skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I wouldn't trust my life to my code, because I don't need to. Quality matters, and defects can serious financial consequences (for instance, losing data can have a serious and measurable impact). But in the trade-off between innovation and risk, I should probably position myself fairly aggressively. Like most programmers, I'm in a position where it's probably better for me to make and recover from mistakes than to avoid mistakes altogether.

This is what I think the "software is like building a bridge" analogy is so inappropriate. If you're going to hold software accountable for its relative lack of reliability, you should also acknowledge that the innovation from this field has been astounding.

Would licensing help things? Would the space shuttle control system software become very reliable if only those software "engineers" were licensed? I seriously, seriously doubt it.

But I do think that "software engineers" would slowly succeed in choking off a competitive and free environment. In a nightmare scenario, you'd have to major in "software engineering" instead of math or physics to be legally allowed to write code, self study would be banned, and something like Ruby on Rails would be illegal because the people who wrote the EJB specs don't like it.

Look at the activities of the ABA or AMA. That nightmare scenario isn't as impossible as you might think. And I'm pretty sure that it would hurt innovation in software severely, in exchange for a safety and security that 1) it wouldn't deliver anyway, and 2) we don't need in the first place.
Unflattening Touch Screen Buttons
Publishers conspire to create iTunes for Magazines, but can it succeed?
Amazing how small the set of accepted changes is given the amount of extensions GHC has. But, I'm happy that a decision has been reached and Haskell as a language is 'officially' moving forward again.
Can you please link to your thesis as well?
If you regularly post on Twitter, and have a sizeable following, you're addressing a room full of (virtual) strangers. Doesn't that make you an extrovert, regardless of how you would react in a similar physical room?

I just dislike the line in the sand between E and I. I'm both, swinging between the extremes sometimes, exhibiting characteristics of both at the same time, whatever. It varies by setting, mood, etc. Having said that, when it comes to the Internet, I'm definitely extroverted - telling the world about my life on a regular basis - and saying what's on your mind is the power of social media, innit? If we all stopped to think about the 'self' we are inadvertently exposing, we'd end up staring at our virtual feet and never twittering at all.
http://videolectures.net/mit1806s05_linear_algebra/
Is there any other action people in the UK can take?
I don't have much faith in the number10.gov.uk petition page.

The number 1 petition there was for Gordon Brown to resign [1],[2]

Despite getting more than 72,000 signatures, the response [3] was more like a boilerplate reply.

[1] http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/27/downing-stree...

[3]http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21213
Apparently nginx is popular in Germany: http://shodan.surtri.com/?q=nginx . Any ideas why?
Horizontal vs. vertical complexity
Signs Of Hope Regarding Clean Energy
mdemare was maybe thinking of Masterminds of Programming, which was like Coders at Work but with only language designers.
Chrome and Chrome, What is Chrome?
A visual vocabulary for information architecture and interaction design
It sort of reminds me of a video I saw when the original iPhone came out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jgYdtBn-8w

I know packaging looks nice and presents the device well, but I think it should be first priority to make sure people can open the thing without dropping it. The iPhone literally requires you to let the bottom part of the packaging fall a bit while you hold on to the top part.
It really doesn't matter if you're an I or an E. Or switch between I/E. As long as you can accept yourself. The rule of thumb I use for I/E orientation is does that person get energized around other people...

Myers-Briggs is simplistic. Check out Kolbe testing ($$) for a more detailed picture of 'you'

http://www.kolbe.com/

A repost but: We had a team bonding day in which we were split up randomly into small groups. Random or not, the group I was put on was all introverts. We were given a problem [a clever problem-solving exercise] and the observer (who was an extrovert) noted that (to him) 'it was like they were all just staring at the puzzle for 5 minutes. They were just sitting there thinking. No one in the group said much of anything until they arrived at a silent consensus.' Contrast that to other groups where members debated the relative merits of their solutions. We won the game.

In another company exercise, done after a Myers-Briggs session, they split the I's and E's into groups. And then they said (hypothetically) 'You have the day off. What do you guys want to do with the day? You have $100 each'. The I's were like - I'm gonna read a book, run errands etc. And the E's were like - 'Who's going to Vegas? Party at our house.' The E's were planning parties while the I's were planning alone time.
wait, this can't be right... http://shodan.surtri.com/?q=google+lighttpd+php
Twitter In 2010: Focus On Acquisitions & Revenue, Says Biz Stone
I don't think it is true that extroverts don't think before speaking. The difference between I/E is that introverts think about what they are saying and extroverts think about how what they are going to say will affect those they are saying it to.

Introverts care less about the feelings and emotions of their co-conversationalists and extroverts are more socially motivated to say nice things that make the group feel good or work better.

I think both introverts and extroverts think about what they are going to say. The question is, what do they tend to say once they've thought about it?
That definition is obsolete, though. I get drained by a constant social setting in real life - but I get energised by a constant online social setting. Like Jennifer, I am somewhat introverted (though I oscillate between the two) in real life, and clearly extroverted online.

It's hard to claim to be introverted when you have a blog that's <yourname>.com and tweet private thoughts to 700+ strangers several times a day.
This is mostly codifying things that are already widely implemented. (Of course, in Haskell-land "implemented in GHC" counts as "widely implemented"...)

Here's a brief list of what's changed (note: this includes the already-widely-implemented stuff) ...

Fix an annoyance in the language syntax that meant that (e.g.) an if/then/else construct inside a "do" needed to be indented in a weird way.

Allow module names to contain ".", providing an obvious way to make a hierarchy of modules.

Allow data declarations with no constructors. Apparently this is useful when engaging in various sorts of compile-time type system magic, where you have types that are used only for that magic and not because you ever expect to use a value of that type.

A grammar cleanup related to infix operators.

Add a standardized foreign function interface.

Another grammar cleanup: Haskell to-end-of-line comments begin with "--" unless that's part of a legal lexeme; it happens that colons are treated specially in the grammar, which mean that you couldn't make a symbol "--:--" because the "--" would always be parsed as beginning a comment. Not any more.

Guards in a pattern-match can now include their own pattern-matches; the guard fails if the pattern-match fails, otherwise it succeeds and the appropriate binding takes place.

Type inference is a bit more flexible (note: in practice most implementations behaved the more-flexible way already).

Document expected behaviour of the LANGUAGE pragma so it can be used portably to specify what language extensions your code needs.

Remove n+k patterns, which were always controversial.
I disagree, I still think the first article was spot on. If you don't want to play by Apple's crappy App Store rules then write a web app for the iPhone. Unless you're doing a 3D game you can accomplish the same result on the Web and you're free from their 'control'.

iPhone devs who write native apps and then complain to Apple about the app store policies are stupid, because they are tilting at windmills when there is a much easier solution to the problem.
Success and Motivation - Business Lessons from Michael Dell, Bill Gates
When I was first learning (recent switcher from various Linux distros to FreeBSD), I asked the same question.

The best answer I received was that FreeBSD isn't quite like Ubuntu vs RHEL vs Fedora vs Gentoo, etc. BSD is a more-direct descendant of UNIX and is an operating system, vs Linux, which is actually a Kernel. They are different philosophies, and solve slightly different problems. From a high-level "I just want to use an operating system", your basic interactions can be quite similar.

The most pragmatic explanation of BSD for Linux users I've seen is here: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4lin...

That said, some things I like about FreeBSD that I didn't like about my favorite Linux distro, RHEL:

1) Ports (you can install packages, too, but I don't like waiting for someone to build one for me to download)

2) Clean and well-organized

3) Phenomenal documentation (RHEL isn't terrible here, I just feel more comfortable with FreeBSD's)

4) Less fancy extra features and such running out of the box (95% Personal preference, 5% security preference)

5) Less base-operating-system dependence on specific versions of languages (read: Yum/Python on RHEL)

Some things that caught me off guard:

1) Ports generally come with the software's default config, not a friendly config created by a packager. This ended up being better for me in the long run, but awkward and confusing in the short term.

2) BIND is not an uninstallable package from the base distribution.

3) No htop without the Linux compatibility layer, which I don't care to install.

I also haven't used FreeBSD on workstations, only on servers, so I am less demanding of comfort features than someone else may be.

I hope that's somehow useful to you.
Hardest delegating lesson to learn: Trust but verify.
I own an iPhone but don't really follow the development side of things so maybe you could answer a question:

A short while ago all the iPhone devs were complaining that their apps were being overshadowed by total crap that was being churned out and sold at 99c.

Did that get fixed? Because that seems to be the downside of the easy charging of consumers, yet no-one has mentioned it during this recent storm in a teacup.
I now realize why people don't always share their failures in the way Feynman said we should in "Cargo Cult Science."

Comments like this:

> wow, you are an idiot. i feel bad for you. you work on image processing for a living?
Good point, will blog next time.
Thx
p g-funk
Author insinuates that all civilization comes from Western Europe. Worse, he suggests that, somehow, the fact that the classic masters more or less invented the arts of painting, writing, performance, architecture, etc. as we know them today indicates that they lived in a more "civilized" period.

The fact of the matter is that, for most people living at that time, life was nasty, brutish, and short (to borrow Hobbes' phrase). Wars were regularly fought as a means of political gain, sanitation was unknown, religious tolerance was sporadic at best, etc., etc.

Yes, the end product has been the greatest global civilization that the world has ever known, but that wasn't how things started out.
There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new or interesting to what's being said here. In particular, there have been many articles on this issue submitted already. Is this worthy of being posted on Hacker News simply because Seth Godin said it?

There's been multiple articles of his submitted that didn't say anything particularly non-obvious (or so it seemed to me), but this one is particularly egregious, being short enough to fit into about 2 twitter posts and bringing nothing new to a conversation that already been progressing here for weeks.
We'll agree to disagree then.

I mean, I'm thrilled that a random article that I stumble on from the iPhone PPK post is getting a surge of readers. Feel like I connected people in a small way.

I know a few introverts who constantly connect with about a hundred contacts through Twitter (I was relieved when Twitter added the @filter)

Technology levels the playing field for making & building human connections (whether it is one-to-one, one-to-many, uni/bi-directional). Introverts can leverage technology to build and nurture communities. And, yes, make a living doing it.

And, I'm going to assume the extremely influential Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber is an introvert based on what I've read about him and his articles and the fact I've never really heard of him making public appearances.
Runaway With Asperger's Syndrome Spent 11 Days in the Subways
The Many Flaws of Twitter's Retweet Feature
Hm. If it were so easy (refering to the first paragraph now) people would have thought of it earlier. And I think they did. As far as I know there were some badly working prototypes of printing presses before Gutenberg. Getting there is not all that hard. It's the little details that will get you in the end. Dozens of little things you have to figure out (or find out who figured them out before) in order to solve them. I would guess that any invention is full of those little details. Understanding the basic principle is easy. Getting the details right is hard.
Start your own online School
Don't worry, I won't scoff at anyone who calls it The City. Otherwise I'd be laughing all day long at the San Francisco Comical--excuse me, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Now if you call it Frisco...
Your first point is good, but the second point is problematic. Just because someone is an expert and helped build software, doesn't necessarily translate to that same person being able to teach it. Teaching is a skill in and of itself.

Luckily other posters here vouch for Strang's ability as a teacher.
At last an opportunity to get this question answered:

Surely "Trust but Verify" is a joke? Or at least a paradox.

If you trust someone then you don't need to verify, and if you verify then you aren't trusting someone.

And yet many people, such as this post and Ronald Reagan use it as if it just a simple slogan without a dark double-meaning.

Is it just me? I don't see how someone who "trusts but verifies" would act any different from someone who "distrusts and therefore verifies" apart from (falsely) telling the person being checked up on that they are "trusted".

Any Russians want to comment?
Agreed, the petitions site isn't terribly effective.

The best thing a UK citizen can do is write to their MP, in their own words. You can do that on http://www.writetothem.com/
2012 – Roland Emmerich | Online Media - OnMe
Paradox of Choice May Not Exist
Another small detail is that much of the art of the Renaissance was paid for by murderous thugs.

Sauce for the goose and all that.
I developed a webapp (project management) before deciding to go native.

Some of the additional reasons why I believe users prefer native apps are:

1. The app store app and iTunes make it easy to discover native apps. Webapps are simply posted on a link from apple. This makes it harder for users to discover them. Here is the link to webapps: http://www.apple.com/webapps/

2. With native apps, users can take advantage of built in UI elements reducing the learning curve and creating richer applications.

3. Web apps can suffer from performance issues especially when you are on an edge network.

4. Payment processing was already mentioned. Its an issue but probably not a huge one.

I think the native look and feel and Apple's own promotion are the two big factors in favor of native apps.
Interesting - there's a lot of info in the page source. In particular the "Why didn't you accept our application" question.
Ask: Review my MVP Doxela.com
Hello HN.

I would like your feedback on Doxela.

Doxela is way to quickly share powerpoint and pdf with several viewers. It is an imgur for pdfs and ppts.
Clickable http://www.doxela.com
Hardly. It's promising to be a long slug.
When I see Twitter accounts spreading spam or following me (clues include "affiliate marketer" in the bio, or the use of the affiliate-oriented cli.gs URL shortener service) I mark the accounts as spam, which blocks them.

Unfortunately, I don't know if Twitter considers affiliate marketers to be spam -- the company's definition of spam doesn't explicitly say. But the more junk that appears in Twitter, or the more spam-related hassles people have to deal with, the less likely users will find it to be useful.
Exactly. This is how it is in India too. You can cancel your phone connection anytime, even during the middle of the month, no penalties. These contracts in US are a pain.
Objective-C Tuesdays: continue
The page cannot be found
Does anyone have an insight as to why Google Trends [1] show that FreeBSD is more searched for in Russia and Ukraine than e.g. in US?

[1] http://www.google.com/trends?q=freebsd
Looks like Java 7 Path class will finally let you link files (yea, made it up to mid nineties Posix level). Java was always very inconsistent about what was not in the language "because some platforms may not have it (ME)" and "well we put a method there and we will throw if we don't wan't to do it (Iterator.remove())".
Usually I like cringley but he's lost it this time.

"It wasn’t always so, but now we have Java and Java extensions in the browser, so the UI capabilities are much better." - WTF?

"Google will make tons of money from its app store. Remember that unapproved applications won’t be able to run on the Chrome OS and the best (maybe only) way to find approved apps will be through a Google store as pioneered by Apple with iTunes." - The 'App Store' is just a list of Web Apps, Google isn't going to make anything off of user accessing web apps through ChromeOS, just like Firefox doesn't make any money when users access Google Docs.
It seems like, in the context of this quote, "trust" is used to mean "delegate thoroughly and without reservation".
Don't laws normally get tested in court? Ultimately if someone gets disconnected can't they challenge the legality in court, law or not?
It may sound illogical but experience proves it to be true
The difference between I/E is that introverts think about what they are saying and extroverts think about how what they are going to say will affect those they are saying it to.

Wow, this would make me an extremely reticent extrovert. That isn't the dichotomy. The chief difference between introverts and extroverts is not whether they think about the feelings of others but how outgoing they are.

Extroverts may or may not think about what they say but enjoy the attention saying it will bring. Introverts are less interested in the attention.
Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
I think it can make sense, although I'm not Russian.

It's not that the OP doesn't trust his subordinate. It's that he doesn't trust the communication between them. It could be that the project wasn't described clearly, or that its high priority wasn't understood.
Intel Partners with White House to Advance Math and Science Education
I've heard the same thing - brilliant people can hold more in their head, so they can read and manipulate more complex code. They don't need to simplify and refactor as much as mere mortals do, and because they're so focused on results, they get something out as soon as it's done.
Would you prefer to have the means justify the ends? If you say, "Hey capitalism is great." but it results in the destruction of our civilization, then is that okay?

I just came up with that. Usually people say, "The ends justify the means." But I've never known of someone to take it the other way. Thinking about it that way though, it seems that is precisely what we do with Capitalism. We know that greed is bad and leads to bad things, but we justify those ends because the alternative means, that is, a bit of loss of individualism and sacrifice of public property is, by capitalists, considered a severe punishment to the self.

So we say things like, "Bankers destroying the economy is okay, because we were more free until it happened." We say, "Environmental destruction is okay, because only a socialist world could prevent it." We say, "Big SUVs and houses and consumerism are good, because the government shouldn't interfere in people's personal decisions."

But the end product of all that is a less habitable planet and less happy place for future generations -- and not only future generations, but these generations in the future.
TiVo, Google pact in data deal
I think that the "stuff you can't say" idea is more about opinions. Specifically, opinions that are so crazy and unpopular that you'd be branded a heretic for even suggesting them -- opinions that you couldn't even espouse on the craziest talk show on TV.

It's not about facts (which are provably right or wrong). So saying, "9/11 didn't happen like we were told" is questioning the facts -- really not a stuff-you-can't-say kind of statement.

Reading through the list, I didn't find any of those statements particularly controversial. I hear people say that stuff all the time, and I suspect that if you were to shout those things on a street corner in a large city, you'd probably attract at least some crowd of people who'd agree with you, or at the very least, grant you an interview.

So, let me make an attempt revise your statements and try to turn them into actual "stuff you can't say":

Old: "The ambitious greed of Wall Street keeps everyone else from true success..."

Better: "Some people will never be successful no matter how much money you invest in them. Better to just test everyone early on for intelligence and let that determine who gets to be rich."

Old: "Successful public companies are bad for society. They are always bound to delivering the greatest possible profit, and rarely held to any standards of ethical behavior..."

Better: "Why do we need personal and professional ethics anymore when we can just legislate everything? Let's eliminate accountability completely and have professional judges decide right from wrong based on a strict set of codes designed to cover all situations."

Old: "There is no solid evidence that 9/11 happened like we are told..."

Better: "9/11 really wasn't a big deal. As a nation we should accept those few thousand deaths as a rounding error when compared to the many more people die of accidents and preventable illness."

Old: "People who join the (US) military are making the world a more dangerous place..."

Better: "The world would be better if it were under the rule of a single world government. The idea of a military would disappear, as it would then be irrelevant."

Old: "Ad sponsored media's primary function is to force you to pay attention. They trend towards accomplishing this with fear and social exploitation (shiny, sexy things) because these play to your un-ignorable biological reflexes..."

Better: "Advertising that manipulates people on a subconscious level should be illegal. We should regulate the advertising industry by requiring every product description to appear in a standard format (black Helvetica text on white background). We should require government approval before any product can be sold in stores."

Old: "And most amazingly: it is okay to be wrong. To attack someone for not believing that we landed on the moon, or in the Holocaust, is actually selfish.."

Better: "From now on we should use the Wikipedia as the final say in what is considered factual and right. Anyone caught vandalizing or defacing the Wikipedia should be punished by death, as crimes against truth are more serious than crimes against man."