skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that part of the problem is that the Netscape plugin API only allows the plugin to draw when the browser explicitly allows it to. This is also the case on Windows, but for some reason it's much slower on the Mac.

Switching to Core Animation drawing (as in Flash Player 10.1) allows the plugin to draw directly to a backing store in video memory without having to wait for the browser. The plugin still has to request that the view be updated, but it's much faster as it can be done mostly on the GPU.

I'm not an expert on plugins or graphics, but that is how I understand it.
It was just the 15 that i personally thought were awesome and every entrepreneur should read.
Johnny had a commercial dispute with a friend of mine. Short version is that my friend is an amazing designer, one of Johnny's guys ripped my friend off, and Johnny ended up selling my friend's stolen design on his t-shirts.

In the end, Johnny was a real gentlemen and took down the whole line, and actually ended up doing a joint venture with my friend. I think the ripper was fired. He handled it correctly.
Tangentially, where do you get actuarial numbers like that, and is there enough data to build conditional probability tables (something like "if you motorcycle 15k miles/year, your chance of dying from an accident rises 300%, and your chances of dying from a heart attack drop by 15%")?
"The comments were mostly nonsense,"

You have accurately described the chief product of Reddit quite well.
Yes, many tournament chess players have turned to poker because it is another great competitive game, but can make you a lot more money. Ylon Schwartz is a Fide rated chess master and made $3,763,515 by coming in 4th in the 2008 World Series of Poker. He would not be able to make a living from chess.
Instead of writing a summary on each of the website, i wanted people to actually go on the five websites which i thought would be benefical for any startup university students.
Seriously, I would have loved even a little blurb about each of those websites, something to tell me why I should check them out.
Even a little blurb about what each of the sites is would have been nice. As it is, it just looks like a big ol' billboard.
Typical engineer, they just want to solve problems and don't care about making money. Why did he tell them the fixed machine cost? He could have started a nice side business providings these kiosks for $5k or $10k. I know O'Reilly preaches creating more value than you capture but shouldn't he captutre some value?
Here's a blog post I wrote about it, which includes a video with Ylon talking about chess and poker: http://www.uglychart.com/2008/11/03/ylon-schwartz-poker-play...
I'd say companies are less locked into Windows the OS and more so tied to binary compatibility with Windows products. I've been watching and using Wine since the project began, and it has made unbelievable progress in the last decade. Given a few more years, I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the stage of near perfect compatibility with Windows products. That coupled with the shift to more and more "cloud applications" spells big trouble for Microsoft.
The First time i heard about him, i couldnt believe he wasnt selling cupcakes, this just shows us about branding, its awesome.
I think you hit on their biggest problem now. They have (mostly) succeeded in their original goal to get a computer on every desk. What's next though? It seems to me that they need a new grand plan for the company as a whole.
Cybersecurity Bill Calls For Research, Task Force
Youtube heavy-users aside, Flash's crashes are somewhat rare, but significantly more than any other plugin I've used. I've had about as many crashes on my Windows boxes as on my OSX. Speed-wise, though, it's definitely faster on Windows for no reason I can come up with except laziness / intentionally ignoring everything but Windows.
But that's what he said: "according to his [the rider's] clock" it would take about 3 seconds to reach the center of the Milky Way. So yes, he is talking about how fast the riders perceive it, which is all they care about, since they wrote off their entire families for dead before they left.

Now the strange thing about traveling at 1516c (i.e. far greater than the speed of light), is that the time dilation equation yields an imaginary time, in this example 1 / sqrt(1 - 1516^2). I'm not sure how that translates into a perceived travel time of 21 years.
What makes you fabulis?
"shouldn't he captutre some value?"

I think he captured a pile of spiritual value.
I will add reasons why we should check them out now, dint know that it looks that way.
This actually angers me a lot, but I understand people who run case sensitive file systems on their mac's are a strong minority. I can't help but think it's due to Adobe being lazy.

I actually do use Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit, but mostly because I work with a few people who are quite skilled at these programs. Personally I'd stick with graphicsmagick.

Illustrator is the most confusing program I have ever seen, but that's because I don't know what I'm doing. If you do vector art for a living it's features cannot be beat. It's mainly because its so feature rich that once you learn the subset that will be useful for your workflow, you're golden. I haven't been able to get a comparison to inkscape yet.

Photoshop is pretty intuitive, I mostly use it for resizing and touching up pictures. I'm far from a power user. The Gimp is like a 5 year old photoshop, I can't stand it.
He captured great job security value.
No, Photoshop isn't (much) better. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928566
"He got it up and running quickly, too. He's a hero around here; talk about job security."

He'll have job security because he sounds like the type of guy who looks for ways to make improvements wherever he's at, which is a trait that a large part of the workforce seems to be missing. I'd hire this guy (and guys like him) and find a place for him in my company (if I had a company) because they look for ways to make things better, faster, cheaper, without it being in their job description.
Challenger space shuttle disaster amateur video discovered
So true, few companies spend as much on R&D.
That's a good point. Maybe you know how many different catalog systems re used commonly in libraries?
Or, maybe he just likes being a librarian. It's probably a lower stress job than engineering.
I pay nearly all my debts (in cash) via a scan-able bill at a combini (convenience store). At first it seems weird, but after awhile, you wonder how you lived without it.

That seems a lot less convenient than just making an online money transfer. When I need to pay a paper bill, I log in to my bank's web site, type in three numbers from the bill (account #, reference #, amount of €) and click "send".
Maybe the number is the location of some Loom assets: https://loom.cc/faq
But it only cost $1500 extra. His salary is already in the budget. No need to do a fund raiser to pay him. At which point, since that money was going to be spent anyways, the only real cost from his time is the opportunity cost for what else he could have been doing.
Great interview, but I hate how infoq pushes the transcript into that tiny box.
This sounds similar to the "Hack Day" conceived over at Yahoo!. We shamelessly stole the idea here at AG: once a year every single developer & business analyst takes 24 hours to gather into loosely planned teams with even more loosely planned ideas and see what kind of cool stuff we can build. Prizes are awarded for Overall Best Hack, Funniest Hack, Best Internal Hack, Most Likely to Go Over Budget, etc., and in fact, several projects who saw their inception as throwaway Hack Day ideas have charmed the company brass and become fully-implemented, revenue-generating projects in their own right. Very exciting!
I think in terms of Gmail inbox.

I got my cat when my inbox was 5,367. Now it's at 10,182. So in Gmail years she is ...
Jay-Z, Giocametti & the process of creating value from nothing
By the time you get to this part of the hiring, you should have already decided if you want to work for the company. What you're doing here is working out what it's going to cost them to have you.

Good point about "real" benefits. You should certainly do some research to learn how good they really are. The company "workout room" might be a well appointed sports club, or it might be a basement closet with only a worn out old treadmill.
Apple is certainly blocking Adobe despite being able to run Flash on a machine like the iPad. The reason for this isn't because it can run, it's that it can't run well enough to not break the flow of the device, making it feel slow. Most mud being slung back and forth seems to be ignoring this.

To a large degree, I agree with this choice, and I welcome Flash's demise (if it happens) in favor of something more open / capable / faster. Flash serves unique needs which have now largely been done better by other tools.

Apple is all about feel, and as they absolutely cannot control the quality of the flood of old / crappy flash apps that will grind the machine to a halt if they enable it, they've decided to block it outright. It fits perfectly with their App Store model, where they can ensure programs run quickly enough. Whether you agree with the App Store model or not is another issue entirely, Apple is being merely consistent in all this.
I personally do this all the time. I actually keep several major projects going at all times just so that I can benefit from the creativity boost that comes from switching onto a new task with a fresh outlook.

Better still, I find, is to travel. This last week, for example, I spent hopping fishing boats between villages on the pacific coast of Colombia, well out of Wifi range, phones, and power.

Having a grand total of 8 hours laptop charge to eke out from the hammock over that week really focused the time I had. And I came back to 2 days of ridiculous productivity as all the pent-up ideas flowed out into the IDE.

Sure, you have to deal with 100 customer emails when you get back, but overall I consider it a big productivity win.

(and you get to go surfing in Colombia!)
Actionscript in the right hands can perform very well. A big part of the problem lies with the barrier to entry (low) and the features available to developers and designers via its API and tool-set.

Things like bitmap manipulation and real-time filters (drop-shadow, glow etc), they are really easy to implement and designers love the effects that can be achieved and tend to design with them in mind (can't blame them really), but without optimization care and skill it will eat a CPU alive.

These effects can also be implemented without a single line of code, a lot of the time it is not even the developers at fault.

I worked agency level for a number of years before I lost the will to live and gave it up, I seen this kind of thing daily and the culture of getting it out there didn't help either, unless there was a really switched on PM or lead developer in charge who understood this optimization time was generally second class.

EDIT: it did not help that OSX was a second class citizen and Flash took a 15% hit in Firefox (windows) either.
I think Windows NT is an even better example of a case where Microsoft was genuinely leading the way. NT was a workstation-class operating system for the average PC -- or to put it another way, it was "desktop VMS" eight years before Apple shipped the first real "desktop Unix".

Without the 98->XP growth path afforded by NT, Windows would have stalled ten years ago.
Microsoft's CodePlex Foundation Names New Exec. Director
Summary: A particle (probably a proton) was detected hitting the atmosphere at nearly the speed of light, which is kind of impossible or at least implausible, and they can't figure out how it happened or where it came from.

My question is: are they sure their equipment didn't just have a glitch?
While it is natural to attribute much of this to individual efforts within the company, and to lack of innovation, the result you see at Microsoft might be more of a natural consequence of a company of that size and success.

Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? (note that some think that the anticipated use of the iPad is more on the consumer end, and less on the creation end).

And another little quiz: where does Simon Peyton Jones work and what does he do and what has he produced?

To me, the underlying takeaway from this story, and I disagree a little with the slant the author of TFA has, is that execution can trump innovation.

There have been articles referenced here on HN that talk about others stealing ideas (my favorite was one told by Steve Blank) but at the end of the day, the winner is the one who executes well.

Isn't this the bottom-line message from the Microsoft story?
It's a clever way of suing your provider. Accenture was sued using the same strategy: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2008/03/sap-sued-for-t...
But Does Sky need to demonstrate EDS sales team was acting in bad faith?

These kind of sales processes are so long and complex that badly selling the solution does not imply bad faith. I'm completely sure that the sales team had not all the information of how things were going to be delivered and for sure they took some optimistic assumptions, but I'm sure they're not trying to swindle sky.

Just for laughs, I recommend this scribd presentation: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2304178/Confessions-of-an-Ex-Enter...
If they are having problems reproducing the crashes, they should pay for me to send my MacBook to them - it is 100% reproducible every single time. I actually installed Windows on a partition, and I boot in there to play flash video.

I open a video site. I try to jump to a location in the middle of the video. It crashes.

And of course, if you play 3-4 videos, the MacBook will decide to switch itself off because of overheating.
Does the same thing as Googlepedia does for Firefox. What impresses me more is the "Try search on" box on the right. It would be nice if that were customizable.
Police want backdoor to Web users' private data
Think tennis for yes, home for no: how doctors helped man in vegetative state
> Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over
> 85% of the top web sites containing Flash content and Flash
> running on over 98% of computers on the Web.

Oh really? I've disabled Flash on all my browsers a week ago and don't even notice that I'm missing so much web-content!
Link, please? Would like to try it on my Mac here.
Downing Customer Service for a week is not much fun for anybody, but it's doable. You just need to manage the expectations for your users and make sure your product is so self-explanatory that it really doesn't need much customer service in the first place.

I can do a week's worth of handholding for all the services I run in about 2 hours. Normally I do it during the week as needed, but occasionally I'll troop off into the sticks for up to a week at a time. Thus far I've managed to pull it off without the business collapsing.
Warp engines make a little stable bubble of space and shift what's around it, so onboard time matches galaxy time, and you can jaunt a significant way across the galaxy and still be home in a few years Earth time.
I just added little descriptions on what they all do, Hope you like it.
No I didn't. But honestly, how many people really need to worry about it? For this kind of analysis just pick an effective tax rate and work out the numbers.

Figure out what mix of money + other benefits is going to make you happy and try to get as close to it as you can.
If you thought iPhone development was restrictive, brace yourself for Amazon's.
thanks. We are a really geeky service. I think we can accept facebook and twitter as forms of openid as they implement the protocol. I think we are going to move forward with just openID and see what kind of demand or requests we get to create our own password system.
I assume you are not joking. He could have done more "good" by investing $1500 of his own money and given them the first one for free. Each one after that is - say - $7500. The library would be thrilled with the free one AND the dramatically lower cost. Say the library from the next town over wants one now, what should he tell them? They know it only costs $1500 and will balk at paying more yet he won't want to build them for free.
Anyone know what software, tools he used? I'm sure other libraries would like to do the same.
I practice inbox-zero http://inboxzero.com/video/ ... my cat is immortal.
> Sokolsky has calculated that at 3×1020 eV, even a single proton could travel no farther than 10 megaparsecs

I wonder how fast proton looses energy (due to interactions with photons of background radiation).

How much energy it would need to travel to us from edge of observable universe?

Particle have (very short) wavelegths associated with them. It might be interesting to observe larger amount of such high energy photons coming from same point in the sky especially if there is a black hole near their path that could bend it slightly. Maybe we could get some diffraction patterns. ... yeah I'm probably insane.
Thx! Googlepedia displays whole articles next to search results (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/images/p/6210/) and not relevant paragraphs.
That's what I thought as well. Putting a clause like that in contract says to me, "It's possible we'll do this so badly you will sue us." I'm not sure I'd want to do business with a company like that.
I agree with both points. In addition, from the sound of the article, it seems like the biggest problem with having 80k employees is the jealousy and feudalism at the management level when it comes to actually implementing the great ideas across multiple teams—the ClearType and Tablet PC incidents being examples of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray
I agree with both the "ratio" and "routine" arguments.

Speaking of getting older, what's with the incredibly tiny fonts on web sites these days? I can read it OK, but Ctrl + makes it less annoying. If they're trying to "fit more ads" it's backfiring in my case because I'm less likely to read it. Now get off my lawn.
ahhhhh ... ok :)
Common sense? In my language flamewar?
Wonderful story and it made my day. I really like it when people are fixing problems and go above and beyond their job description.
The spirit of volunteerism and innovation that you admire is impractical when managers define the employee's primary responsibilities in a way that requires unpaid overtime every week.
For me it was the Sharp MZ-80K: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year...
Ok, so what do I have to do in order to fix some things, recompile and upload a new version on my Nokia E71 ? Is this even possible ?

Looking forward to seeing Symbian-based distros for our phones but I have the feeling this is more like the end of the road for Symbian, not the beginning of an open-source explosion.
Flash video performanc is awful on OS X and Linux. That is entirely Adobe's fault.
I think it's a very unfair impression. The Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii are not competitor products: the people who only have a Wii would have never bought an Xbox 360 in the first place. The Wii is to console games what Flash games are to PC games. Flash games didn't cut into the strategy, shooter, simulation, or role playing genre sales on the PC at all, because the people buying/playing them are not the same people who buy RTS/FPS/sim/RPG games. The Xbox line has been singlehandedly responsible for redefining the console gaming experience. Sony has been playing catchup ever since the 360's release.
So if someone sells a gun to a minor and that young person goes on to commit a crime, is the seller liable under the law? IANAL but I would guess yes.

My point is that there is a spectrum of how crimes bring liabilities to people not involved in the crime itself. The trick is to where to draw the line. I think where Italy put the line is very wrong, and I am very interested in finding a more sensible place for the line.
There are many (20+ main ones), and they're all horrid dinosaurs.
You got that right. Great hiking too, along the foothills and all the way up Pike's Peak. And speaking of "fourteeners," the Collegiate Range is pretty spectacular too.
It's difficult to discount it on the grounds of innovation. It's the first gaming console to fully integrate online gaming successfully and it's earned status rather than ridden on the back of brand loyalty like Sony or gone for the casual gaming market like Nintendo.
As a kid I wrote AI for snake in Atari Basic. I was very proud of it since it played aggressively and when you moved your snake close to its, it turned to get in you way when it was sensible.
Which is surprising to me. I guess to be a success in his mind is to completely dominate a market space. I guess when you use the market share of Windows as your barometer for success, nothing else quite compares.
I don't have a link on me now, and I'm at work on a windows machine so I can't go fine one. I have a couple year old white macbook and while I've never had a crash from Flash (Or maybe I did and thought it was something else) running flash video pretty much stops the computer from being able to do anything else and proc usage goes to about 85 - 90%. Try running two things in flash at the same time and I might as well not have a computer at all.
Interestingly, the Readability bookmarklet picks out the transcript perfectly. http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Obviously it's the macbook's fault - It's not designed to play that many videos...

/sarcasm
No problem, I'm completely cool with any business plan that does not include clauses such as "And in this case, we take all your stuff and lock you in a cage."
Why is it that Google does not seem to suffer from the same internal competition as this article claims present at MSFT? Perhaps Google is seen by its employees as the Land of Plenty while MSFT employees see the company as a zero-sum game? I'm not suggesting that either view is necessarily rational, but such perceptions could explain the behaviors.
How I Landed A $50/hr Side Gig With Little Effort
And, remember, job security isn't free, and he has an even more secure job now.
That kinda illustrates what I mean.

You can effectively perform legal action against single guy who was smart and rich enough built huge castle for his family (and probably did it smart way), but you can't do anything effective to protect people inhabiting most dangerous buildings because you don't have tools to enforce building code on them. Periodical tearing it down doesn't do anything good.
The Chapter In The Bible That Appears Twice
My guess is that 85% number is actually referring to a majority of that content being flash-based ads. So both of you are right.
He might consider it an "equal contender" but that division brings in hundreds of millions.
Cloud Monitoring Services: A Resource Guide
What makes the iPad a bigger deal than the iPod? The A4
Funny. A couple things to add about this:

- Gutenberg basically tried to mimic illuminated manuscripts with his creation, in terms of the lettering and the use of hand-painted letters at the beginnings of new sections. He did not immediately see the potential of his application for new styles of books and new uses of printing.

- Printing presses caught on very quickly in Europe. Once they did, there were very few people who believed illuminated manuscripts were better. Certainly, the Church didn't like losing control over information, but even it recognized that the technology was superior and could serve its own ends (see Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change for more about this, as well as the impact of printing on many aspects of society)

- Illuminated manuscripts held on through the early 1600s (see http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/browse....). Of course, by then their impact was negligible compared to books and other printed works.