skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I object to your definition of philosophy. Evolution is first and foremost an philosophical concept. It is just biology to the extent that the evolution of life happens to beautifully demonstrate it.
It's all nature. Nurture is what you do with it.
The fact that a single, first-person consciousness exists is entirely objective. To the best of my knowledge, there is no scientific way to go about verifying the consciousness of others; despite this (and despite the traditional "lack of evidence is evidence of lack" bent of Popperian science), most people work from a default assumption that other people have an existence somewhat similar to their own.
I see "Give the average person an education"

I read "Give the person an average education"

So I'm assuming they mean "giving all people the opportunity of an education" or some such; "average" is such a bad word to use in this context.
The iPhone APIs are written in Objective-C (some are just plain C) which is a nice language with nice and interesting features. If you have to deal with these APIs anyway, using another language wouldn't change much. You will have to create objects in the same way, send them messages in the same way, implement the same callbacks etc. Code is not much terser or easier to write with these bridges since you're not abstracting much, if anything.

Performance will be affected, heavily, since you're running everything on top of an interpreted language (with garbage collection) which then must call the equivalent Objective-C function, for every single line of code.

Moreover, I don't believe that any of these wrappers (for Lua or any other scripting language) will ever cover all the APIs available on the SDK. So, what happens when I need to call one of these? What if I need to use some other library written in c, or c++? And what if I've use this code to write some apps, the projects stops being maintained and the API changes with a new release of the OS?

What does make sense instead, is to use a language like Lua as it is intended, embedding it in your app and writing only the interfaces for the parts that should interact with it. For instance, if you're writing a game, it would make sense to embed Lua to code the game logic (which would be completely independent from the iPhone specific stuff).

Just my two cents.
I very much doubt that he is unable to learn to read English :-)
Our share of foreign nationals accounts for about 22%. That is almost 10 times the share of foreigners in the Czech Republic and about double the amount of the USA.

If a multicultural experience (four official languages) is boring, then you are right.

Sorry, but Switzerland is a little bit more than just bankers, watches, chocolate and cheese.
Ask HN:  Working Hours of Actual Startups?
The lore of the startup is 100+ hours a week, always-on, check your family at the door. There are plenty of blog entries (including PG's) and books to support this. Lately, I'm even starting to see items about people using Provigil (aka Modafinil) to increase their available work hours.

On the other hand, I also see a (smaller) number of counterarguments, e.g. that the decisions you make are more important than the hours you work.

I tend to be in the first camp myself (I certainly was at my last startup), but this has me curious. I'm sure HN is full of current and former entrepreneurs--what are your experiences?
School is time consuming. Freelancing is time consuming. Building a new business is time consuming. Either of the above could be a full time gig or more. Of the three, the best you could probably do is one full time and another part time. For students whom have full time school schedules and part time (or more) jobs which actually pay for survival, I'm not surprised they wouldn't be interested in starting a business.
Dynamic Text Replacement Solutions
Convert a List of Strings to UTF-8 in Python
Tracking projects and time on projects I like to use Klok (http://klok.mcgraphix.com/klok/index.htm), it's an Adobe AIR app so it'll likely work on whatever you're running.
It's a shame that this is ceasing development as it was actually a reasonably useful class. I'm sure there will be someone out there willing to fork it though especially since it's in use on some pretty high profile sites. (e.g. Guy Kawasaki's, alltop.com)
Appreciate the generosity!

sarah dot francesca at gmail dot com
There are similarly many blogs/books about working a "normal" work week or day (and some about less than "normal").

http://www.caterina.net/archive/001196.html

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/893-workplace-experiments

http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/d...

But, I think that having passion and drive for your cause is more important than counting hours. Most people will and do burn out from long hours, they lose interest, etc... which obviously isn't good in the long run.

If you're thinking about using aids (Modafinil), you're probably comparing yourself to others in an attempt to catch up or keep up or something rather than shooting for personal success.

As for me, I'm more concerned about constant and continual self-improvement (and if possible, aiding others in their own self-improvement). If you continue on a route like that, you'd be better off finding what you're really after ;-).
Check out MacRuby and some of the Obj-C bridges for other languages (MacRuby isn't bridged though), you'll be pleasantly surprised.

You still start out with the same set of classes and methods as in Cocoa+Obj-C, but how you abstract on top of it can be radically influenced by the language you're using.

Lexical scoping with real anonymous functions, for example, is a huge win. It catches Obj-C up to the 70s, at least :)
I have heard multiple stories of these "low overhead" operations of high frequency trading. They are making millions.

Makes me wonder if a large enough cluster of these operations trying out their (same) ingenious (simple, but effective) algorithm on the market would manipulate it enough to just feed into itself.
Can you please leave contact email, or better even, IM.

Can I IM you in icq or, failing that, Skype format?
Of course, I talk about that but I'm awake coding on the east coast at 2 a.m. ^_^
Canvas Prints for Xmas-Start Thinking About Holiday Gifts
It is that time of year again often referred to as silly season and our minds are already growing tired and our bodies longing for a decent break. These are the signs that yet another year is about to be done and the holidays are just round the corner. It is already time to start thinking about picking our holiday gifts for our loved ones. As soon as the thought of presents pops up, a cloud of confusion too will emerge and we will have to come up with something interesting for our loved ones.
I was reading this and thinking ... I wish someone had submitted some of these companies to HN. Some of those apps are very interesting and I think the discussion would have been too. Why haven't I heard about these apps before?
OK, I'm sold.

Except for the point about irregardless, I still hate that word and feel it is needlessly redundant, regardless.
People care because the anti-evolutionary forces are hurting scientific progress and the technological advances that usually accompany them. If an honest research proposal needs to include the word 'evolution', but you can't use that, because it would reduce your changes of getting funding, then something is seriously wrong.
Very variable, depending upon the startup. I've been at one startup where the engineering staff basically lived at the office and slept under their desk. I've also been at one where basically everyone worked fairly standard 8-9 hour days, no weekends. The second was more successful than the first, though neither were huge hits.

What seems to work for me: I usually have about 3 periods of useful productivity a day. 10 AM to about 1 PM is when I get anything that needs intense concentration done, then I've got 2 other productive blocks, roughly from 4 PM to 6:30 PM and 11 PM to 1 AM. I'm pretty much useless after lunch, and by early evening I can't really concentrate. I've found myself falling into this pattern at many different employers, plus when self-employed - the difference is that all 3 blocks were devoted to my startup then, while now the 2 daytime blocks are devoted to my employer and the nighttime one is for side projects (or occasionally 20% stuff).

I do agree that the decisions you make are more important than the hours you work. You should work as hard as you can to still make good decisions, but no harder. The cost of one poor judgment call made when you're fatigued and worn out can easily undo a year of solid effort.
I'm normally not very convinced that everyone who does something neat deserves that label (yay, everyone's a hacker! thus cheapening it), but this guy clearly does. He's solving real problems in creative, non-obvious ways to make something where there was nothing. Inspiring story.
9 Signs You Shouldn't Hire THAT Web Guy 
My employer specializes in creating websites for middle-sized businesses.
upvoted! yay
Basics of Swing trading strategies
If you are interested in venturing into the futures market, then it is important that you learn about various types of trading. One of the most common types of trading that you should know is swing trading. Swing trading is also referred as channel trading. Swing trading tries to predict the trading ranges of a market and project buy patterns when the market reaches the low range and sell when the market reaches high level within the predicted range.
No, you're not a hypocrite, but you are being inconsistent. That's not necessarily a bad thing, unless it leads to hypocrisy. There's a fine line between defending a point of view and defending it in such a way that you really can't reasonably defend the opposite point of view anymore.
Yeah, actually I think roc's advice is better. (It was partly red tape this that made me quit Amazon.com to work at a startup.)
That may have been a good thing.

In some cases, stacking two layers with conflicting policies could thrash from caching/garbage collection logic.

This is at least the argument of most full stack proprietary formats.
We've had several years of experience with the proposed extensibility syntax, since it's taken directly from XML 1.0 (and XHTML 1.0). Some common real-world uses include SVG and MathML on web pages, and Creative Commons license data (using RDFa) for HTML documents.

The main reason for this general approach is that it works with current (and future) XML vocabularies like SVG.
Traditional news organizations (magazines and newspapers at least, I can't speak for TV or radio) erect high barriers between the news and content side of their operation and the business and advertising side, specifically to stop this kind of interference and fiscal incentive. They know that having a business motive in the reporting damages their credibility and so they avoid it.

At the same time, there is another wall between the editorial pages that contain opinion pieces from the news pages that contain objective reporting. Unfortunately, many people don't realize that this wall exists and that when a columnist for a particular paper writes something, they are not representing the viewpoint of everyone at that paper.

I don't think TV bothers trying to maintain these distinctions as almost all TV news is opinionated and alarmist.

The journalists at most newspapers are still by and large impartial, the problem is that the ones who now get the most attention are the loud, impartial ones.
Strunk and White say that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks regardless of the context (except for question marks and explanation marks), so if you are listing quotes, then the comma goes on the inside of each quote. On a side note...The serial comma (the last one in a list of items) is most certainly needed (imho?).
The Lightswitch That Might Explain a Lot About Java
Wow I've actually just started working on something quite similar to the very first app listed here. It's somewhat discouraging to say the least. The travel social network market is rather large - there are a few existing sites that do an okay job at it and get fairly decent traffic numbers but none of them are clearly great. At least none were until I clicked on that link.

Edit: It's actually kind of odd for how nice the site is, it's virtually unfindable on Google. Even if it takes time to gain PageRank you could at least start advertising it with AdWords...
Not sure why this comment is getting downvoted.

A few years ago, we used to manage just fine with 128Megs of RAM and 500MHz processors. Now, programmer productivity has suddenly taken importance over user experience.

As far as desktop apps are concerned, I would prefer a C++ app with a couple of features I need over an extensible, feature-rich app written in Python.

WebKit and Gecko have shown us that it is possible to make dynamic languages go faster. Yet, most people start yelling 'premature optimization LOL!!!1!' if you dare to tell them their app is slow.
My own language, Hecl, is written in Java, is no way as fast as the C version of Lua, and yet it provides acceptable speeds for apps on phones that are slower than the iPhone. Just don't try and write an action game in Hecl - save it for the configuration and level descriptions or something. So I don't think that speed is an issue for most applications; Lua is plenty fast.

I'm not 100% sure, but my experience has been that scripting languages are more compact in terms of code:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

In terms of the API, well, that depends entirely on the project and their goals! A small, decent team of open source developers could probably cover most of the API in less than a year without particularly working that hard on it.

The real problem here is that interpreters for the iPhone seem to be a gray area at best (see discussion elsewhere here).

Anyway, looks like good work, and I think interpreters on phones are a great idea:-)
I wonder if iPhone's browser does XML and XSLT, like all modern browsers do?

It happens that XSLT is Turing complete, and the browser can certainly download stuff from teh internet. This could mean that merely embedding the browser into your iPhone app effectively turns it into an interpreter for programs downloaded from anywhere. Sure it's sandboxed but technically that shouldn't matter. And I'm sure you could introduce hooks to the browser from native side, to make something interesting out of it.
That sounds like a pretty cool system; thanks for sharing!
The problem I have with this, is that the examples provided, e.g.

A HTML document editor adds information about tool settings so that a subsequent editing session can continue with the same settings.

A JavaScript library processes custom tags in a browser and turns them into custom controls dynamically on the page.

A browser wants to allow custom behaviors to be defined in one module and attached automatically to custom elements.

An author includes processing instructions in the document that will be processed by a server before delivering the document to a user agent.

An author runs a tool on a document to add numbering to headings and a table of contents. Running this tool leaves custom metadata tags intact.

can already be pretty easily achieved with the technology we already have.

I don't really see the need for namespaces in HTML. If you need custom tags and attributes surely you are better off going straight to XML and then parsing your data in any number of ways that are already available (XSLT, Javascript, PHP etc. etc.)
So far, the only recurrent pattern I've found is this: the best way to recruit great engineering talent, is to include great engineering talent on your founding team.

There are start-ups that begin with marketing/business development folks creating an idea and hiring others to implement it, but usually these places aren't technology companies staffed with top talent -- but are rather shops operating in a niche market, staffed with people who had nowhere else to go (which isn't always a bad thing: it makes these people much more determined to succeed).

"Top talent" joining such a company would be in for a disappointment: they'd find themselves both underutilized (not being able to use their talent and skill) and yet overworked (with tedious tasks).

(I've underwent this experience myself which had left me rather jaded: I was no longer at all interested in working for/starting start-ups and advised others not to as well. Fortunately realizing this "kinds of start-ups" dichotomy changed my attitude for the better).
Yes, MacRuby is something slightly different.

Still, I would suggest people who are seriously interested in developing for the iPhone to check if plain Objective-C works for them, first.

My recipe is:

- Objective-C for the minimum necessary to deal with the iPhone specific APIs.

- plain C for critical parts which need to be optimized for speed and memory consumption.

- your favorite embeddable language implementation (mine at the moment is TinyScheme, but I've also used Lua) for scripting.

Also, consider that often you may need to include libraries written in c or c++. This is trivial to do from Objective-C.
I think the best one is the one that allows hourly workers to trade their time slots.
I have never heard of or seen any iPhone APIs written in C++, although some of the low-level stuff is in C. It's possible to include your own C++ code, but I really don't think Apple has any of their own. Have you got an example?
Twins may be identical physically, but they present a challenge to the assumption that being is merely physical because they are often completely different when it comes to who they are (and what is that, really?)

I have lived with twins for 3 years (married to one of them) and you couldn't find two people more different. Physically they look the same, but as far as personality, you couldn't find two people more different.

They were both "nurtured" from the same woman, same environment, yet they are opposites. I think there is an ontological question raised. Is there a non-physical component to our existence? Something to think about.
Yer welcome.

Done in 1969.
Re point 3: Don't use Pound. Use HAProxy, it's superior along pretty much every dimension. The idea is right though :-).
Believing in angels and believing in evolution evolution are not mutually exclusive. The statement is misleading. Most people believe in evolution, not creationism. Those who do believe in creationism have detached themselves from logic and reality, so there's no point in arguing with them.
This is one of those debates/issues that is not going to be solved on HN, is more likely to generate heat than light, and thus is probably more appropriate for some other forum.
It's not often I get to say something positive, so I'm jumping on the chance here. I'm going to guess that you live in a first-world nation where plentiful electricity is an afterthought. A working CD-ROM motor is awesome! I presume that this is a brushless design? And the feeling of control you get from lighting those LEDs is awesome, too!

William Kamkwambe did not put you to shame. With any luck, he will have inspired you! You and I live in an environment saturated with information and technology. Maybe you'll be inspired to accept a slightly less extravagant lifestyle in exchange for some charitable donations? Maybe you'll be inspired to use your skills to do some work overseas where it could alleviate real suffering?

The beauty of this story is that it makes both the plight of many people and the prospect of manifold solutions seem more real. What you do or do not do with William's contribution will be your source of pride or shame.
ReTel is genius, if it actually works. I'm a little skeptical of something that comes out of three getting their MBAs (I don't know if they can code, but I assume someone there can if they got into TechStars), but it's a genuine business process issue.
I once worked for a PhD student in entomology (nematology) who did not believe in evolution. She was a devout Christian and rationalized the adaptiveness of organisms as microevolution and claimed that any long term large scale change is unlikely/impossible. Btw she got her doctorate.
or that God knew all about code reuse...
Translate your site with Google
Probably those that don't deny evolution. I think they are more the "intelligent design" camp. I'm not terribly familiar with what the labels mean.
I don't even understand why this topic is generating contention. I mean it's about the veracity of evolution! In a forum filled with noninsane people!
Interesting - I haven't heard about non-functional vitamin C-producing program before... Could you point to an article/book with some details about it?
Some advantages of sales shopping online - Dealcoin - shopping deals
I've been using Sensobi for awhile and it works great. Once it's installed, you don't have to do anything but check it every few days.
If I am not wrong, Justin.tv enables live streaming of current clips that are also stored for replayed streaming (but not on-demand in a pure sense where clips will play from the start: instead they are looping and not utilizing client storage).
Yeah, it's pretty neat. What's astonishing is the uptake at the Starbucks locations here in Chicago. I haven't randomly asked baristas if they use it, but I believe it.

My prediction: Paychex and ADP fight tooth and nail to acquire it. It's just way too valuable and too easily integrated; it could be a huge competitive for one company over the other when bidding to process paychecks for 10,000s of hourly workers nationwide.
In case you are wondering what he is talking about (like I was), see: http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?script
I disagree that evolution and Christianity, as broad concepts, are in conflict. The whole Adam and Eve thing is (obviously, to those that look at science as providing facts) not to be taken at face value. Original sin is not a central theme to many if not most Christian sects, and it's not exactly necessary in those sects where it does play a role.

Christianity was invented by men, so certainly every flavor got a few things wrong. It's when people on either side are unwilling to admit that there might be flaws in their own thinking that we get these poisonous and unproductive debates.
Another thing that (IMO) is a main cause of the slowdown is the sheer scope of possibilities available on general low-cost hardware these days.

In earlier times you had to work hard to make your code do all the work in a given space. This meant thinking long and hard about which features to implement, let alone how to implement them efficiently (time + space) - a practice which has disappeared somewhat, mainly because it is relatively cheap and easy to just implement it, then optimise if necessary.

Premature optimisation while coding can be a big problem, but this need not mean that optimisation should be left until the end - in fact it is a good idea to optimise the design prior to implementation (that is, at the end of the design process)

This means implementation can be done relatively quickly as the key features are already decided.
congratulations.
> I'm not 100% sure, but my experience has been that scripting languages are more compact in terms of code:

This is obvious. That's what they are for. But on the iPhone the tedious stuff is dealing with the APIs. And you would not gain much just by wrapping them with another language.

> The real problem here is that interpreters for the iPhone seem to be a gray area at best (see discussion elsewhere here).

As I have stated many times in other threads, there are apps (published on the Appstore) written with squeak smalltalk, games made with Unity (which uses javascript on top of Mono for scripting the game logic) etc.

What you can't do is to expose the interpreter to the user or to make it run code downloaded from the web.

Even if this wasn't the case, how could Apple even know, for instance, that I have statically compiled the Lua interpreter and used it to script part of the logic of my app?