skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real difference is that you can take a unix program (which obeys the dont blabber rule, is a command line program with lots of options, etc.) and with a good amount of effort put a GUI on top of it to make it look pretty. Case in point: Ubuntu. It attempts to do this to most tools, and succeeds in many ways. My computer illiterate father was soon able to wrap his head around Synaptic package manager (which is just a wrapper around APT).

But you can't take a Windows-culture program and make it easily programmer accessible. This is a one way street. I think that the Unix-style dual access is far more powerful. Apple doesn't open source its work, but it is BSD based and I get the feeling that internally, Apple follows this "unix culture" (I hesitate to use the article's terminology, but bear with me here) and thus comes out with powerful programs that are command line accessible but have wrappers (albeit beautiful ones) around them. This is what enables them to refactor internal parts like in Snow Leopard that cut out gigabytes of cruft - it starts to sound like this "unix culture" is simply best-practice engineering in terms of modularity and flexibility of individual packages.
If Microsoft even attempted to refactor some parts of the OS, they'd break something terrible.

I disagree with Joel where he says Apple follows the Windows culture. It seems that OS X is factored "the unix way" up to a point - where a beautiful API is exposed, and another team (the Steve Jobs insane perfectionist team) takes that and puts a usable beautiful front-end on it, which may, in Joel's mind fit the "Windows-culture", but is thin enough that the unix-culture layers beneath hold the meat of the OS, and thus can be modularly modified rapidly.

Linux lacks this final layer, which leaves it looking so broken and hacked together at the top. It still is an open question if the front end can be created without the dictatorships of a large company like Apple or Microsoft at the helm - but if anyone's got a shot, I think Canonical would come closest.
Expert Rockband drums... that counts right?
The idea that Microsoft could remove the registry without breaking millions of applications is a pipe dream. Say what you will about Microsoft's love of backwards compatibility, but they'd lose customers if half of your applications broke with Windows 7.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it wouldn't really be a registry then, would it?
I'm not hung up - I'm right. You do bad shit in your app, and apple doesn't let people get it. You do bad shit available in the browser, and apple leaves it up to you do not get it. It's the exact opposite policy.

If there were a parental control for the app store that blocked objectionable content, off by default, this whole issue would go away.
That was awesome. Of course it had the obligatory "10 year prediction" near the end.
C# finally gets default parameters
Eh, there are some "free speech" registrars focused on not responding to such nonsense. I believe a Google search should turn them up. For general purpose registrars, both Register.com and GoDaddy have been pretty good for us.
Debunked - iPhone Background Apps Without Jailbreaking Or Push
I don't see that big of an issue with this. If it helps Ubuntu make money and all it does is make the Google search result page look different, then it's fine. It's installed by default; it's removable and disableable just like every other Fx extension. What's the big deal?
Well, his alternative careers for those who with an inability to determine the order of program execution are pretty good. I wouldn't mind being a civil engineer.
WebPageTest.org is pretty good - almost YSlow/Firebug-like, but hosted.
Analysis of crazy water slide jump
My understanding is that cycling became common when cities responded to the 1970s oil crises by dramatically increasing gas taxes (to reduce driving) and invested heavily in continuous cycling infrastructure.
Bots are allowed on Twitter - that's fine with me (@beijingair is a very cool twitter bot)

But Twitter should make applications mark themselves as such to let tools filter out auto tweets (imo twitterfeed should count as a bot)
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Meet the ladies of the financial crisis
FWIW: http://www.blyon.com/blog/index.php/2009/08/06/twitters-host...
Deutsche Bank: ‘Underwater’ Mortgages to Hit 48%
Major League Baseball's MLB.tv is really, really impressive.
The Federal Government as systemic risk to innovation in the US
wow, still more wtf comments. ok.

i think i can sum up most of these as: you are saying that life is hard and you should limit the choices available to people. if you don't reach for anything you can't be disappointed. or do you think only the 'gifted' sometimes find that what they want wasn't all they thought it would be?

this is a good one:

"If your teachers in a gifted program look down on computing as a career, that certainly isn't encouraging."\

how about this:

If you teacher looks down on your desired course of life, that could be discouraging. The teacher being in a 'gifted program' doesn't really have any bearing unless 'gifted' students are weak and fragile and will collapse under the weight of having to follow some preordained path that they simply were unable to deviate from.
I didn't see them as giving up too much at the time. In the end they were able to buy some time to release some great products and still have a great Mac Business Unit producing Office.
Its not opaque to me, i just haven't invested the effort to bother learning it yet.
The fundamentals you need to master in sales: cause & effect
Rate My iPhone App
It's called Middow and it basically takes two locations and finds the midpoint between them. You can then search for pretty much anything around the midpoint and meet people in the middle or whatnot.

I have already pushed out the first update which will save addresses you search for so you don't have to type the same ones over and over. That should be approved by the App Store either tomorrow or sometime soon after that.

Also, if you wanna be a sport and give me some free publicity, digg this story!

http://digg.com/apple/Middow_Meet_in_the _Middle

Any tips, suggestions, praise?
"It's very sweet for MIT types to make these declarations from mount olympus, but lisp is something that can take time to acquire."

Don't worry. In the Valley, people from MIT don't have a good reputation as great programmers. For some reason, their education is a lot of 'theory' and less practice.

Apart from Standford\Caltech, Some of the best schools that produce great programmers are your average state school.

I have a theory behind this, which may be correct. Learning to be a great programmer takes years, and school is just the start. People that do well enough go to something like MIT, think they are already very smart, and don't try hard when they come out.

But if you are hungry, and smart, and just happen to go to your average state school, you probably will do better, as you probably are humbler to begin with.

It seems when the rubber meets the street, in startups, building products, that's where the great programmers are made, and lisp is not a requirement to know to be a great programmer, or actually build great products. Having an idea of what functional languages are is a must, knowing them is not.
Unix Windowing Terminal System Blit, 1982, Bell Labs
I can't learn LISP. I can get reasonable work done in imperative functional/OO languages like Perl, C, Java, etc. and took the time to learn Erlang to get a look at functional programming and I can drop the SQL bomb like nothing else (so I can do declarative too) but every time I've sat down to learn LISP because people say it will make me a better programmer, I've gotten distracted and haven't finished.

I don't think this makes me stupid, or a bad programmer. I think it means I have different tastes and limited time. Learning LISP feels like learning assembly: a great exercise, but there are other things I'm more interested in doing - like building things I enjoy with my limited free time.

That being said, maybe I am stupid, or a bad programmer. I don't think not being into LISP means this is the case. I like building things people use, more than I like writing elegant code for code's sake.
Blame FriendFeed II
That's ridiculously difficult to do at all, much less in pithy universal checklist form.
In five years all browsers will block Internet advertisements by default.
When I want to compile a program, I don't have to exit the program, I just go to another layer and type make

Although my current setup for editing and compiling is still eerily identical to that.
This one time I had to work at a place where a postgresql install was not only the main datastore, it was also the main system message bus by abusing notifies. Further the enterprise message bus was a homebrew thing that was written to both pass messages and do RPC, oh and be the main way to monitor if a remote site was up or not. I think both of those count as well.

For those who are curious: given these were linux systems, d-bus was the right answer for the former, and something like RabbitMQ or OpenAMQP, or even JMS solutions would be the proper answer to the latter.
I think if web-based advertising ever got close to being unprofitable, people would find a way around Ad Blocker really fast.
What a load of s*%&$. Was he the only pro Georgian blogger out there? Why go through all this to target him when I am sure there are thousands of pro Georgian websites and blogs all over the place. For example, why not attack the white house website:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Vice-President-Biden-Reaffirm...

Or any of the major US news websites which are all quite pro-Georgian.

So by going through all this trouble to silence this particular blogger the evil FSB is not removing much pro Georgian info from the net at all, as there are many much more popular sources of pro Georgian information that are still online. Also, what the hell were the evil FSB trying to acomplish anyways. I mean, they know those websites will resume in a couple of hours after the attacks. Was it so important to silence that guy for several hours?

Oh, and let's not pretend that having an accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal and Google blogs is something unique, I guarantee you thousands of people have all these accounts.

But don't mind this - when in doubt blame the FSB. Now it is no surprise that that particular blogger has floated the FSB theory, he just wants to be famous. Maybe he is paranoid enough to believe this story but that does not mean we should. But it is rather amazing how quickly any bizarre and paranoid evil-russia-behind-the-scenes theory gets picked up by major newspapers.
Weekend shredder here.
I don't think Lisp being opaque has anything to do with your ability to learn a particular PL such as Common Lisp, Scheme, Arc or Clojure. Rather, opacity is usually a term levied at a syntax, when it makes it hard to understand what the underlying semantics of the program are. Lisp has the least "syntax" of any programming language I know of, so if it's opaque to you (e.g., you can't take a guess at what "(+ 2 3)" means), you probably shouldn't be programming.
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Why was it killed?

It's a dupe; it's the same article.
What would be more interesting is if browsers visited internet advertisements by default, but sent the return pages to /dev/null...
Does anyone have a mirror for this page?
Google cache for those who hit the "pageview limit exceeded" nonsense:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=clnk...
I've spent the last two days implementing VGA and basic graphics support in my OS, and it's great to watch this and see something I know I can implement in a short period of time with what I've already built. Good for morale if nothing else.
It's down, but it sounds like a copy of http://badprogrammer.infogami.com/
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Mirror:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fsites.goog...
(Funny, ain't it?)
I assume the author realizes how little $20k is when you have a real income stream? For somebody in Schmidt's position, it's like taking a free coffee for being on the board of Starbucks.
I'm getting the same message, could someone post a mirror? Or if any one still has the page open, please save it and post it elsewhere.
Never thought I'll see that on a google service. Thanks for the cache.
I see. Its not literally opaque - I got that far in the book, but I can't follow a real program's execution.
Oh man, I wish I had this at my last job half the team had over 50% of these symptoms, one guy had 90%. They believed, and had somehow convinced management, that they were great programmers! Some awesome practical examples from those guys below:

Overheard statement "You know when I was in college I learned C. I just can't get the hang of these objects, so I try to avoid them". The guy who said this is now 34, and has programmed python for 4 years.

A guy who would copy and paste 100 line blocks of code, and then occasionally thing "oh yeah, i need functions", and then finish out the current function by passing 12 parameters of state to current_function_2(). If you combined the func, func_2 and factored out the 100 line blocks it would be reverted with a commit: "stop making this so complicated".

There was one guy who insisted that using templates was only for web frameworks, to use them to write system/config files (done frequently due to 3rd party daemon limitations) was an abuse of the templating system, and we should just use inline prints. The program was to be called with prog > /etc/conffile.

One guy who decided that threads were so tricky, that he was the arbiter of thier use. My idea of a job queue and worker threads was "too abstract and hard to debug", so we stuck with the "tried and true" one thread per job method, all spawned at once.

I could go on, but you're all prolly bored now :)

tl;dr: i worked with the guys the article was written about
You can't just take the assets of the company and give them to another. I think that would require some kind of asset transfer or purchase, which could involve the preferred stock holders. That's just a guess.
If you use their web application to place calls and send SMS, then yes it's "VoIP" in the sense that it's using the data connection.

The native applications for various platforms, however, seem to involve actually using the phone as a phone, but with the calls routed through GV in order to have the caller ID and such work as expected. IIRC some earlier efforts involved explicitly dialling your own GV number to initiate the call.
If there were a parental control for the app store that blocked objectionable content, off by default, this whole issue would go away.

Um, that's exactly how the parental controls for the app store work. Apple uses the rating system to determine what apps are considered objectionable, the parental controls block access based on those ratings, and access to everything is enabled by default.
It's called Middow and it basically takes two locations and finds the midpoint between them. You can then search for pretty much anything around the midpoint and meet people in the middle or whatnot.

I have already pushed out the first update which will save addresses you search for so you don't have to type the same ones over and over. That should be approved by the App Store either tomorrow or sometime soon after that.

Also, if you wanna be a sport and give me some free publicity, digg this story!

http://digg.com/apple/Middow_Meet_in_the _Middle

Any tips, suggestions, praise?
I play the guitar.
It fills your headspace with negativity that a dictionary includes the definitions of curse words? Its not like they peppered the menus and help with curse words.
At one stage I was very into metrics and this was one of the more interesting aspects. As a very general rule, removing features basically amounted to the same effort as adding them (i.e. a feature that takes 5 weeks, generally took 5 weeks to remove).

However, the payback in testing and regression was usually a no-brainer. You could make back your investment in removing something in 1-3 product cycles...

Somewhat contrary to what you'd expect, this was often a better payback than adding features - of course you could take this to a variety of absurd conclusions... However, what it generally meant is that in most situations products will tend towards "feature bloat".
The article fails to mention the biggest players in the ad market have a vested interest in browsers and what eventually becomes 'default behavior'. I doubt they will shoot themselves in the foot or won't lobby to avoid this becoming a default.

Microsoft controls IE, Google now has Chrome and I have to think Google still has some type of partnership with Firefox.
When C# was first conceived, it was to be the system language of the .NET platform. It had to, through a pit of success, produce APIs which could be consumed by any CLS compliant language (any language which compiles to MSIL and has a some minimum feature set). Microsoft expected (perhaps naively) developers to use VB.net for application development. Over time, C# has become the primary language choice of the .NET ecosystem. With that change, C# started adding a significant number of non-CLS compliant features.

As a static and strongly typed language, overloading is a very clean solution for implementing default arguments. Haskell, for example, uses the same mechanism. VB, on the other hand, can use late binding. This is an essential feature of VB for COM interop.

Optional and named parameters are being added to C# with support for the "dynamic" type and interop with COM (primarily Office), IronRuby, IronPython, and the HTML DOM via Silverlight. If C# were to stand on its own, I don't think they would have ever added this feature.

EDIT: Also, the actual title of this post is "Two New Features of C# 4.0". Please don't editorialize the headline :-)
An alternative explanation for feeling more alive upon having contact with someone from the big screen is that we perceive such people as demigods.
Ask YC: Any suggestion/ideas for a college project
YC folks:
I’m searching for a new project/idea for my friend, who needs to do a college project (3 months timeframe). Preferably web based, desktop client is also ok.
Appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance.
No, not necessarily. You've been spoiled by GPUs.

Try filling any modern screen buffer (>1024x768) pixel-by-pixel, just as software rasterizers do, even with just a solid color. You'll find it takes a long and quite frankly unacceptable time (for real-time apps at least), even with modern processors.

Even at 1024x768 (@ 25 frames/sec), you are given just ~300 cycles/pixel, which is gone quickly after slow memory accesses and multi-cycle instructions.
wow, that's completely ridiculous.

searching through their help center, they won't even tell you what the limit is, but it seems to be pretty low. just. wow.
I've used Vanilla forums before and liked them a great deal. Is this Lussumo in the TechStars program, or has someone taken their open-source app and run with it?
Google account suspended: A post mortem
You Do Not Have Health Insurance.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

One of my favorite quotes.
If that's true, then in five years nothing on the Internet will be free.
Enough with consumers already
Just reading that made me a bad programmer. :/
Just moved it to another host. Not like Google was any better >:|
Please don't editorialize the headline

Mea culpa. :)
When launching a new product it is very safe to cut down the functionalities to the absolute necessary features. If not you may end up finding that users actually need feature x to behave differently. Sometimes changing that single feature means changing 3 other features or the application will be flawed.
I think those sorts of claims are an insult to the hundreds of smart people who came after Einstein, including the many smart people who are still practicing physics today. In fact, I think the whole idea of "If X hadn't done it, it wouldn't be here today" is virtually useless beyond a 20-year timeline at most.

Have you seen those string theorists? I'm not a big fan of string theory, but anyone who can even remotely navigate those things could work out GR in a few afternoons, with all the advantages another 100 years of evidence and developments would bring. (Sort of a weird thing to say since it's already worked out, but still.)

You think all those smart people would just be diddling around, going, gosh, I sure wish I could reconcile this overwhelming data that points at a 100+ year-old mathematical formalism, but I guess we'll just have to dick around for a while longer!?
Oh! I thought that was the joke. The sign that you're a bad programmer is that you implement a page rate limit on one of your properties (google sites), only to serve up the exact same page out of another one of your properties (google cache) thus accomplishing exactly nothing
Would have been much better if they made a deal with google and firefox and got there own 'real' search page. Like http://www.google.com/firefox
Yours is a good idea and is widely used right now as the standard reaction to droop.

As physicists we are interested in the droop problem because it is more fundamental to the structure and intrinsic nature of semiconductors and solids in general. It is along the same lines of: if we have type-2 superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen, why do we keep looking for SCs that work at room temperature, or if we have type-1 superconductors, why do we need type-2?

From a purely pragmatic point of view we know that more LEDs leads to the use of more money, more time, and more materials. A more efficient LED is a wise idea. I believe you may be missing a link here, that droop, or its physical cause, IS the entire problem that causes strains on price and size constraints. This is the reason to single it out.
Yeah we are. Thanks for the heads up, we'll forward to teamapart.com.
What if it turns out that we are actually surrogates for some aliens?
The New Nomads (2007)
This has MASSIVE implications. e.g. when facing a trial, find out whether the judge is left or right-handed, and sit as appropriate!
Not true. No voice travels over IP, except for the MP3s of your voicemail that you download.

Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?t...
The inability to determine the order of program execution is what made me give up haskell for ocaml and scala. Does that make me a bad programmer?
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Unix compilers are slow, so to entertain myself while I am waiting, I can play Asteroids!

Good lord. The whole video had an underlying tone of fun.

I have read this repeatedly and heard it in person from several older engineers: "unix is a toy", "unix is for playing video games and writing term papers", "unix is for usenet", etc.

During that time, if I was a buttoned down government or corporate programmer with IBM and Honeywell training, jockeying Cobol, assembly and Fortran, I too would eschew this newfangled game-playing computer.

[Edit: I was gonna say Dan Ingalls invented bitblit operation that made 2d graphics possible, then I saw he had a hand in the production of the video as well ;-) ]