skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(1) If Apple pursues massive mainstream success, it will alienate its traditional supporters, because not everyone in the mainstream values design so highly - some value cheap, performance, convenience or utility etc at the cost of design. Sure, sometimes you can have everything, and sometimes there's a trade-off (fast-cheap-good-pick-two).

(2) Ballmer is right that the iPhone cannot handle all webpages as well as a desktop - it's just impossible to shrink the power of a desktop into such a small, light and elegant form-factor (today, anyway). This is not a fault of the iPhone, but a shortcoming of the web with its layers of inefficiency (esp javascript, flash, java). Apple's genius was to strip those layers away, by integrating the hardware and software to work well together. Only Apple has enough expertise and market clout to do both, and to do it brilliantly.

But the above foreshadows dark days ahead: what will happen to the iPhone when it is possible to have a desktop in that form-factor? When ingenious integration is no longer required, and an open market is favoured, with mix and match, and webapps and so on? I see two ways for Apple to win:

i. Apple uses the new technology to move ahead to the next frontier (because that's where they like to be). Perhaps an even tinier form-factor?

ii. Apple has become so established as the leader in this category, that no one can catch up. This is within Apple's grasp, but I believe they will not take it, because taking it would involve pleasing the mainstream (if you leave major market segments unsatisfied, a competitor fills them), and, as Mr Fireball implies, if Apple did so, it would no longer be Apple.

But Microsoft.
I'll assume that your comments about socialism aren't simply trolling and respond that even in a broadly capitalist system, network infrastructure is effectively a natural monopoly.

Due to physical property issues, it needs public rights-of-way for deployment and maintenance. Also, fixed infrastructure costs are very high and only become cost effective with widespread buy-in and positive network externalities.

It makes no economic sense to build two or more parallel networks side-by-side, with each capturing only a fraction of the potential customers.

As a result, an unregulated telco in a natural monopoly has no competition and minimal market incentives to innovate and improve service. Consumers cannot "simply choose another supplier" because other suppliers wouldn't be crazy enough to sink the necessary huge capital investment into a competing service.

In general, the options to deal with this situation are:

* Public ownership and/or administration.

* Regulated monopoly with mandatory service quality benchmarks and profit reinvestment requirements.

* Introduce competition by forcing telcos to offer wholesale service to resellers.

* Introduce competition through public investment in parallel facilities.

* Introduce competition by allowing network service providers to leverage their networks to offer different services (e.g. cablecos offering telephony, telcos offering streaming video).
"Is it really that hard to tell whether or not a call is in a tail position?"

It is easy to forget when you are focusing on the logic of the code, and easy to change accidentally. Clojure explicitly tells you when you are trying to recur from a non-tail position, which is rather nice, and not possible with implicit tail call optimization (how do you know if the programmer really wanted a tail call or not?).

Having the compiler catch your mistakes is always nice.
the nanny state, from the cradle to the record store... :-(
The real answer is to ask their peers. Developers know how much their teammates contribute. The hard part is giving them reasons to be honest with you.

Code statistics are fun, but they won't tell you anything real about productivity. That said, running "git blame" (or "cvs annotate" or other equivalent) over the whole code base will tell you whose contributions are still around today.
I've had a 2 hour commute for about 5 years now, and over the years I've used Pimsleur's language cds to learn Japanese and Italian. Today I just didn't feel like driving, so I'm typing this while riding a commuter express bus.
HTML + javascript + asynchronous http request = open, interoperable web applications.
Thanks! I was talking to a friend that runs a small CoLo and it was looking like $200-400/month for each server, depending on options.
Stop Exposing Collections Already
Beautiful point. "very, very, very high-paying jobs" is a relative term. If you want someone with skills and options to go into that specific field then the overall compensation for that field has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options.

Of course, part of that "overall compensation" does include things which are hard to directly measure such as enjoyment of the job, flexible scheduling, and prestige in addition to traditional ideas of money and benefits.
You just made an argument by completely ignoring what Ballmer said. Ballmer was making an insult to the effect of, every application on the iPhone is trying to make the Internet look good, which is a fucking bizarre insult. The iPhone makes the Internet look really good, it loads pages much faster than any phone Microsoft supplies the OS for, and half the Internet redesigned itself to work better for the iPhone. I browse HN on my iPhone without a special interface and it works perfectly. So Ballmer's just really throwing out bullshit with that comment.

I disagree with your comment. Microsoft wasn't bad for being closed, it was bad for attempting to use its monopoly to force its competitors out of business. Apple's closed, but they have plenty of competition, so it's all right. As for the Internet being open, I'd like to see you download the source code for a 37signals application. You can't, because it's closed. But you can use APIs to export data? Well, good news! You can export your iPhone's data also, and they give you APIs to do so!

But it doesn't matter that I disagree with your comment, because my actual point is that Ballmer doesn't have a point, is a terrible executive, and should have been fired two years ago for his riotous incompetence as a businessman and a marketer.
This article is discussing federal standards of which it claims determines 60% of a school's federal funding which is less than 5% of a school's total funding.

That may be true (although at least here in NJ it varies widely from school to school). But that doesn't drive the conclusion that the federal influence on the disposition of money is proportionate.

It's conceivable, and I think even probable, that state and local governments are willing to throw considerable portions of their own money in to chase those federal dollars. There's no reason to think that they won't use inefficiently a big chunk of their budget just to extend it by that additional federal chunk.

I base that on (1) the willingness of states to follow all sorts of other federal guidelines in a quest for funding (speed limits, drinking age, etc.) without questioning their importance for each individual state; and (2) my opinion that despite the lip service of the NEA the rest of "the education lobby", their primary motivation is to build and solidify their power base and individual member benefits, rather than to serve students.

(I agree with your criticism of the logic comparing achievement by low achievers vs. high achievers.)
What you'll find if you get into more detailed discussion with public-utility internet before dropping the socialism bomb is that they're usually advocating a hybrid model: municipality builds out the pipes and then isps compete on actually providing internet service.

You're right about the loudmouths here, but it'd be a mistake to let your sense of public sentiment be overly colored just by volume.

Calling something socialism here is a pretty good debate hack, like calling someone racist or anti-semitic or whatnot; it's enough of a social taboo that the so-accused will usually feel compelled to defend themselves against it, thereby derailing the original course of discussion...this is a good strategy for winning unrefereed debates.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680063

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=701367
> or perhaps U.S.

If that was the case, the owing would be the other way around and the amount would be orders of magnitude larger.
I wonder which Labour sponser lobbied for this.

None of them per se. This is Mandelson's baby, of course the fact that he's been in bed (pun or telling?) with hollywood execs over the last few months, tells you a lot.

Labour knows they're pretty much finished, NuLabour perhaps irrevocably so, and are just trying to setup their own little cushy cash cows before June.
rather than to line the pockets of greedy corporations

What do you have against lining the pockets of greedy corporations? If there was no profit in it for them they wouldn't be doing it at all and you'd have no internet connection - or almost anything else.
Fresh Windows install? Get back to work quickly with Ninite
Why not? Serving pages fully off cache.

How many hits per second is slashdot effect? We could count.

I think slashdot effect mostly happens because database (mysql, generally) locks down, and we're removing that bottleneck by going into file-based storage and in-memory caching.
Google Wave, or wikis, could be used to build a software forge
Beware--some people may be better at multitasking than others. I've tried Pimsleur tapes while driving, but didn't feel I could both adequately maintain situational awareness of the road, and have the slightest idea what the speaker on the tape just said--let alone repeat it with the correct accent.
That's enough!
jQuery is the most popular JS framework -> everyone is writing about it -> there are thousands of tutorials on how to start working with jquery/understand jquery/build a toilet with jquery -> why another one?
Can we see something more advanced?
Like - how to create reusable pieces of code instead of

$('stuff').click(function() { alert('wowza!'); });

?
Thank you.
Yes, and if the Internet wasn't a public works project to begin with the greedy corporations wouldn't have anything to do at all and you'd have no internet connection.
Compared to marine mammals yes. But I've read someplace that ours is remarkably strong for a supposedly completely non-aquatic mammal.
Free Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0
> "The client gives out the RF[PQ] so the client can say it was properly competed for so it can pass the approval process in upper management."

Indeed, we call this "column fodder," ;-)
Not only running.

Maximizing one's endurance takes years.
Of course there are other factors that affect performance and deteriorate over the years (Force for example) -- which is why endurance athletes peak at their 30ths.
Underscore.js: Functional Programming for jQuery
Let this be a lesson in what free software is about.

It's not about the low price. It's not because the people who make closed-source software aren't talented, or generous, or that their software isn't worth the money.

It's that closed-source software is under the exclusive control of one person or one corporation. You are at the mercy of the whims, incentives, and fortunes of a tiny group of people. And the odds that their desires will remain aligned with yours are poor indeed.

And it's not as if this is an iPhone Twitter app, where you can switch from one to another in a few minutes. Or even Mac OS X, which is Unix -- though I love my Mac OS toolset, I reserve the ability and the right to install Ubuntu and come back up to speed in a few days. No, this is your text editor. It can take weeks or months to thoroughly learn a new one, and it's the centerpiece of your professional life.
For $20 a month you can get two books from audible. Their catalog is pretty decent and it is a good way to keep on top of your read list.

I've also been enjoying the "How Stuff Works" podcasts. Their "Stuff you missed in history class" is especially interesting. Lots of stuff from the well known "Pompeii's excavation" to the esoteric "The great molasses flood of 1916".
Entrepreneur ADD
Do you ever find that you have a few decent ideas that you could pursue but need to pick one obviously since there only is so much time in the world.

what do you do? how do you vet the best one?

Do you just think really hard and just pick which one to work 100% on? Or do 2 or 3 beta versions and then pick?
Motorola And Verizon Wireless Make Droid Official
An unholy mixture of pre-high-school math and graduate specialist seminars. Some good stuff in there, by chance.

And did they seriously call Markov Chain Monte Carlo a card game? That didn't sound like they were joking.
Top List of free antivirus, firewalls and security softwares
Microsoft selling crapware-free PCs in its stores
Comparing employee experience at Gap, UPS, Starbucks & Apple
I'm a massage therapist. I have worked with professional athletes, college swimmers, and desk jockeys alike.

Get yourself a good massage therapist, I don't know where you are, but find a qualified professional on www.AMTA.org. be sure to ask them questions about whether they have dealt with chronic wrist pain in the past, and they can show you a series of stretches and/or exercises to help you be more pain free. Now, I truly hope massage can help your situation, letting symptoms go unattended to is definitely a BAD idea, as prolonged compression of a nerve can lead to permanent nerve damage. You should feel some relief after your first session, but I would highly recommend going once a week for 30 minutes to an hour for at least the first 3 weeks of treatment. Your therapist should work on the small passageway of your ulnar nerve right at the base of your wrist below your little finger as this area often gets compressed from keeping your wrists pointed IN and your hands turned out to stay aligned with the keys. The wrist flexor and extensor muscle attachments should also be attended to at the top of the forearm near the elbow and on the underside of your forearm as well.

Another very immediate thing you can do is to purchase an ergonomic keyboard with the split down the center, this allows the wrists to be at a much more normalized angle than traditional keyboards. Also look at how your mouse is...if it's straight up and down, with the two click buttons evenly placed at the top, this is not the mouse for you. Ideally, a mouse at an angle to fit your hand with a trackball on the thumb side is what you're looking for. Try and find a mouse with an offset right and left click button to follow the natural difference in first and second digit finger length.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at my office,

Andrea J. Munsell, Certified Massage Therapist
The ChiroFIT Wellness Center
2249 Wealthy St. SE, suite #240
East Grand Rapids, MI 49506
(616)458-CFIT (2348)
I'm actually working on something similar for a DSL used by my employer. We started with Javascript, but recently decided to port to Silverlight. I'm not entirely pleased with the decision, but within the context of the app, it makes sense--the DSL is used to generate screen flows on devices using WPF. By using Silverlight, we didn't have to define the existing WPF controls in Javascript in order to render the scripts from the IDE--we can just leverage (for the most part) the existing controls which are defined with XAML.

Personally, I don't particularly like developing via Silverlight--many of the tools required by VS2008 are buggy, and often there is precious little documentation as to how the tools work under the hood.
As I understand it, some ISPs have a legal monopoly as the only Internet service utility company allowed to operate in an area (similar to how other utilities such as power and water work).
One data point is a good example, but hardly a good way to back up an argument. I will concede that I'm unaware as to whether any serious analysis has been done of the efficiency of publicly-run corporations vs. privately-run corporations in first-world, democratic countries, but nearly any data set can be cherry-picked for evidence to support any view.

Arguing that all (or the great majority of) public organizations are wildly inefficient on the basis of i) philosophy, and ii) examples, is like arguing that all (or the vast majority) of governments are dictatorships because back in the 80's, Romania was one.
Quick Summary:
Underscore provides all the functional programming goodies that you would expect with Prototype.js or Ruby, but without extending any core javascript objects, so it can fit hand-in-hand with jQuery. In Javascript 1.6 compliant browsers, it delegates to the native versions of functions, so you can have your "map()" and run run it at native speed where available. The production version compresses to 4k, so there's not much overhead in adding it to a page.

Blog Announcement: http://www.documentcloud.org/blog/2009/10/28/underscore-dot-...

Git Repo:
http://github.com/documentcloud/underscore

Test and Benchmark Suite:
http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/test/test.html
> You just made an argument by completely ignoring what Ballmer said.

Or maybe I interpreted Ballmer's comments differently than you did. I might be wrong in my interpretation, but it sounds to me like Ballmer is complaining that the iPhone interacts with the internet via proprietary applications on the device rather than web applications.

> Microsoft ... was bad for attempting to use its monopoly to force its competitors out of business.

That's certainly a valid point. It's unfortunate, because what made Microsoft successful in the first place was its relative openness (particularly its cheap OS licencing terms) compared to its competitors. They seem to have forgotten this after becoming the de facto standard for desktop PCs.

However, Microsoft was also bad for being closed and proprietary. Ask people who developed software in VB6, only to have Microsoft abandon them and break backwards compatibility in the .Net framework.

> As for the Internet being open, I'd like to see you download the source code for a 37signals application.

That's true, but it's not what I was claiming. What I meant by "open" was that anyone with any kind of computer that has a reasonably modern browser can access and use a 37signals application. You don't need a special proprietary application or framework running on your own device to do this.
Not to unnecessarily complain about design, but 23px body text is borderline unusable.
That sucks. Any way to work a 4-day week? Or pry a telecommuting day out of their cold hands? [Unless you're the boss, in which case strike that last remark.]
Seaside (Smalltalk web framework) provides something similar to this, where you can access the Smalltalk browser (i.e. IDE & Debugger) directly in the web browser. Whether or not you'd actually develop this way, is another question.

Unfortunately I cannot find a running example openly available on the web, probably because you could easily crash the server if you wanted to.
1. no netbooks

2. no iPhones
I could work from home on some days if I really wanted to, but I've got a team of people that get their direction from me which complicates things.
due to increased student:teacher ratios, I suspect they've gotten worse

Class size seems to be the single biggest concern related to education quality. However, it's not entirely clear that smaller classes help; especially not that they help "normal" students (as opposed to those who are "at-risk").

It seems that other things being equal, this is can be a big help to those that need extra help, especially when they're not getting much support educationally at home. But it doesn't seem to have the same effect on kids that are doing OK anyway.

Also, having smaller classes means having more teachers. And that means either offering much higher salaries or settling for less-good teachers. The latter is probably not helpful, and higher salaries may cost money that could deliver greater results when invested in other ways.

Simply assuming that your kids will do better if the classes are smaller is erroneous. Read a bit more here:
http://www.edweek.org/rc/issues/class-size/
I'm not saying so much that there is conflict, but I very much doubt that the Facebook people truly believe that this will have any real effect on world peace or that their motives are anything other than money.
This is a good point; I already know I can't use the cellphone while driving because it turns me (and most people I guess) into a terrible driver.

Pimsleur language courses are a pretty cool idea though. My Spanish has deteriorated to the point of essentially useless (I was never fluent).
Some podcasts are excellent. Check out radiolab.org

edit: I have family+friends 4 hours away and gf 2 hours away, so I spend a huge amount of time behind the wheel as well. I download courses from iTunes U, OCW or individual universities' web sites. I also follow a few podcasts. The skeptic's guide to the universe is decent, radiolab is great. I'm half way done through Yale's Bob Schiller's "Financial Markets" class, and its been great.
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you... ;)
There are already phones coming out and planned with 800x480 and higher res screens, 1Ghz processors and upwards of 256Mb.

Moving up to 720p HD, 1Gb of memory and even quicker/more-cores chips doesn't seem more than a couple of years off. Whether they'll manage to make them any more usable is a different question :)
Announcing Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0
My question has always been, why is the US dropout rate at ~30% country wide, but Canada has a figure marginally above 10%. What is the social norm that's having a huge effect on these children's ability to stay in school?

This isn't mentioning that even American institutions recognize that Canadian children are better educated. Even the sports scouts who hand out college scholarships say that while American students need an 80% to apply, Canadians only need a 60% because the educational standard in Canada is higher. How can a country consider its education system even passable, if the standard of its high school graduates with 100% is worse than any Canadian kid on the honour roll?
Is there any way to get to the algorithm view from the IDE?
It all seems to be about Windows. I run a bunch of Linuxes in VMs, and it would be nice to have the Compiz desktop stuff to work in a VM.
Come as you aren't: 10 geek costumes for Halloween
The fail is on their side.

1. On my Windows and Mac machines I refuse to install the Silverlight plug-in (I haven't found a site that legitimately needs it yet).
2. On my Ubuntu machine (where I generally read HN), there is no Silverlight plug-in (and Moonlight isn't advanced enough even if I wanted it). I'm not sure Chrome for Linux could deal with anything but the Flash plug-in yet anyway.
I think you're leaving out the fact that an iPhone sized device with desktop capabilities is still going to require exquisite integration and interface, the very qualities iTouch devices have today in excess. Raw processing power doesn't change that, it only adds to the advantage.

Everyone gets distracted by the phone. The phone is just an app (and some extra electronics). The platform is the thing, and Apple is light years ahead of the competition at this point. Use a Kindle. Then use an iPod Touch.
> You must have Javascript enabled to view this site.

Uh, why?
iPhones and other smartphones. I just bought a 16GB USB stick for the equivalent of $95 (and I live in an expensive country). What was the cost of that kind of (portable) storage space in 2004?
> What I meant by "open" was that anyone with any kind of computer that has a reasonably modern browser can access and use a 37signals application. You don't need a special proprietary application or framework running on your own device to do this.

And I need Windows to run Steam, and I need a Mac to run iPhoto. You're suggesting an absurd fantasy wherein everything runs on everything. If I want "open" by your definition of "it's on the Internet" on the iPhone, I go to the Internet.
The Transition Between Small and Medium