skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. I don't think it's right to discount the CLR and focus on the language whereas the fact is that C# can not do certain things without support from CLR. [In fact, for each C# feature, I like to know whether it's a compiler trick or CLR feature.]

The biggest example I can think of is 'generics'. Java 'generics' are implemented using the compiler and JVM has no clue about them whereas CLR actually understands them and you get full reflection support for generic classes. Read this detailed article on Generics in Java vs C#:

http://www.jprl.com/Blog/archive/development/2007/Aug-31.htm...

I also like the utility of AppDomains supported by CLR.

Overall, I love .NET platform precisely because how all the modules (CLR, languages) are integrated with each other to give you a powerful tool set.

Other than JVM being portable, I don't know of a single case where JVM is superior to CLR. [Performance wise there is not a measurable difference between the two.]
Not a fan of the name.... but great concept.
[Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft but on cloud stuff not on anything Mac vs Windows related. This is not officially endorsed by Microsoft, just my personal opinion, etc, etc]

One small clarification.The 'rounding error' he was talking about was the change in share. I know this since I was a few feet away doing manning a booth for my team :)

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/FY09/BallmerFAM2009.msp... has the entire speech. Grep the page for the quote - it appears deep in and is just a couple of lines.
It's too late for either company to really change how they do business. Apple has always cultivated a user base that accepts the changes required for the evolution of hardware and software platforms. They've created a great environment for innovation. The PC industry has largely gone the other direction. Embracing a kind of technical creationism. God created the start menu and it was good. God created the taskbar and it was good. A significant number of people only know the one true faith of computers and they shackle Microsoft's ability to innovate. It will be interesting to see how the mainstream reacts to the Dock in Windows 7 since it's probably the single most significant user interface change Microsoft has made in the last 15 years.
Vis-à-vis A little knowledge :

One particular Ph.D who I worked with had created a much lauded database. It was done in MS Access. It stored natural numbers. Each sample contained a few gigs of natural numbers. Numbers could be anywhere form 0 to 99999. So each entry contained all possible numbers in increments of 0.02, with Null in all places where the sample did not contain that number.

This is what happens when people have never heard of foreign keys or a one-to-many relationship or a many-to-many relationship.

This could have been done so it's a lot smaller and faster to search. The place holder could have been a negative int, instead of Null, so that it would evaluate to something other then Null in searches. An infinity of things could have been done better.

But when you have Ph.D and you legitimately think of yourself as brilliant. AND you are used to doing a lot of HARD work, then heroics with MS Access just seem natural, right, that's what hard science is damn it. And this is why a little knowledge can be worse then no knowledge.

If that guy had instead hired almost anyone else to design the database, he would have been better off. It's hard to imagine anyone who could have screwed up worse AND had the tenacity to stick with it.

PhDs are not just smart, but they also are used to working hard so when things get hard they don't quickly perceive that as signal to try something else.

As to being computer illiterate:

A field biologists might get away with it, but anyone working in a lab will sooner or later measure something with an instrument entirely controlled by and accessed though a computer.

Let me say that again, a computer is the gate keeper.

And it's not enough to simply know how to use the GUI/API what ever. You have to also know at least something about the algorithms involved in the analysis. Because a lot of analysis of things that can't be seen with the naked eye is actually statistical inference of what's there.

Let me say that again, a whole of of stuff is not measured in the way a lay person thinks of measuring, it is inferred using fancy math.

But make your math a bit too fancy and you're just making stuff up now. Use a second order polynomial and you're good, use a 3rd or higher order and you can see anything you want. There's a reason we use cubic b splines for computer graphics, it's because we can fit them to any shape we want!

And oh yeah I've seen 3rd order polynomials used in science, no they were not used correctly.
Public backlash ensues when there's the possibility of something affecting them. How many people actually have (or care to have) a Google Voice number?
PyramiDOM: Spectrum DOM Analyzer
What kind of readers does this guy have that he's not afraid of losing them to boredom at this point?

The kind of readers this "guy" has are the 2+ million unique people that visit per month (see compete.com chart) who are actually interested in every nook and cranny, pro and con, detailed form and function, and in-depth overview they need to make an logic-based, informed, $700 decision. First-version phones can be notorious for having major problems, and those issues need to be discovered before blowing a grand buying one.

All the iPhone taught you to do is ignore the negatives of balanced phone reviews, because the majority of your comment is

1) attacking the layout of the review and

2) restating a few pre-release issues of which the iPhone had plenty itself

What do you expect from a review? That it'll hide all the problems and only tell you the positive features of the phone? I certainly wouldn't trust a review website that does that.

As I said before, I bought a Nokia N95 back in 2007 that had 8gb, GPS, 3G support, Google&Nokia Maps, music player, FM radio, 5 megapixel camera, and VGA video support. I also get Google Voice, and while there aren't as many Symbian apps in total, let's just say I don't feel like I need iFart Mobile. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention I can easily take my phone to any GSM carrier I want? I think I also forgot to mention I can do basic tasks you'd expect a phone to do, like MMS and choosing the sound for your alarm clock.

If there's any phone that's behind on tech, it's the iPhone. Not only do you get subpar performance, you're also locked into a little cage where Apple decides what you get to do, and to me that's not a phone for a hacker.
WPS: PostScript and PDF interpreter for HTML 5 canvas
What we need to do is encourage Google to open source their Google Voice iPhone application so that we can compile and install it on our own. Granted, you have to have the tools and your $100.00 developer certificate but it would be nice.
At least the OO parts. Of course the syntax was originally C.
Just a day ago I asked how HN participants learned biology

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731362

in their higher education. I would think that with judicious course selection and choosing fitting internships it would be possible for a CS major to learn quite a lot of biology, or the other way around, but perhaps I am mistaken. A book Mathematics Unlimited--2001 and Beyond

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Unlimited-Bj%C3%B6rn-Engqu...

included an article by a European author suggesting that all math majors should study a lot more science than they did as of a decade ago, and all science majors (in all sciences) ought to study a lot more math. That makes sense to me.
TED Talk: Elaine Morgan says we evolved from Aquatic Apes.
I have a wonderful idea for a business (almost along the same line as this). You outsource your CCTV video watching to a 3rd world country.

This will help a lot since it will be a lot cheaper (even a small business can have 16 cameras that is difficult to monitor).

The reason why this will work is the same as in the article: The people doing the watching do not know those they are supervising and they are not likely to empathise with them.
Yeah, we use Train number because the new light rail system is right outside our office and it looks like someone damn near gets hit from walking in front of the train about 3 times a day.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my...

'Amazon didn’t delete the file containing Gawronski’s notes on the Kindle device. But since the book text “no longer exists, all my notes refer back to nothing,” he said. “I can’t really use it for much.”'
I believe Squeak just adds the extra indirection when #become: is used, by turning the old objects into "forwarders". On the next full GC, the forwarders get cleaned up and the extra indirection removed.
you could use mono....?
Yes, I'd prefer Eastern medicine, where I get diagnosed as chi-deficient and treated with the powdered testicles of some rare animal.

I'm only partly joking.
...which reminds me of the Dave Barry article about the professor who discovered that basketball fans universally chant "air ball" in the key of F:

http://archive.deseretnews.com/archive/print/430672/AIR-BALL...
MSFT Makes a Strategic Error Chasing Search
If he said "Oak", instead, I would vote him for being a predecessorist; usually, a bunch of people with better judgment than fadists.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/19/cheney-office-fire_...

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
I'd have to disagree with this. Have you owned one of the plastic Macbooks? Regardless of it being plastic it was still the toughest notebook I had owned to date. Yes, the Pro's are MUCH tougher and I'm glad I upgraded when I did, but I had no complaints or issues with the build quality of my plastic Macbook. It was a great machine.

My comparison was HP's, Dell's, and even an IBM that all ended up falling apart with only a few years of regular use. With the Macbook this was not so.
Often leads to the statisticians giving the biologists tutorials in statistics and the biologists giving the statisticians tutorials in biology. Which is okay, but then you have to wonder if more formal study up front would have been more efficient. Which brings us back to this topic.
Are books killing the oral tradition? The ability to recite long tracts from memory, from The Odyssey to bread recipes, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be looked up in a book?

"It's a damn shame" say out of work poets everywhere.
More information at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my...
To be fair, he speaks in english sentences ((with the occasional chant), not Palin's constant word salad
Stupid stupid crap waste of taxpayers' money.
You're off by a couple of millennia, the 'Wohl Temperierte Klavier' was only possible after some German dude called Werkmeister came up with a way to tune instruments across large ranges to allow them to play together.

That's where the math came in to it.

That other German 'dude' J.S. Bach then proceeded to cover the new possibilities exhaustively, see the music in the volume of the same name. The enormous jump music made in the relatively short span of 15 years or so during which this all happened is still quite unbelievable.
I guess my basic point is that people talk about the "cloud" like it is a magical entity that solves all our problems when it comes to server load, resources and data. The reality is, it's still hardware, it's still physical, and it is still a limited resource.

Not having to think about something doesn't change the nature of the thing you aren't thinking about. Clouds are still built from servers.
Answer: Google is killing many kinds of Trivia. For example, I always have to look up how to link external CSS.

Google is also teaching people more than ever (e.g. I know many more definitions of words than I ever would have looked up without Google). Google (more Wikipedia) gives me instant summaries of complex topics or figures or events, which I remember.
The title is a misleading summary of the article. The article only discusses income taxes, not the entire tax burden.
This is exactly the type of tool I've been hoping someone would make for small businesses like my mother's. Since she already knows how to make a spreadsheet of her inventory, all I need to do is place a snippet of code on her website.
Ultimate in hubris: IBM regarding Wintel [Edit: PC] offering as a "toy" circa 1984. This seems to be in that same spirit.

Apple's Standard Oil model of business (fanatical control of every aspect of its products) has given it certain major engineering advantages but has limited its desktop share to that of a strong high-end niche - great for connoisseurs and for those on the cutting edge, less appealing to those who need to solve immediate business problems with cost-effective solutions.

It was a seismic shift ala first-time-ever mass computing that blind-sided IBM and caused it to lose hegemony in the enterprise market. That could happen today as well (though not from the Mac itself, which will remain a high-end niche product), and I would suspect that Microsoft is not nearly as sanguine in the back room about the threats to its dominance as it lets on. Agreed it is not wise to put on an arrogant face about it.
Brilliant analysis in there of how getting people to buy new more fuel-efficient cars could have no effect on emissions.
I also can't install whatever software I want on the cable box I got from Comcast. Nobody's ranting about that though.

You also did not pay to buy that box from Comcast either. You're leasing it from them, with full expectation from Comcast that you will give it back if/when you terminate service, and from you that Comcast will replace it at no charge if/when it breaks or stops working.

With the iPhone (or any cell phone for that matter), you have bought the phone, and it becomes your own personal property. You do not have to return the phone if you cancel service, and the provider is under no obligation to replace the unit if it breaks (unless you paid extra from the start for a warranty).

That is why nobody rants about their unit from Comcast.
Picking the (legacy) white MacBook as representative of the entire line is disingenuous. 100% of the modern line is unibody and does indeed represent superior design, from battery life to multi-touch trackpad.
Upvoted for comparing science work to oceans 11.
If anything, I know more now than I would have without Google. I tend to look up words and interesting facts I don't know on my palm when I am out and about and run into something I don't know much about.
Most founders quit a job to do the startup. Only about 20-25% were students before.
You need both. Percentages are better for showing movement (e.g. growth), while absolute numbers give context.
Hm? Windows was first released in November of '85, and the first release that achieved significant popularity was released in '87. Do you mean to say IBM regarded the Apple Macintosh as a toy?
All I know is that it never drops calls in the UK, and my experience of cellphones and landlines in the US has always been absolutely abysmal.
I think it is hugely ironic that Mike is as mad about the leak as he is.
I don't know - I couldn't find the answer on Google.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/
Great article on the complexities of proposals competing for standardization. I especially appreciated the no-nonsense rundown of the statistics.

Whoever takes the Grade 1 Haskell Invitational prize will apparently net a big advantage. Is there a twitter blog or RSS feed of the results?
Hey, I said human civilization, not humane or human-originating civilization.
Someone wiser than me once noted that the purpose of technology is to allow individuals to be incompetent at more and more things.
The same thing goes for a business plan. The act of writing the business plan is more important than the plan itself. Combine those two and hopefully you have new perspective on your product and positioning.

My favorite questions include:
What do you get that your competitors just don't get? (straight from the YC app)
What are you intentional shortcomings?
Defensibility: What is your competitive advantage and how do you respond to big names coming into your space?
Not to mention that any site that hopes to sell things has to account for an audience that includes a sizable proportion of people with weak vision.

If you're selling tchotchkes to sharp-eyed design conscious teenagers, then tiny grey font on a pink background can work. But if your audience is full spectrum, legibility wins. Good designers make legibility win even more; by making things legible and beautiful, but they are rare.
Looking for Recent Startup Checklist Post - help
Hi, sorry if this is the wrong place to post but not sure to look after google turned up nothing.

There was a recent post pointing to a blog with a startup checklist that specifically mentioned pre & post launch customer relationship building. It was a large & quite thorough list.

I'm kicking myself for not scrapbooking it as I can't find it in the system of tubes now. Does anyone recall it?

Thanks
In the 90's I worked on vehicle emissions inspections programs for several states. A colleague of mine wondered if what we were doing was cost effective. He found out that it was cheaper to buy all the high polluters that it was to run the inspection programs. Of course nothing came of it because it would have put us out of business.
Every ThinkPad I have ever had at work has emitted this super high pitched whine from the left side.
I wanted to use a certain drawing program (better than xfig but proprietary) for some of my writing. Since I was too cheap to pay the $10 registration fee I decided to try and crack it. It took an afternoon with OllyDbg to crack the program (from its trail version). This is significant because I haven’t looked at x86 assembly in 10 years.

I don’t know if I should be ashamed or proud.
Trends in Password Masking Security and Usability
She rocks for writing that book. I definitely want to read it.
I remember this! The author wrote a hilarious/insightful blog post about the development cycle. I'll see if I can dig it up and submit it.

edit: cool, it was already submitted. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467402
Check it out :]
Java bytecode is Turing-complete, so there's nothing explicitly preventing you from implementing many of the advanced features of C# atop the JVM. As the OP stated, alternate languages running on the JVM (such as Scala) already do this.

The problem is simply that most Java shops use only the officially-blessed Java language. Because Sun has always forced "certified" implementations of the language and platform to conform to their standard, there has been little room for innovation in the source syntax and bytecode format since the release of the first JDK in 1996. In the meantime, programming languages (and the programmers who use them) have moved forward, and Java has failed to keep up.
There aren't many situations where I'd need information, without being able to look it up.

So it's not killed my general knowledge, it's expanded it beyond any level I could have had without it.
I wanted to use a certain drawing program (better than xfig but proprietary) for some of my studies. Since I was too cheap to pay the $10 registration fee I decided to try and crack it. It took an afternoon with OllyDbg to crack the program (from its trail version). This is significant because I haven’t looked at x86 assembly in 10 years.

I don’t know if I should be ashamed or proud.
It does change the nature of the thing to the person using the cloud. I agree with your points about the silver bullet hype, but the cloud does give people a lot of advantages and a lot of cost savings under the right circumstances. Those circumstances happen to include a very large segment of web developers.
Online community best practices: Reward your top users
Discussed the 90-9-1 rule of social communities and how to reward that remarkable 1%.
I wish job interviewers would catch up with this. They always seem to expect you to have this kind of triva memorized :-(
That's a battle of pedantry that you lost a long time ago, and you will win it sometime after "begging the question" gets used correctly most of the time.

It's a good example of a picky use of language that adds nothing whatsoever to the understanding of the subject.

"Interval" has connotations I didn't want, namely that it's the same no matter what degree of the scale you start on. I really did mean "I, III" specifically. As far as I know, there's no term in music for that, but "chord", namely a major I chord (only without the fifth) seems to fit what I wanted to say better than "interval" to me.
yeah, you're right, but a lot of people have that sympathize-with-the-little-guy mentality despite what they have done.

Bollocks indeed.
I disagree with your implications that someone is lazy if they have concerns other than low level bit twiddling. Some of us are trying to build businesses or simply progress the state of the art in other areas. For example, I work in a research group on information retrieval. I could spend hours of my day making progress on IR with higher level languages or I could instead waste productivity on manual memory management. Choosing the former is not being lazy.

Also, the idea that "some" people still do C therefore memory management isn't obsolete for most people is clearly flawed.
Or perhaps he knows that if you want a bigger fire, you start fanning some flames.
If the government was buying high-polluters, though, there would be 10x more of them. People would keep them running and sell them to the government rather than junking them.
This is a great point, but please don't apply because just for validation only to turn it down because you aren't ready to commit.
I think you're being harsh on COBOL. Clearly, it is a thriving language that's being kept up-to-date according to the latest trends. Check the out the COBOL Ruby on Rails equivalent, COBOL ON COGS if you don't believe me: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
> And the computer at the bottom are netbooks and smartphones, markets that MS is not strong in.

Was that a serious comment?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

> As of January 2009, over 90% of netbooks are estimated to ship with Windows XP[52]
I guess I can understand the first two, but you'd take Java over Ruby? Really?
I think a lot of people who buy Macs are the opposite of hardware geeks and case modders. I bought my MBP because I got tired of dealing with hardware, picking out parts, etc. I just wanted a nicely designed and built computer that let me do what I wanted (in my case, programming).

To me, having to deal with hardware just gets in the way of letting me do what I want, which I feel many people can relate to.
In hindsight, hate was a bit strong. thanks for the bookmarklet. I too prefer the low-band version of the msdn. But I prefer java docs layout. It's a lot easier to use and navigate. With namespaces at the top, classes just below and method/class details as the main view. I think it's very elegant.
> "... We were able to see the Neda video out of Iran trending well before CNN linked it in, and we’ve begun to refine our capabilities there to be able to pinpoint stories like that." He said part of this technique involves looking for links being shared by unlike people, because that means they have universal appeal.

This is why I fell in love with computer science. I can already imagine the use of a good shortest path algorithm combined with collaborative filtering (Netflix competition-type algorithms) being used to tackle this problem in real-time. You are given a unique url and 1000 twitter accounts that linked to it. You also have the entire twitter-follower digraph. Now design an algorithm to calculate the "universality" factor with the lowest Big O. Now do this 10k times a second for 10k unique urls.
If you enjoyed this video, check out this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Bstv5z-Ow

It's him doing the same thing, but longer, and with more interesting soloing over it. This one's a proper piece.