skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One example cited:

"Walter Wriston pointed out that "A person with the skills to write a complex software program that can produce a billion dollars of revenue can walk past any customs officer in the world with nothing of ‘value’ to declare." And this is true. But the ability for a person to carry knowledge of huge economic value in his head is by no means new. An interesting example is provide by the U.S. textile industry, which basically began in 1789 when Samuel Slater left England for America with his vast knowledge of how textile machinery operated. (In order to protect what we would now call intellectual property, emigration of textile workers was actually prohibited by British law)"
Discovery, ESPN to launch 3D TV channels
the first point here: be narrow is such an overlooked and important idea. Facebook didn't have more than one photo for over 18 months and is now the largest photo sharing site by FAR.
That's what my point was supposed to be, that the criminal charges for a first offense most likely would come out to community service and a fine of less than 50 thousand dollars unless the price of the cds put them into the next class of felony.
I was referring to Australia (in response to the grandparent).
You're right - which makes comparisons like this even more pointless. I like that there's a cost breakdown - math like this is important, but doesn't run through your average consumer's head (not this precisely anyhow). Besides the price tag, the only remaining thing to do is go out and play with one.

It's a little like doing car comparisons by mere horsepower and cargo space - sounds relevant on paper, but in reality not so much... the only valuable advice is "test drive them all". In the end your satisfaction with your car probably has little to do with the fact that it has 20% more cargo space than the nearest competitor.
The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years.

I like and totally agree with most of the article but this myth annoys me. Exactly none of the the huge complex web apps he namedrops could have been made in under a week. And even if they were, that time omits what must have been an extended period of contemplation and conceptual design by a definite "rock star" level programmer.
I'm working on my browser-based game (kind of like Kingdom of Loathing, but with cavemen) at http://www.shinyrockhunter.com and a more business-focused product that needs a bit more work before it's a minimally-viable product.
Apple ceding open-source app market to Google?
It's actually not like saying that. He said Windows destroyed PCs.
The Amiga is similar to the Mac to the extent that the users loved it. Unlike the Mac however, the parent company detested and destroyed the Amiga.
Mellon foundation closes grant program that funded open-source software projects
Sure, creating an entire new product can take a lot longer, but almost everyone working in web startups has the experience of launching a new feature (for an existing site) the same day it was first suggested.
PDF

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2083231/Successful%20Lisp%20How%20to...
They do but they iterate when solving the problem, usually on paper. If they make a design mistake and it's in production or prototype phase it's much more costly to address. And because of this development cycles are longer and a lot more time is spent upfront.

This I agree with. Most engineers would kill to have the kind of feedback cycle that we have. (Disclaimer: my experience, such as it is, is with electrical rather than mechanical engineering.)

Solving real life problems, like this, thoroughly is worlds away from what most programmers enjoy - creating.

This I disagree with. Of course (mechanical) engineers enjoy creating - for example, read Florman's Existential Pleasures of Engineering.
ApunKaChoice : Bollywood
The fundamental flaw with this line of thinking is that you need to be useful to others because to maintain any sensible standard of living you will need to trade.

Q: What do you trade? A: Things that others find useful.

Even if you give people land they will need tools, supplies, medicine, housing, plumbing, fuel, electricity, roads, computers, phone/internet, etc. They will need to trade, they will need to be useful.

One can easily move to the middle of nowhere montana/north dakota/alaska and live off the land with a little bit of planning. Most don't want to.
Yes it's a big hit, and yes it holds a relatively small proportion of the total phone market

This is because the iPhone holds a significant portion of the smartphone market, but the smartphone market makes up only a small percentage of the total market
That's not true. Best Buy sells plenty of quality merchandise. They've got the same TVs, digital cameras, etc. you'd find highly recommended on Amazon or anywhere else. Their Xbox 360 is no more failure prone than anyone else's.

Their computers range the gamut, but so does Dell.com. Most Best Buys now even have an extensive selection of Macs on their own wooden table. They've got every mp3 player worth considering (and many not). I bought my Diamond Rio there back in what must have been 98 or 99.

Amazon sells most electronics for about the same price as them. I just looked for my camera, the Cannon Powershot. $149 for the newer model at both places. (Perhaps time for me to upgrade).

It's really the sales tax that ruins the business case for shopping there. A copy of Halo is $3 more at Best Buy, and I have to wait in line. When my business bought a Macbook, we saved $100 buying it from Amazon. I could have gotten the same thing off the shelf at Best Buy or an Apple Store, but why pay extra?

And the computers I wouldn't buy there due to lack of customizability, which was the original point of the comment. Even my dad just orders them off the net because of that.
There's already a perfectly good app at http://dontbreakthechain.com/
Well, the number of possibilities grows exponentially with the number of moves you plan ahead. Going from 10 to 20 is a huge difference.

Obviously no one plots out every move, but still...
Thanks for the link. He even references this Larry Wall article in the footnotes.
Why on earth would the ability to use unicode in comments be a bug? Seems like a basic feature of any modern site.
> could have easily taken his nail clippers and gotten on the train with it and... well, I dunno what you would actually do with nail clippers on a train that's really so bad.

Oh you know ... induce mass discomfort and panic by clipping everyone's nails just a little too close to the skin ;-)
Prepaid is huge in the UK, so much so that you can get topups for your mobile in almost any shop of ATM (of course, they call them cash machines). I was amazed in Australia that it is so limited, and such a PITA.
There are some inaccuracies in BBC report. Here is what happened according to Slovak news [1]:

Slovak police was training explosive sniffing dogs at Poprad airport. They planted several samples of explosives in passengers' luggage (90 grams of RDX / Hexogen [2]).

Here versions differ - Slovak police claims they planted two, Irish media tell they planted eight samples. One of these was missed by dogs and subsequently police screwed up, forgot about it and let it pass to the airplane.

The explosive sample was in a baggage of Slovak citizen living and working in Ireland.

Once the police realized their mistake, they let know the pilot (still during the flight), and he was supposedly ok with it.

They also let know destination airport in Dublin. Again here versions differ - Slovak police says they did it already on Saturday, when the incident happened, Dublin airport claims they got the message only on Tuesday.

Three days after the flight, once Irish authorities got to know there is a missing explosive (from Slovak official sources), they sent a bomb disposal squad to poor unsuspecting passenger, cleaned two streets around him, and arrested him.

----

BTW This was not the first time such incident happened. Five years ago similar thing happened at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4069785.stm

Also, not explosives, but similarly Japanese police lost planted drugs in an unknowing traveler’s luggage:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/26/japanese-customs-pla.ht...

----

[1] http://www.sme.sk/c/5179110/policajti-na-letisku-schovali-vy...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX
In other news, work on SVG comes to a grinding halt.
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Depends how you judge it.

One way is to look at profits, and Apples mobile division makes more than Nokia. Think about that for a second. Now, WOULD YOU CALL THAT A SUCCESS??

Another way to look at it is to see how many copycats there are. Are there any companies releasing very similar phones to the iPhone. Yes, every single phone company has released a similar product, from Blackberry to Nokia. Now, WOULD YOU CALL THAT A SUCCESS??
Large-Scale Simulatanous Inference: Empirical Bayes (Efron, Stats 329)
Yeah, he lost me at point 2: "If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm."

I think I see what he means, but the expected payoff from having people waving irons in your face is always non-positive, so it doesn't support his argument - ie. if you're rational you should always fear an iron approaching your face.
How does one catalyze mass behavior change to improve society?
I remember when they first came out and literally standing glued to the floor, multiple active windows, it was the first time I ever saw that.

The only other machines at the time capable of doing that were priced way out of ordinary mortals budget.

There as the Acorn 'unicorn', probably the cheapest and then right away big $ stuff like the Apollos.

There was no way I could afford a machine like that (nor the Amiga, for that matter, at least not at that time) so I stuck to my trusty 8 bitter for a bit longer and built the Elektuur 'GDP', a hardware assist for vector graphics.

But it never looked as good as the Amiga OS.
Just about every time I've seen ESPN HD (in restaurants and bars), it's used the extra resolution to upconvert a standard definition signal and bookend it with two huge "ESPN HD" logos.

Is there any reason to think they can do better with ESPN 3D?
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You really had to create a HN account just to say that?

The reason I did not respond is because of your overall trollish comment with very little content. Everyone is having a good discussion on the article so the content was at least interesting to the community.
These are great for inspiration and a chuckle. Thanks for the wonderful link.

How'd you find this?
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Como Mudarse de Windows a Linux
Sure, if it's a small feature that fits in well with the existing structure. But Tbray's talking like people can just knock up facebook or basecamp from scratch, in a matter of days. No-one can do that. Oh yeah sure, you might be able to make a decent stab at re-implementing one of them in a few days but it's a different story when you have to just make it up.

Anyway I do agree with him generally, just that I see this stuff a lot. Good web developers are stunningly productive compared to your average .NET corporate seat-warmer but they're not magic!
Regardless of the completeness of the language, I was really stunned by the total lack - as characterized in the article - of natural human curiosity. Does anyone know whether this component of the story is accurate?
This will sound bad, but did anyone check if they are the same species as other humans? (Not sure if species is the right word.)

According to the article they have been isolated for thousands of years.

Perhaps they don't have the same DNA for language as other humans do. Wikipedia said they don't have the ability to count, even when taught.
Indeed. In India, most phones are available unlocked. Also: (1) SMS and voice calls are dirt cheap on most networks, (2) there are no arbitrary vendor lock-ins, (3) voice quality on most networks is very, very good and (4) there are many, many mobile carriers to choose from.

We still need number portability and affordable mobile Internet, though. Ah well.

EDIT: s/India/New Delhi. I'm not sure about the state of mobile networks in other parts of the country.
High quality in application development without unit testing
Latest Video Games in Japan - Photos
The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb.

No-one's saying they're dumb. They're saying they're Doing It Wrong. And the things you're talking about - banks and stock - are edge cases of the enterprise world. I would actually argue that most stock markets are actually very well implemented. Banks usually have competent IT too, since IT is a core competency of theirs.

These are edge cases though; most corporate IT is orders of magnitude less sexy than real time trading systems.
ZumoDrive Lands Deal With HP To Power Storage And Syncing On Mini Netbooks
you wouldn't download a car
I do the same, just a backpack. Have customs agents ever given you crap for not having much luggage?
Don't ignore the departmental revenue from license renewals.
I was talking to a friend and they said that in order to quantify objects this tribe counts on a logarithmic scale and not an ordinal one, which I found quite cool, since there's really no reason why we must count in one or the other (logarithmic or ordinal).

This seems counterintuitive at first, but logarithms are just ratios and henceforth sometimes actually more useful than ordinal counts - for example, when comparing say, land mass sizes and one plot is 1sq mi larger than the other. Without the context of the size of the plots, this is relatively useless (if they are huge, they're about exactly the same, if one is small then the other is massively bigger). If we say plot B is 1 log unit larger than plot A then it is twice (if base 2) bigger than plot A, no extra context required.

I thought it was cool...
>Wikipedia said they don't have the ability to count, even when taught.

http://fora.tv/2009/03/20/Daniel_Everett_Endangered_Language...

In this interview, Everett mentions that he met a 13 year old girl in Brazil who happened in fact to be a Pirahãn—working as a cashier clerk, fully well able to count and do maths.
I've never respected the pure capitalist prod of "work or die, whether we need you or not". But subsistence farming is probably the least attractive alternative ever known. Every sweatshop is full of people who think it's better than the farm. Serfs had to be kept farming by force of law--and some escaped, preferring life as a criminal in a disease-ridden city. People will do just about anything to stay out of that life.
We have thought about it.. there is a downloadable app an individual can use, but it's not too likely they'll earn any significant money.
[2005]
Newsflash: Your Startup is Not in The Playbook
Stolen from another forum: "Is there not an 'Eicar' equivalent for testing airport security?"
I didn't vote you down, but you cannot assume the cars are of identical size and mass, or indeed that it's a car at all. Hit a truck at 35, while he is also doing 35, and you'll feel a 70mph effect all right. For a few milliseconds.

Unfortunately, poles, especially old ones, do not have as much give as one would like, and large trees have basically none. Plus, their narrow aspect is a very bad thing to hit; cars are designed to collide with large, flat, wide objects and to crumple accordingly to wash off energy. Hitting an immoveable narrow object is outside this design consideration and cars have a nasty tendency to wrap around it.
From what I've read, and heard, Apple has it's very own prick who will do whatever it takes to burst it's own bubble. That this process happens behind closed doors doesn't make it any less painful for the designers whose ideas get shot down on a regular basis.

But, unless you're a borderline sociopath with excellent taste who's also managed to recruit and inspire great product teams, you're better off showing your product to people who don't care what you think.
This article seems like a mishmash of a dozen different points in an attempt to get hits. However one line that stood out to me is:

The iPhone, however, is a relative wasteland for open source.

Hardly true. The best bits of open source projects for the iPhone are frameworks and tools under a BSD license, rather then full applications under something like GPL. It feels somewhat like the author is complaining that he can't always get high quality software for free, not that software isn't open source.

There's stuff like TouchJSON (or json-framework) or Three20 happen to be used in a lot of different applications. Theres also lesser used (but still incredibly useful) open source projects like Mover (transfer files between iPhones/iPods) or Flow Cover (OpenGL CoverFlow implementation).

If you want to make a game? You're in luck. There's OpenFeint (social platform of sorts), game engines like SIO2 (3D), Cocos2d (2D), OC3D (3D, based on Cocos2d), the engine behind Wolfenstien (it is open source!) and so on that are immensely helpful if they're what you're looking for.

And theres frameworks like MGTwitterEngine, RegexKit(Lite) or ASIHTTPRequest (an ObjC REST library) that work on both Mac OS X and iPhone.
Shapeways?
I believe this idea was part of Snow Crash, and also a premise of Cory Doctorow's "Makers." (Except the means of production are centralized in Makers, iirc.)
Maybe this tribe has small mutation in FOXP2 gene causing impairment in comprehension of typical human grammar.

EDIT:

Maybe not.

> Gordon ruled out mass retardation. Though the Pirahã do not allow marriage outside their tribe, they have long kept their gene pool refreshed by permitting women to sleep with outsiders.

Unless this mutation is dominant.

> A Pirahã child removed from the jungle at birth and brought up in any city in the world, he said, would have no trouble learning the local tongue.

I wonder if they tried that.
Why Corporations Provide Little Venture Capital
Another datapoint: I couldn't be happier with Dreamhost's registration. Well ... I'd like it if they offered more country codes. But apart from that, they're excellent.
so why didn't twitter start charging 6 months in? and it doesn't look like he followed his own advice on staying small
The problem with elements like <cite> is that they don't do anything -- since there's no default style they're just <span> with added wankery. Just because the spec exhorts you to use them a particular way doesn't mean that anyone will do that -- the real world has proven over and over again that unstyled tags are used as if they were classes, and attributes that aren't parsed by user agents from day 0 will have random shit stuffed in them. This isn't be done by ignorant users, but by aspirational Zeldman-reading cargo-cultists, almost always in the name of accessibility (see the saga of longdesc).

At least the putatively 'semantic' <em> and <strong> tags have agreed-upon meanings in the real world: they're synonyms for <i> and <b> -- and noone can argue otherwise in a world where every WYSIWYG toolbar has a B button that insets <strong> tags.
Controversial. How so?
Who cares, it's great stuff. That's one of the few times that such a 10 items list actually was worth reading, most of the time they are not worth the bits they're stored on.
Obviously because they had a different plan.

There is a huge difference between being a medium and selling a product.
Thanks bryanjohnson. I was wondering if you work for Braintree and if you could please tell me who at Braintree I could contact as a new merchant? I would like to discuss our business model and see if we could achieve the same effect without putting ourselves in the higher risk category.
A lot of it probably deals with a plethora of byzantine patents needed to manufacture a mobile phone.
The Flickr people thought naked RPC via URL query strings was somehow RESTful just because you can use GET.

They didn't have a fucking chance of noticing the existence of the Accept header. Microformats are bullshit when you have <link> and HTTP!
I nearly never read this...but am so glad I did.
Pre-Twitter. In some ways that makes it better in my mind.
where you're going to find a way to monetize

You could put your own ads on your search results. The point is that people would prefer to search from your site, because your results would be even better (more relevant) than Google's.

People wouldn't go to your site because they can't stand ads, but because they want to find links that are not filled with ads.
We wore "short timers chains" on our belt loops when we only had a few months left. Small brass chains with one link for every day we had left. We would dike one link off the end every day. Breaking the chain was something we looked forward to.
But if Applications store their basic resources on the SD card, the card isn't swappable anymore without breaking shit.
Glad you enjoyed - the source is http://waxy.org/links/ - but be forewarned, lots of good stuff there to get lost in :).
You want a real end-user comparison?

How do the facebook apps on each phone compare?
Is there a way to use the UI pack and nothing more?
I don't see how these are remotely related. I have ESPN HD at home and the quality is outstanding. A lot of channels add their logo when showing SD content on their HD channels. Big deal.
I really really wish Linux could get a serious hold on the consumer market.

So then Linux machines would ship with a ton of crapware too?
Mozilla fixes the UI problem that has been crippling FF3.5 takeup
There is an episode (entitled "Numbers") of WNYC's Radiolab (available for free as a podcast at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/) that talks about the possibility of an innate ability in infants to interpret quantities on a logarithmic scale, which is later supplanted by the ability to count ordinally. I haven't looked into how much evidence there is to support this theory, but the anecdote offered in the podcast is thought-provoking.
Maybe I am misreading, but you seem to be contradicting yourself. You say that it isn't a cultural problem, but then describe how what I would call cultural problems ! I agree with the gist of your post though - and yes, choosing appropriate technology would help, a lot, but it is a cultural problem preventing it ! (culture of management perhaps?).
iPhone's is miles ahead, darling.
Rule 9: Be Agile.
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The attack you just described applies to all online commerce. Your bank and brokerage (and the clearing firm your brokerage uses) all fall to HTTP cookie sniffing.

The point isn't the relationship between you, Bank of America, and a hacker; it's the relationship between you (a hacker) and Bank of America.
Mostly agree, though I think physical media rentals are going to be around a lot longer than many people think. Though perhaps not the Netflix (i.e. mail delivery) model, maybe more likely the RedBox (vending machine) model.

A lot of folks who like to watch movies don't even have computers... it's easier on the budget to spend a buck or two on a movie rental vs. $500+ on a computer plus broadband internet.