skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have said in speeches that Apple could forcibly impose software changes in Mac OS X, just as Microsoft can with Windows. I heard this in the Mac community, but there is no published information that confirms it, and I now believe that I was misinformed.

Ah, yes, that devious Mac community, always tricking people into making counterfactual statements. Stay classy, RMS.
I like all the Android FUD in the comments section.

I don't feel like engaging anyone there (as they think they are funny by calling Google "Skynet"), but you don't need to have any interaction with Google to distribute or sell Android apps. Any user, even with a carrier-locked phone, can download a file to his computer and use free utilities to install that on his phone. (I am not 100% sure that the computer is even required; there is probably an app that will install apk files that are on the phone's SD card.)

Example where I have done this: Sipdroid. The version in the Market does not support VoIP over 3G. The version on their website does. So you download their version, run adb, and now the Sipdroid on your phone supports 3G. If the Sipdroid website wanted to charge me for this transaction, they could.

No Google needed.

If you want openness on your phone and still want a good user experience, Android is the way to go. Other phones have a good user experience, but they are only "open" when compared to game consoles or microwave oven firmware.
I think everyone is aware OSX is closed source software. Most don't care because the open source software community has yet to provide any high quality alternative platform that meets the needs of the broader computer market. Very few people outside of the tech community are going to switch to less functional alternatives on the basis of a political statement. Most people can't even be bothered to vote in our real life elections. OSS can win on functionality, price, availability, customizability, etc but it will always lose on politics an zealotry.
apples and oranges. The 3 months of Showtime is just an incentive, they'll get you hooked on a show, at which point many people will get the actual subscription when the free trial runs out
Don't ALL of us have a finite supply?
People forget that depression is a normal part of life. Its normal to feel depressed just like it is normal to feel happy. What you should do is admit that you feel this way, let yourself feel those emotions, and reflect on how you want to live your life. It's part of being human.
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I agree with you about the medicalization of depression. The unspoken boogey man behind this is that the professionals say this kind of thing in the belief that medicalization is a lesser evil than the prospect of young people killing themselves. Its the old problem of whats good for society isn't necessarily good for the individuals. Wide spread medicalization of depression saves lives, but the cost is that individuals offen get medicalized for things they don't need.
Why Tablets Will Fail:
They're too big to fit in your pocket. They're awkward to use in most normal situations (ie, sitting at a desk) They will require a case for screen protection. Perhaps a case that folds open -- kinda like a laptop. Current software is designed primarily for keyboard/mouse input. Using a software keyboard and a stylus offers very little to most users who type faster than they can write. (that's one of the reasons type writers were invented in the first place, who wants to regress at this point?)
This would be much better titled "iTunes and Quicktime mistakes and malfeatures". It has many valid points--none of which have to do with OS X.
I've used Anchor for web hosting (for myself & for clients) and I thoroughly recommend them. Not only is their service great they have technically competent staff. The norm in IT these days seems to be that you have to persevere/fight your way through x layers of support before you get someone who understands tech, at Anchor everytime the person who first spoke to me was able to understand and resolve the issue.
Honestly, you can't separate iTunes and Quicktime from OS X. In the general sense of it, OS X is as much an ecosystem as anything else. In that ecosystem, iTunes and Quicktime are extremely important. Everything Apple does now runs through iTunes, it's central to the experience. And the underlying technology behind quicktime powers much of what you see on the screen when using a mac. These things ship with the OS, and it's taken for granted that all users have (and almost all use) them.
the professionals say this kind of thing in the belief that medicalization is a lesser evil than the prospect of young people killing themselves

Interesting. I hadn't heard that before. How do you know this?

Have suicides really gone down with the advent of antidepressants? I remember lawsuits about increased rates of suicides among adolescents prescribed some of them. It would be interesting to know the overall rates.
The economics indicate that giving discounts to new customers is more NPV positive than just repricing the whole portfolio. Every portfolio has sleepy customers who don't get maximum value or the maximum perceived value. However, every active and vocal customer should be provided with all benefits. That's the perfect marriage of economics and customers service.
You think a "culture of VC reliance" wasn't the prevalent model in 1999?
True, sorry for the misleading post. I just mentally copy-pasted from the nVidia press release, was far too sleep deprived for any critical thinking at the time. I'd edit the title, but it's too late.
I generally find that if you go to any top-tier school to hire, everyone there passes the intelligence threshold (See "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell). Once that's established, it's more important to make sure the person has the right personality for the job and his qualities fit the culture of the company. Doing bad on a coding interview could be a result of a host of issues, none which may be due to lack of coding.

Personally, I find that the more technical the interview process, the more dry the place is to work at.
Didn't expect the results -- thought it'd be less common.

Here's a couple of resources I've found helpful wrt understanding and avoiding depression. Hopefully they'll be useful to someone.

Short: http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/

Longer: Martin Seligman's book on Learned Optimism http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/1...
Historical oneupmanship quickly turns into an infinite regression:

http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Lessons-Learned-Building-Suc...

(Edit: the Amazon page doesn't make clear that the book, though published in 2001, is about a desktop software company from the early PC days.)
But there's certainly nothing requiring you to use them on the mac. And you don't need to have anything to do with the features he mentions. Use mpd/theremin/vlc/etc etc. And simply don't buy DRMed files in the first place. You can certainly just trash both Quicktime and iTunes from your Applications folder without deleteriously affecting the OS, except in so far as you actually wanted to use one of the two.
It used to be more for me too but somehow as I've gotten older the amount of time has decreased.
This is how frequent-flyer programs work. Once you are invested in one carrier, you are stuck with them. Am I going to give up pre-boarding, special security lines, free upgrades to first class, lounge access, and double mileage earning just to save $50 by flying the competitor? No.

When you give loyal customers free stuff, they stay loyal. It's too bad other industries don't get this.
"Stay classy, RMS."

Well, at least the retraction is reasonably classy.
I'm talking about exploitation of this vulnerability in general, not the specific case of Flickr. Not everything is a sequence of key-value pairs formatted in UTF-8.
You're making the wrong comparison. Compared to things like game consoles and portables, or most phone platforms (e.g. BREW), Apple's deal is quite favorable to the developer.
So: what does it look like?
I was able to make tmux hang in a matter of a few minutes of playing with it (and not even trying hard). It's definitely got promise, but it also still has a way to go.
Lucene 2.9.0 released
My parents did that for years with The Boston Globe. Every August, they'd quit, and every September, they'd pick up a new 1-year introductory subscription at about 1/3 of the price.

I've been trying to get them to do the same with phone/Internet service - my Comcast is about half as much as their Verizon because I'm on a promotional 1 year subscription. Hell, just quitting FIOS, using dialup for a month, and then buying the exact same subscription they already have would save them $10-15/month.

Similar perverse incentives are at work in the job market (you usually get much better offers by changing jobs) and the housing market (apartments tend to jack up the rents as much as possible on existing tenants while offering move-in specials to new tenants). And people wonder why there's no loyalty in America anymore...
A Red Duct Tape
If you've really been working on a startup in your free time from your regular job then you'll be painfully aware that this is true.

Every friday, I try to plan a well balanced weekend so that my willpower to work on my startup is kept topped up after my regular job workweek. I do this by:

1. Planning for one activity during the weekend which I absolutely love to do: kiteboarding or watching football. Its usually good to have this on sunday so that you look forward to it during friday night and saturday. (Yes I've stopped going out on friday night.)

2. Recapping who my most likely paying customers are going to be. And writing out a list of bugs and features that I will work on to be able to acoomodate those users.

3. A list of UI (simple) and fun features which I can do when I start to get tired working.

The system seems to work but is not procrastination-proof. I think I still need to add:

1. A well stocked fridge.

2. A little more face time with my friends. (This is a great willpower rejuvenator.)

3. More time in the gym. Right now this is at 0.
These are some excellent ponies.
Neither iTunes nor Quicktime are anything like IE was alleged to be in the '90s. You can work on a Mac system just fine without using DRM-tainted Quicktime code or ever launching iTunes. Everything Apple does does not run through iTunes, and iTunes is not central to the experience.

You're confusing the weirdness of managing a smartphone contacts database through a "Tunes" application with, um, an operating system.

Webkit is far more important to OS X than iTunes is; note that Webkit has also begun to devour iTunes.
Startup Founder Compensation: The Good, The Bad and The Irrelevant
Huge chunks of core OS X code are in fact open source, including several of the most important bits (xnu, webkit).
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I went through a serious period of depression during high school. I missed a huge amount of school and there was a period of about a month during which my parents were considering having me committed to an institution.

The key to beating depression is introspection. Recognize it for what it is: a couple chemicals in your brain that are out of whack. No small matter, and there's probably a cause. But your mental faculties are still there -- they just have a distraction breaking their concentration. Think of it just like a loud noise, and tune it out, then figure out where it's coming from and silence it.
And another important point: There's a lot of momentum (possibly misguided, but it's there) toward "paperless" everything right now, but the problem is that you can't just draw all over a PDF. Rather, you can draw all over things, but it's super awkward with a mouse, and my pencil has a fantastic user interface that's hard to beat.

Tablets, though? Here's a device that promises to actually let me use my great UI (pen/pencil/stylus) to actually draw all over documents I want to edit. I think that that, together with the desire to go paperless, is going to be a big factor in wide adoption of tablets.
Colin didn't flag this flaw.

To be fair, I didn't notice message extension attacks because AWS used an HMAC -- not a hash function -- and thus wasn't vulnerable.

crypto primitives are radioactive. You are not going to get them right

It doesn't take an expert cryptographer to know that if you want a MAC you should use a MAC.
Okay, Johnson & Johnson, now it's your turn. Where are the LifeScan iPhone devices & apps?
Interesting. I feel like I'm the only person who hasn't noticed much of a difference, emotionally speaking, even after dramatically increasing the amount I exercise. (I biked about 8 hours a day this summer, and now that I've started work, I ride my bike to work.)
Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans
I almost stopped reading halfway through. Glad I read to the end. He's right on.
Have an idea of how many "man-years" of effort there are in things like Ruby, Python, Linux, Apache, Postgres, GCC, etc... etc... ?
I have previously argued with people who couldn't figure out why car insurance companies would ever raise someone's rates for being in an accident that was not their fault. Clearly, if it's not my fault, then I don't deserve to be punished!

Is there a word for this? Is it simply an inability to empathize (i.e., to see the world from the company's point-of-view) or is there a larger fallacy at work (e.g., a belief that the world operates according to some standard of fairness)?
I drove to Australia, mainly to limit my carbon footprint but also to avoid the merciless torture that is in-flight entertainment. Delta runs the golden collection of Adam Sandler: Auteur.
Really nice read, quite easygoing.
"or most phone platforms (e.g. BREW), "

So what's the situation with brew? Does one have to pay annual development fees? I've never developed a BREW app so I wouldn't know. I don't know if BREW is particularly widespread either.

I do know that I can code and deploy on my Nokia phone and Android phone (ordered, on the way). I used to write and deploy apps on a Windows ME phone(not a great experience but I didn't have to pay any money, least of all annually).

I'll be damned if I pay an annual fee to deploy my app on my phone. F$%^ that. Developers paying platform vendors to be "allowed" to develop for a platform is completely backward.

Others can make a different choice. Fine by me.
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Don't worry, invitations have not gone out yet. We posted this early so hackers in the bay area can list their extra rooms ahead of time.
New Public Data Set: Wikipedia XML Data
Ask HN: Is OneForty.com good for Twitter App devs?
At Squeejee (http://squeejee.com) we've developed a number of twitter apps (TweetSaver, Floxee, TweetCongress, Sherflock) and when I first got wind of oneforty.com it seemed like a grand idea. After reading their publisher contract, which you are REQUIRED to agree to if you want to "claim" your app, I'm not sold on being a part of it. Read the contract here: http://oneforty.com/terms/publisher_contract ... would love to hear thoughts from other twitter app devs.
I appreciate the interview you did. I found it enlightening, and watching and listening the whole clip increased my knowledge and understanding on programming in general, as well as on functional languages and the background of Erlang and Haskell.

The second question ("Haskell and Erlang have 2 distinct models of concurrency, right? Haskell is going to side-effect free, Erlang is about messaging. Can you talk a bit about this in contrast to both models of concurrency?") was especially interesting to me. I'm not experienced with functional programming, and I'm interested in the unique characteristics of Haskell and Erlang. This question directed Armstrong's and Jones' discussion towards the differences in the languages, even though they did not clearly answer to the question.

For the sake of feedback, the question starting with "Yes. This is in sync with how things happen, but sometimes it gets out of sync. It's the same thing with when you are dealing with processors"(...) was a bit hard to grasp. The mental models related each programming languages are interesting, but your question directed the discussion away from the issue of mental models. Perhaps asking "what do you see as the mental models of Haskell and Erlang" would have done the job?

Anyway, thanks for the interview, it was beneficial to me, and I'm surely not the only one.
the configuration that comes out-of-the-box actually is correct in a sense that it works. shared_buffers is low enough so that kernel.shmmax and kernel.shmall don't need to be changed.

Of course that means that there isn't enough shared memory available to achieve maximum performance, but chances are that you don't need to worry about that while you are still a beginner.

Later, when the amount of data grows, then it's time to learn about that stuff and this is when you will change shared_buffers - and the kernel resources with it.

Agreed about the other stuff, though it has pg_-tables, not databases. And having database metadata exposed in database tables is quite the common case and has indeed been made into a standard, though not in the form of pg_* but in form of the information_schema (though pg_* still expose a lot of additional information)
I'm depressed that "Never because I'm awesome" is not a possible answer.
The end of the recession, determined by GDP
It is properly a mix of the two things, that said it does seem strange to increase the rate since the other guy would have to pay.
Well if it wasn't their fault, and the company cuts them a break, then they have much more customer loyalty. The trick is how much effort you're willing to devote to figuring out he said she said debates which I'm guessing is not much.
Dell Latitude Z 600
It's always a good idea, specially if you want to join the MHC, for N > 2.
How To Use Google Spreadsheets With Google App Engine, Part 1
NX is supposedly able to do this, but last time I looked (which, admittedly, was two or three years ago) you had to expect serious problems if the set of available fonts on the different display servers was different (i.e. in all realistic scenarios). Oh, and it only worked on x86-32.
Tablets will only succeed when they have an OS designed around their features and limitations. Just mapping the touch screen to the mouse input and throwing on the latest version of Windows is not useful.
... And Melbourne turned grey.
On the other hand, you're not a publically held company. The telecom can't justify decisions on the basis that they are right. Cooperate law in america is messed up.
Broken down, the article really only talks about two different things:

- iTunes updates that either stopped 3rd parties from accessing the iTunes Music Store, or only allowed iTunes libraries running current DRM versions to play DRMed music.

- A single quicktime update (7.4) that broke export functionality of AfterEffects. This was fixed in the very next update (7.4.1 [1]).

Using these two (three if you count iTunes as two) examples under the headline "Mac OS X mistakes and malfeatures" is disingenuous at best.

[1]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1345330...
Employees Don't Vacation Fearing To Lose Jobs
This probably seems like an odd submission (feel free to downvote this comment), but Dell's done some really innovative stuff here:

- Wireless dock for DVI+USB

- Latitude ON: always-on-and-connected mini-Linux running on a dedicated ARM chipset

- Induction charging stand
Why Australia's Pirate Party won't get elected
The great airline scam of 2009
Write Local: How Small Newspapers Are Surviving
I agree that it's a good article. Its primary point, that "type" doesn't mean the same thing in "statically typed" and "dynamically typed", is well put. The model he presents of static typing taking a proof-based approach to correctness while dynamic typing takes a test-based approach is also interesting.

It's quite wrong, though, to say that the modern unit testing school (i.e. xUnit and TDD) is a creature of the dynamically typed world. It is very much a creature of the Java world. It's true that the original xUnit was Smalltalk's, but that was a pale foreshadowing of Junit. And all the examples from Beck's TDD book were in Java. The most zealous unit-testers may be Rubyists, but their numbers are surely dwarfed by the number of people programming in that style in Java and .NET. I did so in C# for years myself.

Edit: he also is far too dismissive of the importance of performance. (Alex Payne's talk about choosing Scala is a nice counterexample since it was posted yesterday). I'm beginning to think the piece is less insightful than it first appears.
About frikin time someone made a PHP based CMS. /s
I use C-z as escape in screen. This would be "send process to background" in a vanilla shell, which I don't need that often in screen.
Thank you so much for posting this. I had heard bits and pieces of it quoted, but didn't know from whence. What an utterly astoundingly deeply brilliant mind. So nice that there is audio to go with it.
Robin Hanson: This is the Dream Time
So we trade faster development time for a longer review process time. So instead of hiring more developers for your app, you hire more lawyers -- sounds like a definite fail. With business acumen like that, I'm not surprised why Palm is failing.
A good tactic when possible, but Comcast requires a 3-month away period to qualify as a new customer. I think the best tactic is threaten to quit, if that doesn't work then phone back another day and try your luck again with the call center lottery.
While I can understand the appeal of a tablet (heck I want one) it never ceases to crack me up when I think that what got me hooked on computers initially was that it didn't matter that my handwriting sucked.

I wonder how useful these devices would be when even I can barely read my script?
William Safire's Finest Speech
Great writeup. I love that you are evolving it as the HN discussion grows.

My biggest stress point has always been dealing with accounting and taxes. I realize that hiring a bookkeeper would be ideal, but as my revenue stream has had some wild fluctuations over the years I have always been a little hesitant to make the commitment. I am curious what you or the other consultants here have found to be a fair price for bookkeeping service.
I think that I heard a lot more about companies that were "two guys in a garage" in the 90s than I hear about these days, yes. It could be just my perception, or it could be reality.

I'm just callin' it as I see it. As someone who sits in this world more or less 24/7, I can't remember the last time (prior to the last couple months) where a bootstrapped company gained wide-acceptance like has been happening recently.
Attacker controls the length of the message so he can make the padding be only 9 bytes long
The Crisis and the Creative
Honestly, every day around 3:00.

My Brain gets tired from hacking. It wanders into the depressed area of my thoughts because of this.

I contemplate all of the mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities I've had. I can spend the rest of the day in a melancholy funk.

Sometimes I used wonder how can I go on as a person;
but now-a-days I wonder how I can go on as a programmer, because I know (believe?) it is a pattern related to my profession.

I don't know what else I would do as a career, however.