skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the opposite of readable, for me. Even assuming that you're using the shorthand notation to compact the properties vertically and that you're listing out each one here because they need to have different properties, grouping the related ones together (all the margins, paddings, etc) would make it much easier to scan. Plus I've gotten used to ordering properties in the TRouBLe format (Top Right Bottom Left, just like the browser does in the shortcut notation) and would list it that way, rather than top/bottom, left/right.
My elevator pitch is, "A slow lisp without a real object system."
The brilliant part of Apple's strategy is that they control the hardware, so they can afford to do a maintenance/64-bit prep release like Snow Leopard that's light on new features because there's no bargain basement Mac clone shop to eat into their sales if the new OS release requires less hardware.

With Microsoft there's a perverse incentive to keep upping the system requirements. I'm not saying they do it consciously, but if this theory of why no one upgraded is correct then it puts MS in a very difficult position.
It's not just that libraries are important. Platforms that are mature, portable and reliable can get products developed more quickly. Platforms that run on multiple target OSes improve my deployment options.

It's not just lack of libraries that can hinder a language. An immature runtime, or one with platform-specific issues limits your options. I think many more man-hours go into developing a rock-solid runtime library than language developers / advocates might suspect.

Language is nice to have, platform wins.
Who killed the link to the primary source non-subscriber content with actual numbers?

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/10/19results.html
Web 2.0 really has spoiled people

I think it's more that Web 2.0 has allowed the spoiled people to broadcast their juvenile "Fuck Yahoo!" to the general(er) population.

That said, the funny thing about Flickr is that they really don't send you a notification when your subscription runs out. The same thing happened to me (so I logged in and renewed my subscription - which surprisingly turned out more effective than blogging about it.)
Philippine govt, IBM quarrel in flood aftermath
> I’ve heard arguments that this kind of thing is culturally acceptable in Taiwan—in fact it may even be expected for technology events, though I’d love to hear further confirmation.

When in Taiwan...

I mean, not to rain on anybody's parade, and I'll say that I wouldn't be expecting this at a conference either, but you shouldn't be holding Taiwan to American standards.

Maybe I'm still too young.
We have spell checkers in everything now. Even my instant messenger has one. I asked someone this question and their response was "what if there is no electricity." I don't see how that's valid unless there is an immanent Malthusian catastrophe.

This seems to be a case of "if it doesn't work, do it harder." I don't see the point in being a hardass about it. What percent of people actually care their spelling? And the people who care if their writing is taken seriously will always put effort into correct spelling.

The time I spent memorizing spelling words could have been better spent learning why they're spelt the way they are.
Those pictures make me feel very uncomfortable.
Design Patterns may be the "disease", but Clojure has nothing really to do with this, "the cure". Lisp has been the cure before the term Design Patterns even came into the CS vocabulary.
Lightning-fast robo-hands
Internet alters older brains in just one week
Why Idling Mind is Mother of Invention
For shame, for shame - forget where it's held, this kind of action reflects on the industry as a whole.

Couldn't agree with this article more. The lack of female talent in this industry is a real shame, and excludes a perspective that could be extremely helpful.
Good point. I just swap out albums as necessary with Picasa desktop. But for your use case I know I'd love to hear alternatives to Flickr.

Doesn't his (and my) complaint still stand though? There are surely other ways of throttling use besides holding data for ransom. Limit to 200 public views and prevent new uploads, for instance.
You really need 2 computers: one development machine that is the latest and greatest (incl. Intel SSD), and one old slow grandmom computer that shows how slow the 1/4 slowest customer computers are.

You can't combine it into a single computer, because even if it is only 80% of the latest and greatest, it is still way faster than grandmom, thus not representative of your customer base.
This is what I used
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2238
...also extending their vocabulary.

My brain completely skipped that when I started thinking about this.
Startup School on Twitter
Apple makes it pretty clear to developers that trademarked terms are not to be used in keywords.

It's not illegal to smoke indoors. But if you smoke inside my house, I will ask you to leave. Do you have a problem with that?
I find it weird that some tech guys, unlike nearly all normal men, get really upset when fine women are in the picture. Would you rather the following image continue to be the image of Hack Day and all other tech events?
http://www.fugly.com/media/IMAGES/Funny/nyc_linux_users.jpg
Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you fall in the "videophile" category.

Maybe. I'm not a videophile, but watching Football in HD is amazing to the point that I think anyone who likes sports with large fields and/or small balls would appreciate it. With movies and television I don't think it's nearly so important.
My personal favorite reason for rejection is "Your big icon doesn't match the little icon". I've gotten that twice so far.
Agreed. I think other popular functional programming languages could fill in for Clojure here in regard to the criticism of Design Patterns.

But Clojure has other niceties as well :)
How about a compromise; develop on shiny fast box, test on the generation or two behind box. Personally, I'm like the GP, I don't feel like my older computer (Athlon XP 1800, bought in 2002) is significantly slower for things that I program. The only slowness are flash movies, but I'm not a flash developer.
Of the things it could be, why does it have to be biology?

Pop-evolutionary psychology doesn't rise to the level of a real biological explanation.
Or for some people a significant degradation in the quality of the user exepience, combined with a significant increase in the cost of the hardware required. And what benefit does the latter give the ordinary user? Nothing, that I can tell. I have Win XP running on a 4-year old laptop and it's fine. My mom bought a new laptop with Vista about a year ago, and it's horrible. So horrible it literally makes me yell when I'm forced to help her with it. It is so bad I can't help but think that whoever made it does not "eat their own dog food". Apple eats their own dog food. That is probably why their user experience rocks.

Because of the above, I will be getting her onto a Mac laptop as soon as I can.
Tweets view. For celeb lovers, I imagine a big part of it is the vibrant looks and identities and small avatars might not really cut it. Maybe just use a larger version of their avatar because custom-creating your own adds more work you don't want to be doing.
Amazing how much thought goes into this now, when many of the most iconic brands are last names (Smuckers, Heinz, Disney) or names that were not chosen for ANY branding reason (Google). It seems that a lot of this article really applies best to naming a product that has to fit into an established brand.

Good insights nonetheless.
Yes, how dare someone on the other side of the world do something that doesn't fit with contemporary American standards for what is professional! Clearly this is the fault of the technology industry, as a whole. Just like the energy industry is clearly not inclusive because of how middle-eastern oil-producing countries treat women. </sarcasm>

Seriously, can we please stop seeking out any instance of anything inappropriate and then using it to slander an entire industry? The fact that something potentially sexist happened somewhere doesn't mean that discrimination is rampant throughout the industry.
It's the kind of image that has been prevalent in the gaming industry for eons. I wonder how disparate the percentages of female hackers (if you can define hacker sufficiently) versus women in gaming are. Certainly in gaming we're pretty much used to it by now - and it is slowly changing.

Plus, as another poster says, 'when in Taiwan'; their culture's totally different. If there is a gender imbalance specifically in Taiwanese or Asian computing (and most of the female CS students I met were from China or Japan), addressing it needs to take the culture into consideration - the miniskirted lapdancers are a symptom, not the disease.
The "cloud" isn't fast enough.

Until most everyone can access files in the cloud as fast as a local NFS connection over 1G ethernet, and do so consistently, desktop apps are here to stay. I view the suggestion that web based photo management apps and editors are(will be) "just as good" as their desktop counterparts for "ordinary" folks with the same suspicion that I view the claims that GIMP is just as good as photoshop or OpenOffice is a suitable replacement for Word/Excel. Not likely...
That would just make things worse. Systemic risk would be discounted by the new, smaller banks even more since. If you do something to increase the risk of everything falling apart and you make up 30% of everything, you discount the real cost of the risk by 70%. If you are only 5%, you discount the risk by 95%.
Are you white knighting disinterested females, or denouncing tech conferences that employ half naked women to make it more enjoyable?
someone needs to go meta and create a stackexchangeexchange that just lists other stackexchange sites.
I strongly disagree, and it's disappointing to see basically a knee-jerk comment at the top.

Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords.

These are just some specific parameters to the same scenario that has played out countless times for other developers. The more general criticisms ARE common even when you don't "put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords". You are in no way addressing the actual criticisms.

It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

First of all, no, not really, it sounds like par for the course for Apple. Many developers sail through with no problems, but way too many developers end up with an experience like this.

Second of all, I find it hard to think of a worse way to handle the situation than "purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious." Honestly, there's so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start.

Nevermind the $100 yearly fee for having the privilege to be rejected - very slowly, inconsistently, and SERIALLY, one reason at a time - by the App Store, right?

I'm baffled that you're making this be the developer's fault. It's sheer incompetence at its best (the alternative being malice on Apple's part, which I think is far worse, but also much more unlikely).
As opposed to the blatantly sexist, misogynistic viewpoint represented by the other pictures?

Yes, absolutely and unequivocally.

I do see your point, and the tech community could learn a little about marketing themselves, but it doesn't excuse the garbage that is in the article.
I'm not sure what you have in mind, and why you think a browser based OS is an broken model. Most people simply don't need an OS in the current form. They just need something light that can run a browser and handle the hardware.

For me, it seems pretty likely that the OS will continue to diminish in importance to the point that some machines just bootup into a browser and don't have any other capability.

The advantages for users are large - no virus issues, no resource hungry desktop apps, no issues if the computer breaks/hdd fails.

I can't see why/how the OS has a long term future in desktop computing for the common man.

And from a business perspective, I don't think there's much opportunity there.
I'm personally embarrassed by the presence of "fine women" if they've been paid just to show up - it makes tech guys look like the only time they get to talk to a woman is if she's being compensated for it.
You are so dead; geek feminists have probably already ordered an air strike on your location.

1. You can't say "fine women" in a professional context.

2. Those women are dressed like strippers, which also isn't remotely professional (in the US at least).
True, but even when you have a disease, you start by treating the symptoms to ease the discomfort. I can only imagine how uncomfortable women at these conferences (what few there are) must be.
The curious thing is that the only reason iPod classic sales are declining is because Apple beat its own product with the iPhone and iPod touch. They're their own best competition.
By this syntax they aren't comments anymore.
Apparently this kind of thing really is pretty much a requirement for a Taiwanese event - pretty dancing girls are in attendance for all kinds of events. But like I said in the post, I don't care. For me, addressing the gender imbalance in technology is more important than obeying cultural norms. Plus dancing girls is one thing, but dancing ON people is quite another.
I enjoy "fine women". Even at strip clubs. This wasn't a strip club.

When the "fine women" present at a technology event are paid to attend (and gyrate), we alienate intelligent, fine women (for all values of 'fine') who might actually want to be there.
Yep. The day Apple is fully ran by MBA's and the Marketing department is the day it peaks. This will probably be around the same time it comes out with an low end laptop. The power right now is Apple's marketing arm is backed up by technology and it is really in the pricing sweet spot.
thanks to all, mine are DDR2 accordingly to about my mac.
I think that underscores an insecurity about your ability to interact with attractive women. Strippers, exotic dancers, and eye candy in general have and will remain a big part of male-only events. You can whine that there should be more females and that is fine. If there were, and they cared, they would voice out against it. This is not uncommon.
I know Plura uses IP information to prevent bandwidth overages, but I don't think they have a list of top hosts.

80legs enforces throttles and rate limits on the sites that are crawled. We try to make a best guess at a rate limit for each site. Sometimes that best guess is too fast, so we take corrective action when we're notified by the webmaster. Users can't override the crawling rates.
Like my point above, if Hack Day had even a 15% female attendance this would likely have not been the entertainment.
Firstly, I'm British.

Secondly, I'm not arguing that this incident proves our industry is sexist. My argument is that the low number of women involved in our industry is a problem, and one thing we can do to address that problem is to have a zero tolerance attitude to this kind of thing.

Thirdly, I couldn't care less about "professionalism". The first London Hack Day had people playing Faceball on stage! I care about behaviour that makes a portion of the potential audience feel uncomfortable or unwelcome.
Note to others who may make this mistake: tech men seem to dislike calling women fine.
Let's make the reserve ratio 100% if any other business did what banks did they'd be prosecuted for fraud.
I agree, though as a matter of policy you have to ask - how do you actually "break them up"? On what basis? You can't just have the government ordering companies to break up.

Unlike, say, Standard Oil, antitrust laws don't apply here (the problem isn't antitrust, it's systemic risk). So either you need some new laws, or just have to ask very nicely (though as a matter of future policy, regulators can - and should - refuse to approve these financial mega-firm mergers).

I suppose the government could have played a game of chicken (as it did with GM): "do what we tell you (break yourself up into smaller pieces) or we'll let you go under"... but if we've demonstrated that we weren't willing to countenance these institutions going under at that particular point in time, I'm not sure how credible the threat would be.
We're exploring the use of other languages that work in the JVM, but for now it's just Java.

The problem with other languages is that they all make use of reflection to get themselves working, which Plura's security sandbox does not allow. If anyone knows a way around this, please share!
Turning down apps to maintain quality, I'll give you that (even though there's a lot of room to argue the specifics).

Turning down bug fixes for stupid reasons, though? How does that maintain quality, if it takes over a month to push a fix to an app? Eventually devs get sick of it (especially if their apps are closer to the hobby end of the spectrum) and stop maintaining them. Can't blame them.
The idea sounds great. Too bad there's not much information on the page. I'm not sure if it will be available for free (I guess not) or you can use it with linux (I guess you can).
Another factor is automatic updates which stream down fixes constantly to XP machines- something that 98 and 95 never had. The jumps from 95 to 98 and 98 to XP usually meant a clean, virus-free OS. XP has remained solid because of the ability to update it - something only realistic with larger broadband adoption.
I personally can't wait until your average store-bought computer is some dumb terminal that boots off of a network.
Less questions from friends, acquaintences, etc when all of their sheah's in the cloud.
> What percent of people actually care their spelling?

Perhaps the same percentage that care their grammar and proofreading?

> The time I spent memorizing spelling words could have been better spent learning why they're spelt the way they are.

Knowing proper spelling is important if only to assist in word and term recognition when reading. What is far more useful is knowing _why_ words are spelled in a particular fashion and to know the history of the word and its roots. Not only does etymology help you know how to spell a word, it assists in selecting to proper word or term to get your point across in the most efficient and least ambiguous manner possible.
“Friendfeed is not dead. It’s transforming” says Friendfeed Co-Founder
Ya know, I've never walked into a conference, office or classroom and started counting up the number of men versus women in the room. Do you also worry about race? Religion? Sexual orientation? Disabilities?

It seems like you're projecting your own feelings about the tech community onto Taiwanese business culture. By your own admission this is common to Taiwan, not tech.

Maybe it would be better if we just saw people as people and stopped freaking out about which sub-groups we can split them into.
You're not going to win your battle by defying cultural norms. By chastising the way that others live their lives, you only drive them further away from your ideas.

You may win your moral battle, but you'll lose the war.

> Plus dancing girls is one thing, but dancing ON people is quite another.

Once again, how other people choose to live may, in fact, be completely different from you.
The sheer arbitrariness of many Apple rejections makes it pretty clear what's going on: applications are put into a queue, a group of approval guys pop the queue, review, and either approve or reject. But they aren't given clear standards for approval, so your results vary based on the whim of whichever reviewer you get.

Which suggests an interesting hack: when you get a rejection, just re-submit instantly with no changes. You probably won't get the same reviewer next time and it may pass.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to substantive issues. But even there, you could re-submit immediately, then start working on the changes; who knows, you might get an approval back while you're still making the fixes.
It seems you're saying that small banks would be riskier because they have less influence overall in the market. I'm sure the JPMs of the world do take such risks into account, however I find it hard to believe that this consideration is greater than the negative effects of a moral hazard of bank bailouts.

Vis-a-vis - the larger the bank the more its failure would affect the economy as a whole (hence the Fed / Tres. would bail them out, which was widely recognized) & also they have a higher concentration of lobbying funds and ability to collude. I see my reserve ratio change as a definite net gain.
> lack of female talent in this industry is a real shame

Why? I really don't think it matters. Is the shortage of whites in the NBA also a real shame to you?
> I can only imagine how uncomfortable women at these conferences (what few there are) must be.

Or would be, if they were American. Considering this is part of their culture, they probably don't bat an eye.
People are way too sensitive. Looks like they hired Go Go dancers for a party. Probably not the best idea in the world but people trying to use this as an example of the "shame" of the IT worlds sexism are just grand standing. There are not a lot of women in IT because up until recently it was considered a mark against socially to be a nerd. Now with the growing popularity of nerd culture and the high incentives to be in that field there will be a more diverse crowd. Or maybe there will always be more men then women because women are less interested in technological fields. Sorry if that's not a popular opinion but I'm not interested in many fields of study and have not slammed one for being in anyway discriminatory against me. It certainly won't be because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are sending out masses of men wearing NO MAAM t-shirts to tack no girls allowed signs on the the computer labs across the country. If anything the same loosely regulated and relaxed environment, common in many IT fields and shops, that would make them think nothing of hiring dancers for a party is the same attitude that would welcome anyone regardless of looks, sex, race, or anything else.
If you're all smiles one moment, and throw a temper tantrum about it the next... then completely forget about it five minutes later... or if you call me 2 weeks later to complain that I smoked at your house... or if you kick me out while someone else is using your couch as an ashtray... then I would probably stop visiting, anyway.
[Virgin America & Google] burden, some
Nontrivial secret to being a CEO: You need to hire people who are better than you (at something).

That seems like a high bar to clear, especially if you are a pretty good engineer.

But if you don't clear it, you will end up working with people who will do things worse than you.

This will make you and them feel awful. You will feel awful because either you won't have the time to redo what they did (and won't want to give them another task), or you will have the time to redo what they did (and waste the time of having assigned them the task in the first place). Moreover both ways you hit their morale and your morale.

Yes, one can make comparative advantage arguments (country/person X is uniformly worse, but frees up country Y for their value add) -- but in real life it sucks to think that "oh, this page could have looked so much better if I had styled it, but at least it got done."

In short: you need to hire people who are better than you (at least at something) in order to delegate with any hope of retaining your sanity.

PS: things are different for a professor. That's more of an r-selected strategy. Go for good graduate students, yes, but if any given one fails it's usually not a huge hit as projects are decoupled. Big difference vs. running a company.