jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Enterprise software sucks because corporations have little incentive to improve it and it's almost impossible for a startup to gain a foothold in terms of sales and adoption. There are so many smart hackers and the problems are so obvious...if they could have been solved with better software, it would have been done long ago.

If you try to make any kind of software that competes even tangentially with SAP, Oracle, etc...you lose. If someone at a big corporation hasn't already heard of your company, the odds of them using your software drop to almost nothing. Because no one has ever been fired for going with IBM. Because big companies are playing strategic games many levels up and don't care about day-to-day employee software usage. Because a startup with a silly name just seems silly, and people willing to fight for adoption from the inside are few and far between.

I'm staring to think that the real game isn't figuring out how to make enterprise software better, but to figuring out how to hack the system itself so that new ideas even have a chance.
Synctus (my startup: http://www.synctus.com) does something similar. It is an always-on hardware appliance for each office that Just Works - including NAT traversal. It presents an SMB/CIFS share that is the same regardless of which office you are at. Drop me a line if you think it could be useful for you.

Synctus is different from Dropbox and presumably SparkleShare because it focuses on emulating a single office SMB/CIFS share exactly, including locking so that synchronisation conflicts never happen - and this means that it needs each appliance to be usually-on (so road warriors still need to VPN in to access a particular share or use Dropbox or similar).
TechCrunch posting excerpts to spread traffic out across their blogs is annoying.

Especially when it's their gadget blog posting on a non-gadget topic, and particularly when it's just summarizing a 3rd blog anyway:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100610161411160
It's less absurd than rejecting apps because of the language they were "originally written in," less absurd than rejecting minor updates to an app you've already approved — less absurd than most of Apple's rejections, actually, because at least then Apple's rationale would make sense without assuming Apple is simply evil.
I found this line funny from the article, in reference to WWDC:
"I can’t remember a single incident where things did not go exactly to plan"

Really? You think Jobs planned having the iPhone browser not work and having to plead with the audience to turn off WiFi?
[edit]
Quick clarification: The OP compared Nokia to Apple and Android, so my answer was specifically about Nokia smartphones. Nokia feature-phones have always had a decent market share in the US, and I think that the average person in the US thinks of those feature-phones when they hear the word Nokia, and has no clue that the E or N series phones even exist.
[/edit]

I live in the US. I've never actually seen a phone running Symbian in person. The only Nokia phones I've ever seen are feature phones. I don't just mean I don't know anyone that has one, I've never seen one in a store when shopping for a cell phone; of course I don't own one!

I work at a tech company where probably about half the people have smartphones of some sort. Until the iPhone, that meant something from RIM or Palm/Treo.

I would bet that the cell phone providers are primarily the ones at fault for this, but I'm not sure. Verizon is the largest Cell provider in the US by a large margin, and I understand they have all sorts of requirements if you want your phone to work on their network.

[edit]
I just looked at the wikipedia page for the nokia E series and N series, and notice they are GSM only. I've only ever been on CDMA (and AMPS) based networks, so that explains a lot right there.

Here's an example of what people in the US think of when they hear "Nokia" it's the Nokia phone I've seen the most, with the possible exception of the old monocrhome candybars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6255i
> If you want to talk about "almost all" then you have to go to measure theory.

From my understanding, "almost all" is somewhat imprecise and can mean many different things even in math, e.g. all but countably many, all but for a set with Lesbegue measure 0, with the precise meaning either stated explicitly or depending on the context. So if it's "almost all" by definition, that fine, that's your definition. That's math. That's why I stress, again, that I'm not talking about precise math.

I do feel that mathematicians tend to use "almost all" in the common sense though as well when talking about uncountable sets, where it isn't precise, and isn't well defined, and actually isn't entirely consistent with our usual intuition. That is where I disagree.

> Having said that, certainly if you color all the rationals red, and all the irrationals blue, then there are more blue than reds, and the amount by which it's more is a lot.

Again, circular argument! If I say the difference between uncountable and countable isn't "a lot", but actually more like "a little", it doesn't follow. One way of stating my proposed intuition would be that there is a big difference between finite and infinite, and a "slippery little" between countable and uncountable. (Where they nonetheless have some important theoretical distinctions, including the idea of measure.)

Against this intuition is probability (whatever choosing a real number at random actually means...) But for it is the idea of the symmetry between these infinities, that there is an infinity of one between the other and vice versa.

> Your problem seems to be that you are trying to visualise this in terms of finite collections and finding inconsistencies/contradictions.

Yes, when you start using imprecise terms like "almost all", you're talking about intuition, and our intuitions are of course based on finite sets.

I think your problem is that you think that one set of math facts (including probability, measure, lack of a bijection) that is sort of analogous to an intuition of finite sets, is the preferred viewpoint, over another set of math facts (infinity of rationals between reals) in shaping your intuition.

To your credit, all mathematicians seem to be on your side:)

I'm looking for the killer fact that destroys my intuition, but nobody has ever been able to give it to me beyond the standard undergrad stuff that everyone who knows anything about math knows.
Interesting comparison. I wonder how many people attended each of the respective events? Could the lines, price, "you're lucky to be here", etc. be based on supply and demand? I mean if WWDC sold out in 8 days AND they charged almost 4 times more, there has to be some issue with supply and demand.
Note that unfreed results of strdupa(), despite having "dup" in the name, does not result in memory leaks. The "a" in the name means it uses alloca(), thus the memory comes from the stack and it's properly released on function return. It's also probably slightly faster than malloc() since it just moves the stack pointer.

Before jumping to conclusions, please verify what the code really does. C is a complex beast and what's "obvious" may not be such.

Relying on such niceties (as weird as it may seem, to a C programmer those are niceties) is what you gain if you are willing to trade them for portability (strndupa() is a GNU extension).
Passive investments like index funds allow you to buy some ownership of a productive investment vehicle (public companies usually, or rental properties through REITs), an in exchange you collect rent on that vehicle in proportion to earnings and your share of ownership, for all eternity.

It's extractive in that you are literally bidding up ownership of a rent-seeking vehicle, rather than creating any new value at all.

In theory you might say bidding up asset values creates something like "potential energy" for productive investment: if an entrepreneur (or venture capitalist to-be) wants to liquidate stock to use as capital for starting a new company, inflated asset values would then contribute to a larger pool of capital for that entrepreneur.

Still, I argue that's a stretch. The existence of extractive investment vehicles are the main motivation for capital to invest in new value, yet their continued existence for all eternity leads to an entrenchment of wealth that may threaten the entire system. This is what Marx is all about (although he seems to presuppose a revolution is the end result, rather than say a wealth tax like Bernie / Liz would promote).
What if I only have one screen?
75-125 is an actual trip. Anything less than that you're not going to get the full psychedelic experience. We can debate the effects of microdosing, but 100-150ug has been a gold standard for decades for a reason.
Thanks! It goes through a central server so it can make it through corporate firewalls. This adds latency unfortunately but makes it more reliable for folks behind strange proxies and scales better for >2 users. But in any case, we'll enable P2P connections shortly so it won't go through the server if it doesn't have to, stay tuned. Sign up on our website and we'll let you know once it's out.
The law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to exclude the public from their private beach compounds.
Vinod wants you to think this debate is over property rights, but it's really just a game of expensive cat and mouse between him and the government for his own amusement. The road in question services over a dozen homes, and he has no building or presence on his property, so logistically there's no warrant for the gate. The gate was re-opened (for at least daytime hours) a few years ago. The beach had previously been accessible to the public for nearly 100 years.

The legal fees Vinod is paying are far greater than what he'd have to pay to maintain rightful public access. He likely didn't understand the access issue at the time of purchase (since he's never actually there!) and so this protracted argument was the only way for him to derive value from his purchase.

https://sf.curbed.com/2017/10/5/16431150/martins-beach-san-m...

https://www.surfrider.org/pages/timeline-open-martins-beach
Based on their site, surveymonkey seems to be very good in corporate sales, having that big customer base is hard to replicate.
Great minds think alike ;-)

I hadn't heard about mobwrite. It may offer a better solution than what I'm using.

Thanks for the tip.
I'm right there with you :) I'm 35 years old (old for this business), started developing my business ideas at 20, and am still plugging away at what most people would consider crazy (a service-based startup) ideas. Success has only started to develop in the last three years. It's a long, difficult journey.

I'm intimately familiar with failure. I can tell you this though, the moment I'm not prepared to commit 100% effort to everything I do is the day that I re-evaluate my choice to remain an entrepreneur. There are too many people out there who are willing to put in 100% all day every day. Even if the momentum of this submission catapults you to point of progress that you've never seen before, you'll have to be ready to commit that 100% effort to stay ahead of the inevitable onslaught of competition.

I would encourage you to try to understand what was different this time around. I would be willing to bet that these factors were not all mutually exclusive from your previous efforts. There's no telling if this will lead to a viable business, but if you can figure out what got you noticed this time around, you may be able to repeat it again in the future.
I was explaining how long it should take using high-speed rail. The person to which I was responding stated that the trip would be 4 hours instead of 7. High-speed rails go around 200mph, however the next gen Chinese will be around 230mph.
I'm lucky, I have a shelf in my office that happens to be perfect standing height for me. I decided to put my laptop on the shelf when I came in this morning, and give it a try.

My office: http://yfrog.com/h7m5ajhyj

So far today, I've gotten far more done than a normal Monday morning, and my energy level is way up.

This could be good.
The Chinese have not had a tradition of colonialism. They're just not as obsessed with controlling the world as the west is. They are assertive over neighboring areas that have been arguably part of China for a long time like Tibet, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong but that's pretty negligible compared to the global domination aspirations of the Soviets, the Axis powers or Colonial European powers.
About 500 to 900 wpm depending on the urgency vs complexity vs longevity-of-understanding trade-off. So something like Game of Thrones would take me about 8 or 9 hours. The key is to move away from "voicing" the words to just "hearing" (or when scanning quickly, "understanding"). I read a lot though, so maybe it's just practice.
"The Manhatten Project wasn't a conspiracy any more than the CIA is a conspiracy. And the Manhatten Project is pretty well documented and would be carried trough with each new president in the know. Plus The Manhatten Project wasn't done against Americans."

He was not claiming that the Manhattan Project was a conspiracy, or a conspiracy against Americans. He was only citing it as evidence that a large number of people can work together in secret.

"If you are comparing those two projects as equals then you are basically insinuating that Obama must know about this project and is keeping it a secret?"

Again, not claiming the Manhattan project was a conspiracy. No reason to bring Obama into the argument.

"Otherwise it's pretty obvious that you are trying to build an argument out of basically nothing."

I think that he cited fairly clearly that there is evidence that is not "basically nothing" that he finds suspect. See the links that he posted.

"You are simply proving my point. You are claiming there are conspirators. Unless you are willing to assume the likelihood that there aren't any, that pretty much means end of any meaningful debate from my point of view."

No, he isn't proving your point. What he is stating is that in most explanations, whether the official or the truther's, there are conspirators. In the official version the conspirators are middle eastern terrorists.
Pretty much, though not exactly.

NASA is, after all, made up of a vast number of people competing to get their own favourite projects funded. If a directive comes down from on high that NASA's primary goal is to build a moonbase then it means that projects relevant to this goal start getting funded (and that projects irrelevant to this goal get a hasty rewrite to make 'em sound like they're relevant to this goal).
Really insightful comment.

> the impact of both poor and excellent teachers is way overestimated, and the impact of poor and excellent administrations (both the school principal and the district leadership) is tremendously underestimated.

Why do you think this happens?

I'll speculate: most people form their opinion about what's important in a school by reflecting on their experience as a student.

Most students attend only one school of each kind (e.g. elementary, junior, and high school), so they don't have a great frame of reference about the results of different school administrations.

But everyone experiences many different teachers, and as a student, you really perceive the differences between the better ones and the worse ones.

I bet if you reflect on your own experience as a student, leaving aside the context of your spouse's experience as a teacher, you will have much more vivid memories and opinions about teachers than administrators.

I totally agree that it's likely to be much more effective to try to create environments that help all teachers do their jobs more effectively than it is to try to change who we're hiring. I wonder what the best way is to make people "feel" the difference between good administrators and bad ones like they "feel" the difference between their favorite teachers and their least favorite ones.
I've come to find that everyone has a different solution, and lots of people have different priorities. A client of mine keeps everything in text files. I know another that does everything in excel. Others use some combination of apps and services (dropbox for files, omnifocus for todos, evernote for notes and articles) and that works ok for them too.

After trying several solutions, I ended up building a SaaS to manage everything. I found most things out there are fairly boring, and are not at all as powerful as what I wanted. It's basically a brain for my brain; so i can remain a scatterbrain and it can tell me when its time to water the plants, or if food in my fridge is about to expire. But it also handles all my notes, important files, time-series data, and historic dates.

But really, you have to figure out whats important to you and what system best aligns with that; and in the end you'll likely need to make a few tradeoffs to get something working.

But I think there are definitely some principles you can apply to any system you use; I can't recommend Getting Things Done by David Allen enough. His methodology is great, but even if you don't like it or can't use it for whatever reason, there are oodles of great tips; and it'll make you into a natural project manager / information guru.
This list is sorely missing some introductory mathematics courses required to build a foundation in CS (e.g Discrete Maths). If there are any course suggestions that anyone has, I'll gladly add those to the list.
The other day I was in my advisor's office and he said "let me show you something you've probably never seen before: a fully legal version of Chinese Windows!".
Without getting all programming language religious on you, I have to disagree with you. Most Java tools are open-source, e.g. Eclipse IDE, JBoss application server, Tomcat app server, etc, all market leaders, or near the top.

We've deployed a reasonable sized startup codebase for our project without paying a dime for tools and libraries.

Plus, we were also able to carry our Java coding skills across into our Android mobile app development.

I think there are pros and cons to most languages.
I clicked through to his blog and it appears he was one of the Seth Godin interns.

The tone of his writing and constant links to others with own-name domains now makes more sense... as do their Squidoo pages.
Well... most of the stats aren't that different but them I'm reminded that this is mono and its using significantly less memory than java. Mono has a really sloppy garbage collector.. what does that say about java's in this benchmark.
Because the author of g-client (on which this is built) is T.V. Raman, a blind programmer. g-client is built upon Emacspeak, which is also authored by Raman.
Yes, you can use it without the speech part. I imagine it relies on Emacspeak for some of the underlying framework.
Squarespace is a lot of Java.
Why do you think it's so easy to track North Korean officials? Decapitating the leadership in Iraq didn't happen quickly, why would it so much easier in North Korea, a country with far lusher vegetation?

Seoul is only 35 miles from the border with North Korea. The North has artillery which can hit Seoul, hence the South needs to be very careful not to provoke the North. Any engagement would be costly.
IMO there is neither lack of hosting support (just use EC2 or a vserver) nor any serious performance issues.

I'm a long term Python developer (since the 1.5.2 days). I've used a lot of different languages so far (from C to Haskell), and I've always avoided Java in the past (at the beginning because it was slow, later because everyone was telling me how bloated it is).

But using Java EE (!) instead of Python for a project a few months ago was really an enlightenment. Yes, it is somewhat bloated (although much less in the recent versions where you can use annotations instead of all those XML files). But on the other hand: It just works - exactly as documented.

With all other frameworks (based on Python, Ruby, etc.) that I've used so far I had to hack around in the framework or in the libraries to make it work the way I want. This starts with simple issues such as Unicode support, where the authors of a library obviously just didn't care if it works, and continues with distributed transactions, where you have to hack up the whole logic inside your application because the framework doesn't support them. Compared to this, with Java (EE) this just works rock stable and has most of the features you'll ever need.

From a performance perspective Java isn't that bad as either. For a project I've compared the performance of two simple (comparable) Web apps that I've wrote: One with Python on Django, the other one with Java on Glassfish). Once you increase the concurrency, the requests to the Django app just return error codes or take a long time to complete. In comparison, the Glassfish app just chucks happily along.

This does not mean that Java is appropriate for all use cases. But just don't believe the majority and try out yourself, if it works for you.
Weird that I find myself agreeing along when reading both the pro and anti vegan accounts, as you say these 2 anecdotes could be both right in aspects but without any hard data that attempts to remove extraneous variables (from all the nutritional claims and counter claims I've read this is very hard to do) it's merely going around in circles.
I agree that curvy got taken to excess, but I'd rather go back to something like a Land Rover Defender aesthetic, where every surface is something to stand or mount something on, often with built in grip surface or mounts.

This dystopian cross between stealth bomber and Mad Max is angular, but straight in all the wrong directions.

It looks like it's going to be a challenge to pass EU pedestrian safety regs, but I'm quite impressed they have achieved the ugliest road vehicle bar none. I'm amazed the balance of comments here seems hugely in favour - to me it looks like a wind up!
Good for you to realize that, then.

On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure it's appropriate to be comfortable with that kind of position in any case.
I’ve had the same thoughts about the iPad. Do you know if you can use reMarkable as a display screen to draw on for video conferencing? If it could I’d probably just buy one now.
Pretty much all that buys you is a small reduction in an already-small warm-up phase before the jit chooses a late-stage optimization (possibly with an increased cost for loading that phase, so even that small gain may be reduced). Only for code that uses this. And performs worse if it proves incorrect, as bail-out logic is generally a bit costly.

Browsers have experimented with hints quite a lot. Nearly all of them have been rolled back, since adding the general strategies to the jit is vastly more useful for everyone, and perform roughly as good or better since they identify the optimization everywhere, rather than only in annotated code.

---

The only ones I'd call "successful" so far have been 1) `"use strict";` which is not really an optimization hint, as it opts you into additional errors, and 2) asm.js, which has been rolled back as browsers now just recognize the patterns.

asm.js did at least have a very impressive run for a while... but it's potentially even more at risk of disappearing completely than many, since it's rather strictly a compiler target and not something humans write. wasm may end up devouring it entirely, and it could happen rather quickly since asm.js degrades to "it's just javascript" and it continues working if you drop all the special optimization logic (which is to its credit - it has a sane exit strategy!)