skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I simply did not know most of the applications you listed, but I assumed that the true Apple feeling comes from software provided by Apple itself.

I don't deny that they do some things right, or at least set interesting trends. I am still amazed at how bad other companies are at copying apple's style (it does not seem that hard, but the clones are always horrible).

Anyway, I can only speak for Ubuntu, and I think they are really making giant steps towards usability. I am very happy with what is available on Ubuntu - it beats the usability of Windows in many ways, and personally I prefer Windows usability over OS X... One major gripe I have with OS X style is that it requires you to know so many things (like keyboard combinations). Windows and Ubuntu almost always let you find a way with the right mouse button. With OS X I often had to google to find out how to do trivial things (like cut+paste, file renaming, etc).

The latest Mac Book Air is a good example: the gestures on the mousepad might be a nifty feature, but they are something you have to learn somehow. There is nothing about the mousepad that suggests those features to you. Chances are, I personally would never learn them, just as I never learned to write the special letters on my Palm Pilot back in the day. But an OS X super-geek will be able to do wonders with them, perhaps, at least impress some girls at Starbucks.

You could be right that the true secret of Apple is the willingness of users to pay for stuff, hence more pretty shareware for Macs. Interesting!
Getting Schooled In Design
Yes, his comment about French people being bad at rational thinking was low quality. But why respond with an insult? That is also a type of low quality comment.
It's really closing down? Just like that? Not even announced in its own post?
He's getting between 10 percent to 20 percent per book. That's pretty good. Some really bad book contracts will specifiy 15 percent royalties on a book's profit...thus maybe $2.00 x .15
I started a company (http://www.electric-cloud.com/) right after the dotcom crash. I partly did this because I knew that going out and finding a job would be hard, partly because I also knew that it was going to take a while to get the product right, and partly because I really wanted to. Once we got funded we had job security for a few years, and we could weather the dotcom storm while creating cool software.
Sexual attraction seems kind of important to the survival of humans, though. Or at least it used to be (cloning and stuff like that might change that).

Of course there are cultural aspects to how women are being treated. Granted, there could be cultures where people would not automatically remark on the attractiveness of a female colleague. For example, if all women are hidden behind veils, and infidelity can get you killed, maybe people are much more careful about what they say (just guessing, I don't know).
I'm a fellow hacker, no economist, but I'd say that now is probably a good time. The state of the economy is going to be irrelevant until you go for the first big investment, at the very least. That's typically quite a bit of time down the line, by which time you'll be catching the economy at its best, during an upswing. If your first big investment is really early on, chances are you're onto something pretty significant, in which case the economy isn't going to stop you anyway.

~phil
This is a really common thought, and I have a lot of friends discussing the same thing. Basically in simple economic your opportunity costs decrease during this time.

If you are considering this, save your money and begin reducing your costs. If a _major_ downturn happens, you can likely live quite cheaply during those times.
This meme is dumb. Look at the pattern from last time:

1. New Technology

2. Enables qualitatively different consumer behavior (Anonymous video rental or mail-order > Creepy Theater).

3. Creates a large market of early adopters

4. Who embrace a particular technology, which goes on to mainstream success.

Nowadays, porn on video at home is the old, accepted behavior. Watching porn doesn't force anyone to become an early adopter like it did with VHS -- porn buyers can take a wait-and-see attitude just like everyone else. And then tehre is teh pr0n on teh internets...
The rise of the hypervisor: virtualization
If the US (I assume you are from the US) goes into recession, is there the possibility of you losing your job anyway?

Could the recession work in your favour? Goods will become cheaper, interest rates will be cut, there will be people to hire because unemployment will rise, etc. So if you have money saved up, it could actually go further.

Although VC investment may slow down during recession, developing through the recession will set you up for prime-time when the economy picks up and VC's want your soul...I mean invest.
"No one buys E-books."

Nobody buys ebooks when the publishers set a high price relative to printed books and have limited outlets for purchase. Also, there isn't a rendering device for the written word comparable to a book or an ipod. Then there are DRM issues for some ebooks.

1) Price -- You can get the printed book with free shipping for $29.69 from Amazon. I can only find the e-book at Apress.com. It costs $22.50. So I get a $7 discount when there's no shipping cost, no printing cost, no retailer cut, and no distribution cut. There's no ebook alternative, from what I can see, at Amazon for Pro Javascript Techniques on Kindle or basic PDF. Is the author getting any more royalty from an ebook sale even though a lot of the overhead is cut out?

2) Rendering device -- This is less of an issue for a programming title, because most of the readers are tethered to a computer anyway. Still, there's very little consumer penetration for very portable ebook devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. (I'm talking eInk devices that you can treat like a book.)

The digital music market took off because the portable rendering devices are awesome relative to the traditional systems. A little ipod delivers music just as good (to my ears) as the big stereos a decade or two before it. It's small, easy to use, and allows easy random access.

Ebooks have to compete against the book, which has great random access by flipping pages, no battery issues, and is easy to mark up. If they had an ebook reader with flexible display sheets like a page, you'd see a lot more ebooks getting sold.
Have you tried reinstalling windows?
iPhone spurs Web traffic, if not music sales
That will never happen. Read any book on evolutionary psychology to find out why.
>> Oh, right. One more thing. This is the last Uncov. Ever. I have been getting tired of it, and this has been manifesting itself in my writing. After seeing the spectacle at the Crunchies, I think it's finally time to quit.
When I was 15 I decided to move away from home and get my own life. Since 15 is a pretty young age to be moving out my mama told me that I would never succeed and that I would come crawling back after a month. That I would ever make it on my own.

Moving away from home was one of the best decisions I have ever made - I got to decide when to work, when to play, and when to sleep. And I have never looked back.

I think that you are in the same position. So take the plunge.
I'm 34 and finishing my degree in CS after being married for 10 years and having worked as a nurse for the last 15 years. Why was I a nurse? Because my parents didn't think that there was anything to the whole "computer craze", and they thought that nursing was a good, solid profession. I almost dropped out of nursing school to major in CS. And, I spent most of my free time in the computer lab, hanging out with the geeks. Go figure.

I know that parents get awfully nervous about this sort of stuff. But... sometimes they just don't understand. Especially when it comes to technology stuff and the tech biz.

If you have the money, and can give a startup a shot.. go for it. What's the worst case scenario? The worst thing that can happen is that you'll have learned a lot about starting your own business, and you will have learned a lot about new technologies, and your savings will be gone. That's it. That's the worst.
Assuming that you are going after a big hill - I think you need to figure out the following things:

1. Is it a big hill after all - your customers might want something else. If it is not a big hill then figure out what a big hill is and reorient-realign-refactor.

2. If 1.is true then figure out that your value proposition solves that big problem or not. For this you can sit with a target customer and figure that out. If your value proposition is not good enough then figure out what could be a good value proposition.

3. If you are convinced that it is a good value proposition then it is just a question of how you deliver it to the customer. And the most important thing is that you have to be convinced whether it is a good value proposition or not - and if you are then hang in there for as long as it takes and figure out a delivery method.

Having said that, I think the only time you need to call it quits is when you want to - and if you not want then there should be a way to make it fly, you just need to figure out how.

..just my two cents
Ha, he should have mentioned that most publishing contracts allow you to hire outside auditors to track how many copies were sold and for how much. I'm actually considering doing that for mine.
There's no reason that you can't keep your site going, and start another one. Monetize the site a bit, so it pays for it's own hosting, and give it another go. I say fail early, fail often.

If you're spending all your time nursing a site that just isn't gaining traction, there are other ideas that you could be pursuing that could gain traction and make you more money.
Photoshop vintage effect
Before intelligence, there was no such thing as 'sexual attraction' in the current sense. There was only the exact same thing animals have: programs that behave in certain ways, based on certain inputs. Like a DARPA car steers left on certain input, an animal has sex on certain input.

With the advent of intelligence, came the ability for high-level interpretation of sense input -- we might say that events took on meaning. From a survival point of view, the ability to reinterpret arousal chemicals, and other things, was no serious danger: any culture that did that would die out. (And even if it was dangerous for the species, evolution doesn't do advanced planning of that sort.)

What we have today, and call sexual attraction, involves many layers of intelligent interpretation, which we (largely unintentionally) teach to the next generation -- ie, it is culture. If parents behaved differently, the meaning of sexual attraction would change.

Edit: By analogy, DNA = assembly language. We program in higher level languages. (Imagine programming in 500 years though, so it's much further removed from assembly). At some level of abstraction, the original details of DNA/assembly are totally irrelevant to the level we normally think in.
A few for-pay sites are in the top 100 overall by traffic, so it would seem they must.
Very cool. I've recently started using http://keishi.net/ipodia/ for online Wikipedia browsing. Good if you iPhone isn't jailbroken.
Hi there. I use the site pretty religiously. I hope that my comments are insightful.

I know a few girl hackers. They do mention a lot of what might be called 'social friction'. In some cases, they stay around through undergrad because computers are a really magical, flexible medium.

The good news is that we like a lot of hackers and scientists and technical people. They're interesting. Other fields have their human debris, too. Lawyers have frat-boys. Lit-majors have bullshitters. But rarely do other fields have people getting together to make things, and that's just a lot of fun. :-)
Palpable computing: a taste of things to come
I have talked to a couple of friends in a similar dillema. My take on the whole thing is that there are two kinds of people:

1. Those trying to find a reason to do a startup.

2. Those trying to find a reason to not do a starup.

"the choice has already been made, it must merely be understood" ...(from the Matrix)
Recessions come and go.

If you can find a sustaining revenue source ealy on, by doing something thatXs truly new and useful, I canXt see a reason why not start a startup even during a recession.

Actually, if what you sell really benefits users, specially if your users are other companies, youXll probably find many of them.

Finally, during recessions, thereXs a lot of great talent available on the market.

ItXs good to remember that most of GoogleXs growth as a company happened during the "nuclear winter" of the web after the bubbleXs burts in 2000.
Here's another approach to building an offline Wikipedia reader: http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffli....
> The last word just dripped with disdain, as if that was a mid-level in Dante's vision of hell.

That's dead-on. It is exactly that.
Go with your gut. If you're too scared, it's probably not right for you at this time. If you can't stand the thought of staying in the corporate world, then you should pull the trigger and pursue your dreams regardless of anything else.
The economy in crisis - will the cure be worse than the disease?
An interesting idea, but I think that some sort of solution where you could not only keep a copy of Wikipedia in your pocket, but get rolling updates to it every day/week/time_period would be nicer. Especially on an iPhone/iPod Touch, with the wi-fi or EDGE.
write and submit a patch!
oops... "bubbleXs burts" -> bubbleXs burst.
When you grow old you won't regret the things you did, but the things you didn't.

In my time I have done illegal raves, had sex with a porn model, started a bar in Ibiza, done drugs, started a crash-and-burn dot-com, and all sorts of other crazy stuff. But when I talk to my friends now (im in my mid-thirties) they wish they had not held back, and just gone with their ideas.

So get going, you have nothing to lose... If it fails at least you tried, your friends will envy you for having the guts to try, and in 10 years you will have a great story to tell.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant
I'll have to check out some of these listed books, if only to have a reference around.

Like with PHP, ASP, Perl and others, I learned the language simply by looking at existing apps, hacking them up, then sitting down and making something of my own and all the fun trial and error that gives.

I find it a much nicer way to learn a language than from a book. But then, I'm a very hands-on person.
StickK To Your Commitments [Steven Levitt]
7 Tips for Managing Your Releases Without a QA Department
Rails is 100% magic with 0% design
EULA out of control
That's correct. Thanks for clearing that up!
Damn... Where am I supposed to read reviews on Web 2.0 startups from now on?
dont give up on your day job, and dont give up on your startup.

find room for both, and if you find that you are still in love with this project after a month or two, then you have that much more information (and money) to go out and finally leave your day job.
It's funny he mentions donating money to the Nazi Party as a means of motivating yourself. I'm planning to do a startup this summer and am saving to get the starting capital. I'm always worrying about not having good enough skills, not knowing enough, etc. So to force myself to start, I made a big deal out of it to tell everyone that I'm going to start this summer, and if I won't start, I'm going to donate the money - about E8000 = $12000 - to the Storm Front or something. Everybody says I'm crazy and if I don't start I should donate the money to a good cause, but the extreme social embarrassment associated with the original setup virtually guarantees I will start this summer :-)
What's In A Name?
There are extensions for RSS/Atom that allow threaded comment feeds; if you combine this with the feed reading support in Thunderbird it might almost get you a news-like reading experience. Probably the biggest challenge would be getting blogs to output threaded feeds.

A standard protocol for posting comments on blogs sounds like it would be politically difficult due to fear of comment spam (it doesn't matter whether that fear is justified). Technically I think you could use unathenticated AtomPub, but I don't know if anyone has implemented this use case.

As for NNTP, you can't serve it from a $7 Dreamhost account so obviously it sucks.
Interview with Jeff Clavier of Softtech VC on raising money
Meta observation: By the time a technology story is in the Economist it's probably old news on Hacker News.
If you can keep your job and hack on the weekends, you can seed-fund your own damn self.

Less worry about money will also allow you to work on what you enjoy, without the constant spectre of "How am I going to monetize this?"
Read the 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. It will give you some useful perspective on this.
Huh... that's harsh, and is coming from more knowledgeable Rails hacker than I am, I wasn't aware of this mess with :union and :group in AR, while I don't mind Rails' habit of passing around hashes of options.

The point I agree with him the most is that "different parts of Rails are accessible at different stages of processing the request". This one annoyed the hell out of me, it took me forever to solve the problem of adding your own custom configuration options and accessing them from anywhere in the app.
Are you working on this full-time or part-time? Either way a 1000 users a day in 2 years is not worth your time. You time is best spent on identifying an opportunity that has the potential to be huge.

It takes the same amount of effort to do something which is tiny than to do something big. Leave this behind, so something different and huge - you have valuable experience now. You have to decide is this worth the effort?
The Crunchies College: B-lessons from the winners
He can't scale because he doesn't grok state: a direct consequence of his not understanding functional programming.
i don't know you, i don't know your idea but even if i did i would still have innuficient data to answer such question.

the only thing certain is that the doing a startup is totally different from a normal job.

you must be ready for a serious commitment.
New MacBook Air Ad (Parody)
"There's no overarching design or scheme of things, it's just a bucket of tools with some glue poured in."

This premise is wrong, so I almost TLDR'd the post immediately. I decided to skim further, though:

"And to stress the first point again, Rails never concerns itself with the big-picture problem of 'writing webapps.' It only thinks as big as 'outputting HTML strings' and 'querying the DB for a list of things.'"

This is provably false. The average reader of the intro chapter of most Rails books could tell you that, for example, Rails enforces high-level application design patterns like Model-View-Controller, thus exposing his statement as factually untrue. The guy seems to have languages like PHP (or, charitably, Ruby) confused with the Rails framework. Nice try by the OP, but ultimately an unconvincing troll.
I blame the press for all this, if noone reported this crap noone would be selling their shares etc. I have seen some real scare mongering going on in the press in the uk for weeks.

In short if you have enough money to last you for year then go for it. You could always freelance for extra money if needed.
(Mac Users) Microsoft relents: Vista consumer virtualization ban lifted
employeesuggestionbox.com

We have our employees submit at least 1 idea a month and after 4 months we have already implemented 6 ideas resulting in a new product and other cost saving measures.
It's easy to piss on things after the fact. It is pretty common behavior in our field to try and make yourself look good by criticizing others' work. It's usually pretty easy to find things to pick on with the benefit of hindsight, but much harder to create something new.
it doesn't cost $3000 unless you want $1200 of options.
Have you tried some of the other ruby frameworks, like merb? Merb is not that different from rails, but seems to perform better and can be used with other ORM's than ActiveRecord as well.
Paper: Facebook Now Pulling in More Users then MySpace
This article is spot-on. It outlines why people like me are former professors, especially the tendency for departments to dial the math way back in favor of attracting students, keeping them happy, and graduating them to show the dean how much growth the department has experienced. When I covered recursion equations and how to solve them in introductory data structures and algorithms classes, most of the class proceeded to bitch and moan about it. When I assigned them exercises to implement associative data structures, the ones who used pre-built Java libraries and received 0 marks complained loudly. It seemed like such a waste of their time and mine.
And that's why most people still don't commit suicide? ;P
Cool! And it will even fit on the 4GB iPhone.
MVC, while a valuable application design principle, is not really tied to 'writing webapps.' The article mentions things like the stateless nature of HTTP requests, which are very much bound up in the idea of writing software accessible over the web. Something like Seaside (a Smalltalk framework for developing web apps) is much more aligned with the request-response cycle that is the web. It uses the continuations feature of Smalltalk to map that cycle into a natural language idiom. Neat.

Rails is certainly not the be-all and end-all of web design. Lately it seems to be the 'cool' thing to bash Rails, but I'm not sure that that's warranted either. It seems to be a backlash against all the hype that Rails has generated along the way.

Time will tell whether or not Rails will become a piece of timeless software or if it will simply fall to the wayside.

Until then, go forth and write great software!
Text only, probably
...I'm kind of taken aback by how clever that is. I wish I could upvote that many times.
Even if every point the author makes is true - there are still plenty of reasons why you should use rails in many cases. The first of which I'd argue is you can get shit done fast! For startup founders, this is essential. Make something. Put it in front of users as fast as possible. See what they like and dislike. Fix it. Repeat. Rails makes this super fast and easy. Once you get to the point where you really care about any of the things this guy mentions, hire a team to rewrite it. You'll need to at some point anyway...