skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comments by "Bruce" don't strike me as markedly more irrational than the posts themselves, and by internet standards they seem not-especially-harassing. I'll admit I didn't devote too much time trying to decipher anything.

If this person is in fact impersonating a real person, then ask that person to press charges for identity theft. Aside from that, just block the user every time he shows up.
> Peripheral makers not updating drivers, though they had an unusually long period of time to do so.

Not so, according to Dell:

http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18002573FE006B7...

They might have had a lot of time, but looks like the goal posts moved very late in the game.

> OEMs mislabeling laptops as Vista ready/capable/whatever when they clearly aren't.

OEMs don't set the standards, Microsoft lowered them.

See: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080305-the-vista-capa...

> Micromanage Vista Ready certifications

RTFA, Microsoft dumped "Vista Ready" and replaced it with "Vista Capable", which will just "run these core experiences at a minimum."

See: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyor...
"The answer is, yes, the process does stifle creativity.
[...]
It's the process that offers a template for any creative enterprise that's looking for a method to produce consistent - and consistently improving -- quality."

Come again?...

"In the modern software environment, 80% of the cost of the software is spent after the software is written the first time -- they don't get it right the first time, so they spend time flogging it."

I'd say most sofware cannot be gotten right the first time...
I once had a Carribean taxi driver tell me that marijuana is the only drug (there are some he probably hasn't tried) that you don't have to process or change in any way. You can ingest it directly from the ground for the same effects. Try that with caffeine, chocolate, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, etc. And of course, the psychotropics that "enhance" takes that processing to a whole new level.
There's a thought I've had in the back of my mind for quite some time but it seems so obvious that I think there must be a glaring flaw I'm not seeing otherwise it would already have been done extensively:

Whenever a language has a burdensome and rigid syntax, isn't there almost necessarily a way to make a good s-expression syntax to substitute it? You'd get macros free!
I don't really understand why you, as a consumer, would care about a company's hardware failure rate. Sure, that hurts their bottom line, but as long as you have a working Xbox 360, shouldn't you be happy? It's not really analogous at all to Vista, since Vista isn't "failing" so much as it's something people don't want.
+1 for ack. It's a great tool.
Mindmaps have been an invaluable tool for me to organize my thoughts. They're less restrictive than simple down-the-page tree hierarchy notes, more understandable at a glance, and keep ideas connected. They've been most useful when I've been trying to grasp really big ideas that take multiple lines of thought.

It's not a tool for providing fully-detailed notes. They've been most useful for helping people who already know the subject matter better understand it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3674140982294628000

"First of all it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art. ...has a lot in common with magic."

So, who knows what it is exactly.
The primary reason they have as many customers as they do is because of marketing, but the reason they're successful is that many of those customers really like their products.

They know they aren't for everyone, they're just betting that there are enough people out there that like them to be very successful. So far, it seems they're right.
People testing NGINX
you can use our service at www.i2drive.com We can provide you with good support too.
With all due respect though, you can't blame them for the retarded process at your company... why should they spend the money to change process and structure when your company isn't willing to?

(No, the answer isn't because you pay them $25 a month.:-)
This sounds suspiciously like startup advice...

Is this article supposed to be one of those "This statement is false" paradoxes?
"The thing is, I keep stumbling into people and books who swear by it and sing all sorts of praises."

Religious people do that do but they don't impress me.
use www.bitgravity.com
Release early. Release often. Release when it's ready.
I'm sure their will be if they start running red. They are the way they are because it works. When it stops working, they'll change.
You should change the link to put it in quotes, out of fairness. Less exciting then, though.
It's the video version of bite-sized Snickers bars. There's no way this won't be popular. There's also no way they're going to be able to see any direct revenue from the project.

Pretty good marketing idea, though.
Might be a better zinger if he wasn't calling a profitable company a failure.
I use it for brainstorming. It allows me to effectively operate in both "sparking off lots of quickly-forgotten ideas" and in "elaborating in depth" mode.
USPS.com already lets you upload or type in a document to send as hard copy mail.
Most of those are minor nit-picks, but I do agree with him about string handling. Strings should be tagged. "dog" should be equal to {string, [100, 111, 103]} or something.
Tipjoy has a system of associating sites with users. Manually finding that someone owns a site is easy. Automatic authentication involves a detectable change in the site.

For example, if PG wrote a crawler to find HackerNews:ivankirigin on my blog, it would be known that I own that blog (just the subdomain though, not all of blogspot.com).

The vast majority of content on HackerNews is created by non-hackernews readers. They aren't going to do anything like this.

So while such a system would be useful, it would be practically difficult to make a real impact.
If by "good s-expression syntax" you mean a representation suitable for embedding into a Lisp, then yes: it's obvious, there's no glaring flaw, you get macros for free, and it is done extensively. There's an s-expression representation (or several) for pretty much anything you'd want to integrate with a Lisp program. Examples of common ones are HTML, SQL, and Javascript.

Where you don't see this done much is with general-purpose programming languages. This is probably because people who find s-expressions useful are already using Lisp as their general-purpose language. So it's mostly done for interoperability with other, pre-existing systems, like web browsers or C libraries. (You can see an example of the latter on slides 15 and 16 of http://www.xach.com/lisp/lispvan-2008-02-28.pdf.)

Erlang is a fascinating intermediate case. The distinctive value of Erlang is arguably not in the language, but in its runtime and libraries (including Mnesia). For this reason, the "general-purpose" caveat doesn't apply, and it's easy to see why someone might want to build a Lisp program on top of the Erlang runtime via embedded s-expressions. I seem to recall that there was a game company already doing this. If anyone knows about that or other examples, please post them here.
Britain makes camera that 'sees' under clothes
Finding Startup Co-Founders DON'T
The world's 50 most powerful blogs
He is using Google blogger/blogspot with an OpenId from Microsoft.

Is it easy to get a fake account?

As far as I know, the aim was to deter fake accounts and at least with some msn accounts, a credit card is required. (with blogger, a cell phone account).

Is this someone I know? a neighbor perhaps? that is what concerns me because he could physically attack us. I don't care too much about some random person on the internet.
Journalist becomes the story at Mark Zuckerberg SXSWi keynote
robert virding (of "hello, robert" erlang movie fame) released "lisp-flavoured erlang" recently. Haven't played with it yet...
http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-questions/browse_threa...
Though this is quite interesting, I'm not sure why it's a sign that Vista is a disaster. I would hope that a company's internal emails about a product are extremely critical -- how else will you get the feedback needed to fix it?

Good software design (and most design) is extremely iterative. You stop when the product is good enough for the market to support. It seems to me that there weren't enough internal emails like this.
>> how to reliably "claim" a blog is a challenge

OpenID
Why write this:

f(X) ->
X1 = foo(X),
X2 = fab(X1),
X3 = bar(X2),
baz(X3).

When you can write this? (I assume this is legal)

f(X) ->
baz(bar(fab(foo(X)))).
> or if Microsoft tried to turn it in to a Windows program, I would switch to Reddit. I like Digg more, but either of those scenarios would kill Digg for me.

I find it hilarious that, even as bad as reddit's gotten, it could be anyone's second choice over Digg. At least reddit has the capacity to still be interesting. Digg, on the other hand, makes me want to kick a Golden Retriever.
It always bothered me that Enoch Root dies in Sweden during the second world war (page 541 in my copy) and then suddenly appears in a Manila prison in the 90's (page 860)

I mean what's up with that? He's a main character - did Neil Stephenson just forget that he killed him earlier in the book or what?
The Air makes your data and system more portable. Things you want with you all the time, can come along more easily.

The Kindle makes your books more portable. Things you don't really need after first read through, and never really urgently need, come along more easily.
Exactly. I imagine writing bug free code is a lot like site uptime, where each 9 added after the decimal place doubles the cost. There are few software companies (or maybe none) where debugging to that extent would make fiscal sense.
Surely they mean English-speaking world's 50 most powerful blogs.
Nascar racing is a sport in which enhanced humans compete at superhuman speeds. They wear specially developed exoskeletons on the field knows as cars. Its great fun to watch, and a complex set of rules has developed over the years as to which enhancements are allowed and how much.
It's like the "World Series": The best in America is the best in the world.

But seriously, they do include a number of blogs from countries whose main language is not English.
Levy: Gone, Without a Trace
Perhaps it used to, and is broken now. Putting the chemical back is fixing it, like a diabetic with insulin.
Ask YC:  How can I compete with someone who has a life story like this and who donates 50% of profits to charities?
"Heart transplant recipient starts new puzzle craze, donates profits to worthy causes"
That thing chokes my system - it's nice for sure, but I'm going to have to upgrade just to get useable speed.
I actually read "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" a while back and all I could think the whole time was "binary search, binary search, huffman tree, something other than linear search please god".
The alternative is to quit. To become a statesman.

Read: To become a quitter.

Obama has been strong in caucuses and in unimportant states. Clinton has been strong in primaries and critical states--evidentally including PA which is coming up, probably in Florida (hard to say) and definitely Ohio. Obama has won a lot of states, such as South Carolina, that are going to go to the GOP no matter what in November.

In the past couple of elections, the chattering classes have waxed long and strong about the importance of the hispanic vote--preaching this assertion mainly to the GOP. You don't hear that too much now--because of two facts:

1) The chattering class wants Obama to win, and

2) Clinton is taking the hispanic vote.

Obama has been winning the black vote handily. What does this mean in terms of overall strategy? Nothing. Blacks always vote about 90 percent Democratic in general elections. Clinton has been winning the Hispanic vote with about 60-80 percent. What does this mean? A lot--because they are swing voters.

The superdelegates, who will be needed to decide this, may well consider the strategic importance of Clinton. Probably not, though, since they are similar to caucus goers, who tend to "know better" than the people.
The Future of the Net (and how to stop it)
I stopped reading at #8... Icanhascheezburger. Funny and entertaining, yes. Powerful though?
While I don't agree with you, I see where you're coming from and don't think you deserve negative karma for your post.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment:

One could perhaps make the analogy to caffeine (as others in this thread already have). Sports and academia alike drink it all the time. This is a drug so generally harmless that we don't even consider it a drug. Who would argue that caffeine gives an unfair advantage? Does it not make sense that a drug with a more pronounced benefit and similarly innocuous side-effects should be accepted?
He's got an ugly ugly site. Go to the closest bookstore and count how many Sudoku books they have. Don't worry about competition like that. Just make your puzzles fun to do.
He has an elixir which allows him to be resurrected. He uses it in the Baroque Cycle as well as Cryptonomicon. If I remember correctly he also uses it to revive Bobby Shaftoe.
Is Web 2.0 Sustainable?
i agree - u r right !
Is this the real Zuck? After that poor interview on CBS' 60 Minutes and the 'every 100 years' hype?

"By now, Lacy was becoming aware of how she was losing the crowd, and said, "Anybody who's seen my (TV) show...has seen me throw a whole glass of water on (Techcrunch founder Michael) Arrington."

With a sly look, Zuckerberg grabbed her water glass and moved it out of her reach."
And if you do dislike Stephenson based on his other writing, this is still certainly worth a try. I thought it was excellent, but didn't enjoy his other books (other than Snow Crash).
After reading the list, finding that I've never read the majority of them, I feel better. I still don't understand the appeal of kottke.org "home of fine hypertext products"
Being a journalist at a tech conference/festival can be a dangerous thing... just ask the Dateline mole at Defcon last summer, Michelle Madigan:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/media-mole-at-d.htm...

Certainly these were different circumstances, though.
Kottke is a collection of good links. Kind of like news.yc or reddit, only picked by one guy who is much better at picking links than your average reddit or news.yc contributor.
this looks staged. I wonder how much she was paid
The Austin-American Statesman has video at:

http://www.austin360.com/news/mplayer/m/73367

Judge for yourself.
Wow, we all have pretty similar tastes. I always listen to something that has a steady beat and fight for my attention, so anything too lyric heavy is out the window.

Proton: www.protonradio.com
Frisky: http://www.cbs.nu/home/
CBS: www.cbs.nu/home/
Radiomagnetic: www.radiomagnetic.com
Thanks. The stories linked to on Kottke.org seem very diverse. Arts, photography, journalism.

Via kottke.org, I just read a disturbing but fascinating article on a photojournalist's ill-fated love affair with a Colombian assassin.
I don't know why, but I've seen many good comments on YCombinator this weekend. Yours is one of them.

Someone is labeled arrogant when they're successful enough that others have to pay attention to them, yet those same people are jealous it's not the other way around.
thanks for the link

Well, if you notice she listens carefully what he is saying
which is quite contrary to her attitude that follows

Also, she is just waiting his response to say what she is thinking.
So, it seems she was ready to attack.

Who paid her is the question to act like that. Or I'd just say is kind of normal reporter behaviour that tried to make the interview known.

Also I didn't find her attitude so rush as the article describes.

both got what they wanted
Dell laptops are great if you consider maintenance and repair. I spilled a whole glass of red wine on my Dell Inspiron 1710. Order a $20 keyboard, pull off a piece of trim and undo two screws, do the reverse operations with the new keyboard, and I'm done! It wouldn't have been so easy with my G4 Powerbook! I know, because I've taken it apart a bunch of times, once to upgrade the hard drive. The thing has screws that could be used by watchmakers, and lots of them!
The Huffpo is influential? They just seem like the average of every left-of-center editorial I've ever read.

Can anyone tell me any stories they've broken? Has anyone ever read anything on the Huffpo that they felt like quoting later? That changed their views in any way? I have trouble imagining this.

This article keeps getting weirder. Michelle Malkin is not very influential among conservatives -- Glenn Reynolds or the Powerline guys or the LGF guys have done a lot more to shape conservatives' web presence. Samizdata should rank below them. I don't see Lew Rockwell or Brussels Journal, who have both gotten far-right fringes (anarcho-capitalists and anti-EU isolationists) a lot more attention.

Also, no business blogs? No economics blogs? To the extent that valueinvestorsclub.com is a blog, it's more influential than all of these put together, since it's caused measurable multi-million dollar changes in stock and bond valuations. And no peak oil blogs? Where would peak oil be without blogs? How many people routinely chat with petroleum geologists?
Paul McCartney Signs $400 Million iTunes Deal For The Beatles Catalog
Thanks, it's always nice when someone's normal reaction is to assume the best instead of the worst:)

Also, like my personal mail, I'll only be able to use skype and such when I leave work. So, I won't be online until this coming weekend (hopefully).

Concerning child raising, I saw your conversation with that other guy. While your philosophy does seem like the best, it also seems to me that I can act unreasonably at times. Aristotle pointed this out, people can lack temperance. I think the keyword is akrasia.

Socrates, on the other hand, thought all moral failings were based on ignorance. From what I've noticed, the older people get, the more they lean to the former viewpoint. I'm not sure which view is correct; I like Socrates', but practically I follow Aristotle's.
Creating a web startup functionality in a department in a big corporation?
If somebody who manages a small group of developers who support web-based infrastructure at one of the biggest non-software companies asked you how you would create a web startup environment/mentality in a reorganization, what would you tell them? The two primary functions would be support and also additions to established portals. This person has been on teams (as manager) of the public, internal, and now the customer-facing site. I'm thinking that with established "products", and people who have worked in a big company for many years, a department can't really function like a startup, or shouldn't. What do you think?
Isn't that the very definition of failing in the marketplace?
Note: the capsized ship in that picture was salvaged/righted and brought to shore (http://tinyurl.com/2bwzdr)
I think making someone's karma filter subjective could solve the problem. Then it would also be hard to game the system, since you'd have to know how most people filtered karma.

This filter could either be based on how people vote, or using karma and something else as the criteria.

An example of the latter, I've thought the good comments would be those that maximize length and karma. That means they are both substantive and well written enough to hold people's attention. Plus, it's too long to be witty:) This could be implemented entirely client side without the need to open up voting data.

Finally, it'd fit great into the whole hacker mentality, since people could pass around and hack the best filters.

(note: this idea has been said by many others, I'm merely trying to perpetuate the meme)
In Response to “What Sucks About Erlang”
On a different note: PG, here's a bug I found.

The text under the submission form says:

"Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion. If there is no url, the text (if any) will appear at the top of the comments page. If there is a url, the text will be ignored."

It seems the text is no longer optional when url is left blank. Therefore, this should be reworded to something like:

"If you submit a url, the text will be ignored. If you leave url blank to submit a question for discussion, the text will appear at the top of the comments page."

(I know you can come up with better re-wording but I'm curious to compare.)
Aren't all languages sexps at the parse tree level? Lisp is basically a language without the syntactic top layer.
I can't comment on how much Erlang sucks (or not) but this quote does bring back memories:

If you’re writing code like in Damien’s example and you want to be able to insert lines without changing a bunch of variable names, I have a tip: increment by 10.
A Few Common Performance Mistakes
XFL: Flash's New Source Format
Explaining garbage collection
Dang, that makes me want to be a billionaire too! Inspired, rms?
It's crazy the amount of effort they put into the process, and yet the slightest computer bug blows up a whole shuttle. I forget which shuttle it was, but an arithmetic bug was replicated in both failsafe systems, and it was exactly this bug that caused the shuttle to crash. Nowhere is Murphy's law more true.
This sounds like a good idea for a greasemonkey script.
Is this Hacker News or Valley Wag?
When I mean fail, I mean not working at all until I send it to MS tech support, they fix it, and sent it back. I have to wait 4-6 weeks every time my xbox 360 breaks; that's why I care. it's happened once before... and given what I read online it'll happen another 2-3 times
No doubt this is true to an extent - some folks need the assist. But this article is about much more than that. A diabetic doesn't take insulin to get an edge in business or sports or academics.
Paul van Dyk
If it's a joke, what's the punchline?
For what it's worth, I've only seen it happen once, given the probably 10 Xbox 360's I've seen ranging from launch day to recent purchases. Clearly, your mileage will vary.

Back to the real point: you want your Xbox 360, you don't want Vista.
No, people are buying the Xbox 360.
Lew Rockwell did a lot more to kill attention seeing as he was outed as the ghost-author of the [person we aren't allowed to talk about here]'s controversial newsletters.
good point, you're right... I guess what I meant to say was that the same thing that plagues 360 that affects Vista's desirabilty, is quality. granted it hasn't stopped me from wanting to play 360... but in the next war I think Sony will learn from its mistake and I won't have to want MS's future crap...
IIRC, the application I am working on right now uses 128 bit ids. In fact, I believe that they are just randomly generated. Since each row we fetch is already quite large, the extra 64 bits isn't much of a cost, but the ability to generate new IDs without any overhead or communication between processes is very beneficial. (The app is distributed between as many as 300 machines, all of which try their best to keep in sync with each other in realtime.) We just have to be careful about how the id generators are seeded.
Bruce Schneier on Dual Use Technologies [video]
http://www.indiapost.gov.in/Netscape/epost.html

(About 15 cents per page)
Threading In Ruby
Is it a Leap Year?!
Git's Killer Feature (why it's better than Mercurial)
Personally, I find the idea of concept mapping to be much more 'useful' than mind mapping as I don't like having 1 big idea stuck in the middle of a map. However, to organize your thoughts in a not strictly linear format, there are worse ways than mind maps.

Also, having the ability to expand/collapse branches of the tree make it fairly useful for organization of projects or for GTD systems. This is not something easily mimicked with other note taking/text tools.
Oh, please, everyone knows Achewood and homestarrunner are both more powerful than the icanhascheezburger and Gaping Void.