skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should pay closer attention.

The game is a Far Cry (pun intended) from DirectX 10. The demo was also on a Windows machine. Let's see the same demo on Linux.

The original poster is absolutely correct.

C++ written for KDE is going to run on Windows now. Well, having worked at Adobe when I was just out of college, I can say that they have VERY bright people there.

Bright enough to get C++ code written for Linux to run on Windows? in a VM? Which itself would be in a browser?

I have to think that VMWare or Parallels would have done that already if it was doable. Or, if it is doable, and just hard, VMWare and Parallels will do it better than Adobe in any case. Be assured, with the value inherent in such a product they WOULD release their own versions.

I can hear the Flash VM talking now:

Scenario 1:

Oh C++ code . . . you want me to run some Intel vectorized math routines? No problem . . . those Microsoft templates you got there are REALLY cool . . . uhh . . . well let me just get this Objective C library here on this shiny new MacBook Pro and . . . Oh Wait? . . . Well . . . Maybe I can try this GCC library and . . . SLASH!!!

<Leopard kills Flash VM process, and drags carcass home to feed cubs.>

Moral of the story: Predatory cats always target the slow ones.

Scenario 2:

Ahh C++ code . . . I get it now . . . you want to use this really cool GeForce 9xxx series card to do instancing. That is AWESOME!!! Let me get started on that for you . . . uh . . . ahh . . . OK so I'm an OpenGL context and you want me to make a DirectX call . . . Oh OK no problem . . . ahh . . . . umm . . . OK so I'm on Linux, can I ask a quick question? Your developer didn't supply you with a software DirectX 10 implementation did he?

<C++ code makes sad realization that both developer AND Flash VM are idiots>

Moral of the story: Even intelligent things, C++, can be put in situations where it looks really stupid.

Scenario 3:

Oh mapped memory? SURE, I'll just go over here to this pool of unused hard drive space and . . . THWOCK!!! THACK!!! WOCK!!! WHACK!!!

<Flash VM realizes that VISTA is actually a Dominatrix, and he is now being beaten about the head, neck and chest with the interrupt controller he asked for.>

Moral of the story: Something like unused hard drive space, or cross compilation, may sound REALLY good . . . but make sure you know who has a claim on it . . . because she might be a REAL bitch. Or worse . . . Microsoft.

Scenario 4:

Oh . . . multicore . . . umm . . . why don't I go ahead and kill myself now so you can get to the blue screen faster.

<Single gunshot is heard from the other room, system hangs without getting to the bluescreen, because Flash VM had problems even managing to commit suicide. The bullet went through its brain, but its vital organs were untouched.>

Moral of the story: Actually test claims before you start making plans, a lot of the potential technologies you want to use, or potential spouses you will meet, will make claims of intelligence, but there may not be too much between the ears.
Yes, IP when used as a catchall moniker for these things just confuses the issues:

- Ideas vs Expressions

- Exhaustable vs Inexhaustable resources

- Property vs Control
"I think that, when pressed, many people who sympathize with Doctorow in this debate would assert that a thing that has no physical manifestation conveys no rights to its creator. But I wish they would come out and say that directly"

That is exactly what many IP opponents state. For example -

Against Intellectual Property, by Stephan Kinsella:

http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
Will LinkedIn's New Mobile Platform Work?
I had the same problem. He seems to define the problem quite elegantly (it's use isn't exclusive, so it's not property, and the word 'property' leads to fallacious reasoning), but he never offers any idea what we should do/say instead.
Definitely learn to cook. You will eat well and spend less. I will often spend $5 to cook a well-rounded meal that feeds me for dinner, lunch, and dinner again...

Just try not to get into an unspoken cooking competition with your roommate. Two months into the semester that my roommate and I decided to learn how to cook, we were spending $30 a meal at the grocery store, trying to outdo each other with dishes like Fillet Mignon with Caramelized Onions, and Grilled Swordfish. Don't do that. Stick to the basics.
Having lived here for 30 years here is my two cents.

San Diego is not a startup town. To expensive, not enough talent, and everyone good longs to head north. I love this place and have had marginal success working here, but the politics here, and the folks that have money who drive it, are to conservative. You would be happier in the valley in terms of surrounding yourself with like minded thinkers.

Nuff said...
That's a piss poor understanding of history.

The only thing that turned the tide of the war for the Russians was winter. Stalin's kill 'em all approach had virtually no effect on the performance of his army. In fact, Hitler's fight 'til the death orders ended up being laughed at my German commanders.

When you're a nazi choosing to surrender to Stalin's red army, you understand the true meaning of death.
Ask YC: What do you use for Time Tracking/Invoicing?
I've recently started using Harvest for this kind of stuff where before I was tracking it badly on paper (didn't really decide what was the authoritative place for this kind of data before this.) But, I'm not happy delegating this to the network (what if the Internet's down? etc.)

What do you use to track time and invoice your customers?
I definitely agree with Doctorow on the disingenuity of the phrase "Intellectual Property." And I agree with him that the creator of a particular piece of knowledge has a long-term interest in that knowledge. I don't think that the point of this article is to propose a new paradigm; rather, it introduces the idea to the general public that as a society we need to find new ways of interacting with the very idea of knowledge. The point of the article is to encourage collaborative discussion, and not yet to offer some new approach.

In the case of copyright I will note that under current laws things without physical manifestation already do not convey rights to their creator. Dances are not copyrightable. Facts are not copyrightable. Mathematics is not copyrightable. Music is not copyrightable until it is recorded. A work must have a creative element and be translated into a fixed medium to be copyrighted.

If something has no physical manifestation, can it be considered to be 'created' at all?

Doctorow is not implying that things which fall under the purview of copyright, trademark, and patenting should give no rights to their creator. In fact he argues the opposite, which is that the creator has a long-term interest in the creation which we as a society need to recognize. However, drawing analogies with exclusive physical property leads to harmful actions which become more and more abusive in this digital age.

I won't claim to have the final answer as to what the correct approach to the dissemination or control of knowledge is. But I do know that the current system of 'Intellectual Property" is broken. Our increasingly connected, digital society must reexamine its assumptions about power over and the creation of knowledge.

Part of the problem is that we don't yet have to words to frame this discussion. What should we call knowledge which required creativity to generate which recognizes the creator's engagement in the work without the contentious control implied by the word 'property'? Knowledge fixed in a digital medium is trivially copied, disseminated, and altered. The level of societal control needed to prohibit the exercise of these fundamental digital rights tramples on the liberty of the individual.

Something needs to change.
It does look nice, the color scheme is nice.
A web spider that's run by out sourcing work to China. We could have hundreds of thousands people going to flash websites and entering the contents into a database. Would work flawlessly.
A few problems with this article:

1. Nine pages? Put it all on one page. Almost everyone has broadband now.

2. Got government grants to develop his startup and still failed? This is the wrong place to complain. Lots of people here would love a handout (that's what it is), but never get the chance.

3. Too long. Hacker news is for 5 minute breaks. That story could have been 50% as long.

In spite of all that, great read. I had to keep going to find out what happened. Nice enough guy. Sure hope he gets everything to work out.
Developing tech hub in Providence and Rhode Island
actionscript is derivative of ECMAscript, it wasn't that hard to pick up
I looked at the series this article was written for, and the previous article does make a suggestion, and names a group which is working for it at the WIPO.

Here's the key summary:

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

Hopefully my small extraction here does not fall astray of the copyright laws.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/29/copyright.l...
About 6 years ago I worked on my own "Battlebot." The thought of mounting a camera and a machine gun to the thing certainly crossed my mind as a simple "lifeless soldier" option for the military.
It's much nicer that before, though.
It should integrate in real time with the rest of the BBC's content.

Where are the recipes when cookery programmes are showing on TV? Where are the playlists when a DJ is spinning tunes? Where are the transcripts for spoken radio?
Disturbing. I find it strange that no one reacted to this part yet :

"I had nothing to do with my own success. [...] I was born with the wiring for capital asset allocation. I had the right wiring at the right time. Temperament is a large part of my wiring. I was naturally good at it, and I used some feedback to develop it better.[...]"

Do you realize the logical assumption behind such statement ?

It means that if you fail, you're not responsible either, because you weren't born in the right place at the right time with the right "wiring". So basically Mr. Buffet doesn't believe in free will, and if you're on the lucky side, "there is no reason to feel guilty about it.". If you're on the unlucky side, there is really nothing you could do about it but try to be happy anyway with what you have.

But isn't the american society based on individual merit ? "Anyone can succeed if he really wants to", wich leads to the logical implication that "if you fail, it's also your fault". Mr. Buffet's philosophical conclusions can be summed up by his "ovarian lottery" metaphor that comes up a lot of times in the interview : you won in the vagina, should you apologize to the others ? Then why should it be different in the society, son ?

Now let me be clear : I'm not emitting a moral judgment about what Mr Buffet says, that he should believe something else or whatever. I just find it paradoxal that Mr. Buffet, wich is one of the icon of the american society, tends to not believe in what makes the heart of the american society paradigm : free will & individual merit.
Scrolling to the bottom means you read it. Or do you comment without reading?

No, scrolling to the bottom means scrolling to the bottom. If I scroll so that the last word of your content is at the very bottom of my browser screen, my scrollbar shows that I'm only about 15% into the entire content of the page. The following 85% is taken up by clutter and the comments of other readers which are poorer in organization and in content. Furthermore since ReadWriteWeb has no karma scheme, there is no good way to provide feedback to other commenters.

ReadWriteWeb's layout also sucks. On my laptop the silly ads and tag box to the right consume 40% of the window's horizontal area. That area is completely blank for 90% of the page (everything after I get to the section titled "Monopolistic Markets: The Tale of the Unfunded Startup"). If I try to correct for this by using my browsers zoom control, all that happens is I get smaller text and even more whitespace to the left and right of the content. YC Hacker news on the other hand handles this exactly right.

No account is needed and no approval is needed

I can distinctly recall otherwise when replying to something else on ReadWriteWeb in the past. Is that something you configure or did they change their policy recently?
san diego really sucks if you don't have a car.

As opposed to the Silicon Valley??
Nice source!
Sounds like an opportunity to me. These VCs may be looking to diversify.
Interview with Jason Knight, CEO and co-founder of Wesabe
...

I don't think you fully understand what Adobe is doing -- they are compiling down to AVM2 bytecode using LLVM. And DirectX is abstracted out of Actionscript, so you gain the benefits of DirectX when it's available, but the AVM will resort to other means when it's not.

That Quake II demo is a completely self-contained flash animation, and will run anywhere Flash runs (including linux).

Edit: It sounds like some people think Adobe is promising to run ANY C++/Java/Whatever application in Flash. They're not. Some C applications however, like Quake II, can be coerced to run in Flash's single-threaded platform-agnostic environment. The developer who gave that presentation at Max described the work he had to do to emulate threading in order for Quake II to run. It wasn't easy, but I'm sure it was far easier than porting the whole codebase.
Meat costs a lot more than just money
Clojure Presentation in Northampton, MA
On March 20th, the regular meeting of the Western Mass Developer's Group will feature Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp that compiles to Java Bytecode and runs on the JVM. It features persistent, immutable data structures and a model for creating multi-threaded designs.

(about 2 hrs from Boston, 40 minutes from Hartford)
"Ok, now put the play bar on the left. No wait, the right. A little more. Good, right there."

Users would put up with this for about 10 seconds before just grabbing the mouse and dragging things where they want them.

I think that's why voice interfaces have not become popular. PC applications tend to be developed for a direct manipulation (window, icon, menu, pointing device) paradigm, so adding a voice interface doesn't help much. A useful voice interface requires an entirely new UI paradigm.
I don't bill others this way right now but my favorite system for people who bill me is currently http://www.freshbooks.com
Earth's Final Sunset Predicted
The Kano Model of Customer Satisfaction
Cory Doctorow is a windy, pompous self-aggrandizing douchebag but I grudgingly admit that he is correct in this case.
'Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don't know why that has not happened already," he said.'

Perhaps because Al Qaeda is rather heavy on the "screaming genocidal religious nutcase" types and rather light on the "genius robot engineer" types?
Thank YOU, edu, for helping to keep it "fresh, clean, and smart". (nice choice of words)
Sweet tech. Bad design.

1. The giant module titles are friendly for first timers, but regular users – for whom all these customizable modules were created – are not served at all by them, in fact, they detract from the experience by taking up a lot of space and demanding your focus because they're the LARGEST THINGS on the page.

Check out how Newsvine handles module titles: http://www.newsvine.com/

2. All together the page is a jumble. I understand that they're giving users the power to move things around and possibly make it look bad, but why have it jumbled by default? Also going from module to module there's little consistency: they have completely different layouts.

Check out how msnbc's modules have a consistent structure: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

3. I can't help feeling like there isn't anything on the page: There is so much chrome. And the gray dividers between modules create a lot of noise. I have to really focus to find the few unordered lists which are the content.

4. Why can I collapse modules? What problem does that solve? If I don't want a module, I will uncheck it. If it's something I don't need often I will move it to the bottom.

I'm sure some will like it, and it's animated (neat!), but I'm not keen on providing two ways to do one thing.

5. Nitpick: I hate when the hover state of buttons is the just gradient reversed: it's lazy and it always throws me because I worry that I accidentally clicked.

(I know this isn't Design News, but a lot of people here are interface designers for at least their own apps, so hopefully someone finds my critique valuable.)
<DFS>

Do you have a blog I can add to my favorites? If not, you should.

</DFS>
Leaky abstractions.

Several people have pointed out that people lacking the word "programmer" in their job description write code to get their jobs done. But what happens when they have two scripts that look similar to them but one finishes in an hour and the other is still running two weeks later? Then you need someone to break out the big O notation, look at the source code for the high level language and figure out what's really happening.

The need for this will continue to diminish over time in most firms. However, for companies that provide software over the internet this will remain very important (make something at Google 5% faster and you're probably saving them a whole lot of money). So, just one more reason to make sure your career does not hinge on getting paid to write software at a place where software is not the main source of revenue.
A quick intro to garbage collection
WRONG.

There is no SUITABLE replacement for DirectX instancing under OpenGL that would be available on other platforms. To say that you will get the benefits of DirectX where it is not available is to be disingenuous. Microsoft goes to great lengths to make sure that, even with a VM doing the work for you, game developers will find it difficult to

"gain the benefits of DirectX when it's available, but the AVM will resort to other means when it's not" - as you put it.

Over the years 100's of millions of dollars have been spent to ensure that you CAN'T do that. If you talk to Parallels or VMWare they will tell you that they can get DirectX 8 to work at times, Direct X 9 seldomly, and then they will have a good belly laugh while pointing at you when you ask them about virtualizing Direct X 10. This is the way things are for now, until the requisite extensions have been developed for OpenGL.

This is not just me spouting off at the mouth. The entire gaming industry has grudgingly accepted this for quite some time. Steve Jobs has been looking for ways around it forever. If Adobe has people who can do this, they won't have them for long, because Steve is sending over a limo I guarantee it.

And what about proprietary templates? Adobe is going to translate all of those too.

Multicore programming? Gonna translate between the Intel multicore stuff and . . . say . . . the Cell processor stuff?

Taking it further, we all know that CUDA code will work beautifully if the machine you're on happens to have an NVidia card, but what if you have an ATI card?

Don't even get me started on some of these templates for mapped memory management . . .

RESPONSE TO PARENT EDIT:

Thanx for clarifying the assertions you were making.
I'm more concerned about Bush getting those than the alleged terrorists.
I'm a San Diego expat who now lives in San Francisco without a car. I love it. I just wish we had SD weather here...
Gaffes Keeping Geeks Out of the Board Room
Opera drops Yahoo! for Google
VC Fundraising Manual: Convertible Debt: Delaying Valuation
Convertible debt is a valuable tool, especially for very early stage startups. This financial arrangement enables an investor to invest money in your company without negotiating a valuation for your company. These contracts enable the debt to convert to equity when the next round of capital is raised at a specified value. Essentially, convertible debt enables seed investors to leave the valuation work to the next investors.

This can be very helpful for seed stage investments as it can be disadvantageous to set a valuation of the company before the first professional investor gets involved. For example, if the seed stage investors invest at a much higher valuation than the professional investors are willing to do in the Series A, there can be...

More @ www.markpeterdavis.com
Four (or Five!) Reasons Why...People Want Google to Stumble
the only changed the homepage
I'm a native. I found the weather to be boring. It is always sunny, never rains, and the plants are either evergreen or scrubby bushes. So you don't get a sense of what season it is.

If you work there then you are not outside much though - you get into your car in your covered garage, and drive to the office park. If you want lunch, then you drive from the office park to the strip mall.

It is not a walkable place at all--even in the strip malls, to get from one end to another you drive from one spot in the parking lot to another.
I guess form factor could be a major part of it, although the 15" MBP does support DVI. And there are lots of laptops with decent non-integrated video cards but no DVI support -- support for DVI isn't exactly a high-end video card feature, after al.
There are startups, just not as many web ones. If you want biotech or wireless then you are in business though.
ob xkcd submission
"Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

Is that really true? Couldn't it be the other way around? If I am designing a module that doesn't talk to Bill's module, then I have no real need to communicate with Bill, right?

I'd guess it's more that the communication structure of an organization mirrors the structure of what they're designing.
Downvoting, oh how I long for thee.
Bingo. It's hard to predict things like story quality or actor chemistry, so those things are not good investments (from the POV of the studios), even if they can have bigger effects on earnings. This is why so many sequels get made - it takes the unpredictability out of story and screen chemistry. Unfortunately, the only way to find the limit is to beat the story/characters to death.

Things that do provide predictable financial returns are:

- big stars (basically a marketing expense, although they can affect chemistry in unpredictable ways - see DaVinci Code, The)

- visual effects, since given the same story, a pretty movie will do better than an ugly movie. But everyone has chased this one to the point of diminishing returns, and the audience expectation here is through the roof.

- production quality (things like editing, lighting, etc) - but this is so universally high quality that it's now more of an expense of doing business than a differentiating quality.

Basically, expensive movies tend to do well because studios throw money at areas with more predictable returns. And since the studios have quarterly earnings reports and shareholders, etc, that's what they focus on.