skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Flash's widespread adoption means that a vast majority of Internet users don't have to install anything to use iPaper"

I could argue the exact same thing about PDF. Although Adobe does not seem to have published adoption statistics, I would bet that they roughly equal that of flash. Not to mention, I haven't come across a computer that didn't understand PDF files in many years. Beyond the obvious distrust of statistics coming directly from Adobe, there are new platforms, like the iPhone, where flash is not even available, and PDF is.

"There are tools for free to create PDFs, just as there are tools to do almost everything for free versus its paid alternative. That does not mean iPaper has to compete with the free tools. They are competing with Adobe Acrobat which remains a paid application."

They are competing with Acrobat Reader, which is a free application. This is not a tool for generating documents, its a tool for viewing/embedding them. That's why you have to create PDF, DOC, TXT etc. to get anything into iPaper in the first place.
First, I'm sure most researchers "work hard and mean well". If not, they'd be much better rewarded in almost any other line of work. I agree that the system is not perfect. However, I would also have a hard time saying that double blind is the perfect system (or even necessarily better). There are many reasons why it would be worse than the current system.
For what it's worth, I have received an invite from them. I played around a little with the one application that is available - Phoenix. It seemed to be pretty good software (but definitely still beta quality) for the 15 minutes I played around with it.
With that as an out, you can basically say that anything goes. I guess 'irrelevant' wasn't the best word. Let's say that I don't think it ought to be here, for the reasons outlined in the other comments.
This article mentions three products with overlapping, but not identical applications. Suggesting that users should "forget" one in favor of another is overly narrow at best.
The intersection of mathematics and murder
Sea cable snappage was sabotage
Little outdated but (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

Also, based on analytics from our sites:

Approx 86% of our visitors have javascript enabled

Approx 100% of our visitors have flash enabled

interesting sidenote: 0% of our visitors that user firefox convert.
Interesting....I've been waiting for my invitation to "hatch" for sometime now. By all means, I hope somebody proves me wrong and I really do hope there is something to Aviary. But for some reason, their promiscuity in showing all of their "goodies" seems that they are quite desperate for some attention.

I will issue a public apology here to Avi and company if my invite does happen to "hatch", but as it stands, it looks like vaporware to me.
Microsoft steps up its fight for Yahoo
6 Tips for Turning Shoppers Into Buyers
Summary version:

Determine your conversion ratio then attempt to improve it

1. Make it really clear what differentiates your from the competition

2. Identify bottlenecks in your sales process.

3. Get your customers engaged.

4. Keep the conversation/interaction going with more leading questions
-> dont ask questions that can kill the conversation

5. Review and adjust your sales pitch often
According to Adobe, flash has the following penetration:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...

Of course, whether or not you should trust this 100% is up to you. My suspicious self would venture to guess Adobe tries to quantify the total number of users who have installed flash at some point, rather than those who have it currently enabled. I have no idea, though, if there's a big difference in those two metrics.

Much less scientifically, I would guess that anyone who has flash enabled, also has javascript enabled. Flash has more security implications, so I'm guessing most people concerned enough to disable javascript would have also disabled flash. Since javascript is also an included feature in essentially every browser flash has a plugin for (and some it does not), its "adoption rate" should then be at least as high. This is just an educated guess, though, and not the result of some scientific analysis.
this sounds like Mozilla saying "What's a web app?" to me..

update: my thoughts in rant form http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/19/mozilla-messaging-ignore...
New Ways to Pay
Summary:

30 percent of the top 100 internet retailers offer a form of alternative payment. Alternative payment methods made up 14 percent of online purchases in 2007 and is expected to grow to 30 percent by 2012.

I have a question: How many forms of pay becomes too many (if too many is even possible)?
"Using WiFi to upload flight plans seems like a particularly bad idea..."

Let's hope they don't make the cliché, predictable mistake of forgetting to override the default password...
Top 10 Movies For Entrepreneurs
Am I the only one here who wants to GAIN weight?
Scribd takes that into account by stating PDF "sometimes" requires download. I think that is fair--most marketers would just say "yes" instead of "sometimes."

Also, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume the penetration of Flash as greater than Acrobat Reader.

"This is not a tool for generating documents, its a tool for viewing/embedding them."

Let's back up to the original goal of PDF: fixed-layout document sharing with built-in security. To generate PDF files, Adobe SELLS Acrobat to general PDF files.

iPaper seems to be a) implementing the original goal of PDF, b) with better usability, and c) with no cost to convert.
Honestly, did you read the definition? It is a programming paradigm relying on precodition and postcondition. Not related to desktop license.
Tipit.to: Digg for Cash Tips?
I was a bit hesitant about the information provided, but the data is from a survey conducted by Millward Brown and it includes both an explanation of the methodology and a survey example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millward_Brown

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/methodology/

http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/survey/npd_survey/
Parents Rise Up Against A New Approach to Math
There's a short review and a link to some invites here: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9868874-2.html

The writer I spoke to about Phoenix, the photo app, said it was mostly eye candy. I think the problem is that with so many projects they'll all be mediocre at best, if they happen at all.
No, I want to see it lifted, in exchange for democratic reforms.

Whether or not it was a good idea in the first place, it's in place now, so lifting it is one of the few carrots which the US can offer the Cuban regime. It seems silly to give up that carrot without extracting some sort of concession, particularly as the post-Fidel government may be more amenable to compromise.

If the US were to unilaterally lift the embargo without any movement by the Cuban government then it's not clear whether that would accelerate or decelerate the cause of human rights. However, making a deal has got to at least be worth a try, assuming our goal is a Cuba where people can speak freely, travel freely, own property, vote in freely contested elections, use the internet, and start businesses (to bring the topic back round to something marginally relevant to HN).
What’s In Your PS1?
I can't speak for Windows, but Mac OS X has always had PDF viewing and creation built in. It's as easy as selecting the "Print to PDF" button in any print dialog. 100% penetration on OS X.

Personally, I prefer a straight up link to a PDF. My browser can display it inline, and if I want to save it to my hard drive I just option-click.
w3schools stats are wrong because its obvious that the audience is more technically sophisticated, thus more probably they are using Fx and have JS disabled.

real numbers are 78-80% for IE(6 and 7), 14-16% for Firefox

and it depends on country too
Two words: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
Flight Plans in the context of the cabin crew probably means basics like destination, duration, gate and baggage claim info, connecting flights for passengers, etc.

Flight plans going to the flight crew are an entirely different matter.
this is obviously a rhetorical question.
"Can Acrobat Reader convert/read documents not in PDF format"

No. As such, this is a legitimate point for iPaper to make. They support more formats. Of course, many of the document creation programs do support conversion to PDF, but this is still a nice thing about iPaper.

But, it has nothing to do with the cost of creating documents. The cost to create an iPaper document is not zero, its undefined. You cannot create a document in iPaper, period. You must create that document some other way, be it MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, or one of their free alternatives, or a text editor.

If anything, they're advertising the cost to share a document. Which is free for every other type of document too, unless that person doesn't have a program to read the given file format, which is obviously the real thing iPaper should be trying to sell users on.
Tip the web with Tipit
How are they beating PDF on cost? Acrobat Reader is free, and they don't put ads in there.

On top of that, they say that the cost of creating documents is "free". What? Are they handing out free Word licenses with this thing or something? Because last time I checked, the price of creating a document for iPaper is the cost of the program that makes the original document for iPaper. As you stated yourself, "converting" to iPaper is free. So yeah, if all your documents are TXT files then this thing is free, but if you want any semblance of structure in your document then you're probably using... you guessed it, DOC or PDF. There are plenty of free PDF converters out there (plugins for Word, built-in support in Mac OS X, standalone programs, etc etc). So I think at best iPaper is even with PDF in this regard.

Tangentially, PDF is not "bulky and painful". It just happens that Acrobat Reader is a ridiculously awful reader. Mac OS X handles PDFs like a breeze, they feel incredibly light weight as they open instantly and any application can output to them. So I whole-heartedly agree that Reader is a bad program, but don't extrapolate that to the format.
Our site's user base is heavily female and tech level is a bit above-average. It's a wedding related site, so it's definitely not the "web 2.0" crowd.

According to google analytics, we see:

flash: 90% 9.0 or better

java: 99.9% have some java capability

javascript: not sure

Just for reference:

os split: 87% windows, 12% mac, 1% other

browsers: 68% ie, 24% firefox, 7% safari, 1% other

ie split: 55% ie 7, 45% ie 6
:-) In my case future has arrived already. I don't use CDs or DVDs for anything, except rare OS installations and Mac Air already shows how that can be done without a CD.

I am on the network, nearly all the time. Plus I have a 4GB flash drive and soon I'll get 32GB one of the same price.

Why would I want a read-only plastic disk for?
Acrobat Reader on Windows remains slow and unstable. Also, it hasn't ever come pre-installed for me.

Don't forget Mac's market share is still tiny compared to Windows, especially with businesses where PDF is used most.
Apparently we've only been having the majority of our dental problems since the advent of processed sugar.
feel sorry for these guys, going up against a well covered and now leader TipJoy
You Used Python to Write WHAT? Pros/Cons of Python in the Enterprise
I don't know about that. I think there are a lot of people that would, all other factors being equal, prefer a desktop application to a web application.

I'm one of them. Maybe I just haven't drunk enough of the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid, but I think people (especially around here) are too eager to announce the death of desktop applications.
Usability is one of Scribd's biggest selling points, which might resonate more with PC users long tired of Reader's unstability.

Technically PDF as a format might rock, but most users just care about how their experience is. People's idea of PDF is attached to their experience with Acrobat Reader.
Yeah, but if you care about the mobile market at all, then PDF is the way to go, given that Mobile Safari is the number 1 mobile browser and it supports PDF natively (as well as .doc)
http://www.fullasagoog.com - the Adobe aggregator
Elonex to launch £99 Linux laptop
Wealth and Religion on Flickr [graph]
Launch for software which allows sharing music bought on iTunes
I guess skip iTunes and go directly to online music?
Yes those are our goals, but they will not be achieved by maintaining an embargo as the last 40? 50? years have shown... You can't just force or pressure countries into "democracy", that is not the way it works, there are more than enough examples in recent U.S. history that hint at this...

Even if you could, the whole premise of the embargo is flawed I think.. it only makes the cuban government look like a "martyr", in this case to the imperialist whims of the U.S. etc.
two rules every developer must know (or why i zone out when my boss drones on about insurance rules)
I generally think having sound in your music is a good rule to have.
I just want a bigger screen for the eeePC. Then I don't care.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119161

It's even on this page.
Proof hacking
Dont think any other country has a debt of $9,295,497,285,361.38 :)
Not Hacker News but Funny [Pic]
IM 2.0
The problem I have with articles like this is they find some fringe figure (either a total bull or bear) and have them talk about the extreme edge of an argument because it makes better press. Because of this motivation, you're not going to get an objective analysis of the issue. The author even said "To answer this question we should ask a true bear".

No one economist is ever going to get this right because economics is more like weather forecasting than anything. You're better looking at "surveys of economists" you can find in many publications to get an idea of what economists on aggregate think. The wisdom of crowds, anyone?
Hmm, let's see...expert cited: Seattle Times tech reporter. Yep, definitely a computer security guru. Smells like FUD/anti-PR.
Any multi-threaded interpreters?
fiaz - please email me at avi (-a-) worth1000.com and I'll send you an invite now to Phoenix and Peacock.

No apology will be needed either, I'm just sorry you had to wait so long.
Requires high-volume untraceable payments (digital cash), which everyone thought was around the corner in the late 90s, but never quite happened.
The new iPaper has ridiculously smooth scrolling. They apparently built it from scratch, and are off Flash Paper, Adobe's product. It's quite an upgrade. Props to Trip and co.
Another DreamSpark perspective: CS major who likes .Net admits he's as lonely as a young Republican
You can't blame Microsoft for awful Office file formats. Remember, they wrote this stuff before the web came along, and before they generally started sucking really bad. It's just the accumulation of decades of feature creep, add-ons, re-dos, compatibility hacks, bug fixes, and workarounds.

Eventually, all software needs a rewrite. Not just MS's.
I had never heard about TipJoy and hacker news is YC central so there is still much work to be done for both companies before one can be called a leader.
Slam Dunk Startups?
The danger is that if I were hired to chop down the tree, I would make the mistake of only billing for 2 hours.

And if I billed for 8 hours, the client would make the mistake of finding someone who would bill for only 2.
New Hardware Found: Airbus A310 http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/03/01/gross.jpg
BORING.
"Boeing denies that a computer-security problem exists, and says further that if it does, it's already been corrected."

That sentence does not sound very reassuring...
While Digg gets more mainstream, the story sources diversity is eroding
NYT: Microsoft to Authorize Proxy Fight at Yahoo
This is great that we have competitors jumping into the arena. Bandwidth really should be like buying gas - there are different grades of it, and it should be priced as a commodity. With viable alternatives to S3 we'll start to see a more competitive landscape and will be less impacted by outages of one provider as we can switch quickly over to another provider if one is set up to do so.

Not quite there yet, but that's the direction we're heading in with more providers jumping into the field. Exciting stuff.
Fiaz, just following up with this:

- We offered invitations to Alexis O'Hanion at Reddit, Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing (and probably every reputable tech blog).

Aviary's videos were all sped up, but otherwise unedited save for the addition of music and closing title / picture screens.
"Scribd takes that into account by stating PDF 'sometimes' requires download. I think that is fair--most marketers would just say 'yes' instead of 'sometimes.'"

My original point still stands. If its okay to say PDF requires a download sometimes, you really ought to be saying Flash requires a download sometimes. Anything less is dishonest.
coLinux is great; have been using it for years, first on XP, now on Vista. The networking is a bit tricky to get going, but it's very convenient and feels "lighter" than VMWare. Have never tried VirtualBox though.
Yep - coLinux is the kernel plus a text console. Using coLinux is very much like having a headless Linux box on the network.

andLinux is coLinux and a Windows X server, all packaged up nicely so you can run GUI apps.
I have received your invite and I have logged in, and I DO owe you and your entire team a great big apology.

It shows a great deal of integrity on your behalf that you took the time to register here and respond publicly. I really look forward to what you guys will be releasing in the coming months.

I'll tone down my skepticism in the future....in the meantime, all the best!!
The best firewall is 6 inches of air

...unless the system is wireless.
I claim that the best firewall is the "off" button.
I should probably do some due research/diligence before attacking:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/13/aviarys-incredibly-ambi...

Apologies as well to the entire YC.News crowd for the trolling above...it's easy to be skeptical, and I made the mistake of taking the easy road.
Cygwin is all you need if you want to compile and run UNIX command-line apps on your Windows box.

The cool thing about coLinux is that it's actually Linux underneath, so you can have a complete Debian install, with apt-get etc. Postgres, MySQL, sshd etc all work as you would expect them to.
I personally tend to try to apply the standard of whether it's of importance or interest to hackers in particular, rather than to human beings in general.

Major news stories are, of course, of importance to everyone, but I personally would rather have a hacker news which is focused on hacker-ish stuff.
The article didn't really make clear what the point is of the new new math. Is it to provide a deeper understanding of number theory? Or is it to provide different algorithms that don't require memorization of the multiplication table?

Not that I know anything about math education, but how hard is it, really, to understand that 3 x 7 means that you add 3 together 7 times? Once you understand that, you understand the fundamental "meaning" of multiplication.

Granted, adding 3 together 7 times is the long and tedious way to do it and there are handy shortcuts, but do we really need to understand how the shortcuts work in order to use them effectively? Besides, based on the [biased] reports given in the article, it would seem that the kids don't really understand the mechanism behind the new methods either.

It would, however, be nice to do away with memorizing the multiplication table. And maybe it really can be done with only a slight increase in algorithmic complexity. If that's the case, then I imagine this is just the age-old gripe of parents not knowing how to help their kids with their homework.
Even that example doesn't fly. The website ratemyface.com (terrible name...) launched first, and amihot.com launched second.
Ask YC News: Measuring Popularity / Awareness
A recent comment about TipIt ("feel sorry for these guys, going up against a well covered and now leader TipJoy") made me wonder (as tipjoy is brand new) how one would measure that.

What do you use to measure awareness of a service / market leader status? Compete rankings? Alexa rankings (flawed)? # references on Technorati? # of Google results for a company name / service name? Google Trends? ComScore? Quantcast?

This has implications for tracking the success of PR / Marketing efforts.
Damn, I was going to say hotornot, but you already did. There have been thousands of other startups though that have had first mover advantage work for them in a huge way.
The new approach may be okay so long as the book is accurate. All too often school boards default to a more error prone book, due to a connection to a specific marketer.

Feynman on school books:
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
From what I can tell, those sites are totally different as far as first impressions. Plus, hotornot got the most brandable domain in the history of the internet.

edit: archive.org confirms it. You've got to be kidding me if you think those sites are remotely similar except for one tiny feature.
It seems to me like Joel has a rather warped view of how software should be built. He claims

It means you have to rewrite all of your date display and parsing code to handle both epochs. That would take several days to implement, I think.

That's just ridiculous. In my mind, you need a piece of code that reads the 1904 record and sets a flag in the code. Then, your date display and parsing code should all call one, or maybe two, functions which handle the conversion for you based on this flag. Thus, supporting two different epochs requires at most three components: one to read it and set a flag, one to convert a numerical argument to a date based on that flag, and one to convert a date back to a numerical argument (again, based on the flag). Should this really take "several days to implement"? It seems to me that an hour should be plenty of time.

It's going to be hard for me to continue to take him seriously if this is his view of how software should be built.
Well, with no ability to downvote I'm not sure how forcing everyone to see every story keeps the quality high. And there are certainly no incentives to prevent submission of low quality stories (as far as I'm aware). Just spam away and hope something will get upvoted.

But from a reading perspective once I read a story (and maybe some of the comments) from the front page I no longer care about it. Something I'll want to follow the comments (but to make that easy an option to see which stories have new comments instead of having to squint at the number of comments would work better anyway).

So usually over half the stories on the home page are links that I don't care about (either I upmoded them or want to ignore them and don't care to follow the comment thread).

Maybe this forces people to follow the new stream (of which an RSS feed would be extremely helpful).
You can't downvote until you have enough karma, and a comment cannot be downvoted after it's been around for more than 24 hours. This is to prevent someone from vindictively going through a person's "threads" and downvoting all of their comments in an effort to kill their karma.

You can never downvote article submissions; they can only be upvoted. Downvoting sumbmissions has merit in some cases (removing spam), but in practice it has been used on other sites to kill everyone's submissions except your own, rapidly leading to a downmodding war where the winner is whoever is more committed to their karma score, instead of the one who is submitting the best articles.
Wow, this could become true just like: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Depression-1990-Ravi-Batra/dp/04...
Is Yahoo sending a message to Pirates?
The main concept is the same, isn't it? The execution and branding vary widely, but that's exactly the point. Like Youtube vs. Google video, this example shows that, even here, first mover advantage doesn't count for too much.
resident evil