skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real issue is that the original author is having a sour grapes fit over the fact that most development is moving the web, and he's stuck in yesterday's paradigm dutifully churning out his MS desktop schlock while guys without a college education are getting hired to work on highly visible and popular websites and applications.

Of course there are a bunch of talentless hacks out there calling themselves web developers, but that's just a function of the size of the market and the cluelessness of hiring managers.

If the original author was half as smart as he thinks he is, he would know better than to associate intelligence with one technical field or another.
One fell apart due to founder disputes, and another changed their idea to something else.
This is from 2005. Please put old article dates in the title.
The amount of work, dedication, persistence, and pain Phelps has endured to achieve the results he has is no less than the work, dedication, persistence and pain an engineer on the first Apollo mission endured. Phelps and the engineer just happen to be good in different domains. They are both amazing people with amazing accomplishments. The world takes all kinds.
"To dig holes in the ground," paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends.
-Alan Keynes

http://www.businessweek.com/blogs/money_politics/archives/20...

Still, I'd like to have some decent public transportation in this country. Driving sucks.

Actually, I worry about the "paid for out of savings" part.
So yeah, sounds like Apple is more or less shooting straight. They're facing a huge problem (hundreds of submissions per day) and are trying to be decent about it.

The Google Voice thing is annoying but not altogether unsurprising since no one is really pretending this is an open platform:

Google is of course free to provide Google Voice on the iPhone as a web application through Apple’s Safari browser, just as they do for desktop PCs, or to provide its “Google-branded” user experience on other phones, including Android-based phones, and let consumers make their choices.

In other words: just try it Google. You're going to play by our rules here.
Hi, Paul, and thank you for the clarifications. (They'll be reflected in the final version.)

I would presume that Y Combinator wouldn't have been as successful without your body of writing, but that without Y Combinator your writing wouldn't been seen by nearly as many people. My opinion is that they're tied quite closely together.
Pondering? Could they choose an any more lazy way to describe this process?
Recently GVR said 'no' to tail-call optimization. Why? Check out his blog post on it:

http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-words-on-tail-...

As far as I'm concerned, when he says, "The one issue on which TCO advocates seem to agree with me is that TCO is a feature, not an optimization.", it's complete bollocks. When your program blows up because you don't have TCO, that's a semantic failure--not a lack of a little optimization.
Engadget has AT&T and Google's responses as well as quick commentary from their in-house lawyer: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/21/atandt-tells-the-fcc-it-h...
The 10 Best Things about Mac OS X Snow Leopard
I am currently one of the people responsible for the finances of a student housing cooperative.

There is precious little property management software and services directed at small to medium sized landlords (most of the market). With a couple hundred members/residents we're a fairly large organization, bigger than almost all of the other landlords in our market, but we're still too small to afford what's out there.1

Address the following problems and you will have a hundred billion dollar market to yourself:

1) Margins are pitiful and you want to take 3%?

2)Retailers have to take credit cards because consumers can just go elsewhere. Tenants don't really choose a place to live based on payment options.

3) Staff is untrained and cheap. Typing checks into Excel or Quickbooks is dead simple.
We calculated that for the cost of automating this process with a Tenant Pro2 module and ach, we could hire another full time staff member.

4) We have no IT staff. Existing services all talk about integration with accounting software and marketing web sites. The vast majority of landlords use Quickbooks/Excel and have no web site. Don't integrate, we can import/export monthly.

5) We don't have accountants on staff.3 Even those that can afford Tenant Pro, don't really know how to use it. Less is more. Tenant, apartment number, payments, payments owed. Anything more and you'll just confuse us.

6) Problems 3+4+5: Less than 25 units, the landlord is the accountant, general counsel, marketer, agent, IT, general contractor, and often subcontractor. Going to the bank once a month they can do, but you want them to wrap their head around ach?

-----------------------------------------

1.Take a look at propertysolutions.com. The clients they list have thousands or tens of thousands of units. That, and the fact they don't post prices or fees anywhere tells me there is no way they can help me.

2. Tenant Pro, the dominant property management software, is crap. Please kill it.

3. Actually, we have one, but we're a feel good nonprofit so we pay peanuts and our funky ownership structure makes it a requirement.

sorry this is a mess, been a long week
If you actually use Google Voice all calls go through it, and get sent to the GV voicemail, instead of whatever voicemail your phone uses. This would make the Visual Voicemail and SMS that ship with the phone useless.
While the article showed more writers wrote in the morning, I don't think the sample size was large enough to be especially significant.

In contrast, all the writers did something to isolate themselves. That seems more concrete and clear advice....

I should sign off NOW!
1) The maxint was just an example and these tests are not limited to arrays. For the same I was talking about bytes. And comparing a byte value against 255 + 1 is still wrong.

So yes, test inclusively, but not only the special cases, but always. It will prevent bugs, make code more readable and give faster code,

Only it's not what Dijkstra advocates.

2) When iterating 20 <= i < 30 or 20 <= i <= 29 the result is the same. At the end of the loop i will be 30, so in both cases the next lower bound = previous upper bound + 1.

While typing I thought of a case where inclusive might be more confusing, When iterating to first + n. Then < would be better than <= first + n - 1.

But I think this has little to do with if 0 or 1 based arrays are better. Only the start is different, after that it's all the same.
This is the kind of problem that you can throw people at though. There is no excuse for them taking this long.
Thanks for the warning, but I figure by posting it broadly here (and having full record of every change I've made within Google Docs) I shouldn't have a problem with the University. Of course, it helps that I shared it first with my advisor last week... :)

I believe it's better to be open, get feedback and have a better paper because of it.
>For example, on an iPhone, the “Phone” icon that is always shown at the bottom of the Home Screen launches Apple’s mobile telephone application, providing access to Favorites, Recents, Contacts, a Keypad, and Visual Voicemail. The Google Voice application replaces Apple’s Visual Voicemail by routing calls through a separate Google Voice telephone number that stores any voicemail, preventing voicemail from being stored on the iPhone, i.e., disabling Apple’s Visual Voicemail.

This is misleading bullshit.

First, they mention the "phone" icon right after complaining that GV is "replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail" to try to give people the false impression that GV is stealing the phone icon, which an app can't even do.

Then, they try to claim that by cherry-picking calls and not letting the forwarded calls hit apple voicemail, they're "disabling" visual voicemail, which is just untrue. People could still call your iPhone's direct phone number, and visual voicemail would work juts fine.
Oh, well, you should try some stuff before you make up your mind, then. Ada and Smalltalk couldn't be much more different.
Google Voice works by sending an API call to Google, asking Google to dial your phone.

After you answer the phone, Google then dials out to the number specified in the API request.

For instance, if I wanted to call my parents, the app on my iPhone would send a HTTP request to Google with their number. Google then dials me, and once I pick up, it would dial my parents.

My parents would see the Caller-ID from Google, not from my Phone.

If they call back this Caller-ID, Google would answer the call, and then dial my phone, so I could speak with them.

If I didn't answer, then Google would record a voicemail message. This message would be both emailed to me, and accessible via API from the application that I originally dialed them with.

Google's ultimate plan is to allow you to "port" your number to their service, so that your normal, regular number becomes the one on their caller-id, and AT&T assigns you a new number that you would never give out.
I'm skeptical that a splitter cable would work, but DualHead2Go is reported to work. I just use a single 30" monitor, though.
I know nothing about Creighton (other than I am obligated to hate the school with a passion as a born-and-bred but non-attending Saluki), but it's also in the city.
When the point of a contest is to discover the best at some particular skill, fairness is an essential component of the rules.

While individuals may try to subvert the system for their own advancement, the spirit of competition is to win and win fairly. Winning because a challenger gets disqualified for silly reasons is less desirable than winning, as the saying goes, "fair and square."
Download A-Patch Windows Live Messenger 9 Wave 3 (14.0.8089.0726) | iYiblogcu
I keep asking myself: "Why _why?" and "_why, why?" and "Why _why, _why?" and "_why, why, why, why!?" and "_why, why, _why, why..."...
There's no need to ban them. Because of what the goals are and how every sport works out, the relevant categories are "female" and "not female". The point of the article is that the sporting bodies need to come up with clear well defined rules that don't leave the athletes sitting there not knowing whether they qualify.
Yup, that's exactly right. But honestly, what if I want this to happen? Apple assumes that people will get confused. At least put some warning note or something. Though I'm sure that most people who download GV will be aware of what's happening...
Apple's original reason for rejecting the application was that it duplicated functionality. This is almost exactly the same statement with more direct answers to specific questions.
If the could grow corn or soybeans - which are the main feedstocks for biodiesel - it would be better for everyone if they just used it for food production, as opposed to refining it and shipping it over here.
You mean the NBC treatment of the Olympics. Whoever decided that slow-motion, voice-over, life-story, was the way to cover live sports events should be shot.
AT&T, Apple and Google respond to the FCC
The author's claim is contradicted by his own numbers:

"According to the National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy for men in 1907 was 45.6 years; by 1957 it rose to 66.4; in 2007 it reached 75.5. Unlike the most recent increase in life expectancy... the increase in life expectancy between 1907 and 2007 was largely due to a decreasing infant mortality rate."*

But with life expectancy at birth of 46 years and infant mortality of 10%, the life expectancy excluding infant mortality is still at most 51 years. So in fact we gained about 5 years of life expectancy from decreased infant mortality and 25 years from other factors.
I am an avid PHP developer, and I can't believe this actually did get added into PHP5.3. Even when I was a total noob I never wished the language had a 'goto' feature. I don't understand why this needs to be in a scripting language.

I guess now it will be even easier to spot bad PHP code. That's the only plus I can think of.
The upperbound = maxint

The total number of items = maxint + 1
The lesson from the eurofighter isn't to not to do software engineering. But instead, do not develop web software with a multi-supplier, multi-national bureaucratic bureaucracy.

Even then, the eurofighter turned out to be more capable than both the F-22 and F-35.
Work, dedication, persistence, and pain have no inherent value.
This is almost ripe for a FAQ entry.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774758
He's right that the period vs comma is likely wrong. But it is a legend based on a real event.

For details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1 or http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/5.65.html#subj1 for more details. Here is a summary. The Mariner 1 probe was destroyed because it veered off course shortly after launch on July 22, 1963. By July 28 the NY Times was reporting that the cause was due to a missing hyphen. NASA submitted a report to Congress the next year that confirms this.

The comma vs period version likely arose as a misremembering of which typo caused the problem. Or possibly by confusing it with another incident. (There are anecdotal reports of such a bug being caught in Project Mercury. Whether they are true is a different story.)
He's saying he wants to charge the bank app at $2.99 as a way of generating revenue.
Yeah, you can throw people at it. And many of them will be underqualified or undertrained, and will reject things for no good reason...
Oh I see, but does this "prevent" AT&T voicemail from being stored on the iPhone? (Which is what was said)...

I mean you could use both the Google Voice Voicemail and the AT&T voicemail, right?
It's a great piece, this little gem is the reason why I posted it:

"If you start a startup, don't design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow. And if you don't, no one will care how comfortingly orthodox your technology choices were."

at about 2/3rd into the essay.
I read it a little more carefully, though still not completely, and I see another thing that's misleading: the poll of potential founders. What you end up measuring that way are what random people expect to get out of something like YC. You're thus two steps removed from the actual function of a ycomorph. (Because the people who get accepted aren't randomly selected, and even they may be surprised by what ends up being the most valuable.)

E.g. I notice that the feature that rated highest in the poll was "connections to future capital." That's actually pretty far down the list of what we do. But I've noticed that the worse a startup is, the more they think this is where our value lies. Their product is perfect, of course; the reason no one wants to invest in them is simply that they lack that magic intro from insiders. In fact the most valuable and the hardest thing we do is the low-rated "product support."
That computes to around 515 applications per day. Can't really blame them for taking too long, eh?

Yes, you can. Apple could easily afford hiring 250 people to review applications - at 2 applications a day, they should be able to thoroughly test apps the same day they get them.
Is this an attempt to earn some quick karma?
Not a good analogy ;) Petra has stood the test of time for centuries, how long do you think your average brick house will stay standing?
(2) - There are already local governments that have funded these types of programs, but I haven't seen anything from the federal level. They're generally doing it to kick-start an ecosystem.

(1) - That's a complicated question, and will try to address it in the paper...
it's affected by dietary factor: cancers are caused by animal-based protein such as meat, fish, milk, and egg

cancers are not only preventable, but also reversible -- see ch3 turning off cancer, especially starting from the indian report on rat studies given aflatoxin in 'the china study' by collin campbels, hosted on google books for reference: http://books.google.com/books?id=FIRLLcLjyC8C&lpg=PA74&#...

solution? whole-plant-based diet, no, not vegetarian nor vegan diet. basically non-processed food (marketing does play trick saying, correctly, sugar/hfcs is natural plant-based because it's made from cane/corn -- but we know it's harmful)

why whole-plant and not vegan? because one can eat fried potatoe, chewing candies, drinking sodas, sipping alcohol, smoking cigarretes ... and still claim (validly) to be vegan, but s/he probably isn't healthy
Is there a good way to do this in python?
Goto floor(10);
window.open();
jump();
"Stupid" people couldn't have done any worse than the "smart" "talent" that got us into our current mess.
8 Free Online Entrepreneurial Finance Classes from MIT
Not a "bank", per se, but exactly what you're talking about: http://www.lendingclub.com/
In the past 3 weeks I have had a very similar experience. I switched my personal projects to git just before starting a new job where the dev team used git extensively. Coming from SVN, it quite honestly amazed me how quickly I was able to just create a new branch, make a small fix, and push it live without affecting any other changes that other devs or I had made.

If you haven't checked git out, I highly suggest you do so. All the hype is annoying at times, but it really does live up to at least most of it.
Same here with the casts, but actually making it work turned out to be quite a challenge. Weblocks looked a lot better, but it was still in development at the time. Since then I switched to clojure completely.
Interesting statistics from the tarsnap backup service
Opportunity knocks! I had heard of this way back when but always assumed it had died when the US was lobbying the Japanese government to scale back MITI.

Does anyone else remember MSX? Looks like it never quite went away.
It's kind of chuckle-worthy because it's being added in so late in the game, and because of the smart-ass bug report, but this is a non-issue.

In saying this, I take my life into my own hands, as you can now bet that I will be forced in the future to work on fixing some code written by someone that takes this new feature and runs with it.
Don't look at the effort. Look at the final result. Lolita took all of four months to write, and it's terrific. That's less time than it took Ed Wood to make any of his movies, all of which bombed.
I mean you could use both the Google Voice Voicemail and the AT&T voicemail, right?

Yes, they're certainly stretching the meaning of "prevent" there.
The label, is that global? The docs say:

> This is not a full unrestricted goto. The target label must be within the same file and context, meaning that you cannot jump out of a function or method, nor can you jump into one.

but that doesn't quite imply that the label names don't need to be unique.

That would be quite typical for PHP, IMHO, with its global scope of top level variables (= not in a function) of old.
Just you wait.. one terrorist scare in a downtown city, and we'll be doing the shoes-off hokey-pokey to board trains, too :(
Citation? Evan is from near Lincoln, a significantly smaller city.
About (1), what's wrong with break? (it also accepts a level e.g. break 3)
Follow Heinlein's rules.
The intersections are interesting, but I feel like our engine does better at sussing out what something really is -- e.g. that PHP is a programming language, that Albert Einstein is a physicist.
1) I'm going to leave this one here, because I think we might be having a semantic disconnect.

2) ... the result is the same.

Ahh, but it's not. When looping over consecutive subseqs, i's scope is the inner loop, and you lose i's value on exit, which means you can't use it as the next outer loop's lower bound. The previous upper bound in your example is 29, but we want 30, which means we're back to index-jockeying. This is the common situation Dijkstra was referring to.

Regardless, I've enjoyed the back and forth with you. You may come back with a devastating rebuttal, but I've got to keep working. Until next time! :)
I don't think I'm in the need of that. You can have all of it, it wouldn't make any difference to me. Let's trade uids, my email is in the profile.
The part that's interesting to me is his idea that it will be essentially a "vault" and super safe. The problem is he'd be targeting people under the FDIC limit, so that safety wouldn't be desirable.

But what if he targeted people OVER 100k. (For that matter, let's say he didn't offer loans at all so he really was a "vault") Sure you couldn't offer interest, and maybe you'd even have to charge a very tiny fee, but are there places that do that? What do people do if they have a lot of money -- put in Treasurys? If I had millions of dollars, I'd pay someone to just deposit it with the Fed. I think the Fed even pays interest now.
Exactly, he pointed out the question isn't about Masonry skill but rather application. Having said that I disagree with his sentiment (web development isn't just building average brick houses).
Imagine how much better Twitter would be if you can email it every time you had a 140-character thought.
Will not work the same way with software. The scope is far too large and dynamic. Software is much more diverse and complex and advances much more rapidly.

Airplanes have been solving the same basic problem for decades, getting incrementally better at it year by year. A flight simulator running on a desktop computer is one example of one piece of software that could get incrementally better year by year. Meanwhile new software solving new problems is released all the time. Designing laws to account for that is difficult and very dangerous.

The FAA model might work well for specific software systems but is no silver bullet.
It shouldn't take a company with billions in revenue this long to ponder an issue as they say. It makes me wonder if there's a bit of a civil war going on inside Apple over the App Store. Apple initially approved the apps, then un-approved them, and is now leaving the door open to re-approve it. If I were an investor in Apple I would be concerned about the management structure around Apple's single most important product taking weeks to deal with the Google Voice situation that has evolved outside of a techie issue into the mainstream business press (WSJ)
Take a look at Dynadot. They have a really simple interface, they aren't resellers and I like that you can cancel your domain and get your money back right through the interface (if cancelled with 3 days I think.)
Well, does 'Jew' describe one's ancestry or one's religion?
The whole point of that article is that there isn't one biological category or the other. It's nice to see blatant discrimination so highly rewarded, though. Maligning people as 'other' and making artificial constructions of stability that simply don't exist is really sad.
Beautiful Beolit
Apple Lifts the Curtain on App Store Approvals
I think that was all a joke. He likes to make up stories, you see.
For some reason, the PHP documentation for goto has a link to that comic too. http://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.goto.php
Never underestimate the power of XKCD.
Wait, you can do that? Exchange uids?! I want nickb's... :-)

Oops. My bad. Pre-edit: "so why post this and why now? :)"