skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should or shouldn’t Amazon.com create a publishing company?
In light of recent events, I can’t see why they don’t begin publishing. Would this make sense for Amazon? If not, what issues make it a bad move?
Photoshop used to be better. But with time it has become terrible. It seems as though Adobe focus mostly on putting out new features, and not enough on just making present features work better, faster and more reliably.
OR:
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
Why HTML5 won't replace Flash anytime soon
"The much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future . . . "

Microsoft never did that. Author has to be a press release junkie to not know that.
Agreed.

Adobe seems to focus on putting out new features first and fixing existing work second. I've seen it before in companies whose development schedules are dictated by sales. "Hey, I spoke to this guy, he said he'd buy 100 units if we ...".

Out of interest, I've recently discovered the Sumatra PDF viewer:

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

It's open source, for Windows and faster than Foxit, the reader usually mentioned as an alternative in this situation.
So what, it's open source now, the OS still sucks. Nobody builds symbian apps for fun, the only people using the platform are paid to.

If they'd done this 4 or 5 years ago, they might have had a chance. But now there are viable alternatives which suck less.
Apparently, a lot of unethical behaviors feel defensible when one works at Microsoft.

I think it may have something with the height where they place the bar.
You're supposed to only have one account. PG gives YOU a right to post hacker news comments, not your computer.

And the government is not restricting your rights with it's "no criticizing Obama with a computer" law. It's only restricting the actions of your computer.

A company is not a distinct entity. A company is nothing more than a group of people acting together according to some mutually agreed upon terms. Incidentally, the government does grant people the right to form groups - it's called "peaceable assembly".

But lets ignore that. Do you believe that after forming a group, you give up all constitutional rights when acting as part of the group? I.e., while the government can't censor me, it can censor papers I publish as part of my association with a larger group (NYU, my employer)?

Also, this brings us back to my (and Robert's) original question: if free speech doesn't apply to corporations, can the government censor the corporate media?
They do publish, or rather let you self publish through them.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html...
It's a long term strategy, and very much dependent on kindle market share.

It's not a move that will help the kindle in the near/mid-term future. And that's where they're focusing now.

But in the long term if the kindle becomes popular , it might be a good move.
Microsoft wouldn't be worth discussing, if not their role on the market. I mean, they were once innovative and now they're just plain stupid. Like many companies in the past, their success is slowly killing them.

The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995.

I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation.

See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution.

Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives.

Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK.

We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.
There's always free cheese in a mousetrap.
They do allow the option to enable flash through the about:config page, they're just disabling it by default. Flash has always been a little shaky on my N810, but it's not really a powerhouse of a device, so I never expected it to handle much more than a youtube video or flash based menus.
Healthy Diets For Kids & Getting Kids to Eat Fruits and Vegetables
Well, everyone does actually get the API key and is able to use it anytime they like -- I really need to do a better job of explaining the product, features, etc on the site. :)

For the API customers, I've ended up haggling deals with them to get them on board. In general, I give those guys the ability to prepay in larger amounts to get a better per-piece rate or postpay for "higher" rates (believe it or not, most of the higher volume API-only users prefer to postpay because it improves their cash flow situation).
Microsoft produces its very own reality distortion field. The author just spent too much time inside it and thinks it's true.

I fail to remember any genuine innovation from them since, well, the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
Sorry, I realized after I posted that that I was hugely inaccurate in my wording. I meant to say that in my experience, "paid" software was much higher quality in the design and usability area than their open source counterparts. There are certainly exceptions, though.
Yes, on Windows Flash performance is quite acceptable. Try living with it on OS X for a few weeks.
http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/
Don't forget about xbox360 - most US males age 7-18 wants/has one. It's an excellent Microsoft product that is often overlooked.
the author's a former vp at microsoft. hardly a "press release junkie"...
That's exactly what confused me, they aren't putting down tools, they're just using them for whatever they want.

I really like the idea too, at my last job there was a lot of discussion for a while about taking 4 hours each week to work on whatever you wanted and present it to the group at the next team meeting. It never really panned out, at least not officially.
Note that the guy who said that is dead.
I hope the US Commerce Dept is standing firm with Italy on this. If a man drinks Italian wine and crashes his car into mine, can I sue the Italian wine maker? No? Well then why can Italy sue Youtube for someone else's video when they are doing a pretty good job of cracking down on copyright violations?
I'm sceptical. What does Amazon know about publishing?

With the Kindle, they were already skilled at retailing and designing user interfaces.

With their cloud services, they were selling a service they had to provide for themselves anyway.

Why would an author sign to Amazon instead of an established publisher? What could Amazon do better than them?
He wasn't when he said it.
I love this part (from your Sidney/Water CRM link):

"Once implemented, the project, which also has a second phase, bringing expenditure up to $68.9 million, is expected to reduce operating costs by $1.9 million a year."

So they should recoup their costs in about 35 years. Priceless (well, not really).
I think it could roughly be summarized as "quantum teleportation moves identity, not substance".
Italy vs Google
"Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business."

He didn't forget the Xbox, but he did give the impression that he wouldn't consider it a success.
Why Apple doesn't need a social media strategy
Yep. 2000 is when I switched career track to writing full-time. Unsurprisingly, I haven't been releasing any packages since then (due to not doing any software development these days).

Incidentally, NetServer::Generic is what Datacash's payment servers ran on for about the first 3-5 years (I can't be exact because I left after about 40-42 months). I gather the last of my code was retired from production in 2008.
I meant the behaviour of saying to the market "we're making something which will be far better than this shipping product" so loudly that no one bought the shipping product.

The fact that their internal politics made it impossible to release something better in the first place is just adding insult to injury.

Read the book, it's a good story.
Awesome, awesome advice -- I'll start messing around with the external pages and see what I can do. I've been meaning to do this for a while and have always found excuses to work on other stuff. :)

I should also mention that my target market is no longer the person that wants to send a letter to grandma every few months -- I haven't found a real demand for that service.

That being said, I have found that my ideal direct customer is a real estate agent, car salesman, insurance salesman or anyone else that does face-to-face selling to their local geographic market. These guys already mail out ~1K pieces of mail every month and they have to manually do it all because the bigger print shops really can't afford to help them unless they were doing tens of thousands each month.

I think that's where the sweet spot is for SnailPad -- we're making direct mail painless for small businesses, freelancers and "high touch" sales people. The margins are so "good" on this side of the business because these customers want good paper and nice envelopes -- they can't get that anywhere else unless they go to large print houses, commit to yearly contracts and prepay tens of thousands of dollars each month.

On the API side, the "ideal" customer is primarily some company that sends a ton of invoices or other automated documents to their user base (or to their user's user base). These guys still want the high quality that I described earlier but they also can't justify the expenses associated with talking to the bigger mail shops.

In general, I'm really excited about the space I've stumbled into. There really hasn't been any innovation in a decade or more -- there could be a reason why people stay away from it but I'm taking a more naive approach to see what I can do. So far, so good. :)
SEO bait.

It's a list of 5 websites. No commentary, nothing.
As someone who's worked at MSFT himself, the author certainly knows what he's talking about. However, there's a couple of factors one must reflect on:

1. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history, the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business-groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan.

2. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to utilize it.
I voted "YES", but I also think that trolling, sockpuppetry and composite entities are part of the charm of The Internet.

I'd also like to note that this is the same question that people on Usenet were dealing with in 1993. I'm pretty sure that history will regard the failure of Usenet to deal effectively with trolling and sockpuppetry to be the cause of its downfall.
Photographer Loves Math, Graphs Her Images
Even complete lock-in might not work for them forever.

The entire US financial industry uses Windows desktops and will for the foreseeable future, but adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible.

I imagine that their future profits are in trouble if they can't innovate enough for users to even upgrade their products.
$1500 + 15 to 20 days work. However wonderful librarians are, they don't get paid $1000/day, so it's still a good deal. But not quite as good a deal as the headline suggests.
Thread about implementing STM on Lispworks:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.lispworks.general/9700/m...
DirecTV Becomes a Cable Company
Not really. If you were following the company in the 90s, two quick examples are Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 4 (Remember when IE was actually _praised_ for better standards-compliance and developer-features?)
Tesla's Valuation While Raising Venture Funding
"Longer run, with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.”

I really don't like this guy.
A Vic-20 Love Story
When universities ask us to whip up one of these babies we quote a number much closer to $25k than to $1.5k. One reason is that the fully loaded cost of the cheapest engineer capable of doing this is probably about $10k for a man-month. (I don't know what librarians make in Iowa but if it was less than $8k fully loaded I'm going to be surprised).

Also, after you install it you have to support it, and these are not the easiest customers in the world to deal with. (Not the worst, either, but an intermediate engineer answer the phone and walk you through how to clear a print jam -- not that any of our customers would ever call four times in a year about a print jam, mind you, this is totally hypothetical -- is not the cheapest endeavor in the world.)
History of Gaming Challenge
Is Adrian Peterson a Liability? A running back's fumble rate distribution
Symbian Completes Biggest Open Source Migration Project Ever
"One last question: how's religious tolerance in India? Assuming that a foreigner doesn't go around proselytizing, does religion come up often as a point of discussion?"

Very often. As to religious tolerance,India is largely tolerant of religions except in certain pockets/times.

Over the last decade or so, there his been a rise in religious tension largely between Muslim and Hindu radicals, but religion is open to discussion and is a safe topic unless you are going around proselytizing in some of the trouble spots where there is a history of religious tension (which you said you are not planning to do). More than that it is hard to generalize. If you have specific questions, I'll try to answer. My email is in my profile.
In enterprise IT, we have 2 kinds of vendors, those we actively embrace and those who hold us hostage.

The biggest fear in making any major IT purchase is not the price, the conversion, or the change in culture; it's the potential loss of options in how we run our own business.

I've seen it over and over again: competitive pressure requires us to make a change in the way we run our business, but we can't. For all kinds of reasons. The license agreement kills any possible ROI. We don't have the needed IT support because so much of it is spent on keeping current. The systems don't talk to each other. The feature we need is still 18 months away. And probably most of all, the software is not as excellent as we need it to be (let's just leave it at that).

Long gone are the days when you needed IBM's permission to fart. Guess who the biggest culprit is today?

Just because you go with someone doesn't necessarily mean you like it. Almost every enterprise IT department I know would love an alternative to Microsoft. (And make no mistake about it, the enterprise is Microsoft's strength, much more so than the consumer.)

Sure, pissing off your customers may pad today's bottom line. How do you think those customers will feel when your landscape changes and they have more choices?

[Entered using ie7 on xp pro. I didn't have a choice.]
Dropbox working on Android and BlackBerry apps
It parses if you are a Brit. The phrase 'down tools' harks back to the years of industrial strife when the union would instruct workers to ... well, I'm sure you can guess.

My thought on this initiative was that it reminded me of the Google system of personal projects, expect coordinated across the entire company.
There's a similar opportunity almost everywhere something is sold at a massive premium to material costs.
How the World Trade Organization could open up Internet access in China
How to Manage Virtually: Four Tips
Tipler's “Physics of Immortality”
Could it be that some crashes are the fault poor programming and not the Flash Player itself?

I can eat up 100% of your CPU with Python.
Personally I think Photoshop has gotten a lot better with the latest releases. The interface is worlds better. Unfortunately this only applies to the Windows version of Photoshop. The Mac version is a stinking pile of crap that I refuse to use.
If they only did this in OCaml, once it's established...
Talking of Photoshop: I couldn't install Photoshop on my Mac because my file system is case sensitive. Needless to say, I have no respect for Adobe.
nice comments:

"Ingenuity is the trump card of jihad"

"iam very happy to see that islamic repuplic of iran has sucessfuly aqcired high tecnology, this the benefit of islam leadership of ayatullah allah,s peace and bless be upon him, really hewas a great man and you are a great nation."

"ALLAH IS GREAT."
The Ruby code is not an annotation.

Which is exactly the problem: it should be, because it is meta-information about when the function is supposed to be called. It's not a good idea to wrap that into a function, together with the code that is supposed to be executed, because you are mixing two completely different kinds of information into some new function. This code is being too clever for it's own good: it condenses information so far that you are forced to think harder about what each piece means. I consider this is one of the main dangers of languages like Ruby: it's proponents lose sight of the fact that they are coming full circle, back to writing code that's so clever that no one in the future will understand it.

every web library I've used has worked this way.

I doubt that we've used a disjoint set of web libraries, so my only answer can be: no, they haven't worked that way. Most libraries map paths to named functions separately from implementing the functions.

Conciseness is not an ultimate goal; in fact, it is rather the opposite, as those that suffered under the clever C hacks of others will tell you. To paraphrase Santanyana: people have forgotten the past and are repeating it.
Www.hackdetudo.blogdoido.com - Hack Sudden attack | shimoda.bloguedoido.com
A lot of business related uses for printers don't cover those anyway. "Print memo x, print report y."
It took him 15-20 days of work for one unit. won't it take him much less time for each unit if he would build them in quantity ?
"Works on my machine!"
Somehow he needs to enable ActionScript to cross the same bridge that JavaScript did. Remember when JavaScript was primarily the tool of script kiddies run amok?
FTA: Before we release a new version of Flash Player we run more than 100,000 test cases and have built an automated system that has scanned over 1 million SWFs that we use for testing from across the web. Our QA lab has a very large variety of machines to represent the machines in real use on the web.
Stallman Number
It's not so much a cost saving, more an indication that this particular librarian is underemployed. With those skills, he shouldn't be stamping books and clearing print jams.
All of the internal issues wouldn't be a huge problem if consumers wanted to buy their products, but they just don't know how to tell a compelling story of improving lives. Microsoft just launches products that they think will compete well in certain sectors, but they're not really thinking about what people need. The XBox is really the only counterexample from the whole past decade! "Hey, we have this thing that plays games, but you can also get updates and games online using our store. When's the last time you've been able to apply a bugfix to your console game?" Show me another Microsoft consumer product that really improves someone's life like the XBox did
Lisp evangelists that miss the point about syntax
By an accident of history and a lot of skill, Microsoft wangled themselves a virtual monopoly. Their skill at keeping that monopoly was second to none.

But now that other markets are opening and their monopoly power is fading, we see the truth - they don't really have anything special beyond the likes of HP and IBM.
Then you don't read CS papers. He's not exaggerating research.microsoft.com.
Can you link me to a site that currently thrashes your machine as a result of Flash on the page? I use a white MacBook (i.e. not exactly a monster of a machine) and my biggest headaches come from leaving Firefox open too long (which is why I've switched to Chrome).
I disagree, this paper outlines the algebra quite clearly. A series of commits in Directed acyclic graph layout, with the ability to modify this graph however you please.
Slide back yes, slide forward no, it is unclear if he knows that & while unlikely could lead to some harm.
Thirteen Million Wikipedia Paragraphs at your Fingertips
Memo From the Monastery
New Project Management in Google Wave from Wrike.com
Implementing STM on LispWorks
Very cool -- particularly the support for so many languages. I was expecting them to require java or some such...

Once they make scheme available, I might give it a shot.
War is hell, but an IT contractor isn't going to experience much of that hell--there'll be exciting moments when someone unfriendly gets a mortar close enough to lob a few shells into the base, but the stress of waiting for the next such attack isn't like going out on a helicopter and shooting farmers in rice paddies.
Ultimate Strategy Guide For Playing Zoo World
Unless they make more than one.
Works fine in the released Safari 4.0.4.
A pretty quick read about a super-fast proton detected in 1991, with a nice set of comparisons to get the point across. Such as that the proton had enough energy:

to light a 40 watt light bulb for more than a second.

Yowza.

That said, included in the article is this:

[Star Trek's best ship would take] a little more than 21 years [to reach the center of the galaxy]. By contrast, an observer on board the Oh-My-God particle would arrive at the nucleus of the Milky Way, according to his clock, just about 3 seconds after leaving Starbase Terra. That's more than 9,700,000 times faster than the starship.

* bzzzz * wrong. It's only perceived as faster to the riders, the particle takes ~32,000 years (according to their numbers) to do the same trip, which isn't pointed out in that section. At which point our whole civilization is probably dead or passed you by long ago. And they've apparently forgotten about suspended animation.
I would think the kiosk needs to be integrated into the library's primary catalog software database. If other libraries use different catalog software, he would need to do integration work for those other types of catalog systems.

The economies of scale would still apply but it's probably more involved than just churning out kiosks.
Think in weeks, not years
The people you see stamping books are probably clerks or pages. "Librarian" is a professional job that requires at least a master's degree. Librarians these days increasingly have degrees in "information science" which includes a wide variety of technologies from books to the internet.

The librarian in this news story "handles technical support for the library." Apparently this isn't just clearing print jams, either: "I had done some Web-application development for the library..."
...and they have Flash. It is a bigger deal than most think. 85 of the top 100 sites use Flash to some extent.
Amazon has Acquired Touchco - A Multi-Touch Company