skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably in this case people would make use of it to run all those games for the c64 that were written in basic. That's the whole point in case you aren't familiar with the situation.

> There seems to be a huge number of anti-Apple reactionaries who condemn every little mistake Apple makes

I think that most people here are criticising the app store restrictions solely. But with the ridiculous level of hype amount hype surrounding the iPhone, it isn't surprising that many would seek to balance things by pointing out its shortcomings.
I wonder if wordpress has unit tests at least
How is this even relevant though? You've been able to do the same thing with Netflix, Blockbuster, etc for a long time now. The housemate of an ex-supervisor had a Netflix account and would immediately rip the DVDs he got and send them back (sometimes not even watching them), and this was from 2002 or so.
BTW: It is not written in python. The core is C. The outer control systems (like cookies) are written in python.
Ernie Babinski (urbantank) on Qik
My favourite one:

"It is not the task of the University to offer what
society asks for, but to give what society needs.

[The things society asks for are generally understood,
and you don't need a University for that; the university
has to offer what no one else can provide.]"

The sad thing is that CS courses tend to go towards the opposite direction.
> Unless they fake the data, researchers do not have control over the results.

Yes they have.
In any statistic, you can introduce bias (many times without even knowing), the most common one being selection bias.

For example, I'd bet that the results for this research done on men coming from fields that are male-dominated (like engineering, finance), are totally different from the results of men coming from female-dominated fields.
hey which neighborhood is this? My friend was looking for a place to park his RV :)
I think Apple has a set of philosophies that makes it better suited to be a niche player. Didn't Jobs once say something about not being interested in price conscious users? Allowing non-app store programs would be a technically easy move to make, (unless there were terrible security problems with the platform) but my gut tells me they believe in what they are doing and they'll hold on to the bitter end.

Also there are many competitors and there were before they launched. I owned for 2 years before it exists. Somehow Apple managed to rewrite history in the minds of a lot of people.
It's about experimenting and having fun, not making money. Better to state it up front than to go in with dreams of making millions in a month :-).
Train your sense of smell: Le nez du vin
You catch changes in the meaning of return that break things because you write tests and monitor your processes (business and OS) so that you know when something goes wrong.

I've never changed the meaning of return, but I easily added a new construct called returnIfError. Instead of having to type the following over and over:

possibleError := attemptSomething
if(possibleError, return(possibleError))

I can now type:

trySomething returnIfError

The power granted by quick iteration of ideas is almost always worth the performance and compile time analysis trade off for the things that I work on.
from personal experience i have none* (since i would have to have written the same software system twice [using the past experience from either way makes this mutually exclusive]).

but a simple "productivity formal methods" query on scholar.google.com gives me: "Productivity on the project was the same or better than on comparable projects" pg 628/3, left column, second paragraph; by E.M. Clarke et al., "Formal methods: State of the art and future directions", 1996.

i think that you mean that developing systems, i.e., the programming part, is less productive using formal methods; which may very well be. but the additional time you lose because of debugging/testing you do not (or at least should not have to) need to spend on the formally correct system--given that the specifications were correct (this moves the source of error to a higher level)

EDIT: * none meaning no specific figures.
Things I Learned from Adventure Games
I had LAMP running on my Zaurus about 6 years ago :D
actually they referred to the "Mom and Pop" model as the opposite of vending machines - the revenue sharing part was independent of the other.
When you submit an app to the App Store, the developer can either choose to have it be made publically available ASAP, or at a set date.

I believe Spotify chose a set date: today, because Spotify was also published on the Android Marketplace today and that's probably not just a coincidence.

So, not Apple's fault this time.
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The same can be said about women's hairstyles. A lot of women prefer medium length hair for the many styles available, the ease of care, and the flexibility to change from shorter to longer.
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Here's a different perspective: I'm in my second year of college and I'm having more fun than I've ever had in my life. I'm more social, more confident, more outgoing than I could ever have imagined myself to be when I was in HS (though, I confess, I'm still not as self-reliant as I would like to be; would someone like to give me a job? :p).

Both college and HS are what you make of them. My HS years were crappy because I was an idiot back then. I'm sure I'm still an idiot now, but at least I'm the right kind of idiot :)

Hear what HN has to say, but do what you think is right. What works for us might not work for you.
More exactly, it's the "beamer" package of LaTeX, not PowerPoint.
Erlang: Impressed with Haskell's concurrency
I love this and wished that it was here in my country. A dollar is cheap even from where I am at.

Here, you can buy pirated DVDs on the sidewalks for a dollar (USD). If there were Redboxes here, people would automatically switch from buying pirated DVDs to Redbox.

FYI, I am from the Philippines and pirated DVDs are so rampant here that they sell it publicly outside schools, and in some malls...
Why? 90% of web is being finanaced by advertising $s. How would you expect or want it to continue?
We Found the Sony Ericsson Aino User Manual Online
RFC: CLtL3 Charter
I think there is probably a gold mine of ideas in things that failed 20/30 years ago. Sometimes things just aren't ready, even though they're really good ideas.
I find these lists of "RFSs" and the earlier list of ideas rather disappointing... I don't think that formulating a problem in such general terms is really useful and I don't think it works at all to create such a "framework" for an idea which someone just comes and fills in with the concrete details. It really reminds me of academic grant applications where there is some grand vision laid out for 5 years, in which only the details need to be worked out. However, the details are all that matter, without the "how to do it" I don't think such ideas add anything valuable.

The line "Ex-Googlers would be particularly well suited to this project" is again the kind of credential-based test that large organizations and the government would like. This all starts to sound much less than the startup-culture that PG talks about in his essays. In this context, using a bit more informal language than in grant proposals and job adverts is slowly becoming a bit gimmicky.
Free info on market size, demand etc.
When writing a business plan or proposal it helps to have genuine information on the size of target market (and other statistics).

Is there any free web service that offers such data/info?

Some example questions:
- size of digital photo printing market in USA
- number of prints made every year...

Some info I can get through Google but would be great to know about a free service that offer the same (I know about few paid ones).
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No, it wouldn't. If it doesn't have enough space to keep at least one backup, it won't delete previous backup, it will tell you that you need more space.
Ask HN: What are the new ideas of the last 10 (or 5) years?
Let's look at the following statements:

"Personal computers will be a big hit."
"Internet search will be an extremely important and profitable business."

These statements were absolutely not trivially true at the time when personal computers started, or when Google started.

Can we collect important statements, which were not trivial 10 years ago, but seems to be fairly trivial now? (Regarding topics in which HN can be interested: mostly innovations.)
A more interesting, but harder question: what happens if we take 5 years instead of 10? (Can we see clearly enough in this case? In what time-granularities can we think? What is the pace of development?)
Genuine Microsoft Software
No, I'm afraid that computer science has suffered from the popularity of the Internet. It has attracted an increasing —not to say: overwhelming!— number of students with very little scientific inclination and in research it has only strengthened the prevailing (and somewhat vulgar) obsession with speed and capacity.

Hallelujah, old friend - speak the word.
Creating a Usable Contact Form
whilst hard to debate till you're in the situation, I really agree with Ron Conway:

> all money in a start-up should remain in the company

You make your money when you exit, and not before.
"Can't you just switch out your senior year of high school for a year of college?"

This isn't as simple as that. A specific example: you are in 3rd year. Everyone is 21 and hitting up bars. You are 20. Some places you cannot even step foot in.

Being social outside your age group is really difficult compared to being social within it, and basically until you graduate from college, your age group is "your year".

To bring it to your current circumstances - imagine a 10 year-old child prodigy trying to hang out with a bunch of 15 year-olds. Or a grade 9 trying to hang out with a bunch of grade 10's. You can do it, but it is highly suboptimal.
Aardvark?
What has Apple got up its sleeves for Wednesday?
>> Can't you just switch out your senior year of high school for a year of college? Stay in college an extra year. If you were to do that, what would you be missing?

Literally, you would be missing your senior year of high school. You'll never be a senior in high school ever again.

The overwhelming majority of college students will tell you that college life is 100x better than hs life. It likely is. Mainly because there is no parental-supervision. Dorm life is potentially a meat-market leading to drunken "fun".

Regardless of what you consider fun, College is probably "socially" better than hs because of the increased diversity, freedom, and sheer population density.

So no, in those aspects you would not be missing out on anything.

My advice stems from the fact that you will only ever be a senior in high school once. Some here feel I am encouraging you to take the "standardized" path, which is highly ironic because I'm the only one from my peer group to have never taken the standard path. Never went to college, never had a full time job, paid my own way for most everything (not to imply I don't have very loving parents) and i am obsessed with building my own startup (single founder) having only learned programming seriously since last October.

There are costs and benefits to everything. So to answer your question, no socially you will not be missing out on anything terribly crucial. And college life is arguably 100x better than hs life, just remember that it is not really apples to apples. When I was your age I would have chosen to skip senior year. But as I sit here now, my advice is to stay. You must have a set of friends whom you wouldn't mind screwing around with for one more year?

I agree we are all different. If you feel you are obsessively focused and driven, then you SHOULD skip because to do anything else would go against your self: not good.

When all is said and done you have to BELIEVE in the choice you make. I chose not to go to college because at the time, I did not believe in it. If I forced myself to go, I honestly do not believe it would have yielded anything significant. Not because college is bad, but because I did not believe in it at that time. So if you believe that college will benefit you so much more, it probably will! Just remember you do not have the luxury of going backwards.

Let us know what you decide!

edit: read potatolicious sibling post. A great point!!
I think mark suster's new camp will be a good magnet for gravitating those types, slay2k. You may want to check it out.
http://bit.ly/launchpadla
I agree with your point that credentialism is counter to the notion of what we've been told YC is about. Yet, pg has always said that they want to see indicators of past performance and success, and working at Google is a pretty darn good one (usually).

Edit: I am curious about pg's thoughts on the balance between relying on strong signals from applicants (e.g. being a serial entrepreneur, working at Google, getting a PhD) to avoid false negatives, versus taking a risk and accepting teams that may be more likely to fail (false positives).

Regarding the efficacy of the RFSs: they've done the market research for you. If the proposal can eliminate a few free variables in your analysis, then you've only got to focus on the ones that remain undetermined. Furthermore, we've found that having someone pose a well-asked question can be enough to get us answering that question in a new way, and driven to build what we envision.
You're assuming other beings as your starting point, you need to demonstrate first that there is an external world that sense data received from your mind are a) trustworthy and b) externally produced. Taking the standard "brains in vats" position there is no way to show in your system the the apparent actions of [apparently] external beings aren't simply being fed to you.

Assuming a realist position (on the existence of the universe!) the fact that a cat responds in a similar way that a person with a mind does proves nothing - if I am startled (assuming I have a mind) then it is not the internally thoughtful part of myself that causes me to jump but it is a basic response below the action of my thought processes, I can't decide not to jump.

Consider that androids will soon appear to think - or that if you play poker online against a bot, but think it a person, that this person [bot] appears to you [from your position seeing their moves] as thinking. It is clear that the bot is only apparently thinking it is simply acting according to a complex algorithm.

Taking your point on a "slip[ping] a simulated intelligence" in front of you. You seem to be saying that if the simulation can work then it is a real mind (a sort of pure Turingism). What if a simpler person is convinced that the intelligence is real, but you are not. Does that mean that the intelligence has a mind? Does it think when interacting with that other person but not with you. I contend that it genuinely thinks in neither situation.

[Yes I meant "hear", I have problems with homophones, usually it's their=there and usually I catch it!]
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The world is different now. Things rarely work that way anymore. Also, if he were as good of a programmer as jwz he certainly wouldn't be asking for advice.
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Thanks! In fact, I originally wanted to write a classic paper, but I realized that ...

* The subject isn't complex enough to really fill a paper.

* Whenever I want to talk to someone about this, presentation slides are very handy in contrast to continuous text.

* The audience are people in the web, who look at it on screen and won't print it.

In addition, I was inspired by other mathematical slides such as http://www.tu-harburg.de/~matjz/work/lectures/ZAemB.pdf
Ugh, he means imperfect python, right? Even if I hated the indention sytnax, which I dont (and it seems to me that it grows on most people after a few weeks of use), I think a patched python is the wrong way to go about it as you now deviate from the main python distributions, so cant make use of updates and bugfixes (and do all libraries play nice with a patched version? maybe - maybe not). If you absolutely must have braces, use #{ and #} :-D, you should be indenting anyway!

I really don't get why some people hate the indention-as-syntax. Sure, its different to C and Java, but it also results in (more) consistently formatted code and readable indention. It also only takes a day or two to get used to, even if you're a hardened C++ user (for the record, I have nothing against C/C++ syntax, I actually switched from years of C++ to Python as my main language and I just recently started a C++/Python hybrid project).
The Alchemy of the U.S. Open Schedule
Not bad, but I'd re-write the first point as:
You can solve the problem in front of you with the tools you have more often than you think.
I don't know how it is for the average, but from my perspective, the social experience in college is notably different from the social experience in hs. In hs, I moved from one social group to another while generally being a loner in between. I didn't have a tight network of friends that lasted for a considerable amount of time. The people I'm close to now that happened to go to hs with me, for the most part, were not the people that I was close to in hs. The people I was actually close to in hs have mostly drifted away.

That might not sound like a positive thing, but it taught me to be more accepting of different types of people. I found my way into networks of jocks, band kids, geeks, nerds, etc. so that now, I don't really discriminate against people. If I had've skipped that whole part of growing up, my network now, which is fairly static, would be nowhere near as diverse or exciting as it would've been otherwise.

As for the girls thing, I found it a whole lot easier to get a girlfriend in hs. For some people, this is different, but I think the whole concept of "dating" suffers a paradigm shift when you leave hs. I don't generally see people go from "in love" to "heartbroken" in the course of a week, but that wasn't an uncommon experience when I was in hs. Like social networks, dating seems to solidify once you get into college. A relationship that lasts a few months is short, whereas in hs, that probably would've been a big deal.

I also believe that last year in hs really sticks home the concept of leaving that whole experience behind you. I know some people that left hs early, that are generally mature for their age, but they still seem stuck in that hs mode. It's as if there was no closure, and they're still hanging on to that last little bit of irresponsibility that makes the (relatively) more adult relationships in college a little more difficult to attain.

I don't know that any of that makes high school or college better or worse, educationally speaking, for your social development, but, at the very least, if you have no reason to leave hs early besides the typical teenage disdain for it, then just stay. You'll make a few more memories, perhaps grow up a little more. Take a bunch of mickey mouse courses. I had two outs, guitar, a courtesy, and my last two required classes (English 4 and Gov't/Economics). I skated through it all, doing very, very little work. It made it possible for me to sort of break out of my shell and get to know a few more people.
I've been planning on using this for a while now.. one day I'll get around to it. I feel Arch + Musca + Uzbl would make a great match for a simple, minimal system. Musca and Uzbl are both externally scriptible, so I can set up a nice and easy system for myself :-P
I don't want to install just to check this point - from the keybinding info it appears you can do a google search but you can't simply enter a url?? Is that right or did I miss something.
More thoughts on patents...

http://billbar.posterous.com/patents-use-them-or-lose-them
More thoughts on patents...
I disagree with this. I've had no trouble hanging out with people much older, and a few that were slightly younger. My friend network goes from 18 to about 26 without there being much of an issue. True, I can't generally get into bars (I'm 20), but there are plenty of other opportunities to get smashed outside of bars.
The best method is using sec edgar filings. You find the largest public company in your market and download the most recent 10-k's (annual report). They are publically available, you do not need to pay (although some sites make it easy for a fee). They always contain good market research and predictions for the markets, and are legally obliged to provide correct information.
Imagine someone interested in data mining and such but not in working at Google, for reasons that are outlined in PGs essays (inability to get things one, large corporation, conformism, politics, etc.). YC were even running these ads in the beginning: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482/

So when you are 100% sold on the idea that a startup is the way to go instead of accepting that offer from big co., it turns out that they look for this as validation. I find this quite sad.

About the market research part, you are right, but I think in the case of really transforming and original ideas, it is exactly the kind of approach that does not work: fix some variables, focus only on the few left. If it were so, we could write programs that come up with ideas.
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How about converting your desktop app to a single-purpose browser that displays the webapp? Steam does this pretty effectively in their UI.
The author has a rather narrow definition of "efficient". Yes, he uses close to the minimum number of bits of storage... but his encoding scheme is horribly slow -- encoding takes O(k^2 log n) time, and decoding using the presented algorithm takes O(k^2 n log n) time.
Thanks for the hint! I really forgot that one. I just added it to the presentation. In addition, I adjusted the example to "30 of 100" as this better reflects the average case. ("40 of 100" was too close to the pathological corner case "50 of 100").
But you didn't say how many cases of (non-swine) flu there are each year, which makes it difficult to extract any information about the per-case fatality rate. On the other hand, if your figures are right then we can be pretty sure that swine flue is relatively mild, unless just about everyone in Germany gets flu every year. On the other other hand, (1) one thing that's unusual about the current swine flu epidemic is that it's happening out of the normal flu season, so some of the credit for the low death rate may be due to the fact that people aren't yet getting it in winter; and (2) no one is actually disputing that swine flu, as it is now, is pretty benign; the question is how likely it is that a slightly mutated version will turn up that starts killing a lot more people.
Is the advertising model dead? (Direct link to video of panel)
Chanced upon this comment from PG made long ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179201
Eyes see trouble coming before brain notices
For the smarter kind of bookworm