skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note that I didn't say Walmart is bad. In fact I said: 'Is it good for consumers? Probably', and I mean that.

I called their goods junk, just as I'm willing to call The Duke's Boardroom Affair junk, because that's how those products are seen, even by people who buy them. That doesn't imply any disdain for people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts, or people who read romance novels.

(If you consider the number of people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts or read romance novels, you'd have to feel disdain for an extremely large percentage of people).

The point is simply that what Amazon is doing could turn them into the Walmart of bookstores, for better or worse.
C# and Java are easy on beginners?

I'd start with Python, Scheme or JavaScript. Python's syntax is closest to English, the language is nice and consistent, there's an interactive interpreter, and there're a lot of libraries for things you might want to do out of the box. Scheme's syntax is weird but simple, there're very few core concepts you have to learn, and it'll teach you core computer science better than many of the other alternatives. JavaScript lets you do cool things right away, the language is small, and there's an interpreter built into every web browser. If you use FireBug you've even got a semi-decent debugger at your fingertips.
Labels.Logos.Brands
> Most companies are structured so that there exists a preferred share class with greater voting rights

"Most"? The press accounts around Google's IPO said that voting preferences were somewhat rare. They mentioned some newspaper companies and Ford.

Do MS, Apple, or Cisco have voting preferences?
Thanks for proving my point about ambiguity.
Komodo has been more than acceptable for me for a couple of years now... but I have to admit it doesn't feel quite complete for me. I can't pinpoint what's missing though.

I recently tried Netbeans for some PHP development, and I think it's ok - but yes, it really slows down when it's "scanning projects...". (I've configured to sync to server on save) - how annoying.

Recently had to learn more vim and I don't mind using it on the server (console environment), but prefer an actual UI.
The answer is very simple. Invest in companies that pay dividends, like telcos, electrical utilities, steel mills, railroads and other giants of the the 20th century. Note that you wont get any stock appreciation to speak of. Tech companies that dont invest in new markets die when competitors make the move. Apple might very well be dead if it tried to live of the Mac franchise.

Companies are allowed to keep their income so long as it is necessary for their business. You might think that a mom and pop store would be allowed to keep millions in cash, but since that kind of money isnt necessary for the operation of the business the excess gets taxed at 80%. (My info is old so the exact percentage may be out of date.) Large tech companies like Microsoft and Intel pay nominal dividends to keep the Federales at by, not out of generosity to their stockholders.
Ah, but the devil is in the small print ... (which is a lot less favourable than that headline figure suggests).
And p.s.-- that's not poetry, it's "poetry"
Wow, so this is the lifehacker's Klingon?
developers having to make iPhone specific version of their app

No, that's not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is that if they do, or if they use HTML5, they're still presenting a better quality product to users of this platform than they would using Flash. To Apple, that is a far more important thing than what they're potentially losing from not supporting Flash. Nobody "has to" develop iPhone apps any more than people "have to" develop Flash apps for the web. It's all about what experience you want to deliver to what audience.

Right now, there are compelling reasons to go either way or even both ways. I'm just saying there will never be a time when going in the direction of Flash-based web apps will get you access to the iPhone/iPad audience, an audience which is growing, unlike the Flash audience. So yeah, I think Apple made the right decision both for their own product and for developers who care about the quality of experience they can provide and the money they can make than they do the particular platform they use.

Obviously this makes Flash developers unhappy, and Adobe is doing the best they can to cater to those developers with CS5, even if it hastens their own demise.

They're locked into the iPhone and you have to pay $99 to deploy them on a real one.

Flash apps are locked into the Flash runtime, further locked into whatever platform assumptions you make about performance, etc., and the developer tools are considerably more expensive than $99. You don't get the distribution or sales channel of the App Store (which in spite of all it's faults is still a very valuable thing). If you're developing games, you're going to be giving a cut to whatever sites you're hosted on, etc.

I'm not saying that's worse. It's just a different trade-off, and as long as you're depending on any platform vendor, you're always going to be getting a little bit screwed. The question is really about how dependent, how screwed, and how strong is the platform.

The same applies to an open platform like HTML5. It may have the market penetration to kill Flash for every use, but the overall outlook is pretty good.

But Flash is the only thing that can deliver that right now on desktop (and cover a reasonable audience).

Yeah, but we're not really talking about the desktop when we talk about Flash. We're talking about the web, and the web is increasingly used from machines that aren't desktops or laptops. Flash may be installed on 98% or so of desktops and laptops, but if you include "all devices capable of using the web", Adobe's share is much lower and is actually shrinking, and not just because of Apple's products. In terms of who you can reach, Flash is on much shakier footing than most people realize.
So what's the plan to deal with that?

Unfortunately, I can't answer that.

See also: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/the-mone...
Hardware costs won't increase, you are right. But the costs to redesign the software to use an extra caching layer are going to be significant. Also, the current situation with flash memory being expensive won't last long, and moving to pure solid-state storage is still better than this 3-tier architecture. So, it's a large investment into a solution with only a couple years of lifespan.

Of course, this is probably wrong, and there is a startup somewhere doing just this, and they will be rich :)
I disagree that pricing is irrelevant to this battle. Pricing is the only reason they're having this battle.

Amazon is trying to drive the prices down to $10 or less because they believe that the eBook market will stagnate if titles are priced much higher than that. They're gambling that lower prices for eBooks will lead to higher sales, and that the increased volume will make up the difference for everybody.

Macmillan is trying to drive the prices up so they can still recoup their fixed costs given current sales numbers for eBooks. They're not gambling at all -- they're trying to structure prices so if the eBook market stagnates they still break even, which has the very pleasing side effect that if eBook sales increase even slightly (something the iPad is threatening to help happen), all the revenue from those additional sales will be pure profit.

I can see points on both sides here. I agree with Amazon that the eBook market is dead in the water unless eBooks cost significantly less than physical copies, but publishers like Macmillan would be insane to give Amazon any control over the actual "list" price that drives all the percentages.

(Pricing rant: In order to succeed, eBooks have to be priced competitively with the actual street prices of the print versions, not the list prices. Bestseller prices need to be competitive with Amazon and Costco, and backlist prices need to be at least nominally competitive with used. Particularly for titles have have been in print for decades -- I think you're recouped your costs on the Foundation trilogy by now, guys; it's not my fault you keep re-typesetting it so you can bump up the page count to make the ever-increasing cover price look "reasonable".)
That's not really right, though. Amazon is a store. They should have the right to purchase books at the rate they can negotiate and sell the books for the price they feel the market can support.

MacMillan, on the other hand, is trying to force retailers like Apple and Amazon to sell them for the same price, eliminating competition and create artificially high prices (aka price fixing). And really, trying to argue that price fixing is good for consumers is a very difficult position to defend.
Yep, that's it. I like this puzzle because while there are lots of examples where having 2 pointers is better than 1, it's the only (non-contrived) example I can think of where 1 point is just as good as 2, but 3 pointers is much better.
Mark posted a pic of his setup on Twitter : http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/01/the-setup.jpg
The publisher's contribution is invisible, but awesome. Trust me, the books wouldn't be the same without them.

Amazon's visible contribution is ... well, there's something rather nasty happening behind the stage curtain.

Agreed, the mass market channel for paperback distribution must die -- everyone in publishing agrees on this (the 50% wastage is grotesque) ... just not until there's a replacement way for injecting cheap books into readers' eyeballs.
If you truly think it's drivel, then flag it.
why do the votes on this obscure website signify anything?
my jquery plug-in is listed there, it is not google's though I am glad to find it listed there

(http://code.google.com/p/js-hotkeys/)
True. But the author hadn't gotten to the point of counting operations yet, so I don't think he was trying to make a subtle point about memory hierarchies and non-constant access times. :-)
"DRM-free" implies to me that I can use the download on any hardware that can play the format. IIRC, Amazon's "DRM-free" titles still carry a license that prohibits their use on any platform other than Kindle.
You mean like these guys?

http://www.gear6.com/
(defparameter greeting (string "hi")
Popularity is relative -- in this case you must compare OCaml to other forms of ML, in which case the popularity is obvious :)
If a stock doesn't pay dividends it's just a glorified baseball card.
Mobile multitasking for dummies
Wouldn't it be awkward to use the dating analogy if the two founders were of the opposite sex, or homosexual? It feels as if people assume startups are for guys looking for other guys, and this way of thinking further discourages girls from getting into the game. So I dunno, good idea to stop using dating analogies?
The philosophy of seasteading is explicitly not about pursuing any one vision of utopia, but building turnkey technology so that any group with a vision of a better society can go try it. The idea is not that we know what utopia is, but that by enabling a startup sector for government, by letting lots of different groups (Randists and others) try out their own visions of utopia, we will generate experimental evidence about what does and doesn't work. Instead of arguing about philosophy or dissing a proposed government because it resembles a videogame, we can compare real societies.

Patri Friedman, founder of seasteading
If Amazon is saying that they don't like MacMillan's terms and decline to sell their books, how are they doing wrong? Like it or not, Amazon is not an actual monopoly, and readers who really want to find those titles can look elsewhere (such as bn.com). MacMillan has no particular right to sell through Amazon.
You have mail! (I hope.)
Ulf's Home-Page of Programming Language Design
There was some work done by Sun recently on this, around last year I think, where they showed how much more performance could be gotten out of a system when flash is added to the mix. I can't quite find the link to the article now though. I'm sure there are others doing this too, but sometimes adoption rates are slow when there's not enough hype. But the issue is probably more to do with software.

I've been researching into this to try it myself for a database-centric web app, but I realized I'd have to write much of the software to incorporate flash. For example, you have to make sure that in-memory caches are delegated to flash and kept there according to an LRU algorithm. I'd also expect items stored in flash to be promoted to in-memory storage when accessed often enough, and demoted to disk when used less. And I'm sure there are other intricacies I haven't thought about that need to be considered to make a three-tier storage system work well.

Rather than writing application-specific code for all this, there really should be some general solution that handles this automatically.
I dunno how you got that from our Intro page, we are quite explicit that seasteading is not about any one form of government but enabling more diversity and experimentation. Startup governments!
Sounds like good damage control now.

First he made fun of Aaron and even this post almost comes off as sarcasm (although who knows if Jason's going to stick to his word, so it may very well be sarcasm). But the comment on the blog makes it seem like people at Mahalo actually care about not being branded as a content-less SEO cesspool.

Kudos to Aaron for making Mahalo right its wrongs!
Academia.edu is looking for developer interns in our San Francisco office:

http://academia.edu/jobs/developer_intern

We value enthusiasm, motivation and curiosity over experience in our interns, and we give you challenging projects to work on.
Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based.

Is there an actual quote to back this up? I was paying close attention back in the "shit sandwich" days and I don't recall this "steadfast" insistence being actually stated by anyone from Apple. What I do remember was just a big disappointment at the time and Apple's usual silence on future plans. And the web SDK they did offer did actually end up getting used widely, as Gruber mentions in this article.

I'm not trying to argue, I just see this idea that Apple never planned a native SDK is repeated so often and yet it doesn't fly with what I remember.
The first time I took it, we had a video of an ex-KGB guy assuring us that agencies like his previous employer are indeed targeting us. These days, there's no concern about Bulgarians in ultralights, it's all about buying an employee a new car so he'll load up a USB drive with interesting info.

I wish I could be targeted for something like that... I don't even have access to secrets but "they" don't know that, and I could use some extra money.
I'm trying to find a way of buying this article, but can't :(. New Scientist used to be one of my favorite online magazines...is my only option if I'm looking to continue reading it to subscribe to the dead tree version?

(If I'm the only one seeing this, it doesn't give me the full article, it prompts me to log in to view the rest. [I'm assuming the article is longer than 3 paragraphs])
Don't give kudos, till you see results.
Golden. Apple. Winner.
I would because I would be losing the power too set prices for my goods, which has always been the producers right.
There is a huge reason why tech firms don’t pay dividends: their employees have stock options. Unfortunately, although dividends paid to shareholders lower the share price, the strike price on employee options is not adjusted for the lower share price caused by dividend payments. Thus, paying dividends hurts the value of employee stock options, so tech firms that use options NEVER pay dividends.

Also, in terms of returning retained earnings to investors, there is no difference between a company paying dividends and a company repurchasing shares (assuming the shares are fairly valued). Happily, though, when a company repurchases shares, it doesn’t affect the strike price of stock options. Thus, tech firms don’t pay dividends and they repurchase shares instead. So in addition to the "dividend yield", we also need to add in all the capital that Microsoft spent on share repurchases, which was $47.7B in the fiscal year ending in June 2009 (http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar09/10k_fr_fin.html). That ain’t nothing.

As an aside, Microsoft started paying dividends only after switching from using employee stock options to using restricted stock (the value of which isn’t affected by dividend payments).

These points aside, the author has a good point, which is that more tech firms should do more to return retained earnings to shareholders (whether via share repurchases or dividends).
One of the contractors I spoke with said that they had a branch running Rails 2.1 successfully. When they deployed it in production, the entire application fell on its face.

Supposedly, the problem was caused by Cache Money, but nobody at Twitter wanted to risk moving to a different version again. They're still on 2.0 today. :-)

Another fun fact: Twitter has over 1,500 remote git branches. They also have bright green deer in the reception area of their office. :-)
"The only defendants who would have been willing to go through with the ordeal were therefore the innocent ones."

This only works if the guilty would in fact face lesser punishments than the ordeal, including the social penalties for having been found guilty. Considering how brutal medieval punishments were, this seems unlikely.
I am not arguing whether this is good for consumers or bad(I have no opinion/idea), I am arguing that "Goods producers" should have should have right to fix prices for their products.

I have trouble seeing Amazon a store for Kindle ebooks. In my worldview they are a middleman/affiliate/market creators. (keep no inventory, Publishers get paid after purchases etc.)
MySQL and partitioning tables with millions of rows
Ask HN: Do you know a good resource for sample business plans?
Do you know a resource where you can download real business plans. I would like to get some inspiration.
The producer is still setting a price and getting paid that price.

If you're saying that nobody should ever be able to resell at a different price, then you're outlawing free giveaways, promotions, markups, etc... basically neutering the whole "free market" concept.
Except, it's not brilliant, and we've been doing it for years. This post is a hollow re-tread of the "lower my taxes and I'll trickle it down" argument, which has been the primary platform of the Republican party (and wealthy people) since I've been alive. Our tax rates are dramatically lower than they were even 20 years ago, and I have to say...it doesn't seem to be working that well.

Two observations that came immediately to mind while reading this post:

1) Accountants and lawyers are people with jobs. Fire them and replace them with non-accountant, non-lawyer jobs, and all you've done is shuffle the jobs around.

Yes, you can argue that every dollar spent on non-administrative expenses can be invested into productivity, but that leads me to my second observation:

2) Small businesses just don't spend that much on administrative overhead.

I've worked at far more small businesses (<20 employees) than large ones, and all of them -- every single one -- has out-sourced the accounting expenses to such a degree that I doubt there's a single full-time equivalent lost in the shuffle. Legal expenses can be more variable, but typically not because of government overhead.

When I hear this argument coming from extremely rich people, my natural instinct is to assume that they're using the populist vision of the "struggling small business owner" to promote policies that would benefit their personal bottom line. Quite honestly, this looks like more of the same. Mark Cuban has a lot more to gain from cuts in the corporate tax rate than does your average small business owner -- yet he'll never employ enough people to make up the difference.
"Tech companies that dont invest in new markets die when competitors make the move."

He moves on to say that these tech giants usually end up dying anyway, so he is suggesting they "die with dignity" or at least realize when they should stop growing into new markets tangential to their core competency.
"Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic
Ask HN: Interested in a Lisp Google Calendar API Library?
Is anyone else interested in a nice, easy to use and reliable Lisp library to talk to the Google Calendar API in an elegant way? I sure am, and if you are too and like to code in lisp, please email me to join the team adding this little gem to a growing list of very helpful Lisp libraries. (We'll of course use one of the existing xml lisp libraries)
The problem is that there are actually two problems:

- Knowing and internalizing the perspective embodied in this post.

- Remembering to actually apply it mid-project where everything is messy and you are stressed and and and and and...

I try very hard to do the right thing, but I know that I'm not perfect and sometimes I fall back into the wrong way of working/communicating. Thankfully someone usually points that out so I can fix it before it's too late :-)
If you want to go the Eclipse-Road Aptana is worth a look.

I personally would recommend Emacs + bpython/ipython. A deadly combination.
Hotspot Shield
Then you should have said that when you replied, not state that it wasn't an outlandish claim.
Razor blades are junk? Toothpaste is junk? No. They are commodities. Wal-Mart traffics in commodities, selling them at commodity prices, squeezing suppliers but generally benefiting their customers.

If MacMillan can't work out a deal with Amazon and sells their books elsewhere, bully for them. If enough publishers did that, maybe Amazon would have to capitulate. But I suspect that Patrick was right, and that most of us would just buy other books, most of the time. The reality is that there is an enormous ocean of good to great books, more than I can ever read, and Amazon's conveniences are likely more significant than which authors get published on Amazon.
Python thirded. Then, perhaps C# ("C++ without the headaches") - it has most of the concepts and none of the really hard parts.
Could you elaborate? AFIK the "fine print" is the requirement that the ebook be at least 20% cheaper than the dead-tree version, that it be priced under $10, that you don't price it lower on some other store and that you enable stuff like text-to-speech. Maybe I'm not thinking like a publisher but that all sounds pretty good.
check out lancemonster.com. It's a new freelance site but it's really easy to use. I used them already. its free to join, bid, and post projects. Great site!
A business partnership is a relationship. It's certainly not a romantic relationship, but it can be just as intense and emotional as a romantic relationship.

No one is suggesting that potential business partners take each other out to the movies. But it's a good idea that they spend a lot of time together and get to know each other well before jumping into a partnership together.

That's why the analogy works. You don't meet someone at a party and marry them the next day. You shouldn't meet someone at an event and make them your co-founder immediately either.
12 amazing add-ons for Google Chrome web browser
His ebook costs breakdown is pretty revealing. $3000 for an original cover? I hardly realize my Kindle books have covers, since they auto-open to the first page. $1000 for a designer? Use a standard font and template.

Book publishers have crazy overheads, with authors typically receiving only 10% of the cover price. Editors and proofreaders make sense, but it's hard to see how everything else adds value. The current publishing model seems to be a big part of the problem here.