skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you fell into the social pressure aspect of Apple's Marketing technique? I thought of getting a Mac for college, however for the price it doesn't offer much over a Lenovo or a Dell. You get alot of nice touches, but those things I'd never use. Multi-touch trackpad? Unibody? There are products out there that do those things much better, such as tablets and toughbooks. Mac is like a DND bard, jack of all trades master of none, and not even better than a master of one. They're nice, they're shiny, but you want toughness? Get a toughbook. You want battery life? Get a Lenovo t400. You want something light that you can surf the web with? Netbook.

If you want to impress your friends about how much better your purchase is, then get a Mac.
Not sure what point you're making here. It doesn't really say anything about a programmer if he/she forgets the semicolons when writing out a C++ function by hand. Especially if this person is constantly juggling many different language syntaxes, some of which have line terminators and some not.

The function logic is wrong; yes, that's a problem. But forgetting the semicolons has no significance whatsoever.
Install Drizzle On Debian Lenny
This looks like a pretty cool project, but the lack of Linux support is a deal killer for me.

How does it handle vandalism? It seems to me that vandalism could be a lot more devastating in this environment than in, say, Wikipedia.
jm4 says it best regarding the quality of editorial content in TC... but i'll just say he doesn't acknowledge that there are very solid business reasons for blocking a competitor like google releasing a voip product that competes with at&t's network, cannibalizes revenue, etc.

he accuses at&t/apple of moral failure for acting in their best business interests as if techcrunch doesn't operate according to the same principles (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I was a c# dev a year ago and whenever I looked for open source packages to address some requirement, I would always end up at codeproject. It always tended to be poor quality, never updated, etc..
Java has so much more but maybe things have changed over the last year.
I used Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop for the still photos and graphics, then brought them into Apple Final Cut Pro for the editing.

The narration was recorded at my desk (with pillows around me to stop echos) using an Audio Technica AT2020 USB condenser mic.
I think the start date, Q4'07 is misleading. I'd like to see the graph since 2005 for example. I believe there was a steep increase of online ad spending in 2006-2008, and this is an adjustment to a "normal" growth rate. Being at the same level as Q4'07 is actually a good surprise to me, I thought it would be well below.
The reason I like C is that every action is so specific. Yes, that means it's not suited for "high level" applications, like web apps, and situation in which development time needs to be cut. But that specificity and control over every action is exactly why it's good for network and hardware programming. I haven't seen C used outside of those realms in a long time.

edit: Furthermore, it's low-levelness makes it very versatile. It centers around the universal abstractions used in Unix - the ability to open, read, write, and close files. That, combined with structs, unions, and it's basic data types allow you to use it for virtually ANY protocol.
According to your logic, we should put exactly the same trust in an article in NYTimes vs an article in the National Enquirer, only "flagging individual articles", that is, ignoring the well-deserved reputation of either source.

That's not how people normally treat news sources or opinion sources. New York Times worked hard to establish the quality of its reporting. Tech Crunch worked hard to show its reader s that quality takes n-th place in its reporting to sensationalism, sleazy behavior, unsubstantiated rumors, heavily biased reporting, etc. etc. Both publications should enjoy the fruit of their labors.

It's an unfunny joke to call Techcrunch "a paper of record" for anything. I'm not saying it's the National Enquirer of the startup world, but it's much closer to that than to being the New York Times of the startup world.

Since Techchrunch now has zero credibility with me, and I think its articles should be treated as untrusted and biased by default, it's a waste of time for me to dig through a heap of garbage to find an occassionally honest and informative piece. Thus the strategy of flagging all Techcrunch submissions is a sound one; the only reason I don't is that I'm too lazy to remember to.
Read:
http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
http://paulgraham.com/mit.html

Two very good articles that cover some of the importance of having co-founders.
A major I chord without the fifth is two pitches, the first and third degrees of the major scale. That's what I meant. Why is that not anywhere close, or even not precisely the same?

I did not mean a major third interval. They could have sung the correct interval, but the wrong pitches. For what I did mean, I do insist that in the limited terminology of music, chord is a better fit because it implies the pitch where interval doesn't.

This necessitates terms like "Power Chord". Pedants are going to say this is wrong. (And oh yeah a Koala Bear isn't really a Bear either.) But it does get around a limitation of the language.
I think a better comment would have been:

One market Microsoft is weak and being forced out (phones), another is very low margin, and dragging down Microsoft's overall revenue and profits (netbooks).
This is a good sign.

Although I'm sure some information on the internet is unreliable, I've been to plenty of doctors in my life who have made incorrect diagnoses and given me unreliable information too.

When doctors and patients have more information more easily available (even if some percentage is incorrect), I can't believe that wouldn't help.

The real question is, why aren't all doctors checking online resources like wikipedia in addition to the resources they normally use?
I don't believe that one bit.
I think the cooking analogy holds. Sure, those people DO use knife-proof gloves and for good reason. They need to be able to cut through things of the same basic structure as human meat! So it goes with code: if you are working on a low level libs and languages you should be protecting yourself with well thought out data and exception handling. If you don't, you might just cut your hand, I mean, data off!
Because the "Twitter Updates" sidebar has pictures of the developers.
On point 1, are you arguing Microsoft should say that Win 7 is superior to Mac OS X, or to previous versions of Windows?

The first argument would be terribly hard for them to win, but the second they might be able to credibly argue. I don't think there are many who dispute that Win 7 is better than Vista, the only issue is if it's better than XP. That likely depends partially on the hardware you run it on.
So you tried it on linux, and it didn't work?!!! :-P
Microsoft's while-supplies-last Windows 7 Family Pack: lame.
I suppose that butchers might use cut-resistant gloves, but in the professional kitchens I've shared I've never seen them worn by a chef.
I'd prefer my libraries be rock solid secure even if I lose some (or even a lot of) performance for it.

Hardware is always getting cheaper.

Losing data integrity and the trust/confidence of your users is extremely expensive, and can be fatal for a startup.

Performance is not the most important metric for a lot of applications.

I'd prefer the safe but slow 5 star crash test rated sedan with a good alarm over the race car that is going to blow up after a few races, in library terms.
Or, better, overlay with ad spend in other media. Newspaper ads are down 40-50% this year.

At the moment online ads are grabbing a bigger slice of a shrinking pie.
I would not call all his claims crap. I disagree with his libraries statement but agree that visual studios is better than netbeans or eclipse.

I have used c# in vs.net for years up until a year ago and am stuck using eclipse now. I miss vs.net, not so much c#.
When I was going through grade school, I heard such bullshit rumors about Mac computers, such as "They're really popular in Europe." Which not only is ignorant of computers, but ignorant of socio-economics of the average European who has much less expendable income than the average American. For them buying a computer that was priced at 1.5-2.0x that of a PC at the time would have been improbable.
The software will assert out (bomb, hard) if it's running on a platform which isn't 32-bit (that's the sizeof), and little endian (checked by putting the individual bytes of 0x12345678 into memory in little-endian order, and making sure that when read as an integer, the value is correct).

Except it doesn't even do that well. Traditionally the C "int" type was the largest word size a machine could comfortably work with. But most 64-bit platforms have adopted the "LP64" and "LLP64" conventions - where "int" remains a 32-bit type. One reason to do this is that most values fit comfortably into 32 bits, so a 64-bit "int" wastes memory. Another reason is to keep shoddy code like this running!
If he really wants a "big boy" grade leak that deserves anger it will need to include unachievable specs, like a dual core Atom 330 processor running at 1.8GHz and an 8 hour battery life @ 2 pounds, so that the media can then respond to his eventual product release with well, it's nice, but they didn't really hit the mark.
Perhaps you have your own theory to explain this shift? Instead of sniping at Gruber, for trying to explain a very real shift in the market, if there's a better explanation, then link to it or share it.
About EyeOS: I guess today is the day of the webOS on HN...

I looked at both: EyeOS seems to have some nice apps, but no notion of instant-edit like wikiOS. Personally, EyeOS is just another webOS, but with wikiOS, the wiki-factor might make it into something completely different. Hard to tell how much of a game changer it is.
It's not just a pun on the headline, it is indeed a statement on the submission. Snarky as it may be.
using a search engine saves you from having to remember things

Being able to pagefault into Googling something is very different from knowing it off-hand. You're easily able to relate and see patterns in immediate knowledge, but not in things you'd need to look up.
Margins for them are MUCH worse, that is why they missed their earning targets this quarter.

Also, count me as a person who bought a netbook that shipped with XP and immediately installed Linux on it - the company no longer offered the model I wanted with Linux. So as always Microsoft is pushing Windows on people whether they want it or not and then turning around and screaming MARKET SHARE MARKET SHARE!
"Jython's page is also a Wiki."

It's not a public wiki, I see no evidence that is runs on a wiki-based CMS, and what would that have to do with anything, anyway?

"Horrendous"

"Horrendous"? Compared to the Jython wiki (http://wiki.python.org/jython/)? That's a bit of a stretch. They are both technical documentation sites using default themes, one using MoinMoin and the other on Sun's Project Kenai platform, and neither is what the OP is referring to.
I disagree: if a company's bottom line is weak, its ability to compete is weakened and a reduction in market share is likely to follow if this continues.
Try linking to the blogs of attendees -- you have pretty spectacular pagerank right now, so they'd be into it.
I'm a single founder. A lot of times, I wish it's not just me.

It's hard looking for a cofounder. Instead of waiting to find one, I went ahead with my startup.

I continue to network and hopefully one day, I'll find one.
I prefer the keyboard & touchpad on the regular Macbook to the price equivalent Dell.
Google and Apple topped estimates for the quarter I believe

Cool. That's exactly what I wanted to know.
The magnitude of the $1000+ PC market in terms of # of widgets sold, or in terms of revenue?

In case you were not aware, Apple's market cap is higher than Dell and HP combined who together sell over 50% of the domestic units in the US, which is Apple's strongest market.

Businesses are ultimately formed to create revenue and profit, not shift widgets. Microsoft has apparently taken their eyes off this fact after 2 decades of easily collected fat profits, but monopolies can be lost if you sit fat and happy on them.

People often talk about Apple's "market share" in terms of widgets, but how often do you hear the media talk about Apple's "market share" of the total revenue in the computer market? I've never heard it mentioned once* in decades of following the computer industry. Profit is what matters, not widgets.

*by mentioned once I mean the main stream media, I've heard it mentioned on Mac blogs. But I've never seen the media show a break down of the exact % of the profit Apple pulls out of the computer industry. I'd love to see one.
This is not a "small" clarification. The headline is completely misleading - thank you for calling this out.
The pre-unibody MacBooks were more sturdy that the pre-unibody MacBook Pros and PowerBooks.
> Hardware is always getting cheaper.

This is a poor justification. A few years ago a house was a good investment because 'housing prices will always be going up.'
Massless particles always move at the speed of light.
Point taken, however financial involvement is still needed. Not only that but I already have a damn computer why should I buy a different one because you decided to lock development to one platform?

Also interesting tid-bit, I've found that resale value on Apple PC's is sustained only by the fact that they're stylish. The resale market has thrived with Mac's more-so because they're an expensive commodity rather than a commodity whose value deprecates at a slow rate intrinsically. It's the same reason why recent (5 yr old)CISCO routers and switches keep price as well.
Google Summons Android for Smart-Phone Attack
My high school math teacher refused to teach calculus. We spent year after year on algebra, trig, geometry, and did proofs. Lots and lots of proofs. He told me not to worry about when I went to college and studied calculus as I would be much better at it than the students that studied calc in high school.

Smart man, he was right. The first two weeks in my first college calc class I felt a little uneasy and understood that I was the only person in class that had not studied this stuff in high school. After those first two weeks though, it was not a problem and I swept through 6 calc classes without a sweat.

20 years later of course, I'm a math idiot again...use it or lose it ;)
Yes, and there's no reason for browsers to accept more than one domain name in a CN field. However a quick look through rfc3280 and an ASN.1 reference make me think it is a less than trivial task to figure out what would and would not be a legal termination for a string encoded in the Subject field of a certificate. But it is perfectly reasonable to expect the CA to check for that.
Well, I'm no economist, but lowering prices isn't always a bad thing. And I definitely think it was wise for MS to adapt their pricing to the netbook market. It is definitely not in Microsoft's long-term financial to give Linux a toehold on the retail desktop market.
On PHP 5.3's Namespace Backslash Backlash: The PHP Internals Team was Right?
I don't apply for anonymous jobs either.

I think the solution to the job problem is qualified HR personnel who are capable of evaluating a candidates worthiness well enough to be an appropriate first level filter.

A lot of people want jobs, many of whom are not yet qualified for the position they are applying for. Any attempt to do all the keyword filtering nonsense isn't going to work too well.

I know reading resumes all day from unqualified candidates isn't very fun, but neither is reading college admissions applications or any number of activities people get paid for. As a technology person, I don't think there's a good technical solution to this people problem.
How It's Made: Soldering Irons
Nonsense headline.

First, there has been no solid evidence that the Apple Tablet is even coming (just a "confirmation" that was only confirming that the rumor existed).

Second, how would the CrunchPad "beat" the Apple tablet? By existing? By coming out first? In build quality? User experience? Price point?

That said, would anyone here pay $400 for that thing? I'm not sure, considering for that I could get an iPhone, iPod Touch (more portable and with native apps, but with the diminished small-screen experience) or a netbook.
Batle of neandertals vs modern humans shows how at the times of great upheavals even small advantages can spell difference between survival and success.
The trouble is, that you're limiting yourself to hardworking & smart people. Opening it up this way gives them a much broader audience.
a temporary snapshot of the text within you focus area

When I read a typo I just can't help it -- I regress and reexamine the text. Dunno how common this is, but it sure limits my WPM reading typical blog posts.
Wal-Mart’s Laptop Prices Lure Buyers to Accessorize
C is advanced assembler. It is an absolutely great language for system level stuff, especially because everything is explicit, no relying on side effects or stuff hidden from view.

The thread of execution is extremely easy to follow.

The only thing I would change if we could revisit the past is that I would add a string primitive to the language with a half decent set of string operators. That would have made my life a lot easier at some point in the past.

The funny thing is that most languages that people use that criticize 'C' are usually at the core levels written in C.

There is probably a good case to be made for the claim that Unix would not exist if it weren't for the C language.
The Myth Of Outsourcing
professional race cars absolutely have ABS. in fact ABS systems are so effective that their use has been restricted in the likes of formula 1 etc.
The amount of equity we ask for doesn't vary that much, actually, because the ratio of applications to people we fund is so high now that everyone who makes it is pretty good.
I haven't seen C used outside of those realms in a long time.

For an example of modern high-level C, check out GTK+. It's a sprawling cross-platform GUI library that provides the foundation for the arguably most popular Linux desktop environment (GNOME). Although GNOME apps are frequently written in higher-level languages using bindings, GTK+ itself is plain C.
20x? That's awesome!

I used to work in a bioinformatics startup - tons of fun with cutting edge science. But the startup tanked, and I moved on to a high paying corporate software engineering job. But I hope to be back in bioinformatics before long.
Using a browser inside the desktop that runs inside my browser: priceless!
Here's a video about Pythagoras and the musical ratios developed on a single string "guitar" - very interesting for math + music heads.

http://bit.ly/tuAvW
Excerpts from the mit.html link above that are especially pertinent:

"Most of the questions people ask Y Combinator we have some kind of answer for, but not the co-founder question. There is no good answer. Co-founders really should be people you already know. And by far the best place to meet them is school."

"If I were you I'd look for the people who are not just smart, but incurable builders. Look for the people who keep starting projects, and finish at least some of them. That's what we look for. Above all else, above academic credentials and even the idea you apply with, we look for people who build things."

"The other place co-founders meet is at work. Fewer do than at school, but there are things you can do to improve the odds. The most important, obviously, is to work somewhere that has a lot of smart, young people. Another is to work for a company located in a startup hub. It will be easier to talk a co-worker into quitting with you in a place where startups are happening all around you."

Sorry for the double comment, but I love this article :)
You need to remove the "annoying" client reference in your video and change it to something like "highly involved" client or "detail oriented" client.

Our clients are not annoying, but some of them are far more immersed in the details than others.

I can't very well tell a client I'm using Bitsybox for their site if your site labels them as "annoying clients".
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Please report the error to the administrators.
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To support the assertion, this article references the main page of the website of a marketing company who published a "report" where 50% of doctors had used wikipedia as a reference.

I can't find the "report" on their website anywhere.

Are they trying to imply that 50% of physicians had looked up something...anything?... on wikipedia, or are they implying that 50% of their sample of physicians made a diagnostic or treatment decision based on wikipedia? What was the population surveyed?

If anyone can link to the actual study/report, I'd be interested.

There is much more reliable online information than wikipedia for physicians, eg. Up-To_Date, Lexicomp, epocrates, MD consult, online Merck, etc. I've never heard of a physician basing diagnosis or treatment on anything found on wikipedia.

I love wikipedia, but don't use it like that.
What's your issue with the quote? C does not have a proper type system. C code is inevitably loaded with unsafe cast operations.

> C/C++

He was talking about C, not C++. C++ has a good type system and also makes it easy to avoid bounds checking problems.
I agree about Ruby not belonging on that list. If anything my learning of Ruby (and then Rails) soured any remaining interest I had in Java development.

I'd really be interested to know why ramoq thinks Ruby is less suitable than Java.

I'll tell you one thing that absolutely stinks about Java: no collection literals. For all the time one spends in Java (and most other languages) dealing with arrays, lists, and maps, I always have to instantiate an object and manually add the elements to the collection. Heaven forbid you decide to nest one collection in another.
I don't think C++ allows you to return variables outside of the scope in which their declarations are active...
Congratulations on successfully crashing my GMA driver; I think that's the first time I got a BSOD in Windows 7 :)

Regardless, I think the real problems with the whole idea of a "web OS" are the fact that it doesn't actually do anything remotely OS-like (besides launching applications and interfacing with the browser) and that the market for a product like this is so crowded that you really need to innovate in order to stand out (frankly, wiki-based development isn't "enough").

However, I do think that the "wiki approach" to application development has some merit: personally, I would much rather see this concept being integrated into an existing open-source system like Linux, however, it would need to be able to play nicely with version control, among other things.

All in all, I think it's a good concept and an interesting approach, and I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.
For a long time people built huge buildings with very very thin measures in place for worker safety. Buildings cost a lot less and went up a lot faster - but it came at the cost of workers lives.

OSHA's rules make it much more expensive and tedious for American cities to grow - but the growth isn't coming on the backs of construction workers. It's a trade off we've decided to make because we value safety and we value not getting our pants sued off for negligence.

You can write some well designed quick-and-dirty C code that does what you want, and does it fast. But once in a while you'll make a mistake that you probably won't notice and might cost you your company.