skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All the information in your iTunes library, including playlists and such, is stored in an open XML file in your home directory. While I think it's a mistake for Apple to play cat-and-mouse with Palm over this, it's not as if Palm couldn't write their own syncing background app that does the exact same thing.
Tally (www.tallysolutions.com)
Safe, threaded design and inter-thread communication
When are we going to stop writing code?
Personally I don't base my opinions of someone on their public support of the things I support. I like Jobs because I like his products, I couldn't care less about Gates because I find his products sloppy and awkward to use. Why do we have to get into a bunch of 'well Gates gave more money to the poor!' discussions? Not even getting into the issue of Jobs being a very private guy in general -- why is this any of our business?
Interesting, I thought Tally was written in C (C++? I knew someone who worked on Tally long ago . I have the impression it was primarily C or C++ ). You did say scripting - Do you use much Python? What's the ratio of Python to C++/C?
But... that's not agile!
Don't forget the http://www.emacswiki.org/ A bit messy site, but the single greatest resource for emacs user.
Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
Did something new happen with Io?
For my latest contract gig, I decided to try a slightly different approach than tallying and billing hourly or guessing at a fixed-cost. We're going with a "retainer" model which more or less makes me into an unofficial employee, but the idea is that they get X number of hours per week of my time. Deadlines and such are attempted to be met within those constraints.

The upshot of this is that they have a clear and known rate of expense. If the project doesn't appear to be progressing fast enough, they could increase the hours per week they pay for, hire more help, hire someone else, or wait longer. :)

The tricky part is getting into a deal like this without them trying to attach things like, "ok, you work 20 hours a week on our project - but if it's not done by the 3rd, we don't pay you." or whatever. But if you can avoid that and get them to think of you as an employee and not just a code factory, it works out.
django4life
I was looking for two things when I got my netbook: 1) great keyboard, 2) great battery life. By virtue of it being a netbook I figured it would already be relatively small, light, and cheap. I think the Samsung netbooks have the right formula.

My NC120 has an awesome keyboard, battery life that seems to stretch forever (8 hrs, and I have a second battery!), and it was only $400 at Amazon (+ $90 or so for the extra battery). It's not ridiculously light like some of the other netbooks out there, but light enough that I put it in my bag and forget it's there. Light enough that I can carry it around town like a spiral notebook and not feel fatigued.

Really the only issue I have with it is that the screen is glossy and I personally prefer matte. Also the windows key is on the right side for some reason. Whatever, it's still great - the screen doesn't bother me that much (still would prefer matte) and the windows key thing is totally invisible to me now. Also I've found that when I'm out at a coffee shop or something people stop me left and right to ask about it. It's interesting who asks - retired folks and middle age folks.

My wife and I took it on vacation and watched movies and TV the entire flight off of iTunes. It was the slightest bit jerky at times but certainly not enough to be bothersome. As a random addition, the NC120 contains a subwoofer. Ha! Not that you can really tell.

I know I'm gushing. I'm going to stop. I don't work for Samsung, but the NC120 is truly great (I'm sure it's sister models are good too). It hits the magic keyboard/battery life/weight/cost sweet spot that makes it just feel awesome!

And yes, I can totally code, write long reports, and respond to emails, browse HN, etc on it to my heart's content. I got a little portable mouse which I rarely use, but sometimes pull out when I'm using it for a long time.

Ok, I'm stopping now. Hope it's helpful to someone out there!
This has been around for a while, but it's still pretty cool. I have a poster-size printout of "Enter The Dragon" that I printed out about five years ago, and it still looks great.
Day rate is the way to go. No time tracking, include an hour break for chatting and eating.
The only message the above popup should contain is “Can’t connect right now. Sorry” Agree?

No. Although this particular dialog is bad, the only time an application should ever tell the user something that simple is if the code is smart enough to know that there really is no corrective action the user can take. If that's not the case then the application should offer to help the user identify the root cause of the problem and tell them what appears different from the last time things worked properly if possible. This is especially important if the user is expected to do any configuration.
True, but I suspect that accusing someone of causing a person's death is a dangerous thing to print in any territory.
I'm not sure that "design" is necessary up-front. There are plenty of good strategies for rapid application development. I think what _is_ necessary is plenty of up-front _thought_, as in "why am I creating software?" and "what does it need to do and why does it need to do that?", then you are in a much better position to keep referring back to your original goals when making design decisions during the implementation process (without committing to an inflexible design should your needs evolve).
I had exactly the same question, having just heard of it today.

You can obviously find more information at http://www.cherokee-project.com/, but basically, it seems to be Apache as it started (sans feature bloat). It's written in C, requires no additional dependencies, and has what seems to be a very nice web administration panel.

Practically, it seems like its performance sits somewhere between Apache and Lighttpd, with Lighttpd beating it in performance, but (unless I'm mistaken) not on features.

edit: I would also love to hear more from somebody who has actually used it as to whether or not there are less apparent reasons to choose it, and whether or not it's ready for production use.
I have a feeling journalism will improve dramatically when people start paying for it.
What the heck? I didn't misunderstand the study by only looking at the headline. The full paper confirms what I said in my comments.

My criticism of the study as possibly being of limited applicability (older, white women) still stands whether you only looked at the summary article or the original paper. That the PI agrees means that she knows her study is flawed (or let's say limited).

Read the other comments; people are taking it as if it applies to them. Some of the people voting this link up also may have thought something similar.

There was a suggestion made that it doesn't matter whether it's vitamin D by itself or vitamin D + calcium because you could just take both. My criticism was calcium isn't necessarily good, especially for men, because too much calcium is associated with basically bad nerves and prostate cancer.

What about what I said is a misunderstanding of the study or "failure" to lookup the original paper?
Assuming you're not making a joke, I think these things get blown way out of proportion.

You're always going to design before you code, even if you just take ten seconds before starting to type your tests into the IDE.

The question is "how much design is too much?"

The reason we have to ask that question is that for some folks design is supposed to eliminate all uncertainty and control execution. When design is taken to this extreme, bad things happen. But bad things happen when no forethought is put into work as well.

High-performing teams use design as a way of getting common understanding about a general plan of attack on the problem domain -- which can include things like initial data models. But the general idea is to do simple, easy things repetitively. So whatever you do for design, make it something that's easy enough to do every sprint. Perhaps that means an hour or two at the beginning of each sprint -- perhaps a day or two. But thinking ahead and getting group buy-in is always a good idea when there's more than just one of you. Heck, it's a good idea even when there's only one of you. Good design can try out and throw away ideas really quickly. Designing from code is a lot more painful.
Startup Idea? Something I'd like to See: Cheap J2ME "device"
Wow. I'm not sure what I'd call that, but it has too many ingredients to be "scrambled eggs". ;)
Not something I have the skills/background to pursue, but I think it ought to be possible to do something cheap and robust with a small screen and keys; that can run J2ME games. You'd load them via bluetooth or USB.
It just seems a bit trivial to me. Surely this has been done a thousand times already.
There's a huge difference between writing "when the mood is on" and not writing when you're exhausted. Zeldman seems to conflate the two in this piece.

I find that inspiration comes from forcing my way through the first paragraph. Usually after that point, I'm ready to go and can keep going to the point of getting cranky if anyone interrupts me.

The strategy Zelman describes may work for him--he's published books so clearly he's found a method that works. Still, I've seen these same arguments used time and time again in order to justify procrastination, resulting in nothing ever gets done.

Edit: Having written this, I guess I'm now obligated to go open up the ol' word processor, huh?
3 Beginner Boxing Tips to Learn How to Box
A Proposed Medical Privacy Act And Why We Need One
Surely the name was supposed to sound like "masturbator". I don't think it can have mass appeal with that name, odd choice.
Want to bet which industry saw this coming and cornered all the good frequencies?
So, venture capital is usually used to accelerate growth at an early stage company which works out pretty well for all involved parties: Entrepreneurs get to build big businesses, VCs enable that and make money off the management fees and LPs benefit by having a well-performing asset class in their portfolio.

The point where goals start diverging is when the VC wants to see rapid growth and a quick sale (say, 4 years into the company timeline).

Fred says:

So when an investment is not working, you are faced with walking away, shutting the company down, or making an additional investment.

I wonder if there is a fourth way, where the company trims itself because it isn't making much revenue (maybe because it's too early to a market that is nascent, or organic growth is much slower than expected but is still there) but keeps going instead of shutting down or trying to accelerate the growth process by raising more capital.

Is it fundamentally hard for VCs to say, we're going to support this company for as long as they want (with connections and a bit of capital) and wait for an eventual exit, if they trimmed down and burned very little capital? Why would you not want to keep going if you were more or less promised an eventual exit/return and it didn't require a lot of capital? Why the focus on "quick" exits and not building big sustainable businesses? Is this something that comes down from their relationships with the LPs?
Perhaps it's just a narrow definition and the "global restaurant industry" only refers to the type of high-end restaurant companies that operate gourmet restaurants around the world.
Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond
JSON first. XML when people ask for it and when you have no more excuse to delay it. It is so much easier to play with JSON, or to pick a particular value. Most languages (with a library built-in or not), lets you manipulate the result as a combination of dictionary/hashmap and array/list. It is SO easy.
It's basic human nature to throw good money after bad because humans are twice as upset about losses as they are happy about wins. It's thusly common among people who know that to overcompensate for their own fallibility and go the other way.
I just introduced my office to this by creating a larger-than-life copy of The Dude. Kittens were next. I fear for our productivity.
There's a good number of ssh apps for the iPhone, the one I use is fair bit nicer than putty :/ , or obviously you can just install a web based ssh client on your server if you feel brave about security.
The nanny state doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to work most of the time, benefits outweighing drawbacks.
Cost of US Letter Delivered to Your Neighbor vs. Kiwi Delivered From New Zealand
JSON.

It makes for a significantly smaller payload (especially important in that in most cases, you're transmitting a great number of smaller chunks) and I don't buy the readability argument — especially when it's almost a no-brainer to employ a function to display to "pretty" indent JSON represenstation — print_r in PHP, pp in ruby, etc.…)

I believe just about every language used in web development includes a library for shuffling JSON in and out of native data structures.
The restaurant industry, particularly at the high end, is incredibly reliant on having a good percentage of diners that will order the higher priced dishes and/or high-margin items such as alcohol/desert/coffee.

Unfortunately these are the first things sacrificed by diners who still wish to eat out but want to be more budget conscious.
Clojure: An Atom Feed in Ten Minutes
I have a Compaq Deskpro Portable from the mid-1980s that still boots. autoexec.bat ftw!
With a $200 termination fee, I doubt this would be much incentive for AT&T to "do better".
hmm.. I'm not so sure if the author is right. If you're building one-time projects, I think he's right. But if you are building large apps that are constantly improved, you can't forecast what features must be added and what features you must get rid off. So it's all about designing your code, in a way that makes sure, that it's easy to change afterwards.
handing someone a candy bar does not give you the right to tell them what to do

OK, let's stop giving away candy bars then. What's in it for me?
When I first first posted my project on Hacker News, someone suggested that I add an atom feed. This is how it was done.
The whole argument is weak: because the transport / distribution involved is so vastly different.
Obama as President, has changed American ideology
Thanks for the feedback guys, I appreciate it. I agree with you Daniel, you have a very good point. Although, I still think we should do the entire design before we do the cause:
a) It's very easy and fast to get feedback.
b) You're not creating any diversion with your team members.
c) As a development guide(if you have a status update going on in every page of the website, that'll definitely make you think differently while developing the product).
Awful article that doesn't even mention the webapp it's writing about isn't (as far as I know) actually available yet.

Also I highly doubt that Apple is busy "scheming to try and stop them [google]" from moving GV online.
Introduction to how and why 'free' web business models work
What does the "Feed Cat" button do?
Should you design your entire app before you start coding?

You can, but that doesn't work very well.
Part of the whole agile and test-driven development movement is a rejection of that "waterfall" / "Big Design Upfront" approach after seeing how it fails in the real world. Slogans like "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" and "You aren't going to need it" are there to stop you doing too much design.

Should you do design?

Of course. Slogans like "red, green, refactor" and "Don't repeat yourself" are there to get you to think about program design as you code. Also doing a bit of design thought before each coding task is good.

See also JEDI Programming - Just Enough Design Initially

http://bradapp.blogspot.com/2009/07/jedi-programming-just-en...

http://www.featuredrivendevelopment.com/node/507
It is amazing to me that anyone still believes this after the last two years!

But I suppose that a little irrational optimism is good thing in tough times...
A few things...

The CEO of Google quitting the Apple board is way different from what you describe. The actions you described would cost companies thousands if not millions of dollars and that's not going to happen.

Injustice is the denial of justice and justice is defined as "the quality of being just or fair". Denying people their rights is an injustice but only because it's unfair to do it. In the end the issue is still fairness.

Again, you use the example of dictating the plot of a Harry Potter book as why the Government shouldn't intervene. But that would be the Government telling a company HOW to run. I specifically said this isn't about that. It's about making the company define how they interact with the public. A better analogy would be the government making it illegal to put the cover of the new Harry Potter book on copies of older ones to sell copies (which in fact is illegal)
It seems to me that in this case the design is serving as a spec. If you don't have any idea what it's supposed to do it's kind of hard to build it. Then again, that seems rather obvious.
I don't think this is an argument for upfront design. Rather it's an argument for thinking about what you are doing.
I'm gonna have to say thanks to their voodoo suppliers, anybody who takes these guys away for from their computers and internet for 6 hours at a time is a friend of mine.
What's ridiculous is I just looked at the posts you've made over the last few days and half of them are just like this (e.g. complain about the topic and insult everyone participating)

If you don't like something why don't you try just clicking away.

Edit: And for those down voting this comment I say the same thing to you: Just click away for God's sakes. There are almost 50 comments here so clearly people want to discuss this. Let Them! Just ignore it and move on to topics you're interested in. Stop trying to control what other people are allowed to do.
the author basically says "I tried to do X, and just got stuck into the code. I failed. I started again, designing the entire User interface. After I was done designing I started the coding. This worked perfectly. So do the Design first and then code."

Maybe the reason that he succeeded the second time around was that he had already tried and failed, and so knew where the pitfalls were. It's not proven that design on it's own, without trying out some ideas first, is going to help. Many people would say that it' doesn't. I'd say that big upfront design without any reality checks can be a major hindrance later on when it turns out to be impractical.

Also "designing the entire User interface" ? Is he talking about graphic design or program architecture?
Since he's a hardware-hacker, I would guess it feeds his cat.
I have a few friends who are mechanical and electrical engineers and they always use a notebook.

Apparently its so that they can document their work and thought process continuously, just incase they ever need to justify why they did something.

I've started to do it myself because it seemed like a good idea. It definitely beats having random pieces of copier paper that are piled up in a mess all over my desk.
So an employment relationship that would cost an individual money is completely different from a company devoting resources to an application only to have it arbitrarily rejected which costs a whole company worth of people money?

In truth it's exactly the same thing you just refuse to see it because you're so set in your opinion.
I like the premise of the article, but there are two shortcomings.

1) Kiwifruit are distributed through existing food distribution networks. New Zealand's economy is primarily driven by agricultural exports, and so they have good (cheap!) ways of getting food to overseas markets quickly and cheaply. Similarly, food distribution (once it reaches the US) is setup through corporate structures (such as supermarket chains and distributors), where high-value products will be delivered together in high volumes regularly tos specific location, rather than a single low-value item being delivered by hand to a specific address that may only receive post intermittently.

2) The New Zealand dollar is worth approximately 0.5 USD. Exporters basically make their income based on the difference in labour, land and materials costs in New Zealand versus the export value of their product in USD.
I recently found a GoldStar cassette tape with my Atari hacks (in BASIC and in 6502C machine code) back from elder days of 1988-89. Externally and visually the tape is in normal condition, no chipouts of the ferromagnetic layer. Now to try it I need an Atari 800, anyone can send me one with a tape recorder ? ;-)
Most Americans and others are not taking enough vitamin D, a fact that may put them at significant risk for developing cancer

As usual, the only thing that Vitamin supplements cure is vitamin deficiency. If you don't have a deficiency, they won't do a blind bit of good, and may even be harmful.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6399773.stm
You're an interesting case, because you claim to have voted 'other', and so I might learn something from you. What is this list of stuff, I really believe their are the two natural cases[^], with bi-gender, eunuch, and trans-gender being the only other possibilities. What are the other possibilities, if you feel comfortable speaking generally, the thread is practically dead.

For me, the word gender refers to a configuration of organs and only has a secondary meaning for speaking about identity, but the secondary meaning is weak and it is better to speak about sexual identity, a phrase that covers the concept much better and directly.

[^] I was looking for a word that wouldn't be insulting. I hope I succeeded.
Interview with a Nigeria-Spammer
http://blog.oliver-gassner.de/archives/3257-Interview-with-a...
reminds me of a less refined version of Googles "Radish" environmentally friendly meeting schedule. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyHaImmmkGs&feature=playe...
I don't think there's really such a thing as a "one-time project". It is very rare that you would create a piece of software in its entirety with no variation from your original design or conception of the software, and then never revisit or change it. As soon as you start modifying or maintaining software, you are in a position where your up-front design decisions may hinder your efforts to improve or add features.
I'd suggest an iPod touch + apple developer membership. J2ME is horrible to write code in, especially compared to cocoa or android java.
This only matters if you need specific features from those libraries in your web app, there is no adequate library in another language and you can't use the python library without strong integration in the app.

Ruby's domain is primarily the web and web systems, and when it comes to that area, Ruby has an vibrant ecosystem with plenty of libraries and tools that don't have python counterparts. Ruby developers have also readily borrowed good ideas from Python. For vast majority of web development, these kinds of things matter more than the existence of something like scipy. Each language has its strengths and weaknesses with regard to the quality and quantity of tools directly related to web development.
I agree that we should stop giving away candy bars, but I don't understand your question.
I would suggest provide support for both. As it has been mentioned, there are libraries that you can use to generate either of these. Tumblr is the first that came to my mind - it provides support for both.

Give developers freedom to choose either of them...