skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Can you prove that whatever you are doing now works? Or is it just a case of you feel it works for you?"

Good Question.

Another question is "Do you go around calling legendary programmers who don't use your practices, yet ship product, "Stone Age Programmers"? Or the questioning of your favorite practice X as "X derangement syndrome"? If so why?
When people start throwing around terms like "derangement syndrome" to refer to those who don't buy their ideas, that's a warning indicator.
I'm at StackOverflow DevDays in Boston, and Dan Pilone gave a great presentation on the iPhone environment. The iPhone isn't really a gold rush, but there is money to be paid. Figures show that the top grossing apps were $50, even though $.99 sell more. The fact is, you're not going to be able to make a $.99 app and expect to make it rich. If you put in hard work, you can get paid. If Pilone's presentation was online, I would link to it.
You'd think they'd act like grown-ups before the press, given media's tendency to blow things out of proportion. But nope, not Schmidt.

The person acting like a child is not who you think it is.
Audio books should provide context-sensitive repeats.
For example, when a character is mentioned that you don't remember, you can ask it to repeat the part where that character was introduced.
> Credit card penetration is pretty low here

Really? I think the average internet user in Japan does have a credit card. It's just that people don't use it as often as Americans do.

Of course the English interface will filter out most of them.
Just for fun: Barcode challenge
Watching the RSS reader example, seems like a single button "Expand to container size, and set anchored all round and grow shrink horizontal/vertical" would be useful :)
From the screenshots it looks like a large (in good sense) app. Do you have problem with load times? How do you handle them?
I'm working on the GWT app and it seems it gets a bit slower to load (not surprisingly) as it gets bigger. I'm getting worried that at some time in the future it might affect users on slow connections.
The problem doesn't lie with the curve.

It's that even those on top aren't winning big. Why play the lottery when the top prize is modest, and the risk is high?
Articles about how iPhone developers aren't getting rich won't make you rich.
There is no single measure of security. The hacking competition mentioned is a perfectly valid data point though.
Why not do this via email? I don't think a lot of people need to be involved. Once or twice a day, a moderator circulates draft articles to the list. Each author can list a publishing deadline, so a reviewer can choose whether or not to start reading the piece based on the time available, and so nobody contributes thought to a piece that has already been published.

Granted, this doesn't scale, but I don't think this is something that is meant to scale: it should be a small group of eloquent, thoughtful writers who can provide meaningful feedback prior to publishing to a broader audience.

The problem with web-based solutions is that they're not pushed to reviewers, so many of the busier people whose insights may be most valuable to an author will not remember to check the site. For example, I doubt Paul posts an essay draft to a private site and waits for his colleagues to check it for drafts to review.

Although I wouldn't be able to provide feedback on every entry, I would enjoy contributing thoughts to authors in a format like this, and I think it would help create special relationships between people in a different way than the HN community boards (less anonymous, more thoughtful, etc).

Edit: I see a lot of suggestions here about how to fix this problem with technology using crypto, etc.; I don't think this is a technology problem as much as a social organization problem.
Hey, by the way, the fact that this industry is so clubby, and that having the right friends rockets you to the front of the line? Something else I don't like about VC-funded startups.

Yes, I know that if you're rocking it, you don't need the friends. But then, if you're rocking it, you don't need a lot of advice on how to engage VC's --- in fact, you don't need the VC's.
It will help prevent you from becoming poor if you were thinking about iPhone development.
Charlie Stross dislikes the Amazon monopsony:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/news_fro...

Excerpt:

* They're using their monopsony position to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) in a manner that threatens a catastrophic crash in author royalties in the medium term (up to 5 years). NB: as a reader, you may enjoy the short term price benefit, but you'll pay for it in the long term in reduction of choice.

* Their actions may start a trans-Atlantic price war between publishers, to the detriment of authors (again, in the medium term).
Elizabeth Blackburn is Aussie. I am USian here in Australia and you had to see how glowing people were looking at her face on the paper at the stands today.
Caring.com, leader in aging care, acquires GilbertGuide.
I've been publishing to the store since Nov. 08 (started in Aug 08). We've had marginal success but it's certainly a very challenging road. There are a number of pains that bother me but that's to be expected, Apple did a HUGE thing breaking down the mobile software barrier and opening the doors to international sales. We would not being doing as well if we relied solely on app sales, fortunately we're building an app for a Comedy Central show and it's compensating us well.

There are a few things to be aware of regarding iFart apps, and it starts by looking at the top charts in Movies and Music. Take a peek — it's all pop culture likely driven by returning customers between the ages of 12-26. Why would the AppStore be any different? It's not. The second thing to be aware of are the big boys. For the first few months it was mostly an indie market but that has long past. Third issue are spammers but I'm not going to go into details, everyone is familiar with them.

When you combine those three issues, along with poor search functionality, Top 100 Charts (out of the entire store) is extremely difficult to hit for 95%+ of the developers. This is where the big-money buying activity occurs. But here's the good news that keeps me optimistic about the future, and hopefully more stable/predictable revenue:

With the recent changes in iTunes 9, I'm most excited about the Top Earners chart. Currently the Top Earners chart is only available based on the entire store, but with a quick hack to the URL you can view Top Earners by category. Top Earners are correlated to app revenue (price), not simply volume which is how the Top Paid charts function (ie: pressure to .99)

Link to Top Earners in Social Networking:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTop?id...

We're still in Top 100 Earners by category whereas in Top Paid we're nowhere to be seen. My hope is that sooner or later Apple will make this information accessible to all customers on a per-category basis... and your affluent shoppers, who are avoiding AppStore unless by referral, will be able to find the real gems a little bit easier. If nothing else, improve the margins of "niche" apps because $.99 is simply not sustainable.
From http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/10/ftc-going-after-blogger... (Althouse is a law professor)

"The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they've deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we're supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined. No, no, no. Overbreath itself is a problem. And so is selective enforcement."
Davis (2009) Atkins decision: IQ part scores and modular nature of intelligence
It seems to me that TDD works against both bottom-up and exploratory programming.

Bottom-up programming develops tiny functions that are each trivially correct. These tiny functions form a base on which the next layer of tiny functions is built, and so on -- each layer written in the layer below. Most of these tiny functions begin life as tests, which are then generalized and encapsulated in a function. So in that sense BUP is sort of test-driven. But if it's necessary to write further tests to determine the correctness of these tiny functions, You're Doing It Worng.

In exploratory programming you're not sure where you're going yet. The development path during exploratory programming looks like a crooked tree with lots of stubby dead-end branches. If you first developed tests for each of those stubs, only to find that that's not where you're going, you may never stop writing tests, assuming you even know what to test for. Plus, testing during exploration would kill the flow. You can't be a pioneer and a settler at the same time.

I'm not saying not to test. And I'm not saying not to use TDD. TDD is probably great for top-down projects where you already know where you're going. But if it preempts the process by which many of the great programs were written -- if it preempts hacking -- then it's not the final word.
Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Play: A Modest Proposal
that's the different class I was talking about; 90% of companies don't want nor need such experience
This is another economist trying to beat the capitalistic drum. Apart from Peron's protectionist policies (which some call a drive toward self-sustenance), one shouldn't forget contributing factors like the 1948 exclusion of Argentina exports from the Marshall Plan by the Truman administration. Peron might have been mistaken on many counts, but so many things are ignored behind the veil of apparently protectionist policies, like worker protection and upliftment, social infrastructure growth, etc.

What a myopic article, so many things are ignored, he's trying to put blinders on us.
Sounds like an interesting project. I wonder, however, if writing code in this subset of python is better than directly using a compiled, statically typed language.

The subset is just so tiny. No a and *k, no nested functions. Most decorators won't work either.
Can you provide a link for education and medical categories or pm me about them? Thanks.
"protectionism" didn't kill argentina

sadly if the HN meme of "college is for LOOOSERS!" continues, and people find education only through article-length tripe, we're well on course for repeating past errors
I was tossing around iPhone app ideas with some non-techie friends a while back. Everyone had a hyper-specific need for an app, but then I mentioned the Daily Show bit about the fart apps that was on a while ago and it seemed to have the most traction amoung the diverse group. I guess it comes down to people being willing to pay a buck for a cheap laugh, thus, there is a market.

I have this hypothesis that there might be a market for apps that cater to a more female market. Most developers being guys, I figure anything a male would be interested in has been created, whereas female-oriented apps might still have a market. Anyway, just a thought.
All good points. And I'm going to sound like a pitchman for Tender (http://tenderapp.com) :) But that's kind of why I liked using this to create a minimum viable version of this community. Tender is very friendly with email. So new things submitted to be reviewed will get blasted to submitters who have their email alerts turned on. They can reply via email. There's also queues if someone wants to put something in their queue so the duplication factor might go away some.
"This fear arises, at least in part, because people don’t know their neighbors as well as they did in times past. People tend to lead private lives, largely indoors, and adults center their social lives more around their work companions than around their neighbors." Seems like a solution will require addressing more than just the kids.
Eating what you cook -- a great way to know what's wrong with the food.
Corporate Communism Is Killing Us
This came to my attention two weeks too late for me :(

Has anyone used it? This is exactly the sort of thing that I'd like to install as soon as my insurance pays out. That and an encrypted FS.

It's a shame that it took someone to steal my stuff for me to realise how necessary this is.
I read the link you listed and the problem that you ran into. I've only had about a day's worth of Clojure programming and year or two of Common Lisp but I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have fallen into your particular trap. Reason being that a quick glance at the docs would have told me that doto was a macro and what it did.

Of course you know that. Your argument is that in a purely functional language, all you need to know is the function call subtree where you are. The same block of code always evaluates the same way regardless of context. Which is neat.

However, your example begs the question: If you didn't know what doto did, why where you tying to modify what it was being passed? You clearly didn't know what any of the subforms did either; otherwise you would have noticed that the methods appeared to be called on objects that didn't have them. So yes, in Lisps, and in side-effecty languages, you can't treat code as algebra and refactor it without knowing whether the operators in your code are macros or functions, and what, in general, they do.

Except, then again, sometimes you can. In your case, you definitely could have. If you wrote your macro to generate exactly the code you were trying to refactor, you wouldn't have hit this problem. If you're changing the logic of the code, you need to be aware of how it's logic works, but if you are just factoring out bits of code with macros, you just need to be faithful to the original, in which case, it doesn't matter whether the macro is in another macro or contains global values. It should simply produce the same code and execute the same.
Absolutely, I've used it on a couple of large projects. I would say that trying to distill its appeal down to the phrase "ease of use" probably loses too much nuance. The best aspect of it comes as a project matures, and especially as it changes hands from one developer to another. Having a statically-typed source language allows you to bravely refactor, especially with the help of an IDE, knowing that the compiler will catch potential breakage long before runtime.

While we're on the subject of GWT, I want to plug the best one hour presentation that you'll ever find on the subject of software architecture best practices in a large GWT project:

http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/GoogleWebToolkitBe...

I have watched this no less than 16 times, and keep pulling out bits of wisdom with each viewing.
I make literally five times as much money in royalties per $24 hardcover as I do per $8 paperback. I'd like to be able to make that money off $10 ebooks via Amazon, but my publishers (and their contracts departments) aren't set up that way; we're locked in place with legal boilerplate written years ago.

Ah, there's the rub. The author's current model, as negotiated by the publisher, has them cutting into margins for ebooks. Is that amazon's problem? I would think that if the author redefined the model through renegotiation or cutting out the publisher altogether, the attitude would change.
What you're saying is not undoable; founding a modern-day Cooper Union but with a more entrepreneurial focus would be a more appropriate approach than trying to revamp NJIT.

You're underestimating the impact of combination: those startups will need CFOs and council and so forth and having attached professional schools with their own robust alumni network(s) helps.
I guess it would be nice if files kept track of individual users' preferences. In fact, I wish Finder would do the same on network shares; I hate opening a network folder and realizing that one of my coworkers has changed the way things are organized.

But that seems like the kind of tiny feature that's a lot of work for not a lot of reward.
You seem to be arguing against a claim I didn't make. I'm not against macros or powerful language features. I simply argued against downplaying their dangers.

Pointers are also a dangerous power tool. I would have objected similarly if a C advocate said this:

"...in order to understand function A that acts on char * B, of course you have to know what where char * B points, but in order to use function C that references const string& D, you have to know what D contains. Big deal."
Then how would having bought it through the store done anything?
no conspiracy theory on the disappearance ?
My comment said absolutely nothing in support of or in refutation of statements along those lines, so I am disinclined to pursue this line of discussion.

But if it amuses you, consider the question of whether people like Alan Turning and John McCarthy operated in the stone age of computer programming.

For that matter, consider the question of whether we are still in the stone age. I am inclined to say we are remarkably unenlightened. Some people ship without process, we don't really know why other than to make vague statement like "they're legends." Others have process but fail to ship and we again don't fully understand why.

Although our tools are concrete, our application of them seems to be a mystery with very little hard research or true science behind it.
We have preemptive scheduling in Coro. See:

http://github.com/nothingmuch/coro

Also available from CPAN is EV::Loop::Async, which allows events to be handled even when Perl is busy. (It uses a POSIX thread for this.)

(The key to success with Coro is using the right libraries. You write what looks like blocking code, but the libraries make it non-blocking.)

Anyway, the end result is that you use a lot less memory to handle a lot more clients. This may not be an issue if every request is CPU-bound, but you'd be suprised how often your process is blocking on IO, and how many resources a process-per-connection model consumes.

Don't let this become another lecture on functional programming: http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=34786
"Beaten" exaggerates what happens, which according to the book is a single "spank" by a smiling man holding what appears to be a slender reed.

Yeah, I've been reading it to the kids recently.
No suggestions other than I think it's a great idea.
"Let me explain why I think this is very bad news for writers."

"I don't link to Kindle ebooks because Amazon don't pay an affiliate fee on them."

Riiiiight.
Reviewing Some Bad Google Search Results With Sergey Brin
This seems disingenuous to me. First, on the 1984 scandel he cites, Amazon has apologized, sworn they will never do it again, refunded customers money and given customers new copies of the book. Give them a break already.

On the "Gay-Rank" scandal they claimed it was a bug and they fixed the bug within a single business day. He claims that's not enough because "it shows that they've created a frighteningly efficient machine for imposing ideological censorship, should they choose to do so". But here's my question: How could they have a ranking system and not create the possibility of censorship? It's impossible (and the ranking system helps far more people than its ever hurt).

Oh, and does Amazon cap the price of books at $9.99 (http://www.amazon.com/CSS-The-Missing-Manual-ebook/dp/B0026O...)?

After making those claims he goes on to fabricate a sinister reason as to why Amazon doesn't have a Kindle UK store yet (based on no evidence as far as I can tell)

So he basically believes Amazon has sinister objectives no matter what they say or what actions they take and based on that he believes Kindle in the UK is a bad thing. The one thing he is right about is DRM but Apple kind of proved that sometimes you have to give publishers their DRM in order to convince them that they don't need it.
The code isn't endian-dependent because it doesn't do anything. The only thing you can do with "3232235777" on a little-endian machine is compare it to another number to see if it's also "3232235777".

If you're going to store IP addresses as 32 bit integers, or work with them that way in your C code, 192.168.1.1 should be "16885952", so you can do > and <.

But your point is well taken, and audiguy, I'm sorry for being such an asshole in my comment.
Except selling auxilliary stuff to the prospectors is also a gold rush...
I'll just tell you how to do it:

1. Right-click and copy the link to the Top Paid chart under said category. The Top Free chart does not work, has to be TP.

2. Replace the popId=30 to popId=38 in the link, then paste it in your browser.

Tada. :) Here's medical: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTop?id...
I wonder how the publishers failed to see Amazon as a monopsony threat before, or if they did, why did they not develop their own ebook sales channels. Several times in the past years I wanted to buy a pdf of various books and could never find it online.
It's a good page actually. Every time I forget a string operation this is usually my first stop.
Telepathy on the Horizon: New Interface Allows Brain-to-Brain Communication
"My comment said absolutely nothing in support of or in refutation of statements along those lines,"

Oh I never said or implied you did. That is why I phrased my comment as "Another question .

I unreservedly apologise if anything i wrote here I gave that impression.

", consider the question of whether people like Alan Turning and John McCarthy operated in the stone age of computer programming."

but those are not the people being addressed as "stone Age programmers". The people interviewed in CaW (which is how this hole brouhaha started in the first place) and Joel Spolsky are hardly "Stone Age" programmers just because they don't "evolve design" using TDD.

As per Bob Martin , people who don't use TDD are "Stone age". People who question the value of TDD are "deranged". This sounds like religious fanaticism to me.

To extend your original comment.

"Person A claims "Process P is good!"

Person B retorts "Sez you, can't prove it to my satisfaction!""

Person A replies "That is because you are a deranged Stone Age Programmer".
"With Atlas what we are going to give you by default is a server that runs Cappuccino. So we have javascript running in the server. We have the same stack end to end. So you know you write your front-end code in javascript. You write your back-end code in javascript. Everything just works."

I've always viewed Cappuccino and Atlas as front-end only tools so this part of the presentation (Q&A) was surprising. Does anyone know where I can find more information about the server side of things?
"Apart from Peron's protectionist policies (which some call a drive toward self-sustenance)"

Trade protection and autarky have long been defended by words like "self-sustenance," and the like, but such policies have never turned out well: just ask India and China before they modernized and liberalized their economies.

"Peron might have been mistaken on many counts, but so many things are ignored behind the veil of apparently protectionist policies, like worker protection and upliftment, social infrastructure growth, etc."

Maybe: but by virtually every metric, Argentina is now worse off than countries like Spain and Italy, which have (relatively) liberal economic policies and relatively high rates of education.
> "$100K from friends and family"

shoot and dang.
huh? Somehow I'm choosing between spending $100 on headphones, and making $9000? And these are related how? I think what you're getting at is making the $100 off the credit card rewards (10%... not going to get that, but anyway), but I still don't really see the connection.
Dropping Django follow-up: Fundamental ORM flaw