skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What the iPhone taught me is to ignore cell phone reviews that dedicate most of their space to listing specs and features. Whoever wrote this review is not experiencing the phone the way I would, or the way any typical user would. Does he really need to tell us that the calculator has "a very limited set of functions" but that "Luckily, you can find third-party alternatives?" What kind of readers does this guy have that he's not afraid of losing them to boredom at this point?

Another case in point: I found the section about the web browser buried on page six underneath a larger section devoted to audio quality, which includes frequency response graphs and a table of audio measurements. And when it comes to the web browser, it says it "would have used somewhat more user-friendly interface" and "could certainly use a bit of fine tuning." It describes how to bypass the "unresponsive" and "slow" zoom feature by tapping a text section to zoom it but notes that it "is sometimes a hit and miss thing as the web browser fails to fit the text on screen." If you ask me, you don't want to use this review to illustrate that Apple is "behind" on cell phone technology.
Though mirrors are not too good at the vice versa part.
From VC Leverage to the Next Generation of FireFox
Cool. I like Philtro, but I do have two questions:

-is the thumbs-up/thumbs-down system going to be able to understand what we like along multiple types of tweets? Funny stuff I like, work-related stuff I like, friends-personal stuff I like etc?

-how can it understand tweets which are mostly compromised of liks with url shorteners?

Good luck and keep up with the good work!
Your analogy makes sense, but it is as broken as the central idea in this piece, and they're both so for the same reason:

Despite high-level languages, memory management is still very much a reality for many programmers. People still write ASM and C every day.

Memory management and physical boxes may be obsolete for Joe Schmoe, but he's not the guy who makes it possible to ignore these things in the first place. There are all sorts of folks out there who's choice to gain copious amounts of low-level knowledge has allowed me to be lazy.
I see C# as a linear improvement on Java. In my eyes, it looks like this:

C++ --> Java --> C#
Creative unveils Android-based iPod touch rival
> I will continue to flag TechCrunch submissions.

Let's check how many people do that.
Vote this post up if you are flagging all TC submissions.
I hate the msdn documentation for C#

Not sure if this is addresses your complaint, but MSDN's low-bandwidth formatted site makes it easier to work with.

Example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlreader...

Here's a link to a bookmarklet you can use to turn loband on: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2008/08/30/msdn-low...
So if the JVM beats CLR but C# beats Java, why isn't there a C# compiler for the JVM?

I suspect that all language features of C# should be expressible in Java bytecode, but I have not thought about the details yet. If you know of anything in C# that would be unimplementable in terms of Java bytecode it would be interesting to hear about that.
Interesting anecdote.

He wrote it in an hour or so because of being frustrated. I can imagine if you have 'great plans' and all people recognize you for is a thing that you whipped out like that it could get a little frustrating.

The real compliment is in that his musical genius is such that he could even do that.

There are other examples of that, I think that such huge popularity of a thing you whipped out in a short time causes people to think of you as a 'one hit wonder', and I'm sure that is not what Bobby McFerrin is all about.
So if you could figure out just how much storage, you could use Moore's law to figure out just when this will become practical? If "nearly infinite", then this will likely never happen (unless you go with the "accelerating returns").
You say that like it is his job to speak the truth and accurately describe the world.
According to Apple and AT&T, jail-breaking supports terrorists, or some such crap.

woah, talk about alliteration, I wasn't even trying!
Our product is self-funded -- should we apply to Winter YC?
C++ has got nothing to do with neither Java nor C#.
Sure; that scenario is quite common.
I normally comment on Fred's blog, but it looks like Disqus is down.

I actually somewhat disagree with both Fred and Jason on this.

Fred is right that investing in search would have been the wrong move. But I think both are looking at the deal as if Microsoft was buying Yahoo! Search Technology, which is not the case.
So I'd be looking at this from an indirect approach and saying what did/should/would Yahoo! do to have increased the value of their audience to a search technology. In some ways, Yahoo! only brought audience and got out of the search technology business which they were clearly loosing. Do we really expect Bing to learn much from Yahoo search? In the last 4 years, has Yahoo! really had a chance in this space?

I'm not sure what Yahoo! should/could/would/did to increase the value of their audience to Microsoft.
Any ideas?
Those Pre keys are way too tiny. I didn't like how it felt after using it for a little bit, and I don't think I'd like it for a long time. I'm really glad Apple went the software keyboard route. It was definitely a smart idea (and it's much easier to type with, too, I feel).
The problem with language features is that people will actually use them. Much better for maintenance to have consistent code. Except for inner-classes, you always know what to expect when opening a Java file. Java's not as elegant as Eiffel or some of the functional languages, but its simplicity has value.

(No, I program mostly in C#)
I think the alternative is the status quo. In other words, I don't think "squatting" is such a problem that we need to go redefining the internet.

Are all the good names taken? Of course, but apply a little creativity, and the problem goes away. We all know what delicious is and that name is a nightmare.
I don't think so. The Greek ideas have just survived, because they wrote a lot and their conquerors --- the Romans --- spread their stuff. Other cultures had well-developed music, too.
YC is one of the few VC's out there where the money really is secondary, it certainly won't hurt.

Applying for funding is also a great way to express to yourself and your team what it is that you do, writing all that stuff down is not just communicating to the outside, it changes you. Even if you get turned down you will still come out ahead.
Actually it does mean that C# is a better language now. If you are developing new applications then all the compromises that were made to shoe horn in new features don't matter to you. You just want something that works well and is simple. I think that C# has that on Java in a lot of respects.
C#, Visual Basic, Ruby to name a few...
It's funny because one of his main talking is that Apple doesn't make remote controls.

But they do...
No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music
There are 13" unibody Macbooks (not Pro). I have one.

http://www.apple.com/macbook/
Has anyone applied to YC, got accepted, and quit their day job?

That is the scenario we're facing with BitsyBox. We love every minute that we're working on it but I wanted to get some feedback from the HN community about whether we should start thinking about it as our big jump out of the corporate developer's life.

Basically right now, we go to our corporate jobs during the day, come back at night and work for four hours on it -- this can't be uncommon. We're ready to make the leap to work on this everyday / all day -- but we'd really like to have some seed funding or be ramen-profitable first.
Is it really about market share?

Yes. Getting market share means you've a product that lots of people want and you've figured out a way to get it to them.

Just because Microsoft does not fit in your narrow definition of innovation does not mean that they are not innovative.

The cool one is the one who innovates

Yes, but the cool one is not usually the most successful business. If anything, Apple's learned that over its history. For the longest time it innovated great cool things that Microsoft would copy and sell it better while after the innovation phase, Apple would crumble. Since the iPod things have been looking up but geez, Apple has a longtime to go before it can compare itself to Microsoft.

Talking about innovation, don't even get me going about Apple's treatment of developers versus Microsoft's. Hint: innovation is a lot more than building cool technology in your secret lab.
Windows shops are vary of writing functionality, that might one day compete with Microsoft. Writing net Tomcat/JBoss could clash with IIS and future frameworks. Something like this happened with nant/msbuild and nunit/mstest. Commercial companies find it difficult to justify development of tools with high risk of being obsolete soon (something competing with MS product does not stand a chance in most Windows shops). Apache projects do not care about this risk.
The majority of Java/C# syntax was derived from C++. So I wouldn't say "nothing".
Is Google killing general knowledge?
The C# ECMA Standard ( http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... ) mentions it several times that one of the main design goals of the C# language was familiarity to C++ programmers. Indeed C# borrowed a considerable portion of its syntax and keywords from C and C++. I suppose the same is true for Java as well.
Are you sure about this? Can you post a reference?

My understanding is that the same sorts of scales (logarithmic, with any frequency f and f*2^n treated as equivalent pitches, usually with five or eight tones per octave, occasionally more) have arisen independently in just about every human culture, usually without a mathematical theory. I could be wrong, though.
This reminds me of another home I've been obsessing over for the past few years: http://www.simondale.net/house/index.htm

Now all I need to do is find some patch of mountains to disappear into and begin construction. Hopefully I can still get wimax... :-)
The travelling vortex ring of gas is known in literature as the Helmholtz soliton.

Scroll over to “Five Minutes of Knot Theory History” for a short video from demonstration class: http://www.southalabama.edu/mathstat/personal_pages/silver
Here's a good five-minute segment from Howard Goodall's 'How Music Works' series, talking about the human universality of the pentatonic scale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpvfSOP2slk
Alleged CrunchPad Specs Revealed: Will Michael Arrington Beat the Apple Tablet?
It's a fair point that those who would even consider switching in the first place would be the nerds.

And I thought a bit about the Daring Fireball article -- holding on to your enthusiasts is important.

Yes, I know reconsidering an opinion you express online is heresy, but it's not as irrelevant as I made it seem.
Pascal. Fortran. Cobol. GW-Basic. Powerbuilder. Befunge.
Really Visual studio is better than Intellij/Eclipse?!?

I can tell that you havent done enough programming in the Java world. Have you ever tried any serious refactoring or bothered analyzing your code. I didnt think so, you would have realized why visual studio sucks..

BTW, I program in both C# and Java all the time. Actually, I do about 70% C# and 30% Java. So your claims are crap.
Ah yes - I did mean conservation of mass, thank you.

I think most people use 'matter' to refer to the regular objects we interact with that are composed of atoms, and that's how I intended to use it in the above post. However, if I had my way, electromagnetic radiation would also be consider 'matter', because it's the same stuff, just a different form.

>> As energy has mass

Is that generally accepted, btw? Because I've always heard people talk about light as having no mass, and it never made sense, because that what I understood e=mc^2 to represent. I think it does have mass, it's just so minute (smaller than anything we know by such an order of magnitude that the speed of light squared is used to express it) that it doesn't seem like it.
I write contacts for businesses, file trademarks and copyrights, and an occasional probate. Unfortunately, the law degree doesn't help the day to day start-up too much.
Verbose... favored by mediocre programmers... loved by business types... you're right, Java is the new COBOL!
For some reason, Ballmer's statements remind me of Sarah Palin's statements
That is a great perspective on it. The application process itself almost always helps the applicant. Will keep that in mind.
I agree, there are some nuggets in here. But I think it's more written for people who want to see why Microsoft is declining than for people who want to see if Microsoft is declining. It doesn't seriously entertain alternative explanations for Microsoft's revenue dip and Apple's >$1,000-market surge, and in turn, I have a hard time seriously entertaining Gruber's thesis.
Nothing new here. I've been working with both for years and I agree.

There is one thing that Java still has though, that I somehow doubt C# will have due to culture. Java has way more free or open source libraries. Yes, C# open source has gotten a little better over the years, but it's still not even close (it doesn't help that historically MS has been antagonistic towards open source even within its own products). What does this mean? With C# I have to keep re-inventing a ton of wheels, as opposed to Java where there are already thousands of existing well made ones for me to just grab and use.
It's a 3 month cycle and most of the team has to move to get funding from ycom. At which point, you better be willing to give it a full-time effort if you're taking someone else's money and you expect success. Building a business is hard work and requires a ton of energy.

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Can we do it without moving to where you are?

Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest. What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a favor by not making them move.

You can leave one founder at home, but the rest, including the CEO, have to live in the Bay Area during the 3 month funding cycle.
Open source Database Breakthrough: 10-80 times faster
Yes, I did. I left a $100K+ job to work on Poll Everywhere. Been growing ever since and it was, without a doubt, the best thing I've done for myself in a long time. Never looked back. It also helps, when you're really small still, to have some decent wad of personal savings, too.
The real question should be, "Why?" Why do you prefer Java over these.
Nokia's innovation precedes Apple by leaps
that's not a full chord, it's a major 3rd interval.
Yes C# is an improvement over Java. But, that isnt saying much with the plethora of cutting edge languages available today.

I still prefer Java, because C# is limited to the Windows environment,Mono isn't much help yet, and that is a huge limitation for me. Especially because Windows is not conducive to any serious systems programming - its ugly.

Another reason in favour of Java is the better open-source eco-system, more libraries and much more mature stuff.

C# has had the benefit that all new products/techs have - it leapfrogged.
Anyone know how historically significant that billion dollar figure is? Meaning, how is that relative to other tech companies missing their estimates in the recession?
LEO - Literate Programming editor in Python
He's saying that there's no material implication. Fast food doesn't make you fat, and it's no silver bullet to health. The typical fast food reliant diet (more calories than you need) makes you fat.

Ceteris paribus, skinny tends to be healthier than fat, with longer life and better quality of life. One study cited here even indicates skinny people don't even have to be that healthy otherwise to outlive fat people. It's a simple "assumption" that requires more debunking than you have given here.

Studies have also shown that obesity is well linked to disposable income. Is it any surprise that restaurants also expand as disposable income increases?
I'm all for distributed services, but only when practical. All services go down, heck, even Google services have gone down several times recently.

So when your boss is screaming at you "why are we down?!", can you get by with just saying "because X (the cloud) is down". Highly unlikely.
First lesson: A great e-commerce website needs to evolve, and that evolving should be done through thorough testing and optimization.

Second Lesson (one I feel is more important in general): Don’t copy what other people do if you aren’t fully aware of the business issues involved.
Windows usually undoes that benefit really fast...
This makes about as much sense as claiming that before people figured out how to write and before linguists started codifying systems of grammar, all language was just unstructured simplistic animal utterances.
In case you guys are wondering about current college curriculum, I just graduated with a BS in biotechnology-bioinformatics so I can provide a little insight.

My core classes consisted mainly of biology, chemistry, organic chemistry and physics. Other classes that my degree required was advanced mathematics (with biological application), advanced statistics, and computer science.

About the computer science portion of my degree: I was required to learn C, C++, discrete math, Perl, and data structure/algorithm design. I chose to take machine language as an elective.

What I've learned in industry: The CS foundation I built in college was critical. Although Perl is widely used where I work, languages like R and C are used more often (for my particular projects). I've also learned that my job is to bridge the gap between biologists and computer scientists.

Biologists say what they want to get-> Statisticians/Mathematicians think up a procedure -> I make sure the formulas make sense with the subject at hand, program it in Perl or whatever -> CS people optimize it and do their magic to make it run super fast -> checked by everyone to make sure its okay. -> stats analyze and feedback to the biologists.

My point being, I always think everyone should learn more math, but the industry has found a way to get around everyone needing to learn everything (jack of all trades master of none) to having experts work together towards a common goal (an oceans 11 type set-up). Everyone has something special to offer. Personally, I think the current set-up is working fine. Although everyone should learn more advanced math (or biologists should learn more CS), not everyone is willing and/or capable.

I hope this was helpful.
Just Open Sourced: Hex Fiend, a fast and clever hex editor for Mac OS X
Microsoft needs a strong Apple so that they don't get buggered by those pesky anti-monopoly fees
That's actually a feature for 80% of the populace.
Mirrors: design principles for meta-level facilities of OO programming languages
White House Says ‘Clunkers’ Rebate Plan Will Go On
There was a great bbc or nova episode that followed a number of children as they passed into adolescence. One of things they noted was how for a child there is no moral ambiguity.

"Your wife is very sick, but you have no money. Your at a store and have the opportunity to steal some medicine, do you?"

The children always said it was wrong and there was no justification for stealing. The 13 year old was very hesitant and unsure what to say.

So for a 5th grader (11?) there is no emotion about it, the guy is cheating and will be reported on.
I think another thing I really hate about C# documentation is that it's merged with docs for other languages like VB.NET. It's a small thing but when I need to do something, I really don't want to be wasting time constantly filtering through stuff I don't need.
Duplicate post. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434830
College students and conference attendees are spending someone else's money, which is why price is no object.
Useful links for those interested in this crossover:

Great Principles of Computing: http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/GP/GP-site/welcome.html

90 min talk by Peter Denning about Great Principles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a_pO3NYJl0
Delegates do it for me (even though VB.NET doesn't have delegate subs), especially their use with IEnumerable.
I know of one good example, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk.
When I was job searching right out of university, one of the reasons I stopped looking at big job boards is that they tended to be filled with jobs from recruiting agencies that wouldn't name the client and would instead show themselves as the employer. I hated that because the type of company was so important to me and what recruiting agency wasn't going to say their client had a position at a "dynamic successful company" where you'd work on "cutting edge technology". They say potential employers spend 30 seconds looking at resumes; I always joked that potential employees spend even less time looking at job postings. If I couldn't figure out what kind of company it was, why would I waste time writing a cover letter?

Although, now that I'm on the other side, I can see why I don't like traditional job listings either. If I post a developer job (at this startup) on something too public I get spammed with mediocre applicants. It takes a long time to sort through them all, and that's time I could be programming.

I do believe this is a problem in need of a decent solution, but I agree that it spreading virally doesn't really differentiate it from traditional means.
Organizational adaptability as predictor of business success
Irrevocability could have been conditioned on paying some stated sum (possibly increasing over time) to the licensor.
Weird. When I bought MS-Office at the Microsoft store on the Redmond campus, an employee gave the cashier his employee number while I waited. Lots of people were doing that, just as openly.
I think 'general knowledge' is a moving target. Like any other power tool google changes your abilities to a different level, the brain cycles you were using before to remember things can now be applied to other items of interest.

Whether you do so or not is up to each individual.

A parallel development is the address book in mobile phones. I used know all the phone numbers of all my acquaintances by heart, now that my phone remembers them that 'skill' is absolutely atrophied.

The only phone number I remember now is my own...

If anything google is enabling people to find general knowledge, not kill it. The trick about information always was to be able to find it and use it, not necessarily to remember it, even though a good memory is obviously an asset.
Startup Aims To Simplify The Ad-Buy
I don't think you know your history very well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_%28software_platform%29#Hi...
Linux will continue to steadily grow among home users if Windows 7 doesn't provide better security than Vista. People do get tired of reformatting their (or their relatives') machines every 4-6 months to get rid of all the sticky malware that managed to get past their antivirus, even though said antivirus has been eating large chunks of their memory and CPU time.
On a side note, BitsyBox is a great idea: content management without the content management system, or, a feather rather than a sledgehammer.
Bitsybox seems nice but judging by the video, CushyCMS appears to be easier to use (I am freelance designer and that's what I currently have my clients set up with).
Review my site: Recipenom.com - Easy recipe storing and sharing
http://www.recipenom.com

I just made a new site called Recipenom.com that is like a mix between Instapaper/delicious and Hype Machine, but for recipes. If you find a recipe you want to save, simply click the button easily accessible within your toolbar. There's also sharing/tagging of recipes, easy printing, and we built in a universal feed that also pulls from popular food blogs.

I'd really appreciate any opinions/suggestions/comments/etc.
Tip: show "invisible characters" only when you highlight text