skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The late Apple is more about masterful execution than innovation proper. OSX is Unix (and a rehash of NeXT's OS), the Macs are x86 PCs (and even run Windows), neither iPods nor iPhones were the first in their categories. They merely were the first to be done right.

IIRC, the last time I saw Apple really breaking new ground was with the Newton. Before that, with the Lisa. The Mac was merely a cheaper, less functional, Lisa.

It was a Lisa, masterfully executed though...
Anecdote of something that never happens, where the value of "never" includes "at least once".

A long time ago, when a Phase I SBIR was a lot of money to a tiny company, we got one and spent 6 months on it only to find that the department which was supposed to accept the report had been organized away. After a year of trying to get someone to sign off on paying us we gave up. Five years after the money was to be paid, out of the blue we got an panicked call from an accountant that we had to accept the money right now! Seems it was going to get returned to congress for being unused for too long and that is bad form.

But that was the '90s. Don't make your plans based on that.
There was site called apprejected.com that was publicizing rejections. It's down now, but Google has it in their cache (from 30-Oct-2009):

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:MjIAwYB6SaMJ:www.appreje...

Apple changed their developer rules in the last couple of months so that reasons for an app rejection were under the NDA. This new site doesn't hide that they are a developer, so I assume Apple will force them either take the site down, or give up their iphone dev membership.
the gmail spam filter is one of the best i've seen ... they have a far larger corpus of training data than any individual hacker could ever access ;)
Yeah, the price of Software as a Service. It might seem low while you're looking at their pricing page, but it really can add up over the months. If you can find cheaper alternatives that you can run on your own server, go for it. You'll be dealing with scaling, fixing servers that go down, etc, but it might be worth it.
I'm delighted that you like "Huck Finn". In my opinion, it's not his best work, nor was it his "big break", by any means.

Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious satire, not the stuff that he's famous for.

Anyway, this chronology will tell you a bit of all the things he accomplished prior to the book that you enjoyed.
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html
i would argue that a real-live nurturing would have been worth more than 150k.

one of her lessons learned was that, yes, there is a downside to having a large first advance. it sounds like the publisher lost money on that book, so after that they were probably thinking of her project as an expensive flop. if she'd taken less money upfront, they might have instead thought of her as a promising author that didn't quite live up to expectations on her first outing.

having said all that, i think the whole thing is moot, because it sounds like a broken racket. there's another regular at salon.com, patrick smith, who has similarly convinced me that becoming a commercial airline pilot is also being part of a broken racket. ditto signing to a music label, trying for tenure at most universities, and so on. i'd advise all of those people to try to find a way to realize their dreams with a more hands-on, iterative approach.
So all the weather stations in the world sent their data to CRU, which then deleted it. Because the data dates 100s of years back, it was not in digital form, so they never copied it. All the little field researchers just trusted the big momma CRU to keep their data for them, and now it is all lost. Climate science is dead, anti-warming campaigners have won.

Boo-Hoo!
I will be glad to help, but I'm not sure if my area of expertise is interesting or useful to you.
While slightly cumbersome, I think you can create a folder for specific people and then apply a filter to have those e-mails go directly to those folders.
Gmail - Inbox - himansham.doda@gmail.com
Selectively forward the email to an account connected to Google App Engine:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/receivingm...

Then you can write a handler that basically treats the email as if it had been a web request. (This amazing new feature was just added about a month ago!)

Let me know how it went.
I think there's a forum somewhere on theglaciersarenotmelting.com that needs these sort of posts a lot more than this forum does.
It is truly amazing how quickly you are able to assume this is all smoke and no fire.
No fiber please
I agree. If its something technically interesting, I'd be happy to help as well. I'm also a skeptic by nature, so while this is maddening for some people, I think it helps bring focus.
oh, and the new website is:

http://apprejections.com/
http://www.wowcool.org

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time.

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visit:

http://www.wowcool.org/productlist.asp?id=s3 (NBA Jersey)

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http://www.wowcool.org/productlist.asp?id=s70 (TSHIRTS)

http://www.wowcool.org/productlist.asp?id=s75 (JEANS)

http://www.wowcool.org/productlist.asp?id=s29 (AIR MAX)

http://www.wowcool.org/productlist.asp?id=s69 (HANDBAGS)

http://www.wowcool.org/productlist.asp?id=s57 (sunglass)
A very interesting article since I have been wanting to write my own card game app for a while.

On a side note, a friend once bet me $5 that you could perfectly shuffle a deck of cards indefinitely (where "perfectly" means break the deck in two and alternate cards from each stack), and the deck would never return to its original state.

I disagreed and decided to write some code to prove it :)

http://jazzychad.com/cards/
> This is a story of great relevance to the domestic American news consumer.

Which means it probably is not hacker news.

(Also, consider whether we want to see both sides of this issue posting their stories - if the anti-warming folks post a lot of these, the other guys are sure to want to see their side all over the site as well. I think it belongs elsewhere)
From my reading, DCI doesn't supplant MVC, but is an architecture for organizing code. Object behaviors are mixed in (via mixins, traits, or templates) according to roles (the common examples are ATM withdrawal and deposit) which are implemented separately.

There would be a couple of benefits of this aside from the advertised ones: Automated tests are associated with the role bahaviors. Instead of testing all of the possible behaviors of an object, tests are targeted at the individual traits. Also, by separating the roles from the data it's easier to mock the data layer.

When code needs to be removed or refactored, it is easy to find the code (and tests!) involved. Adding features becomes less of a refactor, and more just adding traits.
You get paid up front, so this was your Phase II award - based on the fruits of your Phase I? I take it this was a lot more money than the Phase I then?
I'm not trying to allege bias

I'll allege bias for you, then. There is no conceivable way that you could produce documentary evidence of a Republican saying, in as many words, "Destroy this so that it can't get used for a Freedom of Information (Act) request" and not have that be the front page of the NYT the next day. I don't care if he was the Deputy Undersecretary of the Department of Who Gives A Care, that sort of thing is normally blood in the water. It attracts front page attention, massive follow-up coverage, and Pulitzer prizes. When it targets the right people.
Any investor who decides furiously will not remain an investor for long.

OTOH, I can't imagine what sane person would invest there. Can't they tell a bubble when they see it?
No, no. I agree with you that we need to hold them over the fire on this. But "purposely" is going too far.

The best explanation, until proven otherwise, is that somebody goofed.
Thinking it over, I suppose the problem really only applies to small fish clients. Big companies probably don't care that they pay 600$/year for 2GB of RAM.
Since I wrote something questioning Aaron above, I'll take the other side with this one:

> If you and I each assessed the same candidate using your methods, we could very easily come up with 2 very different assessments. And that's the trap you'll fall into as soon as you're not conducting every interview.

...

> What's also needed is the application of some standards and metrics to give a higher probability of consistent results.

I don't think that's necessarily true. If you're Google or IBM, it might be, but if you're hiring for a smaller firm, it may very well be best to get someone that is a good fit for that particular culture.

Which actually sort of ties into my other post: I think your point about scaling is important to consider, but it only kicks in at a certain size, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Aaron has not handled hiring for, say, Accenture (nor would he want to).

I don't think hiring is ever going to be a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter, "standards and metrics" sort of business as long as you're talking about hiring people.
I like reading what the HN crowd thinks about this. And I like the articles posted so far on it...but yeah, you're probably right.
And the groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to others and have a good chance to do things differently.

Well, the initial premise that all civilizations have this happen suggests that later groups wouldn't see it as a problem, but as a goal or path to the goal.

There are groups here on Earth that seem to be resistant to the pull of the virtual, but all by resisting technologies of other kinds as well, so it could still be that any group capable of building advanced computing succumbs. There's a depressing thought: Dune as an accurate picture of the attitude towards computing in long-lived technological civilizations.
"The single biggest difference I have ever seen (over and over again) between a good programmer and a great programmer is how they respond under pressure."

There is a huge difference between being under pressure and the unique pressure of performing in an interview. The former is being able to handle a longer term fear of failure. The latter is dealing with a short-term fear that activates the primitive brain's "fight or flight" instinct.

There is a HUGE difference, and I would never trust anything I got from the latter style interview.
Variable bindings in Erlang are immutable to support the pattern matching. If variable bindings were not immutable, then Erlang would need syntax to distinguish between free and fixed variables in a pattern. The "=" in Erlang is pattern match, not assignment. Erlang could make bindings mutable without impacting the concurrent nature of Erlang because values would still be immutable.
Wil Shipley also tweeted his progress at getting his barcode stuff working on the iPhone - from what I recall he claimed success, but said it probably wasn't good enough for productization.

The 3G camera truly sucks for macro work (though there's a case from Griffin that includes a little lens to attempt to route around the damage).
Acne medication products
The U.S. Can't Manufacture the Kindle
The abstract of the article is that companies want to make money. Therefore, anything companies do is the result of them thinking it will help them make (more) money. Seems pretty basic to me.
That's why I cancelled my subscription and almost entirely quit reading it in the 80s.
I tend to think good faith is a nice assumption to have, but it should be rebuttable. For example, if someone were to say "I'd rather destroy my data than let it fall to a Freedom of Infomation Act request", and then they were served with a Freedom of Information Act request, and then the data were to be suddenly missing...
"Many brilliant people can seem delightful in a one-hour conversation, but their eccentricities become grating after a couple hours."

That is so true. Most people can't keep up their "interview face" for very long. It's tiring. At some point, if you put them at ease, they will revert to their normal self. That is when you'll get to see what they're really like. I've seen some pretty amazing transformations when waiting for this second phase of the interview.
One reason that the media are reluctant to cover it is that they do not know what is normal in science. I remember data crunches in speech recognition research in the late 80's. We would run out of disk space and have to delete stuff. Usually it would be the value added data. If we wanted it back we would re-run the processing scripts to recreate it from the raw data. Sometimes the raw data would be archived on tape and deleted from the disks. If you needed to regenerate the value added data you had to get one of the system administrators to retrieve the raw data from the tape archive before you could start.

Two take home messages. One: we never lost raw data. Two: we never lost the scripts for applying corrections and were always in the position of being able to replicate our work. Shortage of disk space meant that we sometimes had to do this, so it had to work.

I suspect that journalists are slow to realise that deleting the raw data is a very odd thing to do. You delete your data when you have no students, have lost faith in your research and are committed to giving up and leaving the field. Do you delete your raw data if you are battling to save the planet? No.
You must spend a lot of time reading legal documents then. Damn near everything involves me signing something saying that I can either get sued or can't sue over something.
OP suggests that some people don't get what they want because they focus too much on what they want to be instead of what they want to do.

I suggest that they take it one step further and focus not so much on what they want to do as on what they want to deliver.

OP says it himself later in the post:

Fix other people’s problems.

Getting what you want becomes a byproduct the moment you stop worrying about yourself and begin focusing on what you're going to deliver to others. The things you need to do for others are (conveniently) the exact same things you need to do to get better at what you do and eventually, to get what you want. For someone on a mission the help others, the endless hours you need to put in at a keyboard may not seem like work at all.

Let your code be the star, not you. Let your user be the recipient, not you. The rest will take care of itself.
Note that tarsnap is not available for Canada at this time :/
Few people read contracts they sign any more. In most of our (U.S., at least) culture, people no longer view a contract as an agreement between party A and party B, but as a paperwork step that has to be signed as a formality. I think most people don't even read their own employment contracts; they just sign however many places it calls for and move on.

With EULAs and click-through "contracts" devaluing the term, the average person probably signs hundreds of contracts a year, and reads none of them.
Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've "blown it"?

Yes. In the eyes of your editor's boss, the VP (Marketing), you have blown it if your first book doesn't break even on P&E. Break-even comes some time before you earn out the advance, but even so: if you don't break even on your first contract they'll drop you like a hot potato. Especially if someone gambled $1.5M of the corporate turnover on you and lost!

Assuming an average royalty rate of 10% -- it varies from 6% up to 15% in commercial fiction, depending on print run, format, phase of the moon, elevator clauses, and so on, but 10% is about right for a big hardcover run followed by a metric buttload of paperbacks -- then you can multiply the author's advance by ten to get a handle on the amount of turnover the publisher was betting on her. Which in her case was on the order of a million dollars.

Her final tally: 10K hardcovers and paperbacks sold. Even if those 10K sales were 100% hardcover at undiscounted list, they didn't turn over $0.24M (and more likely they broke down into something like 2500 hc and 7500 mmpb, in which case total turnover for the book was more like $100K). Actual profits for the publisher are typically about the same as the author's advance (a lot of money goes into the pockets of the distributors and retailers). So they were looking to make about $150K in profit, and instead made $10K and lost $150K on the advance (not to mention another $100K on the unsold copies they pulped).

If they'd given her a $10K advance they might have patted her on the head and said "there there, dear, let's try again, shall we?" But you don't get a second chance if you lose big right off the block. The usual response is to bury it deep (before someone higher up notices the oopsie and fires the responsible party).

In today's publishing industry, you're only ever as good as your last book. And if Mark Twain was alive and writing today he'd be an embittered blogger.
The data is claimed to have previously existed, but has now been deleted (links at bottom of this comment). In general, academia is not that fucked up. Medical journals certainly won't let you get away with this.

Climate science appears to have a lower set of standards.

Some of the CRU emails criticize climate journals which were considering adopting a "release all data" policy, and argued for not submitting papers to those journals. Other CRU emails discuss deleting data to prevent Steve McIntyre from getting it, and conspire not to release the data to him or other skeptics. This is why climategate is such a big deal.

As for other data sets, there are a few others. However, the CRU is one of the major sources of paleoclimate data. They aren't the only game in the world, but they are a big game. Both their data, and various analysis which are based on their data, are now inherently suspicious.

To make an analogy, imagine that a major open source regex library (maybe PCRE) is completely tainted (e.g., a rootkit). How large an impact would that have on open source software?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966336
Indeed, he just referenced it this weekend in his Wave review: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/11/so-i-finally-tried-...
Yeah, "goofed" by sending emails that talk about a plan to delete data rather than turn it over. ;)
How is this relevant?

I've been mentally bombarded enough with WW2.
As I understand it, at least some Japanese cities were intentionally designed to be "stupidly difficult" to get around. The purpose was to make it more difficult to successfully invade them.
Why is Intel having so much trouble shipping its solid-state drives?
You mean like the George W. Bush White house email scandal? It got MSM some coverage, not front page, and certainly no awards. In fact, it was only noteworthy because it was a meta-scandal that lived inside the far bigger one of the firing of US attorneys, a story that was basically set ablaze not by the media but by the moronic testimony of Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling before congress. And it was never wrapped-up or followed-up on beyond diggings from the progressive blogosphere because after AGAG was hung out of dry the media deemed its job complete.

Anyway, your comparison is apples and oranges. Political scandals will always carry more weight in the public eye than science ones, if for no other reason than the fact that their hands are directly on the levers of power, whereas scientists just use a (relatively) small amount of taxpayer money compared to what is doled out in the halls of political power. And their impact on our daily lives is significantly less direct than even a mid-level staffer.
Why are citizens and residents of Canada not allowed to use tarsnap? What do you have against Canucks?

I don't have anything against Canadians — in fact, I am one. I do have something against sales tax. Dealing with federal and provincial sales taxes would not only mean dealing with extra paperwork; it would also mean figuring out whether the government considers me to be selling software (the tarsnap client code), providing a service within Canada (since I'm resident here), or providing a service outside of Canada (since the tarsnap service is provided via hardware in the US) -- not to mention questions like whether tarsnap is "data warehousing", "data processing", "telecommunications", or something else entirely. How tarsnap is classified would determine if I'd have to charge sales tax, how much, and to whom — and I'm guessing that those answers are different between federal and provincial taxes, too. From what I've read about sales taxes I'm reasonably confident about one thing, however: I don't need to charge sales tax to non-Canadians.

So for the moment, I'm taking the path of least resistance: Don't allow Canadians to use tarsnap, and spend my time writing code instead of trying to figure out how complicated sales tax laws, which were written by people who never imagined the internet or online services, apply to tarsnap.
Donno. Never heard of them before today hence my comment.
iamaleksey is right that you should stop and think about what you're doing if you have a lot of that kind of Erlang code.

The guy you're looking for is Tony Arcieri, and his language is Reia. And here's the FAQ about assignments:

http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/FAQ#Destructive_assignment.3F...
Mint's founder on virality (paraphrased): his product had essentially no virality (no one shares their bank stories with their friends) so he focused instead on good old PR: making sure he'd be in the news as much as he could.

So much for virality :-)
Ask HN: Review my web app BuyersVote.com
Short description: it's StackOverflow for product reviews.

Basically I wanted to bring the power of crowd source + wiki + voting with reputation to product reviews.

There are good product review sites out there for major consumer goods, but for long tail or niche stuff (say online dating sites, property managers in Houston, email newsletter companies, etc) most google searches turn up pages with affiliate links or endless forum posts with no succinct conclusion.

Now if you care about a niche you can start a reputable review page for it in seconds. I made a big focus on UX and keeping it super simple.

What do you think about the idea and how can I improve it?

And as Joel Spolsky pointed out when he launched SO, the hardest part about a site like this is not the technology, it's the critical mass. So if you have a second I'd really appreciate it if you could signup here and submit a vote or two:

http://buyersvote.com/user_session/new

Thanks for your feedback!
As a programmer with an IQ of ~125, I'm doubtful that I would want to be a programmer if my IQ was 160+. I have a hard time believing that there are many professional programmers with IQs that high.
Interestingly, just a couple days ago I was talking about Mint to my friends...
The article is actually fairly careful to note the difference between manufacturing (high value) and assembly (low value). This distinction is usually missed when discussing trade.
That's an envious turnaround time, especially given how long these usually take to get out (I'm looking at YOU Djangocon videos), but it's only 7 out of 40+ talks right now.
(that was quoted from the tarsnap website)