skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah when I read that "just so true" part I thought he was either being sarcastic or would come to his senses later in the story. Neither seems to be the case. It is a shame because positive thinking in the form of good old-fashioned optimism is a great thing so long as it is balanced with a healthy dose of realism. Applying positive thought naively and waiting for good stuff to happen to you is sad and embarrassing.
It boils down to this: no more hard news.

Mainstream media simply repeats talking points and soundbites. I was reminded of the stark difference between mainstream media and "real news" when I heard an anchor on NPR actually correcting some Republican legislator's ramblings about socialized medicine. I was shocked. It was as if I had just heard a kid talk back to his parents or something. Then, of course, I realized that this is how journalists are supposed to behave. CNN and MSNBC just "leave it there" after some blowhard spouts off a slew of factual errors.
I'll always remember as a first-year CS undergrad our professor came into class one day and told us about how he just came out of an interview with this recently minted Phd for an associate professor position.

The candidate's demo just totally crashed and burned and he was a wreck for the rest of the interview.

Since then I've developed a fundamental fear of live demos. Rarely is the cost/benefit worth it over a pre-recorded demo.
The promise is/was not 'reporting by those who know most'. The promise is lower barriers, democratisation & meritocracy. Scobles & Arringtons compete against Cunninghams and Torvalds on equal footing.

If success is derived from or defined as 'most readers' (not obvious in the context of blogs), then it is mostly a consequence of who people want to read. But you don't need to be concerned with blogger success. You can read whoever wants to write.

That is the promise of blogs. Anything about what the content of blogs would be was always speculation. The promise is that anything can be thrown at the wall by anyone.

Some experts got thrown against the wall too.
All parties involved seem super flakey.

Even though he was made out to be the 'villian' and is in fact probably a douche, the guy running the zen dojo or whatever sounds like he has a good thing goin.

This story has given me the idea of collecting stories about failed startups from the perspective of those involved.

That way if you find yourself in a shifty situation you have something to consult that should confirm whether or not you're in a textbook train wreck.
It's also the case that if we'd just check our egos at the gate for a little while, we have more to learn from the salesy/marketey people than from yet another web framework developer; after all, most of the devs I know are proud of figuring the dev stuff out for themselves.
What rubs me the wrong way about this story is all the references to "the iPhone millionaires" and "the millions to be made" and the "iPhone gold rush".

Gee, when you're only aim is to get rich quick, it's not too surprising that you are vulnerable to being taken for others than want to get rich even quicker.
I once picked up a book at someones house titled "Everything Good About George W. Bush"; It had a nice fancy cover and everything. I opened to the first page, blank - the second page - blank..the middle of the book? Blank!

I picture this $300 manual to be very comparable.
A youtube video viewer in HTML5
How Apple Handles App Store Infringement Complaints: Badly
Yes, but now you have to go re-learn radix tries. Stupid brain cache!

You know your comment isn't totally fair, right? Jason Fried's not exactly Don Knuth.

Also, while it's true that every dev should be able to be a B-player marketer or salesperson, the A-players in all our fields are definitely at another level. Watch them price products, or negotiate large deals.
Congratulations. You just blew off Steve Jobs.
Yes, this is called specialization of labor. Plato wrote about it. Good advice, but something any hacker with a lick of business acumen already knows.
Has anyone had any luck requesting transfers with non-brand names that have been dead for years? I tried contacting twitter, the account owner, other twitter reps and tried their web forms, all to nothing.
Look into rrdtool.
I personally didn't find the learning curve to be that high. Perhaps because I was in a course learning taught by one of the founders of the R Project ;).

The lecture slides he created were great, and I recommend anyone that is interested in R to have a look at them: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~stat380/?Lecture_Slides
The article misses step 1 in selecting angel investors: Make something which is so hot that you have angel investors lining up to invest in it.

I think most people would be overjoyed to have the problem Chris describes.
It seems to me that the emphasis from Fake Steve is really more like NYT < bloggers in general, because the newspapers have lost their balls. They've gotten into bed with the politicians and corporations they report on (in some cases they're owned by the corporations they should be working to keep honest), and were doing just fine with their coke and hooker parties until technology began to pull the coke mirror out from under their nose and send the hookers home.

Just because it's fashionable to tear down Arrington and TC, doesn't mean that mainstream media should get a pass in the process.

I think Fake Steve is completely right here. And what he's really talking about has little to do with Arrington and TC.
Actually, this "point 1" is my pet peeve. I hate it when shopping for computer parts. In fact, I think most web stores overdo the "explanation of benefits".

Every single web store has pages upon pages of meaningless marketing speak on every product page, and the tech specs are either: a) at the very bottom, in small font, b) under a separate tab, or c) broken, inaccessible, and unreadable.

When I have to go to a third-party review site to find out what the resolution of a monitor is or whether the netbook I'm looking at has an extra RAM socket, I can't exactly call this a good shopping experience.
Several prominent intelligence sources confirmed that there were a series of cyber attacks in Brazil: one north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005 that affected three cities and tens of thousands of people, and another, much larger event beginning on Sept. 26, 2007. That one in the state of Espirito Santo affected more than three million people in dozens of cities over a two-day period, causing major disruptions. In Vitoria, the world's largest iron ore producer had seven plants knocked offline, costing the company $7 million. It is not clear who did it or what the motive was.

Really? I live in Vitoria, capital of Espirito Santo, and I don't remember an event of power outage with all this proportion taking place here or nearby.
>Well, I've actually liked the GOP proposals that I've read. Yes, the ones that do in fact exist. (Claims that the GOP have offered no solutions are one of the most blatant lies of the entire process; it's simply objectively false. You may not like them but they exist...

It's funny, during these last few months of the debate, this topic has come up a large number of times among my social group (largely in a community and neighborhood messageboard startd as an alternative to my HOA board and in proper startup fashion now has advertisements).

There certainly are many examples of work done by the GOP in this area in the last administration (mostly around medication pricing), but as to this particular case the GOP has been very late to the party and has brought substantially no ideas to the table until very recently -- generally running and obstructive tactic vs. an alternative tactic.

I believe the alternative bill they presented a week or so ago was political theater mostly. There was no chance on it getting debated, voted on, or really seriously considered (particularly this late in the game), and the party knew that. That's why the opening portions of the bill didn't contain policy, but rather a stream of consciousness of party talking points. They simply wanted to be able to point to it and say "see? our ideas aren't even being considered!" knowing full well that most people won't have tracked the submission date of the bill. David Gergen offered a different but similarly minded analysis today.

What I thought was interesting is that, when I asked people, and threw out ideas almost a year ago now, the right leaning members of my community generally came up with some very good, feasible plans that addressed the bulk of this particular issues (no recision, no denial of coverage, must accept people for coverage even with preexisting conditions, balanced by an open market place, all insurance is moved nationally, breeding open competition etc.). But these weren't offered up by the Party (capital P) until many months later. Instead the Party chose to run a scare campaign that had very little to do with the actual contents of any of the proposed bills (including doing a Godwin and interjecting Nazis, which was clearly the point knew they had no appropriate counter argument in the wings anymore). It was wholly disappointing.
+ operator does use StringBuilder. But it will use a StringBuilder for each string expression. Take the following piece of code:

String foo = "";
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
foo += "x";
}

The inside of the for loop can be replaced with:

StringBuilder tmp = new StringBuilder(foo.length());
tmp.append("x");
foo = tmp.toString()

As you will notice, we are still copying over the string foo each time we concatenate. So building strings with + inside a loop will still give you the feared copy-string-each-time behavior. The new String.concat() trick is only useful for crafting long strings in a single go, i.e. in a single expression.
He needs to lawyer up it seems. Get a lawyer to send Apple and the competitor a note on letterhead saying that the dispute is without merit and that if Apple proceeds with pulling the app, there will be hell to pay.
Twitter How To Get Followed By Being Interesting
Ugh marketing.
This author has a really mean, nasty attitude.
> edit: personally, i feel less hungry after exercising, and more in control of what i eat.

Same here - the days I workout/play a sport, I end up eating less (this might also be 'cause I end up drinking a lot more water). On the days I don't do either, I find myself constantly hungry and snacking at regular intervals - plays havoc with my calorie monitors :(.
37signals started as a design firm. Which meant they knew their audience because they WERE their audience.
http://37signals.com/about

This is an exception, but rarely the case.

In regards to bounce rates, yes, they are absolutely important and are one of the core metrics you want to reduce when you implement split A/B testing. Think of it this way: if you open a physical store and most of the people who walk in immediately walk out, is your marketing effective? How much did you spend to get that person to walk in the door? If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate.
On the list of things to be worried about, this just seems to rank a few notches after what font you should use for the names on the conference room doors.
Ask YC: Best short text to learn Objective-C
My favorite C book is K&R.
My favorite Scheme books are The Little Schemer series.
My favorite JS book is JavaScript: The Good Parts.

The pattern is that they're all ~100 pages long, and assume I'm not dumb. What's an Objective-C book I'd like?

I'm interested in doing OSX/iPhone development, but looking to quickly get a strong theoretical understanding of the language before I dive in.
Are you an iPhone developer? Do you want a similar, competing application out of the App Store? Do you want to spend the next 18 months of your life in court, instead of developing applications? All you need to do is send an fraudulent infringement claim to Apple.
What's the advantage of this over Haml?
Use PHP to create a JSON object
I'm not sure about entire books, but here is a PDF that sums it up pretty well for those with C++ background:

http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-obj...
That first paragraph would have informed Zaid that Facebook shut down one of Zynga's applications for violation of the Facebook Terms of Service.

Exactly. What caused facebook to shut down that app? The heat from TC etc. What caused TC to report this in first place? Seems like tips from Zynga's competitors who refused to take part in this. My point was that Zynga's competitor's refusal to participate led to this crackdown--as opposed to government intervention.

I can hardly make head or tails of it.

Agree. My writing is usually rushed and scattered. I mainly blog to clear my own head:) Every now and then it makes sense to someone and ends up here.
So, an article about how you cracked some poor indie Mac developer's software so you could avoid paying them for an account?
I've found that the opposite is true. It is much easier for a tech person to learn selling than for a salesperson to learn technology -- and it's a whole lot easier to sell if you start by knowing what you're selling, and then build a case around that.

This piece is surprisingly fluffy. Of the five bullet points, the first is a cliché, and the second are so obvious that they haven't even reached that status.
> R.J.

> So if I wrote a computer program to deliver the newest xkcd comic to my screen at random intervals (it's like being gifted a comedy video)it would increase my productivity?

> Rolf

> @R.J. Hmm, randomly popping it up in the middle of your work would seem like a distraction. If you have a to-do list, having it occasionally pop up when you check off an item might be a possibility. It would also tie into the power of having a random reinforcement schedule, with the usual caveat that there's always a little danger in having extrinsic rewards.

Anybody know if this already exists? 'cause I'd buy that. Maybe have some social voting, feeds going into the reward set, and vote on the best rewards: Dilbert, XKCD, random top thing off reddit, etc. Find out what people find "rewarding".
I have also benefited from the Bates Method (at least portions of it). The new findings about spending time outdoors particularly accord with Bates' idea that sunlight is beneficial to eyesight. Bates said that pointing the head towards the sun and swinging the closed eyes through the path of its rays could relax muscles in the eye. It feels good but I never spent much time purposefully doing it. Instead, the biggest benefit for me was the knowledge of eyestrain and the damage that over-prescribed lenses could do if used in close-work for prolonged periods. I saved my vision from deteriorating further by reducing my prescription and even wearing reading glasses over my contact lenses while reading in order to reduce the prescription (negative diopters in the contacts plus positive in the reading glasses = reduced prescription).

I'm still longing for a time when I can take off my glasses and live outdoors for an extended period to see if I can manage some real reversal of my nearsightedness.
The software is free. They are giving it away.
Depends. If you actually enjoy computer programming, maybe. If it's just a way to make a living, then you're going to get exhausted having to constantly learn new technologies.

Go to university if you think that's the best route for you. I'd avoid certification factories. But your best route is actually to just start writing programs. Try getting involved with a open source project.
For the technical side of HTML email, it's important to realize that you need to do the opposite of all the prevailing trends in web design over the past decade.

Tables should be used for layout, font tags for different typefaces (and sizes, if possible). If you must use CSS, put it inline. No form elements or javascript. And you need to make darn sure that everything looks good without images, because that's how the vast majority of recipients will first see it.
I'm biased to defend founders, but in that story, I'm not particularly on the author's side.

Yes, the guru was probably abusing the situation. But the author refuses to quit his job and rejects an offer for a $250,000 seed investment. The guru does provide a key connection.

Even a legit guru would have become frustrated with the author by then, and tried to get rid of him.

I'm also not shocked by someone who spends $900 on flowers for their home. If you have the money, why not? The author is just showing how young he is. Driving a BMW is also not proof of cardinal sin :-)
A Better Way to Use Twins for Developmental Research [pdf]
But I think it defeats the value of cutting prices. If your competitor honors your prices, then they are automatically matching your prices to those who are price conscientious. In fact the competitor gets the best of both worlds, they still attract the bargain hunter, but they don't lose the extra revenue that others would gladly spend.
> I am worried about the future ability of a population's to resist a technological tyranny

No one should consider themselves informed on the subject of robotic tyranny without having read this:

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second-amendm...

"...tell me, how good does a combat robot have to be to kick in your door, spray the house with mace, and hit anything that coughs with a taser until it stops moving and can be encased in spray webbing for later pickup and processing? How goes does a robot have to be to detain anybody who smells like pot? How good does a robot have to be to break up a political demonstration? Not that good. If a robot is good enough to fight wars, its good enough to do political policing. It might not solve crimes, but it can bust heads that protest and capture people who’s position is known and who have been identified as enemies of the state."
If you're comparing the languages, Ruby beats PHP any day. But if you're comparing PHP with ROR, then you need to throw in a Rails like framework for PHP.

I recommend Codeigniter - www.codeigniter.com
"Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. . . .

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn’t an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size."
http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Objective-ndash-Mac/dp/143021815...

it's a very quick read (sorry for the Mac bias) and allowed me to get through it in about a day before moving on to the iPhone app book from the same series
Apple actually has a wealth of high-quality, Objective-C PDF's online for free.

Intro to Objective-C: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/cocoa/C...
There really isn't much to Objective-C. If you're learning Objective-C to do Mac development, I'd highly recommend Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. It spends about 40-50 pages talking about Xcode and Objective-C, and it goes in depth for a lot of key Cocoa concepts in the rest of the book.
I think the bargain hunter will just buy the product at the cheaper place to avoid the hassle of price matching. (Ever actually tried that? Employees have attitude.) I still think price-matching guarantees are disinformation aimed to give the illusion of the best price, and are very rarely taken advantage of. (The fatwallet.com crowd probably uses them, but I think stores lose money on those people. Best Buy famously had a memo calling them "devil" customers, and discussing strategies to get them to stop shopping at Best Buy.)
Alphabet of computing
This seems useful: This document both introduces the object-oriented model that Objective-C is based upon and fully documents the language. It concentrates on the Objective-C extensions to C, not on the C language itself.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/cocoa/C...
Yeah, people abuse the legal system. What's new?
I spent 5 years at Apple and Steve spends zero time blowing smoke about spirituality. He may be a private hippy, but at work he's pure business.
It's not an obsession, I wrote it because I needed something like this for my current work. I know there are quite of bunch of javascript frameworks out there, but the ones I looked at where either too huge or clunky, or didn't fit my needs.
My intention was merely to share it with the community and propose the base for a hopefully collaborative project.
Display Random Dynamic Content with PHP and XML
Every developer, at one point in time, will run into a situation where they need to display a small amount of dynamic data. Why create a whole database? Enter the magical world of XML. Here you’ll learn how to use PHP and XML to randomly generate HTML content.
I'll admit it's always been here and that it's incredibly hard to measure in any case.

But still feel that shortsightedness has increased in the last twenty or thirty years. The housing bubble is closest I can come to concrete verification of this but that's a long way, I'll admit.

It would be nice if someone could do a study akin to Bowling Alone, to study shortsightedness instead of social isolation.
Very similar to it indeed! That's what I like about REST... standards organize interfacing tools in similar ways. I'll take a better look at jester :)
Thanks to everyone for the comments!
I think you're both reading way too much into the fact TechCrunch did a better job on this story than NYT. It's not unusual that some reporter will find or dig deep enough into a story that others hadn't. It doesn't prove that much.

The Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinsky story, which nearly cost a US President his job - does this mean The Drudge Report is a better news source than the NY Times?
Both the end-to-end principle and the principle of common engineering sense argue against baking content distribution networks into "layer 3" Internet routing:

* Internet routing, particularly interdomain routing, is already overtaxed. Despite the fact that BGP4 is fully capable of doing so, it's still impossible to advertise a "typical" individual IP address (so that you could, for instance, multihome).

* There are as many different CDN service models as there are CDNs, and when you have flexible and changing app requirements, you want to keep the center of balance in the app layer, where it's easy to change.

The problem with Vixie's argument here is that while BGP4 is genuinely a "lower" layer --- where almost any policy innovation needs to be agreed on by multiple billion-dollar corporations --- DNS simply isn't. These stupid global traffic management pet tricks that Vixie is arguing against don't actually break the DNS; they just rob it of its purity of essence.
CDNs threaten the vitality of fundamental Internet infrastructure how? CDNs are the vitality that keeps the fundamental Internet infrastructure relevant.

W.r.t. the NXDOMAIN trickery, though, he's completely right.
That it isn't compiled but is immediately transformed. (In regards to Emacs)
In Kiwi models are simply representations of server side resources.
Yes, the API (which I will add a link to in the google code site wiki) specifies getters and setters for the image file used as a colormap and the image file used for point-plotting
Well, I know a handless woman that can write using her feets. Knowing that, I don't understand why a developer can't learn how to sell and vice-versa.
Error 404: The domain you are trying to reach has been disabled for violations of our TOS/AUP.

(That apparently applies to ne.ws as a whole.)

Bravura, do you have a backup? Will you move to a different domain? Please?
My first and only client best deal in town, from arizona has added me on facebook :)