skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this migth be some confusion between Mr Alan Kaye (http://people.forbes.com/profile/alan-kaye/51664) and Alan Kay of SmallTalk & Object Oriented fame.
he actually DM'd me on twitter and said they were actively trying to post more. They hired that Moonwalkin' Milo guy too.
El Rio Grande on 39th and 3rd. The best margaritas in the city! Two of those and you wont be able to tell if the food is good or not. Although the food is pretty tasty.
People who switch to an Android after using an iPhone for a long time are going to interpret anything different as poor UI design. That said, I think the iPhone browsing and app experience is superior, whereas the Android email and chat experience is far superior due to background tasks and the notification tray.
Python is designed to be easily extended with C. If you need performance then write those performance-critical parts in C and write lightweight wrapper to python.
The greatest open source software of all time
Really? Is MSNBC still owned by Microsoft? When it comes to the Internet, Microsoft seems like one of those companies that really doesn't mind investing lots of money for a long time as long as they hold a glimmer of hope.
I'm confused by this comment. In this article Gruber is saying how much better iPhones are than everything else. He doesn't seem to take the biggest criticism of "no fixed keyboard" seriously.
The brand, the domain, the eyeballs, the data, the deployment environment, and (of course) the team.
No, even worse is the meta-complaining about other people complaining about complaints.
Not sure who you have been meeting. But you should check out the hackers and founders meetup. There are of course a few financial people, but overall a great group of interesting like minded people. There are people in NYC doing interesting stuff, you just have to weed through a lot of crap to find them. But they do exist... If your interested in details for the meet up, shoot me an email.
Interesting article, but you have to consider that the people that you'll never hear from are the ones with the success stories. So they may be a lot more prevalent than you'd think!

Also, I really wonder if 10 years in jail is the right way to punish somebody that tries to reboot his life in the wrong way. His kid needs him more than he needs 10 years worth of punishment. Garner the guys wages but set him free.
They have a 'wall' where you can fill a bucket with whatever pieces you want.

Whoa. I had no idea. Now I know what I want to do when I retire: Become 12 years old again and live near a lego shop.
the #1 area where you can compete with Apple (at least for now)

Your qualifier here explains why Gruber doesn't dwell on this. He wants a competitor to Apple that can succeed in the long haul, not a bunch of scavengers who survive for another year or two, picking off the edges of the market that Apple hasn't gotten around to steamrolling yet.

Indeed, my off-the-cuff take on the state of the market is that Apple's carrier exclusivity is a positive danger to the competition. Because it means that the market sends all the wrong signals. You put out an iPhone knockoff that runs on another carrier, and a bunch of people sign up. Your product is a success! But: The reason your product is succeeding is that the playing field isn't level. And it's non-level in a way that Apple can fix, just as soon as the agreement with AT&T runs out.

My take on the smartphone market in the USA is that Apple's competition needs to race to come up with a product that can survive the day when iPhones are being offered on every carrier. Because I see no reason to believe that such a day will not come.
That assumes that MSNBC wasn't the best of multiple offers. It's not hard to believe that EB could have scored term sheets. It's an impressive and sticky site.
I am just confused as to what these iPhone converts are doing.

That's exactly why iPhone is superior (so far): it is not about what, it is about how
The anchor text would still count against the message length, but the href would not. Just have some simple syntax, like markdown's [text](url)
They probably mean "it doesnt' work with itunes"
Which handset is this on? How's your battery life? I have an iPhone but I'm thinking about making the switch for two main reasons: first that things like VOIP apps and Google voice won't happen on the iPhone, and second that Android's security model is vastly better. The thing is, I've spent some time with the myTouch at the T-mobile store and performance was terrible (app launching, returning to launcher screen, scrolling web pages, software keyboard). I've written an Android app but we really mostly ran it in simulation... Then again, it could have just been the floor model's problem. How would you compare performance in extended usage with the iPhone?
Why should I switch to Scala ?
Also, PG's old coat: http://www.listia.com/auction/198

Only 3 hours left!
In further news, I plan on eating a sandwich for lunch.
Rarely do I buy complete sets anymore, I just buy the individual pieces I am looking for from http://www.bricklink.com (no affiliation just a happy customer). (92,700,724 items in 2,814,678 lots in 3,404 stores as of Aug-17-09 1:00:08 PM.)

Looking for old catalogs? Can’t beat this site http://www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory/; scanned in and categorized by theme, name, year etc.
PG's old coat on Listia!
I'm actually not a big fan of Milo's typical 2-3 paragraph news releases... I much prefer longer, more thoughtful articles like this one.
He has taken the "no fixed keyboard" argument seriously. He wrote about it a number of times. He came to the conclusion that (when implemented well) there is not much of a difference, except user preference.

http://daringfireball.net/2009/07/mobile_phone_keyboards
Y Combinator’s Request for Startups in Journalism
> tool you need for the job.

What is it about your tool that you need for the job? Is your tool specifically designed for your (type of) job? What trade-offs are you making with that tool versus other tools? Did you consider the long-term implications of your choice of tool? What if you wish to extend your job? Is your tool well-maintained? What if a customer comes back with questions about your job after a few years? Is it possible that more people will work on your job? Will they need to learn your tool? Will you still be happy about your choice of tool? (etc, etc, etc)

Engineering is making trade-offs.
For those interested in the text itself, pg hosts a complete version online: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html
Here's a crazy idea: could you design a house this way?

Perhaps, for very hot climates, houses should be designed so that the air can only escape upwards, which would severely reduce cooling costs?

(most likely, they already are...)
I think it's a neat concept, but keep in mind that many programmers can type very quickly; speech should probably deliver something that is difficult to achieve in as much time with a keyboard.

For instance, "begin decorator" might write the entire function-wrapping-function code that is typical for producing a decorator, and that would certainly be faster to say than to type. Whereas, the example of simply importing a library is less useful (to me, anyway).
You do not want to issue investors common stock. If you do several raises at different prices, you can move the preferred price up and leave the common. Changing the common stock's price and affecting the options granted to employees can have tax implications.

Ask a lawyer. And an accountant.
I lived in Bayview, north of Candlestick, for a couple months. My sense was that it was the worst neighborhood in San Francisco. It didn't even come close to the worst of Chicago. How does someone from NYC manage to get intimidated by SF? I kind of don't believe this happened.

San Francisco is too small for genuinely dangeous neighborhoods, and the whole area is so expensive that even Oakland is viable for family housing.
There are really good taquerias in the Mission.
All Things D says "several million" and then quotes the recent Patch acquisition at $10 million, which is their way of saying it's more than that. http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090817/more-local-heat-msnbccom...
Dispelling the magic of dispersed storage
I wonder when it is you don't encounter limitations from the real world. I certainly couldn't type a line of code without my computer interacting with the real-world.
[Django] Dynamic redirection after login
> I think it's specious to suggest that the problems in programming language design and implementation are illusionary

That's definitely not what I was trying to suggest. I was suggesting that we do not need to accept "trade-offs" as an inherent property of programming, and that we can strive to do better. Sure, programming languages are designed within a context, but the number of inherent limitations upon us as programming language designers are fewer than those placed on real-world engineers. Gravity, mass, cost and tensile strength of certain materials are fixed constants, yet building skyscrapers and wide-body jets are a practical reality. What have we got to contend with? Incompleteness? Bah!

So my reply was not intended to say "programming language design is not hard", rather, "we should not be so quick to accept unnecessary trade-offs". The original post was complaining about problems which have been (largely) solved in other languages. The reply about seeing trade-offs implied that working around limitations is acceptable and part of an engineer's lot. I disagreed, suggesting that most of these "limitations" are imposed by limitations of thought, not limitations in what we can actually achieve.
> That is an extremely vague statement, but is basically a statement of the logical positivist notion of the scientific method which is now universally accepted as inadequate.

That's a fitting statement in a thread about the demise of philosophy. If you go to any lab, they'll tell you they're trying to come up with an accurate model, or trying to create structures with a certain known function. Your name for the process & opinions about it are irrelevant. It should be empirically clear what is happening.

> But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?

We did chemistry for a long time without an atomic theory, just memorizing which chemicals should be mixed with which. Of course it was rudimentary, but there wasn't a way around that.

> But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here.

They are statements about what people think people should do. If we all had brains like these [1] it would be morally normal to be a sociopath. Again it doesn't matter what you call it (moral nihilism), this is also empirically true.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18573/
Ask HN: Fedora style version of RedHat RHEL MRG? 
Has anyone tried out the Redhat RHEL MRG product? It is a variant of their enterprise Linux distribution with a realtime kernel, optimized messaging based off Apache Qpid, and Condor/EC2 integration. I'm particularly interested in the realtime and messaging components performance relative to the standard enterprise alternatives.

I realize various parts (or perhaps every line) of MRG is available in various ways, but does anyone know of a Fedora style project with the bleeding edge versions all nicely packaged so hobbyists like myself can experiment with the technology? The CentOS guys have MRG on their todo list but it seems there isn't enough demand for them to get to it sooner rather than later.
If you care about comparing SF and NYC, I wouldn't trust somebody's account of a weekend visit. I almost laughed out loud at some of it. "Awesome summer weather" and SF are fundamentally incompatible.

And Zed apparently doesn't actually like Mexican food, he just likes burritos, as that's the only thing you can only find in SF.

Now he is spot on regarding Muni. Actually, probably lucky he found a bus at all. Muni vs MTA alone probably makes it worth moving to NYC.
I think it's pretty rare that something "spells an end" to something else, and I usually assume such claims to be false until proven otherwise. In this case - I think I'm right. I don't own an iPhone, and I don't want to. If I was in the car, I would want my phone and my GPS to be separate. I'd also rather have a GPS unit that did a better job of GPS than an iPhone. I would think that most people feel the same way.
This looks like an app that turns Sinatra into 1/3rd of Rails. It seems like it defeats the purpose.
Do you use an alarm clock to wake up? If so, are you sure you're not sleep-deprived?

What do you eat for breakfast? I'm usually hungry within 2-3 hours after eating cereal, oatmeal, or a banana.

Where do domestic tasks fit in? Weekends only? I can't cook, eat, and do dishes in half an hour, and if you're cooking fresh vegetables, waiting a week between grocery trips seems to be suboptimal.
Since you've got no problems with Android, maybe you can solve mine:

- Why does the phone crash when I try to pair with my bluetooth headset?

- Why do all eleventy-billion of my contacts show up in the dialer instead of the relatively small handful who've got phone numbers?

- Why the *@#$% doesn't this thing have a proper headphone jack?

- How do I sync music between my computer and my G1?

- How about podcasts?

- How do I play videos on this thing?

- When I mark a contact as a "favorite", how do I change which phone number gets dialed from the favorite screen?

- Why don't I get autocompletion when I use the hardware keyboard?

- Why does the system freeze for about a second when I rotate it?

- Why do about 25% of the apps I have not work with the soft keyboard?

- Why do another 25% not work in horizontal mode?

- Where's the PDF reader?

- Why can't I read Google documents on this thing?

Shall I continue?
Lol: ("This is not a post about Zed Shaw...")

Such a self-negating post would not prove Tarsky's Theorem but it would demonstrate the impossibility of halting Zed Shaw posts...

I've been reading lots of symbolic logic lately...
There's also the question of "how do you arrange the products in order to maximize profit". There's also a great deal of machine/learning data mining that could be involved in this: e.g. market/basket analysis ("people who bought product X, also bought product Y"). Safeway does this, Amazon does this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_analysis

That would make this an ideal project for people with machine learning/data mining experience, particularly from a retail/e-commerce background (Amazon, eBay, Wallmart.com or even a brick and mortar store chain such as Safeway).
To the contrary, I found myself shaking my head. Why is it in Apple's interest to be forced to constantly innovate simply to maintain market share?

To say that 'a monoculture is not in the consumer's interest' make perfect sense, but why wouldn't Apple prefer a case where it has no strong competition? Their goal is profit via market share, not innovation for the sake of innovation.
They had to do that with Javascript, too.
This article makes everything pg says about the reasons behind Viaweb's success sound rather suspect, doesn't it?
I would sell all my assets to buy www.thesixtyone.com which I view as one of the newer models for music sites emerging. I don't know if it is making money, I would just love to own it for its beauty!

I agree that there is a need for greater innovation for moneytization models, the market is huge and the same resistance in paying for music was always around, even before the internet. Yes keep your ideas guarded but let us know when you implement them!
Seriously? You don't feel a little bit fanboi stalkerish posting this?
Computer Man
I have the T-Mobile myTouch 3G.

The battery life is a lot better than my old Windows Mobile phone, but I have not gotten anywhere near running low yet, so I can't really comment. My impression is that heavy use does not really run the battery down that quickly.

Performance really depends on what you have in the background. K9 totally kills it for me, because my IMAP server sucks. Google Sky Map and the Market sometimes lag for me. Google Reader can also be very slow. Otherwise, everything is good. I have a task manager installed, but since I stopped using K9, I have not needed it.

It is not a flawless experience, of course, but so much works incredibly well that I don't really care. Google does care about the details (changing colors, syncing contacts), and the third-party apps are really cool. (I forgot to mention Locale above; it's awesome! I never forget to turn my ringer on at home.)
I think that Windows Mobile is effectively in the deadpool.

With Microsoft signing a deal with Nokia to include Office into Nokia phones, and Nokia's announcement to ditch Symbian in favor of Maemo there's no room for somewhat outdated Windows Mobile.

Android, Apple, Maemo... there's already too many smart phone platforms to develop for. Since MS dropped the ball with their Mobile OS, They might try to adapt their strategy by partnering with Nokia and getting exclusive rights for some software groups (pre-installs) or some other deals. Most likely exclusive search engine deal.
I think a lot of people may not realize how cheap this is. 700 credits is effectively $20, because you get 500 free credits for signing up, and additional credits only cost 10 cents.
I'm slightly ashamed to say I was standing there working out how to fit the most bricks into the plastic cup. (It's larger at the top than the bottom, so it's quite a puzzle to fill with mostly square bricks) :) I'm 31, but really still 10.
"There are no tales of rejected Android apps because there are no rejected Android apps."

I wonder if all of these mini-controversies actually help Apple and the iPhone. It's another headline, another conversation piece, and like Gruber says, most / many people aren't all that unhappy with the App Store. The only reason they're stories and relevant in the first place is because of the iPhone's insane popularity -- the App Store rejection articles seem to further promote such instead of actually hurting it.
to be fair, the iPhone is at the same place or worse on several of these issues.
The Secret Thinkpad Powerbutton Code To Bring Dead Laptops Back To Life
The brain is hard-wired to obsessively love Google, Twitter, e-mail
Btw, anyone downmoding me cares at least to say, which part you disagree with: do you think that Andoroid phones are superior, do you think it is not about how; or both; or are you just not happy with the way things are? :)
Some of the issues you are complaining about can be cured with a setting (syncing contacts). Some should not be features of an open handset using non-proprietary technology (syncing music), some are legitimate bugs though not everybody has them (crash when pairing) and some are just rants.
Simu-Nation: On a slippery slope with cybersex
That's quite a list. I'm with you on the annoyance with apps that don't work with the soft keyboard, but that's due to developer lag.

I had no trouble finding a video app in the app store that worked fine.

A good PDF viewer is RepliGo Reader. It's $8 US, but no available in some Android Markets (such as Canada).
It's surprising that the competition - megablocks for one - is so ridiculously inferior. My son got some megablocks once, and none of them fit together properly. You stick them together, then they pop off. Or leave cracks. I guess they are filling the "cheap and don't care if they don't work" sector :/
I'd say the leverage lies with EveryBlock given that MSNBC did not have to buy them.

And if there were competing offers or options available to EB, all the more likely that they weren't picked up on the cheap.
I haven't but I really wished that the realtime patches would be made a standard part of the kernel. Lots of code could take advantage of that.

MRG supports MPI, the de-facto message passing interface for clusters, that alone makes it worth looking at.

One step closer to QnX...

To have the CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch in stock kernel would be very nice. A real-time kernel is not just for people controlling machinery.

If you are going to spend time on this will you please do a write-up of your experiences ?
One part of this deeply resonates with me: get users the "early success experience". I have worked on it over the years, trying to provide more and more of a glide path to people so that they successfully get something coming out of their printer.

It pays off -- I sell to 2.5% of people who get that far, and only about .8% among people who don't. (How do I love thee, analytics software, let me count the ways...)

This is one of the reasons I wince when I see apps which drop people at an empty screen, waiting to be filled by clicking the unobtrusive New Document button in the top corner. Grab them by the collar and tell them what they need to do next ("Click the new document button to get started!").

If what they need to do next is perfectly obvious, don't even bother with the text. Consider taking them straight into that funnel, or providing them with a half-built document that they can jump right into.
I guess the only reason why ppl think "iPhone is cool" is just because of slick multi-touch GUI, there's nothing else superior in iPhone per se. I have been programming for both platforms for quite a while and, you know, I find Android's Java less evil than all that iPhone's Obj-C stuff randomly mixed with tons of C wrappers (CoreFoundation) for regular POSIX. I find Android SDK more advanced because, 1) less code does more, 2) it's pretty standard Java whereas iPhone/MacOS is a mind explosive mix of C, C++ and bogus ObjC, c) testing/debugging cycle for Android is significantly shorter and d) Android app deployment is almost instant.

Is there any reason why some vendor cannot implement same multi-touch input on their hardware ? Is it strictly patented ?
The math is right but misses the point: to learn how to do your own startup. To learn from what the founders are doing right and wrong, and to start building up your own network of contacts, in preparation for striking out on your own.

Plus if you're not really into the premise of the startup you're working for, you should probably quit right away. And if you are really into it, well, then, that's worth something right there.
Is it time for an open source social network?
Subtle Differences Which Distinguish an Entrepreneur from a Certifiable Nut
Vicious circle, heal thyself.
Dunno.

I get Google Docs just fine. Google for "Google Docs", tap the first result, and there they all are.

I sync my music with a Perl script that looks at my xmms2 playlist and copies the music in there to the phone. (Not possible with the iPhone, BTW.)

What you consider major flaws are things I have never had a problem with. I do have a few contacts with no phone numbers, but I can also tap them to chat with them via GTalk. (A green light appears next to their name when they are online. Cool!)

Nothing is perfect, nor will it ever be. With the iPhone, you are stuck with whatever Apple says you are stuck with. With Android, you are stuck with whatever you decide not to write.

BTW, one complaint: I wish I had the Kindle app for this phone.

Some other things:

The iPhone is just as bad with respect to proprietary connectors. If you don't have an Offical Apple Cable, you can't even charge your phone. With the HTC devices, you just plug in a standard mini-USB cable. Tradeoff.
You can't have both lots of regular news and longer thoughtful articles all the time. These take effort to write! ;)