skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
<item>
<title>Ask PG: Link to comments in RSS</title>
<link>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112684</link>
<comments>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112684</comments>
<description>
&lt;a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112684"&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;
</description>
</item>
From the reason they quoted ("the $31 per share offer massively undervalues Yahoo!"), my guess is that this 'rejection' is just the first play in a dance over the price, which I'm sure Microsoft was prepared for, even if it bid high initially in an attempt to appear the White Knight.

If Yahoo!'s board really did not want to sell, it would have cited lack of benefits to the merger, culture differences, or technology platform differences, which are all real concerns.

Their risk is that if they ask too much, then Microsoft will slink away, which will probably crush their share price for a while. Hopefully some people had options that they could excercise under the recent 40% jump in Yahoo!'s shares, although considering it's decline in the last year, even that seems unlikely.
Ok, I waited to see if anyone would say it and no one has.

1) It is always easier to create a given user experience with the desktop. Desktop apps have more resources available and more tools. This favors the user.

2) Web apps are always easier to distribute. This includes distribution, versioning, upgrades, etc. This is not up for discussion. This always favors the producer.

3) It is generally easier to incorporate non-local data into a web app. This is not a significant factor compared to #1 and #2.

4) Success = balance between benefiting user and producer. Depending on the app, one will be favored over the other (i.e. low latency needed for games vs. low cost per user needed for ad-supported services).

5) If the user experience is acceptable to the user, then the producer benefits mean that it will probably be created as a web app. As more tools make producing acceptable user experiences cheaper, more apps will be web apps.
The point is that the original poster used a bugmenot account to post this and thus anyone using the same account can delete this post.

http://www.bugmenot.com/view/news.ycombinator.com
Hmm. There's very little difference between actual complexity and perceived complexity. If you add options for features that could possibly increase complexity, you also increase the chance that someone feels the perception that the app is complex.

For that reason, I still dislike the idea of hidden/user-activated features.
Expensive Wine Just Tastes Better
A variation of this has been proposed before. However, it wasn't an auction. The idea was that people could include a micro-payment with their message. If their payment is below your threshold then the message would be bounced. If the payment is above your threshold then it is delivered to you. If you like the message then you refund the payment. If the message is spam then you keep the payment.

This system makes most spam uneconomic and financially compensates users for the remainder. It can be combined with whitelisting and it doesn't preclude legacy inputs.

It is certainly better than Microsoft's digital stamp which earns you nothing and Microsoft one cent for each of your messages - legitimate or not.
Likewise, I think Microsoft's perception that they need to get into Search and Advertising via Yahoo! just goes to show they have swallowed the Google Kool-aid (the desktop is dead and all growth is on the net). Google should consider that a victory right there.

I think Microsoft should try to change the game rather than beat Google on it's home turf. Surely if it focused on technical excellence for once and stopped following everyone else around, it could probably leverage it's desktop dominance into something. Of course, Microsoft has never been apt to do that.
BoxBe is a startup you should look at...they started with this idea, but according to a few friends of mine that use it no one has ever bothered to pay them for their attention. As a revenue generating business model, it seems thats spammers don't pay!

btw - Goodmail has signed up ISP customers to get mailers to pay a couple of cents per message to "guarantee" the delivery of the message. To me seems like a protection racket of corp. customers by the ISP and Goodmail.
“I like the moment when I break a man’s ego.”
Could you give a couple of examples of what you consider bad? CL is so much better than anything I used prior to it that I'm not very sensitive to these distinctions.
Shares offer proportional votes.
Yahoo’s Bold Whimper
Are you sure you don't mean 'cat foo.py' or maybe 'cat - < foo.py'?
The first sign of trouble is the sheer weight of CLTL.

The fundamental problem with CL is that it's an accumulation of bits written by many people at different times in different styles. A lot of it is written in a style common in the mid 80s Lisp Machine days when it was the fashion to give everything every possible option. The loop macro is a particular horror, with its unLisplike syntax and semantics so complicated that the ANSI standard doesn't even try to explain it.

CL is also missing a few things. Not having continuations is a problem, and having a separate namespace for functions adds a lot of complications.
"Massively Undervalues" huh...

Let's see, a stock price of under $20/share previous to the $31/share offer being made. A greater than 50% premium is massively undervaluing the company?

Granted the market is not a perfect indicator of true value of a company. Google was a good example of this when they were valued at around $100/share and then proceeded to quadruple in value over the next 2 years.

However, Yahoo is no Google. They have not been able to effectively compete. I'm surprised Microsoft was willing to offer such a premium for Yahoo in the first place. Maybe I underestimate the synergies of the two companies and/or Microsoft's concern about their online division.

The interesting question to me is what comes next...Does Microsoft:
A. Sweeten the offer
B. Walk away completely
C. Give it a year expecting Yahoo's price to drop significantly before making a subsequent offer?

Unless the Yahoo boardmembers have some plan up their sleeves, I expect some very unhappy shareholders should B or C pan out.
The article is marvelous - uncommonly literate and wistful. The video is also a must for anyone interested in Fischer. I'd never seen him, or Cavett that I remember, and the interaction between the two is riveting. There's an atmosphere of tension that Cavett manages expertly. He senses right away when a particular direction is getting stuck and gracefully diverts attention to something else. He acts as a buffer between Fischer and the audience when the audience gets nervous and starts to laugh. And he senses when the connection between the two of them is robust enough to tolerate raising some pretty charged material, such as Fischer's accusations of cheating and walking out of matches. This is a dialogue between two masters of very different arts.
Visual proof that this would be a poor move for microsoft, at least according to investors.
http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...
I'm pretty sure he was serious. Large masses of unemployed people aren't good news for anyone. While having a dream job beats having a lousy job, having a lousy job is a heck of a lot better than the hopelessness and helplessness that comes from not being able to get a job.
Great comments everyone. If there's one thing I agree with the other on its the first line in one of his other articles.

"Nothing bothers me more than unchallenged ignorance."

http://metacircular.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/the-triumph-of-...
Doesn't this almost always happen with mergers and acquisitions?
Terry Tao: The blue-eyed islanders puzzle
He's criticized the lack of a generic print function, calling it "a face-smashing insult to usability."

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/when-polymorphism-fails

Note that like many of the alleged deficiencies of OCaml, this was a compromise for performance.
On the Origin of Species
Yeah, I was totally dumbstruck by how well this article is written. It's one of those rare NYT gems.

It's nice to read something that puts Fischer in a somewhat positive light, considering how much negative press there was around his death.
That is the most beautiful website ever.
There are some pretty good comments about the deal over at slashdot.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/09/1812239
Is it possible though, that the stock prices went up as a sign of investor relief? I'm not sure all stockholders were too happy with the deal.
$30 can buy a cheap bluetooth webcam that could do the same job (given that you have a ... laptop on your car), but cool nonetheless.
Theres a slight problem, that being when you put "Ano," which means "year" in spanish, into google translation without the tilda over the n, you get it translated into "Anus."

Now imagine what that would do to a professional conversation when someone mentions a year!
Quite frankly I have a distaste for advertising in general. Google has taken that dislike and made advertising as unobtrusive as possible, if I feel clicking a link then great. Whatever happened to paying for something you like, these business models seem to always resonate with me. I think the article is spot on, let google play with advertising move on from the ad game, its over, maybe .... maybe facebook has chance to provide advertisers with something different in terms of ads and thats HUGE maybe
Americans from Google and MS doing start-up in China
Many people believe that Yahoo is massively undervalued on Wall Street.
I don't see the big deal with Microsoft trying to stretch like this when it can't even get its operating system or office suite right. Has anyone seen Office 07? I feel like I'm drowning every time I use it. Default font is arial 10pt instead of Times New Roman 12. What happened? And Vista...lets not even go there.

What happened to Windows being good at what it does? It feels like its overextending on every front. Windows = Next GE?
They changed the design sometime in the last 12 hours. The previous one was even better.
How would that give you the range to an arbitrary object - like a white wall?
I don't know if there's anything different you should have done.

If you discuss two different computer languages in any piece of writing on the internet, a large majority of the readers will assume you are advocating one over the other. I've seen this so many times already.

I'm just sad that I fell into the same trap.
Fischer has a classic dumb jock, grunting-style laugh. huh huh huh. First rate chess player, but second rate anti-semite, really. C'mon--at least the latter would have had some real effect on the world. Kind of sad to watch a supergenius throw away his (almost) 200 point IQ on a trivial game and a political faux pas. It's the separation between one degree of mental illness and another, I guess.

Legend has it that Dick Cavett is full of "wonderful stories about other famous people that include him in some way"
Arc Internals, Part 1
Sure, that is quite plausible. The current market capitalization / stock price of a company is not the final word on a company's value. Whether it is true or not is another question, but it is certainly possible that Yahoo is undervalued by the MSFT offer.
True. When we launched our email service, the only users we had complaints from about emails not being delivered, were hotmail users. As it turns out, Microsoft's SMTP servers were simply dropping all messages from our servers, without giving us an error code - they would respond with "Message is accepted for delivery" and silently discard it.

As it turns out, we had to custom-register our SMTP server with hotmail administrators. It took us about 20 emails back-and-fro and about two weeks, but they finally started accepting our messages.

Not only this violates SMTP standard, it also demonstrates their "f'ck you all, Internet" attitude: they are saving on spam filtering at expense of everybody else: their users, our users, etc.
Делать нечево...
Designing a Domain Specific Language
Yahoo Board To Microsoft: "Raise Your Offer and We'll Talk."
I wonder why they did that...
Nice idea. But the mom things was a little over the top.
Yes, I'm sure.

cat > foo.py copies standard input into the file foo.py. The rest of the characters you're seeing in the message are what I typed in. The only character you don't see is the Ctrl-D I type to indicate EOF. This is a quick and easy way of creating foo.py without using an editor.
That video really highlights the change he went through. I can completely understand how saddened Dick must have been to watch the young genius he admired fall so far.

So tragic.
The Flexible Thin Anorexic Gymnast that Democratized Deployment
That's YHOO's price after the offer was made, before that the price was below $20.
I'm not claiming other languages are easier to install. I'm saying there is value in offering development tools over the web in a way that eliminates any need for installation.
That's really odd. NNW for me doesn't show links, and never has...hmm, too bad it doesn't keep track of when I subscribe to feeds, but I'm fairly sure that's how it's always been for me.
"... Since 'cat > foo.py' erases foo.py, you are obviously lying about that error message. ..."

True this syntax erases the file. But all I did was cut+paste the example from the original source & added the source code encoding on posting. I knew the example code missed the encoding and I checked the example text for extra unicode characters (another possible source of errors) as I saved to the file & checked with cat. So I tried the example on the CLI before I posted and overlooked the redirection. It's not worth lying, way too many sharp people to pick you up. Just a simple display mistake.

Btw, the inference I'm lying. Does that also apply to the original author as well?

"... Some time later ..."

Doing a bit of digging. It appears the 'cat > foo.py' works like this ...

"... Redirection of output causes the file whose name results from the expansion of word to be opened for writing on file descriptor n , or the standard output (file descriptor 1) if n is not specified. If the file does not exist it is created; if it does exist it is truncated to zero size. ..." [0]

So my theory is you have tried this with a full file & it has erased itself. Thanks for the pick-up though. It is a fine distinction and something I've not come across before. We are both right but at different times.

[0] http://www.wlug.org.nz/bash%281%29Part5
Robert X Cringely had some interesting theories. Mostly it was about MS wanting to turn itself into a "General Electric" over time, rather then compete head on with google.
Don't forget the corollary: including messaging itself. Wait what?
Did you just complain about the default font size in a word processing app? Really, you can dig deeper than that next time you want to criticize Microsoft.
I feel like the value of a company is mostly defined by Wall Street, at least for a company the size of Yahoo. Obviously there are companies that provide important services that aren't even public, however, when determining a company's overall value or growth, stock price is a pretty good indicator.
Good find. I don't see how this keeps OCaml "from being a first choice for server-side development" while making it an acceptable language for client-side development, though.

There are a several hackish polymorphic print implementations, but the best solution so far seems to be the "deriving" camlp4 extension (http://code.google.com/p/deriving/wiki/Introduction). This looks pretty good:

type 'a tree = Leaf of 'a | Branch of 'a tree * 'a * 'a tree
deriving (Show)

type point = { x : float; y : float }
deriving (Show)

let points = Branch (Leaf {x=0.0;
y=0.0;},
{x=2.0; y=2.0},
Branch (Leaf {x=1.0; y=1.0},
{x=1.0; y=0.0},
Leaf {x=0.0; y=1.0}))

Show.show<point tree> points
=>
"Branch
(Leaf {x =0.; y =0.}, {x =2.; y =2.},
Branch
(Leaf {x =1.; y =1.}, {x =1.; y =0.}, Leaf {x =0.; y =1.}))"
Microsoft is 2000 times less effective than Google; Yahoo Board seems to be insane
Eee PC- A Few Months Later, Reality Sets In
This title is very misleading--it's not actually radar at all. The described system uses a very short range and simplistic IR transceiver.
Facebook privacy chief: Data portability dangers overlooked
Virtualization in Linux: A Review of Four Software Choices
IBM Proposes One Computer to Run Entire Internet
Web 2.0: Unsafe At Any Speed?
It's kind of scary to think that corporations existing today are likely to be around for hundreds of years. All hail our corporate overlords.
Not Danga
Or like this:

<item>
<title>Ask PG: Link to comments in RSS</title>
<link>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112684</link>
<description><![CDATA[<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112684">Comments</a>]]></description>
</item>
The interesting question is why a company that claims to know how to program would pay anything for Yahoo, much less a P/E ratio of more than 60.

Huh? Sounds like someone needs to cut back on the sauce.

We can infer from this offer that Microsoft expects its own programmers to be only 1/2000th as effective, dollar for dollar, as Google’s.

We can infer that, if we're near the bottom of a Chivas bottle.

The chance of a Yahoo shareholder ever getting more than $31/share, adjusted for inflation and risk, seems remote

Hey, I know a place where you can put money down on such predictions. Good luck!

Microsoft is to Yahoo as Time Warner is to (correct answer) AOL.

Except...the purchase was in the opposite direction.

despite the fact that the $31/share bid was higher than Yahoo has typically traded since mid-2006

Here's the thing...if Ballmer logged into his Ameritrade account and started buying YHOO at 10000 shares per second every second until it was all bought up, the share prices would probably hit about 50000 dollars. When Microsoft makes an offer, it's understood that that is equivilent to skyrocketing demand.
Google To Acquire Stake In CNet? Unlikely
Question for FB app developers: How do you avoid becoming a 3rd-tier Slide.com?
I've actually used these IR ranging sensors before. They have circuitry built-in, so the interface is really simple (the drawbacks are that the output is non-linear with respect to distance, and the time between outputs is kind of slow ~50ms): http://www.acroname.com/robotics/info/articles/sharp/sharp.h...

He uses a lot of LEDs. If I were to design something like this, I'd just use a speaker from a PC case and have it beep different tones depending on the distance to the object.
Look, you're going to be having dinner with Groucho tonight if you don't beat it!
Joel Spolsky talks about how to bootstrap your business with no cash
If you want to pass, cheat. If you want to learn, research
You said earlier that tell me more about the ai.
Does anyone know how to compile this on Ubuntu?

I Googled and found two guides, but neither of them worked. I'll post the particular compiler error I got when I get home.
If it was in the text markup, then it wouldn't be perceived.
The latest build of Webkit "has to be seen to be believed."
I don't know what the heck that was about but I'm pretty sure it doesn't belong here.

Where's the mod article down feature when you need it?!
Ok, does it work now? Here's what I'm doing:

(def rss-stories (stories)
(tag (rss version "2.0")
(tag channel
(tag title (pr this-site*))
(tag link (pr site-url*))
(tag description (pr site-desc*))
(each s stories
(tag item
(let comurl (+ site-url* (item-url s))
(tag title (pr (eschtml (s 'title))))
(tag link (pr (if (blank (s 'url))
comurl
(eschtml (s 'url)))))
(tag comments (pr comurl))
(tag description
(pr "<![CDATA[")
(link "Comments" comurl)
(pr "]]>"))))))))
A smart bureaucrat might mandate dynamically rewritable keys and get the Optimus
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

But smart people don't endeavor to regulate minutia.
I would hardly call Google's interface designers "tasteful."

It seems more likely that they knew they were bad designers so they just went with the simplest possible design.

Yahoo doesn't get enough credit. They are doing some pretty awesome and forward-looking stuff. The reason they're falling behind, I think, is because the "yahoo" brand is so large and complex that it's hard to find anything by going to their site. It probably doesn't help that AOL.com ripped off the design almost to the pixel (I'm extremely surprised there has not been a lawsuit there).
It's working in akregator now (wasn't working before).
It seems more likely that they knew they were bad designers so they just went with the simplest possible design.

Yes, I think that is exactly it. But even that level of performance is quite rare. In design, merely simple is version 1 of good.
What happened to Altavista?
ui is not always about being good looking as it about being functional. UI/experience design is totally differnt from graphic design and i see a lot of people confusing it still. (which is why u dont want a graphic designer design your ui but instead a hacker with a good taste can build a better ui)
here's another link:
http://www.tedtalks.com/2006/02/webwhat_happene.html
Making Science a Presidential Priority
This is definitely true, the nightly builds of WebKit right now are incredibly fast. But, the shipping version of Safari is also much much faster than Firefox 2, and is still faster than Firefox 3 Beta. Safari has come a long way in a short time, it's an incredible browser.
It's pretty impressive that Apple can compete with open source. I forgot that was possible.
see "all marketers are liars" by seth godin for a pretty thorough treatment of this -- our satisfaction is heavily influenced by the stories we tell ourselves, e.g. that expensive wine tastes better. even just drinking out of an expensive glass causes people to perceive the wine as tasting better.
it wasnt exactly the 1st version. their logo and appearance was much bulgier

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html
Apple has open source figured out. It's the prefect fusion: the core technologies (http://webkit.org) are open source, but they manage the UI like no one else can. Software with style, the way it should be. The WebKit team is absolutely fantastic too, I miss them.
Apple competes with open source all the time. Linux is the most obvious example, but most consumer open source software competes with either Apple or MS, and open source is almost always losing. I think what makes this unique is that Firefox is an unusually well designed product that appeals to the average consumer in ways most open source software does not. It also had a head start, and has a huge user base.

In fact, you could argue that unlike usual, Apple is actually winning on technology, and not usability, since perhaps the biggest advantage to firefox is its ability to install plugins.
If it's already been done, then why re-invent the wheel? Cheat to win!

Yeah I do miss really good programming books though. Haven't seen one of those in quite a while.
I think what you say and how you say it is wise. you could help change education as we know it. but i guess, even in a subversive way, you are - but i just ruined it by talking about it.

thank you for your communication skills.
i like what you say. your argument for speeding up tech and all...one of the best articles (it came at the perfect time)i have read in a long time.
Now who wants to learn Objective-C with me and port some of Flock's sweet Web 2.0 features over to Safari/Webkit? ;)
Whatever's up now is working with Vienna. I see a comments link.
I'm having issues installing in cygwin too. Hundreds of errors like: "source/IoBlock.c:58: error: parse error before ')' token"
Safari is not the only browser to use webkit.
މީމަގޭ މާދަރީ ބަސް. ދިވެހި ބަހަކީ ރީތިބަހެކެވެ.

This is my language - Dhivehi.
Written right to left.
I've switched my search from Google to Yahoo, but Yahoo mail still sucks too much to use over GMail.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a Yahoo documents.

If Microsoft want to beat Google, they need to start pushing out on-line document editing, Excel, etc., under the MS brand but through Yahoo infrastructure and internet know-how.