skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Power: The Frontal Cortex
$251 billion (+33%) in interest. That is a staggering figure.
Apple doesn't care whether the technology is open, so long as nobody else has sole control.

Supporting open web standards is the only way Apple can provide a decent web experience without constantly playing catch-up to whatever Microsoft implements in IE.

Creating OpenCL as an open standard was the only way they could provide GPU computing that wasn't totally controlled by NVidia, but would still get support from GPU vendors. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't have the resources to maintain their own proprietary GPU computing language.

Killing Flash is the only way Apple can give their users access to dynamic web content with good performance, because Adobe clearly doesn't have the motivation to do it for them.

libdispatch is Apple's way of trying to make multithreaded programming easier, and open-sourcing it is the only way that it will become popular enough for most programmers to bother to learn it. Apple wants third-party software on their systems to be multithreaded so that it won't make their system seem slow. Similar things can be said about some of their other open-source projects, like launchd.

Overall, it feels like open-source is one of Apple's tools for avoiding the influence of monopolies. When Apple weakens existing monopolies or prevents the formation of new ones, it has the side effect of helping all the other little guys, too.
I posted this because there's so much conjecture about Apple's motives behind blocking Flash. I don't think it's that complex - it's actually really simple.

If I broke any rules about self-posting blogs, my apologies; Neg karma all you need.
Microsoft “Natal” | Agent Zoo
Apple’s Next Revolutionary Product: iTunes
Strange new usage of the word copyright that I was previously unaware of.
Looks like mass transit is actually staying the same at 8.38 billion.

Edit: Looks like there are two different "mass transit" boxes with differing figures.
You'd be surprised what people will build with a host environment-bound language and then call an operating system. Brings back memories of VB6 on PlanetSourceCode.

Nifty, unix-like command-line interface in Javascript.
Interesting, thanks!

I'd still like to someday understand what makes Google qualitatively different from other companies.
Because I don't think 20k smart engineers necessarily yields a functional company nor is immediate access to the top levels always a good thing (for obvious reasons).
IPad apps likely to be bigger, pricier
What is he doing with his time now? Is he employed, is he writing the great american novel, is he gardening?

None of the interviews touch on that- it makes me sad.
Particularly in the "it used to be so much better when it was easier" style politics. If it really was so good why did we change it? Also true in the parts of politics where you hear complaints of conspiracy and/or ivory towers.
I understand what he's implying. His case is thin. PayPal is huge and can easily afford the customer service required by noobs forgetting their password. Can you think of another way to operate such a business? His solution implies that google, yahoo, facebook should be the next PayPal in this regard. OK, so now those organizations have to handle this type of support.
The pitfall I've run into when building CMS interfaces for the sales types is that they always want to do something you didn't enable it to do. The image always displays on the right, so naturally they want it on the left, and you end up having to go muck with the code anyway.

Sure, there are plenty of vetted CMS systems out there (e.g., Drupal, Wordpress, etc.), but they're massive overkill when you only need an events list or something.
In the future, Weave Sync will also sync your extension preferences.
OK, so what about that tiny TV at your favorite pub?
If Apple were to buy my software for $9.99 and then sell it to consumers for $0.99 I'd be very happy.

Of course the publisher should be free to set the wholesale price to whatever level they want, but Amazon should in turn be free to set the retail price based on the margin they want to make (even if it's negative, like right now). Having the publishing industry fix the retail prices is going to be a total disaster for the ebook market, since there's a good chance just going to use that pricing power to protect their existing dead tree business.
In my experience Flash on Windows is a less-buggy resource hog, so that statement is somewhat universally true.
I can't help but wonder if this "discovery" and cognitive fluency theory doesn't sound so great and obvious because it is so simple. :P
I'm several levels in and I can't jump high enough, even with the green hat. Am I missing something?
The other thing I keep thinking is, if you're seriously worried about kids not being able to learn to program because their only computing devices are locked down, why not fight back by developing kid-friendly web-based programming platforms? Surely an iPad would make the nicest dumb terminal ever...
I don't understand what you mean.

If you're referring to my use of Flixel, this was a cautious decision made at the start of the project.

If you're referring to my coding ability, I can assure you that I was coding for at least 30 of the 48 hours.
They risk next to nothing by keeping tight control while there is little or no competition. If it turns out that people prefer e.g. Android because of this, they can easily change their policy and turn it into a positive PR event.

If people don't buy other stuff, they probably need to spend a bit less on support for users who have installed something bad on their devices than they would with a more open system.

Win-win.
The iPad isn't a third device, but a third revolution
The GRE has 3 parts. Verbal, analytical and quantitative. For that you're supposed to put in the sum of the first 2 of them, not the sum of all three.

I got 800 on the quantitative part, so put in 1540.
The first study you link to does not appear to address the correlation/causation issue whatsoever. Specifically: "The study acknowledges that people who regularly run marathons, like many of the study's participants, may be genetically predisposed to running long distances."

The second link describing neurogenesis stimulation is more interesting due to the fact that they are tracking actual changes in the participants over the course of the study.

For the record, I do not doubt for a moment that exercise has numerous positive benefits, both physically and mentally.
Panflute 0.6.1 su Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty e 9.10 Karmic
I think co-founders are most useful when you have a similar vision but bring different expertise to the issue. I agree with what you are saying though, that you should have similar values and vision, but then want to discuss the implementation from different perspectives. It's kind of like having a mini focus group or think tank. Those different understandings of the issue are important to come to the BEST implementation and to avoid groupthink.
#777 on white is just plain abusive
Speaking for myself, yes and yes.

It's a fairly interesting view from someone just starting out in a company that has an almost mystical appeal.
Some Observations, I always find it interesting how the break it up.

1. Normally the FBI & DOE are not considered national defense

2. Why is Medicare separate from health?

3. Why are veterans benefits & Military Retirement not considered national defense

This diagram is very misleading as criminal investigations is squirreled away under Administration. From this breakdown you can't actually tell how much is being spent on each top level category, which defeats the purpose of this type of graph.
Fire Outfoxed: Greasemonkey Creator Builds Native Support Into Chrome
Great product - very well executed. I think you might be able to capture a sweet spot in the market: self-service, afordable and fully customizable sports stats/content. Would love to see clear pricing info up-front. Again, great stuff!
I think SV is pretty interesting; but it seems like most people care about saving time more than they care about food cooked well.

I constantly fret about how done things are whenever I cook, to the point of obsession. I inspect every steak after it's been cut open... Did I evenly heat each side? Is one side more cooked than the other? Is it overdone? So on and so forth. It seems like SV would be nice just to get over that sort of cooking anxiety.

What sort of additional time does it take to cook? I mean, it's pretty quick to heat my cast iron to where I want it, and then just 16 or 17 minutes later I can have a nicely rested steak ready to go... I'm sure this takes longer, but no idea how much longer.
Now if the gcc mainstream folks would just integrate it. I like gcc's non-standard nested functions for C, but blocks is superior. Sadly the gcc folks don't seem interested.
>> Paypal, online banking services the password has garnered undeniable legitimacy among the majority of people.
>>I have no data to back this up, but this isn't too outrageous a claim. Right?

nope, sorry you're wrong & yes you have no data to back this up. even with "100's of millions of account", it's likely PayPal has never been used by a large % of internet users -- perhaps even a majority -- and it's certainly not used frequently (ie, >1x / month) by more than tens of millions of users. even without me being there for 5 years i'm pretty sure any recent eBay quarterly stmt will back me up on that (note: accts != users != frequent users).

trust me: "the forgotten password problem" is STILL a huge issue for PayPal today, as it is with almost every large site... even one as frequent as PayPal (or Amazon).

if you think i'm mistaken, i suggest you talk to any major tech blog site that has switched to using Facebook Connect or Twitter oAuth for comment authentication, and the subsequent increase in comment activity.

it's not too much of an extrapolation to draw a similar conclusion around 3rd-party auth integrated with payments (which is what PayPal has been doing for 10 years).
The same top people who thought it was ok to delete Orwell's work from their customer's kindles.
How is moving from Flash to HTML 5 going to resolve any of your complaints with a rich media experience?

I loved this experience http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/ but it's still a closed box and uses up 100% of my cpu (Win XP/Chrome). If we move from flash we are just going to replace those rich experiences with another technology, which has the same issues. You can't turn it off any easier than you can turn off a full page flash example.

Will your complaints be directed at HTML 5 for serving up the same web in 2 or 3 years time that we have today?

I'd suggest directed your energies into getting more large corporations delivering the kind of content you want (The iPad page is a great example), as well as serving up a rich experience e.g. (http://www.apple.com/ipad/ipad-video/#large)
It can be crawled; moreso than a bit of <canvas> (canvas is used in a similar manner to the way Flash is sometimes used).
It can be deeplinked, just as asyncronous js/HTML can be deeplinked (using a code library).

Video, audio, vector graphics and bitmaps all fail to meet your criteria for a "web technology", and they're still a part of our web (and more growing more important everyday). I'm not in favor of using Flash as an Html replacement, but it works just as well as any other binary format on the web used to deliver content.

That all said, I was objecting to the idea that we Flash developers don't want to be part of the web.
Not sure about the down voting myself. Non populist view points I guess (even though I did not express one). I bet the guy who claims Flash is a factor in climate shift didn't have this problem.
>>PayPal is huge and can easily afford the customer service required by noobs forgetting their password

nope, wrong again. ARPUs for PayPal users are probably only around $5-25 per year (excluding the minority of fanatic eBay regulars), and you can easily eat up all of that cost or more in telephone customer support.
What utility, if any, does something like this provide? Or is this more of just a fun toy?
What if they offer to pay for development of a Farmville app and a Hulu app and just go through one by one knocking out all of the killer Flash apps and turning them into native iPad/iPhone apps?

They've already got the YouTube app. And that looked pretty dang gorgeous.
Low Quality Offensive Ads Degrade the Web Experience
If your point was that businesses need to start charging for their services/content, ok fine, no argument there. But much of your rant is in finding a solution for password friction by pointing out what a major cost it is to PayPal. You make no case as to how google/yahoo/facebook will solve password friction better than PayPal other than to say that users log into these sites more frequently and therefore remember those passwords better than they do a PayPal password. While users "use" these sites more frequently, they do not type their passwords much. This does not solve the password friction problem since transactions (with the exception of some types of micro-transactions) will still need a password at the point of committing to the transaction.
Linking to a fringe paleo blog which is blind to mainstream research (unless it supports paleo!) isn't much better.

The 2.5 to 1 increased incidence of heart attack from marathon running over sedentarism bit is BS, and flatly contradicted by studies already linked to on this thread.
This game has a disturbingly large number of features for the amount of time taken...which ends up making it kind of hard to play. It took five or six tries to understand the first puzzle of the game, and it actually crashes Firefox when I die sometimes.
Something else I read someplace (so it must be true!) is that Google has maniacally strict rules about what programming languages are allowed and that everything must go into company-wide version control. If that's true, and if they also have good code-conventions, I can see how that would have a magnifying effect on productivity and technology improvement.
Any sentence containing the word "Mensa" is arrogant.
[Replying to myself since there are so many people who think this is silly.]

There are many, many people who could be good Python programmers within a week. Obviously a programmer with only C++ or Java experience could not; I only mentioned those languages for contrast, because you wouldn't hire someone to write C++ unless they were already a good C++ programmer.

The differences in style between Python and Ruby or Python and Perl, modulo the differences related to the available language features (which enforce themselves, and which account for most of the difference), are on the same scale as style differences between different C++ shops. You expect a good C++ programmer to adapt to the local dialect (assuming he has the technical chops to do so), so why wouldn't you expect a Perl programmer to adapt to Python? There's no way you would pass up a smart Perl or Ruby programmer for a Python job. (Vice-versa is another matter.)

As for experience with other tools, looking at Python in that context actually strengthens my point. When you interview a developer, you don't bother asking about build tools, IDEs, SCMs, or testing frameworks unless they're applying to be the local guru. I've never asked a candidate if he knew how to build a .deb package. I've never worried about how much a candidate knows about Eclipse. (Or Jira, or gdb, or cvs.) The cumulative amount of tool-specific knowledge required to do my job dwarfs the complexity of Python, but I really don't bother with that stuff when I'm interviewing somebody for my group.

A big technology like Django might be a different question. Django (as much as I've seen of it) seems to be considerably more complicated than Python. I could see wanting to hire a Django developer. But then it's a Django job and not a Python job, except by implication.
I would highly recommend playing online video games with voice chat. With almost any game you choose, you'll find a mature group of individuals that play casually and would enjoy chatting with you.
Fawlty Towers ended after only 12 episodes because John Cleese basically wanted every episode to be 100% awesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawlty_Towers#Episode_guide (see the last para in that section)
Sounds a lot like OJs "If I Did It" deal.

Very informative.
Stable and beta channels are 4.0.x, only the dev. channel is 5.0, it's not a beta release.

See: http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/
The Lack of Netiquette
I'd recommend always using a black background in your flash movies. It helps to offset any perceived negative carbon footprint caused by the decision to use flash.
Hey, if everyone starts believing it, it'll happen, right?
Keep in mind that Adobe's already pushing their Flash-to-iPhone (App Store) compiler.

And that many (most? I'd imagine!) Flash games would be rather sub-optimal, if even playable, without modification to support multitouch instead of keyboard/mouse.

So if I were Farmville, why wouldn't I just wrap my modified-to-support-multitouch FLV with Adobe's tool and put it on the App Store?
Not to mention, does "outperform" mean "higher earnings over time relative to stock price" or does it mean "stock prices higher relative to earnings"? The latter would seem to be what is predicted, and that's hardly "outperformance".
I really do WANT to use Chrome, but there are so many Firefox extensions I just can't do without. One step closer though.
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth
'lazy' is one way to put it. another might be 'paralyzed'. it's a rare company that gets as big as adobe without growing so many layers of middle management that it becomes difficult to get anything done anymore.
I submitted a link recently to an open issue on a side project focused on polishing Ubuntu for ordinary users; they have feedback from an ordinary user which they acknowledge is exactly the sort of thing they're looking for and they open the case and move it into progress and then ... it's sidelined. A request to "fade" icons when files are cut, and it's been open since 2003.

Not for lack of time, clearly. Not for lack of ideas what to do there are plenty of those. Not for lack of effort or interest - many many people have been involved. Not for lack of coders, there are patches referenced. Not for lack of a place to track the issue, there was one, now two.

That's a microcosm of your humanity reaching for the stars but are unable to manage the last cohesive push and everything collapses into war, civilisation flickers out and the unthinking void closes over the solar system again sci-fi story right there. That's your Adobe can't get it's act together tale, but happening in public.

So what was lacking?

I can't help but tie everything back to the iPad this week, but isn't this missing thing in the development process exactly what Apple has and the much pointed to Netbooks and Android and ChromeOS's and Maemo's don't?

A unified vision, a benevolent dictator, a plan by which each suggested fix can be measured? GvR runs his personal is_pythonic?() filter over any suggested additions to Python, his way or the highway. Rich Hickey drives clojure and Miguel de Icaza heads up Mono.

Maybe what the suggested openpad needs is a figurehead with a vision who could step in and make decisions and force it to coalesce into a particular shape? And maybe that's incompatible with being "open" shaped. But I wouldn't mind being wrong about that.
Not sure I understand the next-to-last paragraph, but other than that, it seems like PG is convinced having a good co-founder is so important that focusing on finding one is the best way to maximize your chances for success (ie. achieving your "#1 goal"). Clearly, that's only true in the average case, and if you're convinced you're significantly different from that average, that might well not apply to you. The point about investor bias is spot-on, though I wouldn't say it's something specific to investors- it's just that, without looking deeply into your particular circumstances, the advice with the highest chance of being useful that anyone can give you is precisely for the average case.
Well it's like they have no concept of maintenance at all in their product management. Literally they produce some code and never touch it again. Witness the hundreds of various similar UI elements in any single piece of their software, all of which act essentially the same. Why not go back and retrofix the old stuff? Because they don't maintain anything they've previously built. If they could solve the registry bug messaged previously by simply piling on some new features, it would be done. But since that's not how one fixes registry bugs, it'll never be done.

It's like the Soviet model for building software. Build it once, build it shoddily, never maintain.
Hi,

I got a reply back from Dr. Nordhaus today:

"The answer is that these are included conceptually in serious studies. The problem is that measurement has proven extremely difficult, so it is hard to judge whether the actual magnitudes are correct. WN"

I think it makes the case that economists do not consider ecological damage to be cost zero. However, it is hard to assign a hard objective value to it.
I think this hurts Amazon more than it hurts MacMillan.

99% of Amazon's customer base will never hear about this little kerfuffle, so the good PR they got for "fighting for the little guys" will be fairly limited.

Meanwhile they've lost a lot of good will on the other side: publishers and authors. The reaction from authors has been almost universally against Amazon, and Amazon has been courting them for years to self-publish, especially on Kindle.

The slight bits of positive "yay! Amazon fighting for low prices!" I think is overwhelmingly erased by the author support lost.
I'm growing less concerned about it actually. If you believe that the world is moving towards web apps, then what programs you can install on your device becomes irrelevant. Google Voice runs well as a web app, and the $30 unlimited AT&T 3G plan means that users can treat web apps the same way as a local app - you don't have to worry about bandwidth or availability.

Compare iPhone OS to Google Chrome OS. I understand that the browser will be the only application that can be installed on Chrome OS. Why isn't Google receive equal (or deservedly more) criticism for restricting the freedoms of its potential users and developers?
I think you can easily ignore a negative comment which doesn't describe what the comment is about or what the issue is, talks in abstract and is from a user who created the HN account 1 hour ago, with the purpose of making that comment.

Most likely it is from someone who doesn't understand, or is just plain jealous (for whatever reason).
I think my generalisation is quite warranted. My sample size ran to about 30 people, who were not selected by me in any way.

If you are selling a product that is a one-time fee and you are happy with the model, then fine, let's agree to disagree. If you are building something and want to make subscriptions or have some interest in my statement being wrong, then you are approaching business with the wrong attitude.

In the absence of any information to the contrary, I like to work with the little info I have.
The best extensions so far on Google Chrome 4.0
Your initial claims here don't follow: Lower prices certainly do have an affect on author's income. Authors receive a royalty based on a wholesale price, which is (normally) directly related to the price you pay as a consumer.

Publishers' and authors' interests are fundamentally aligned. Volume and pricing affect everyone in this equation. It seems like they should be the ones discovering and ultimately setting the right price/volume ratio, not Amazon.

(I have no idea what you're driving at in your last two sentences.)
The possibility that having a bunch of people watching decoded radio signals could be illegal is just bizarre.