machines weren't very quick then and speed was a real issue. Even later on when Scheme was designed, speed was an important consideration, and it probably did affect the resulting language.

What the author was saying about TCO was that, based on the fact that all our machines today use stacks, and not wanting to have programs that break(!), any implementations of lambda calculus on these machines must have TCO to allow as much of the lambda calculus as possible to be available in the programming language, lest you reject otherwise correct programs.

But make no mistake, Lisp[2] and functional programming languages ARE based on the lambda calculus. The article really did hit the nail on the head.

--

[1] "Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, based on Alonzo Church's lambda calculus."

-- Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29)

(and lots of other sources agree with this)

[2] Sorry to say it, but Lisp isn't the center of the Universe. It's a cool trick, but it isn't that great.
True, it is worth the research... however, what about spending that money on establishing mangroves in the areas where the coastal nations are being affected? The benefit from a small coastal mangrove buffer is amazing.
I never get these Git vs. Mercurial debates. I don't see why they matter. Pick something you like & are comfortable with & can use well - and then learn that tool well.

Linus certainly doesn't care if you think Mercurial's better than Git. He doesn't agree. He wrote a tool to help him manage the Linux kernel source trees, something it does well. His goals never have been making the most elegant or intelligent software, but making good software that works. And it's a strategy that's succeeded.

And the Mercurial devs probably think the same regarding Git.

As an aside, I wonder what would have happened had not Linus popularized distributed version control systems. I doubt we'd even be having this discussion. I certainly hadn't been exposed before hearing about the BitKeeper debacle.
I totally agree. I wonder what other unadvertised "features" the kindle has, which are transmitted secretly by the always on wi-fi.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!
The Kindle has a switch on the back that turns off the whispernet. It saves battery life.
Well, I grew into "Mark as spam" before I got any spam,back when I my email was from a small local ISP and I didn't send many public emails. I taught mozilla's spam filter to recognize the forwarded emails my father sent me (and keep the emails he wrote himself), which were generally junk powerpoint presentations, so for me it's always been a way of saying "gee, I'm just not that into you" (which is also why I think I'd like a bayesian filter to learn my categorizations of messages into labels).
I think this article completely misses the point. He isn't apologizing for the copyright laws, he is apologizing for how it was handled and most likely for allowing it to happen in the first place. You can't escape the delicious irony that this whole thing happened over 1984. Literally any other book would have been better for Amazon, it just makes the story that much better. This whole thing goes to show how DRM can negatively effect a consumer, not something Amazon wants to do with their new device that sells DRM protected content.
I'm not sure, I don't really follow web 2.0 stuff. The list does seem a bit West-coast biased though. I can think of other Canadian tech and software companies (Idée, for example) that are more interesting to me than HootSuite, but it's not my list.
CueCat is now just Wikipedia lore? I feel old. Those things were a favorite hack target for a couple of years in college....
You used the word "lifted". That's not an accusation of having a similar experience, that's an accusation of plagiarism.
"If it's not "optimal" then you are wasting. Either water, or energy, but you are wasting."

Not really. "Optimal" means "most desirable". There are a lot of places that aren't the "most desirable" locations where you can plant an avocado tree and the inputs are not at all comparable to the outputs.

I definitely agree that the optimal plant is not just one plant. Farmers in India have been learning the hard way, for the past 10 years, that putting all their eggs in one basket is not the best idea. They are slowly trending toward profitable multi-crop output, where handfuls of other beneficial species are in the mix.

For example, many nut crop farmers are now interplanting sweet potato as a ground cover, which not only yields another crop, but also prevents surface evaporation (which is crucial in low rainfall areas).
I guess this depends on startup size. I think most technical co-founders see the hierarchy divided between a CE(xec)O and a CE(ng)O and tend to call that second slot the CTO. After twenty employees or so the VP/E tend to take over the real management duties and the CTO tend to be an architect role that slowly loses influence unless the CTO active asserts themselves.
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And quite relevant to this topic, our compilers and computers have (since the invention of Lisp and Scheme) gotten hugely better to the point where we can make much closer approximations to the lambda calculus such as the inclusion of lazy evaluation and immutability.
My favorite notebook maker used to be Samsung (Korean I think), but unfortunately their latest line also has the piano lacquer problem.

Also, all the makers have far too many options to choose from.

Both seem like solvable problems to me, but perhaps they are doing well enough as it is?
Just to be certain, have all of you read Lockhart's Lament? Because it argues the case for teaching math more beautifully than I can.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
Another plus for Dell. Unfortunately they don't tend to have the most elegant notebooks.
he is apologizing for how it was handled and most likely for allowing it to happen in the first place

But it's copyright laws that allowed this to happen legally. How should Amazon decide which legal rights publishers get to keep and which rights they don't? And are corporations the right entity to decide what is moral and what isn't? Would you blame chain manufacturers for slavery, or the laws which make slavery legal?

This whole thing goes to show how DRM can negatively effect a consumer

But DRM is just the mechanism for enforcing what people perceive as immoral laws. If books were removed once-bought in a way without DRM, surely people wouldn't be any less outraged, would they?
It's significantly less usable for me. For example: can't jump to function definitions from the console; can't step through code using just the keyboard.

(If these things have changed since I last tried it, I'd like to know.)
I've done a lot of reading on medical stuff and I've run into some folks who know the most amazing things. Like when I began stuttering last year, I was able to ask around for what supplements would help and get a list of suggestions. I had never had a stutter before and I knew there had to be a cause, it didn't "just happen". The supplements cleared it up. When I start reversing too many letters again when I type, it's a clue that I need to up my supplements (or restart ones I've stopped taking).

I've heard lots of similar stories, but you they don't usually get told in "normal" circles to avoid being booed down as "nutty". :-)
Not quite, copyright law prohibits you from doing some things with the presentation of the information such as distributing copies and creating certain types of derivative works.

I am free to do virtually anything with the original including archive for all eternity, loan out relentlessly, sell, or chop into small sections and sell the sections.

I can even copy within certain contexts (archival copies of software, for example) and I can create certain types of derivative works (parodies and certain limited educational uses for instance).
The solution to that is a complete change in the way society views education. If education were seen as a lifelong thing and it was the norm for people to pick up new skills then things would be so much better.

The current system forces people to make choices at a point in their lives when they don't even know who they are yet, let alone what they want to do with their lives. Instead of Google's 20% time, we need 20% education time.
It's not a legal issue. If I bought a paper book, and it turned out that the publisher didn't have rights to the material, Amazon wouldn't break into my home and take the book back. They should compensate the actual rights holder instead. The Kindle is no different. Regardless of the law, customers feel just as violated.
Have less kids? Adopt?

Not that I'm advocating this. I think people should be responsible enough to choose how much to reproduce.
Copyright law said the sales of the unauthorized copies were illegal. It didn't necessarily create an obligation for Amazon to use the remote content-kill functionality to "undo" the sales.

Remote content-kill is such a dangerous and abuse-prone capability that even if it is a 'tidy' way to undo a previous mistake, it still shouldn't be used.

The apology indicates Bezos at least at some level understands that.
urm, people dont care about copyright laws, why should buying a book be any different from buying a loaf of bread?

but even past that, I am sure if amazon pushed hard enough / paid some money out then they would have been able to convince the publishers to allow the bought books to, stay bought
I'm not sure I agree with this first statement. For sure scheme was motivated by lambda calculus, but I do not believe McCarthy (a functional analyst by training) was aware of lambda calculus when he invented Lisp. Rather he was motivated by symbolic calculations often performed in functional analysis.

NOTE: I stand corrected, I just checked and McCarthy's Lisp paper does cite Church's thesis work. Somehow I had thought Algol was motivated by lambda calculus
Amazon wouldn't break into my home and take the book back

...because breaking in is illegal, not because copyright law prohibits it. A remote self-wipe mechanisms which turned all of the pages of a book blank at the request of the copyright holder would be just as legal.
I think the part that really pissed everyone off is the manner which it was done and the fact that, while the illegal copies broke copyright, it isn't Amazon who owns it.

What probably should have been done (and would have been done, if it weren't for DRM/TOS) is that the book be removed from Amazon. Rather than to remove all the infringed copies right from under the noses of Kindle owners and essentially make them realize what exactly they signed up for when they got a Kindle.
I think I have some of the same problems,I thought it was a good write up and hopefully will make me more aware when I am making a common mistake...

Spending to much time on the technology over the people seemed very relevant to me, as it might pay off in the short term but as the company grows it surely hurts it.
If Bezos wanted to fuck around with his apology, he'd have used more cushiony words. "Stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles" doesn't allow for much leeway with how he views Amazon's actions here. He's saying straight out that they made a mistake.
why should buying a book be any different from buying a loaf of bread

Great question - a question that would start a debate about the validity of copyright law, a debate which goes back centuries, and a debate where I can see both sides. But nobody is having this debate - they seem to be just taking one side, the side opposite the one hundreds of years legal scholars have taken.

if amazon pushed hard enough / paid some money out then they would have been able to convince the publishers to allow the bought books to, stay bought

Absolutely, they could also push hard enough/pay enough money and only allow material onto the Kindle if copyright owners allow customers to make copies and derivative works of their books. But why should they?
Google Latitude for iPhone
A Maker's marketing can be more interesting than a non-Maker's reporting.
Ask HN:  Is there a "YouTube" for free interactive webinars?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_conferencing

Although scheduled IRC chats are common, this is more compelling.

Is there a "YouTube" for these webinars?
SubEthaEdit is Mac-only software, which sort of rules it out as a competitor.
> Surely, it isn’t Amazon’s responsibility to judge which laws are moral and which aren’t - that’s what we pay all those people in Washington for.

No. We pay people in congress to decide what is legal, not what is moral.
Plagiarizing himself? Huh? Is that even possible?
that was actually a typo I just edited, I meant buying a loaf of bread vs book.

but even so, 1. I dont see what the length of time to start reading has to do with anything.

2. why should they? because they are a company who needs to serve their customers interests or they will go out of business, thats a pretty compelling reason in my opinion.
Relatedly, how is it that cell phone companies screw their customers at every turn and still have single-digit profit margins? Given the amount of malice we perceive in them (and they make me as angry as the next guy), you'd think they were making far more.
Both articles are in Joel's voice and credited to Joel. You can't plagiarize yourself. I also used the word "might".

The Founders at Work interview is at http://www.foundersatwork.com/joel-spolksy.html . The Inc article is not a copy and paste, but it triggered the "seen this before" meter.
It has been fixed. Thanks again.
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