skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But is the distance from the top to the bottom surprising? Microsoft in 2010 is a much more complex animal than it was in 1996. IE, Xbox, Azure, Windows Mobile, Bing, etc. didn't exist back then, or were in the early stages of development. With more products and more interconnection between product groups, there is bound to be an increase in managers and layers because the existing management can't scale to take on all of these new tasks.
oh!.i mis-understood his comment. Thanks for the clarification.
Intelligent Droplet (video + link to New Scientist article)
Think he meant to put pauses around proprietary: "Most people were using CVS or other, proprietary, version control systems"
Wonder what Paul Buncheit has to say about Buzz :)

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-... (via HN)
Nothing worse than hollier than thou high and mighty "TV is dumb and for the idiot masses".

If you actually learnt how to use a TV guide, and decided to watch only programs that interest you, you might have a different view point.

And how can you not even mention "micro men" from the BBC which was a fantastic look at the 80s home computer revolution. How can you not rate Newsnight? Question time?

Will the next meme be "I haven't even been connected to the internet for a year! The internet is full of rubbish and I don't miss it one bit"?
hah, "TRouBLe", haven't heard that one. That's kinda useful... most mnemonics I've seen typically mean I have to remember more rather than less. Heck, about the only other one I've found useful is "roygbiv", and that's more about being pronounceable.

Any particular reason for not specifying value types on zero? As in, is there a difference in how it's interpreted? Or is it just for code style?
Perhaps that should read, "Most people were using CVS or other, proprietary, version control systems"?
What amazes me is not how bad TV is, but how good it is.

I'm glad to hear this perspective here. Let me pose a question: What exactly makes watching a thoughtful, well-crafted drama (for instance, The Wire) on television any less worthy than reading a good back or going to watch a play?

I think there's a lot of unfortunate knee-jerk bias against TV.
I like jQuery and use it a lot, but I don't think popularity is a good measure of quality.
The Failed War on Drugs in Latin America: Could Decriminalization Be the Answer?
why not hook the computer up to the tv though?
I'm really curious about why the author succeeded with the other four major browsers, but couldn't make it work with Opera.
Can someone define "middle management" at a giant software company like Microsoft? Does it only mean people with direct reports, or does it also include people with no direct reports but significant product/business responsibilities as well?
Subversion is better than Git because many people use Git in a centralized manner? Wouldn't that make Git better, since it offers more options?
If this interests you, I suggest checking the discussion over at lwn.net: http://lwn.net/Articles/372419/ , which includes comments by Google's Chris DiBona, if I'm not mistaken.

(Six days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099016)
Another iPhone Marketing Experiment
Example Executive Summary Used To Raise Angel Investment
I assume you're targeting the middle market, because enterprises went through a "replication and caching" craze (they called it "WAN Acceleration") about 4 years ago. Riverbed mostly won, but there are a bunch of other companies in the space too. They all have roughly the same appliance you do, but they transparently support a bunch of protocols and applications, too.

If that's what you're doing, I see the value: you're the Drobo to Riverbed's NetApp.

I'd worry a bit that your typical customers --- law firms, doctors offices --- aren't going to understand what you have up there. You need to do the "Feature/Function/Benefit" exercise (what it is, how it works, how it makes money for your customer), and then write your copy based on the benefits, not the details of how you sync. Your "benefits" section is still too technical, where it isn't, it's too fuzzy.

For me, the biggest win to something like this would be not having to have employees dick around with VPNs. You get one connection set up, not 50, and everyone has access to the same files.
Awesome! But the "length of time" displayed is always "NaNy NaNm NaNd" (Chromium for Linux).
People, not process, is the soul of "agile"
How do you balance this with the fact that kids have short attention spans, or that some kids just aren't great at making themselves put in the hard work necessary to become great at something without prodding from their parents?
Architecture of a J2EE Reddit clone
He seems to be saying that svn is better than git because _some_ git users have a central repository they work against, and because they are planning on adding some features that might to some extent allow them to mimic a few things git already can do. That's just about the weakest argument for svn over git I've ever heard.

Then the went on to use the word "enterprise" about 10 times in 30 seconds. Not convincing.
I've been about a year (super-senior in college, now), and it would be longer without roommates. Haven't missed it; Hulu has most of what I'm interested in, and I don't have any interest at all in following what's new on TV. Others, I tend to borrow seasons from friends (which is MUCH easier at college, I'll grant, but still).

It's amazing just how noisy TV is. DVDs / Hulu of the same show are way nicer to watch, because 1/3 of your time (or more) isn't spent watching / ignoring ads.
The disparity between the low end and high end on Android devices is becoming staggering. Several carriers still sell ~500Mhz Android devices (Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) on 2 year contracts. So these devices will certainly be in use for years to come. There's the current gen devices at ~1Ghz on 2 year contracts that will probably be around for the next 5 years. Now we have 1.5Ghz next gen devices with a shelf life of more than 5 years in the hands of consumers. So over the next 5 years it seems Android developers are going to have to account for a radical variation in performance between mainstream devices.
Things Foursquare and Gowalla can learn from frequent-flyer programs
I'm not addressing your point, I'm only saying that harsh experience shows that an organization gets grossly disfunctional as you increase the number of layers from 5.

My answer to your point would be that it's the job of the CEO and board to structure the company so that it's as close to the ideal as possible. In the case of Microsoft, one approach would be to force less coordination on some of these separate units. As it is, they pay a terrific "architecture tax" by having to use and support (and generally only use and support) Microsoft products.

If it turns out they must do that to keep the core of Windows, Office and server products viable, well, that suggests they shouldn't get into the businesses that can't be usefully built on top of the core in the first place, and get out once they realize that.
Agreed. I don't think many people who proclaim how they haven't owned a TV for years understand the irony - they've switched one activity for an even dumber activity.
It must be a US (or East Coast) thing. If someone has a smartphone here, it's either an iPhone or a Blackberry.
Came across as excuses as why the subversion design was so inflexible and how it's going to change.

Painting a picture that distributed version control systems learnt from subversion is rubbish. These technologies were developed over the same period: bitkeeper's development started some time in 1997.
I haven't had a TV for three years. The hardest part was giving up Lost in Season Two. I feel lost when friends talk about "The Wire", "Weeds", "24" but I'd rather live vicariously through my own life. I don't even Hulu. I almost feel like TV is a treadmill - just keeping up with show plot trajectories.

Getting rid of a TV isn't a magic solution for life's problems. It doesn't make you more social. It doesn't make you focus on your big projects though. You can easily whittle away free time surfing on your iPhone on your couch (as I do).

I recently saw a two-year old boy whose parents had been raising without TV. They've succumbed. Thomas the Train. Previously, without TV, he would literally cry on the floor for 20 min. straight - because what the heck do small kids do if the parents can't distract them with the real opiate of the masses, in Karl Marx parlance.
You should really be careful when you ask to filter the information for you. Dig the information yourself or take the advice from friends, I don't see any other way.

I don't follow the recent developments, but I have a few people or teams whose opinions resonate with me, so I regularly read what they say. Here's "Top 9 Games of the Decade" by Auriea Harvey of Tale of Tales, whose opinions I value very highly.

http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/2009/12/31/aurieas-top-9-games...

If you're not familiar with their games, check their blog to see if is the kind of games you're interested in. But again, to even know these people whose advice I follow, I used to read many websites, magazines and even visit conferences.
Fixed -- thanks.
Simple, there are more web pages on the web than web apps.
Interesting. I don't "follow back" at all, because I turned off notification of when people are following me. I follow people who say interesting things that land on my radar, and that's it.
I suspect that you didn't read to the end of the paper. They're using the 'seven dwarves and scrooge' example in the context of sovereign debt. They aren't criticising individuals for saving and investing.

The entire thesis is that China hoarding large surpluses is essentially unsustainable and damaging to global productivity. This is probably true, unless China is willing to accept IOUs (which is what US bonds are, essentially) ad infinitum.
> What exactly makes watching a thoughtful, well-crafted drama (for instance, The Wire) on television any less worthy than reading a good back or going to watch a play?

Great question. A few points:

1. A play or movie has a start and end time that is reasonably compressed - you watch Memento or Gattaca, it takes you two hours, you sit and think about it afterwards for a while, and it's done. A high quality program will run for many seasons, taking 30 minutes to an hour of your life times X weeks for however long. Also, being not as compressed, the average quality tends to be lower (with some exceptions of very good programming, though it's rare).

2. Very easy to just keep watching after the high quality program ends, watching the next thing that comes on. Very, very easy to do that. My housemate last year had a TV hooked to a DVD player and Nintendo Wii for parties, but no channels. I did buy him a box set of Planet Earth for his birthday after seeing some of it at a friend's house. But it's like, put on the DVD, watch it, put it away, done. No getting sucked in.

3. Garbage books are no good either - I tend to read books that give me a perspective on another culture (Koda Rohan, Eiji Yoshikawa, or Genji for Japan, for instance), or read business books, technical books, history, economics, finance, etc. I'd classify a lot of fiction as similarly mindlessly-distracting-without-growth too. That's fine for what it is, but I'd rather get the enjoyment while also developing as a person, asking myself tough questions, getting more in touch with another culture, gaining expertise, and so on.

But sure, there's some good TV. I used to go do cardio at the gym whenever a sports match was on that I wanted to watch, for instance, because they had a bunch of TVs, and I'd go during the fifth inning or halftime and watch the end of the game. I might buy a boxed set of DVDs and have a weekend marathon at my place sometime if a show is really good, insightful, and develops the character.

Still, I don't watch television regularly because I think I'll have a healthier, happier, more productive life where I reach more of my goals if it's not part of my life. Perhaps some people have knee jerk anti-TV reactions as a signaling mechanism that they're "unplugged", but that's not it in my case. Some TV is really cool. I watched some Top Gear at one of my English friend's flats in London, and it's just really enjoyable. The question was still - wait, is this what I should be doing with my time? Couldn't I be enjoying myself while also learning, or producing something, or connecting more deeply with someone I like? It's a keenly thought out thing that I made a conscious decision about a long time, but I'm not one of those horrible anti-TV preachy people. If it serves a role in a person's life and they're happy with its effect, then it's a good thing for them.
Blogging's allure fades
Don't more users of an open source product cause better quality?
A sort of side note: I suspect what's got the PLA really upset is the proposed sale of Patriot PAC-3s to the ROC (this is the dedicated ballistic missile killer version, with four smaller missiles in each launcher cell).

You don't have to have a totally effective ABM system to make a first strike difficult to impossible, since your opponent can't choose which missiles get through. I.e. to be absolutely sure you take out a particular target, you have to massively saturate it ... and you can't afford to do that with all the first priority targets.
I would describe it as someone who primarily finds new music via online sources and also buys most or all of their music online. An analog customer would be someone who primarily finds new music via FM radio or TV. They probably still buy CDs.
Unless you code in raw machine code, everything is a source code transformation.
I think the reason is likely that people started releasing 'plugins'.

eg "jquery plugin to add 2 numbers!!!!"

I don't think that really tells you much about quality though.
I was a poke-hoarder. It has the nice advantage of preventing people from continually poking me. Email me if you want a response, a poke carries zero information.
People who don't watch TV do tend to mention it at every opportunity.

Most of those opportunities are probably situations when the topic of conversation has already turned to television and they are politely excusing their lack of participation.

In my experience, the topic rarely comes up. My guess is most people who would care are off watching TV rather than socializing.
Quite often the opposite I'd say.
I'll give them this: they certainly have their work cut out for them. If they can make me want to go back to SVN, they'll have performed a miracle.
How would that work exactly? China starts selling t-bills. Selling to whom? Buyers. Now non-Chinese buyers have the bills. Are those bills repudiated? Also, since the sell-off is a legitimate threat, it seems to follow that the market for t-bills is so liquid, that repudiating those bills belonging to one entity would be technically impossible.
Sending a subset is easy, but choosing that subset can be more difficult.

I doubt the selection criteria would resolve around which bank, but information about the account holders and their status. This data will only be available to SWIFT's customer banks. Building an interface to query this data in a standard form from lots of banks would be a nightmare.
Django Advent - Messages for the rest of us (Feb 10, 2010)
This wasn't meant to be snarky: there is simply a very clear 'disable buzz' link at the bottom of your gmail.
It's actually part of HTML5:

http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html#type-date

But "support is… sparse".
The other problem is that you can't make people rehabilitate; in the end, it's up to them. While I would support a prison system that provided better opportunities for rehabilitation, it is not clear to me what percentage of recidivism that would reduce.
Australia's net censorship and Operation Titstorm
I see that in Chromium on Linux, but I do NOT see it with Chrome on Windows 7.
I wrote this in response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114122
I don't really see how hosting the attack at Google is impressive — gmodules.com is no more believable as a proper login page than login.google.com.2de4dasdz.cx, or any of the usual phishing URL schemes.

Maybe there's some merit to not loading external, untrusted gadgets into waves without user approval, but where there's user-supplied data, there'll always be phishing.
This looks VERY nice. My only question that I don't see an immediate answer to is whether or not these timelines are embeddable from another site?
Why yes, i would like to fill your dialog out, and yes, i need data immediately behind it on my computer screen to finish filling out your dialog. Oh, wait I can't get to that data because you're modal :(
I always just thought of it as a clock. Start at noon, and go.
Wow, he's complaining that there are too many good games, not too few. Now that's refreshing! Is he serious? After all, Drucker is a comedian and I can sometimes be dense on humour.

I was really surprised to hear that the number of games increased from say 15 years ago. Surely, the industry grew very much, but I thought costs and complexity of game development more than offset this, so I expected the number of games to decrease. Does anyone have numbers on that?

Also, I thought it became customary to say that newer games are not what they used to be (and the grass back when we were younger, but still). So I see Drucker's article as an opposition to the general notion of gloom and doom in the game industry, though again I am not sure how serious he is.
FWIW, I'm of the school of thought that branching is bad, causes mess, and should be hard.

Having said that, branching seems pretty simple in svn if you really like having them.
Adobe got 7 million iPhone and iPod touch d/l requests for Flash in December
True, true ... but this threat only works if the PRC keeps buying our debt. If they stop, they have the problem of getting the outstanding debt redeemed or writing it off, and they are of no use to us going forward (at least in this narrow area).
I see you went with my favorite icon choice! looks good.
It wouldn't change the real value we have to pay externally for oil and so on.

Most of the oil producing countries have currencies pegged to the dollar and politically they are bound to stay with it. If you have a low dollar Chinese goods will become more expensive and consumption will go down. America wants a stronger Chinese Yuan and has been pressurizing the Chinese for this - in efect if the Chinese dump dollars America's wish will be granted. (A similar move saw America out of the First Oil Crisis).

I thought the problem with the "Continental" currency was that it got devalued due to the British forging large amounts.
On a quick test, drop down boxes don't work on Chrome 4: when I click on the scroll bar it closes down. I've seen this bug somewhere else two years ago and there was some workaround but still...

Anyway, it's a nice idea!
Twitter Text library in C#
GMail to be likely to blocked in China
With the introduction of Google Buzz, it is only a matter of time before GMail will be blocked in mainland China. Providing Facebook like functionality and the watching of Youtube videos from within GMail has all but guaranteed the service will be blocked soon.

Sorry for the previous, slightly missleading headline but as someone living in China heavily dependent on GMail I can see it coming.
I think he's saying that talking about a great lolcat you saw isn't viral. Reposting them or sending a link is.

I spread viruses because the virus makes me cough or sneeze. I spread jokes and urban myths because they make me repeat them to others. Online these are generally called memes or viral.

It gets confusing because he's not talking about funny videos, he's talking about a business plan. If your business was putting funny images of cats in front of as many people as possible for free then job done. If it's getting people to use a service or visit a site then you need to make sure that usage of your service is the thing that's passed on virally, not the content.
Wow, that's 4 minutes of my life I won't get back,
and I'm a subversion (and git) user ;-(
I think knowing about popular culture is actually quite valuable. Especially if you're trying to sell to end users as many of us here are.

>> "In my experience most people who don't watch much TV are too busy doing other things to bother bragging about it."

Like checking reddit, watching youtube vids, laughing at lolcats? ;)
The more that I read the more I feel that perhaps Microsoft might have faired better--- and we'd all have better technology--- if they were indeed broken up after the antitrust investigations.

Doesn't the best technology come from well funded small companies?
I can say from experience that this is on the right track.

My only addition would be to say that parents need to be ready to "jump" to facilitate new interests while at the same time they'll need to accept the fact that most of these new ventures will "flame-out", and this needs to be allowed to happen without the typical guilt associated with "giving up".
I think you are posing the wrong question.

TV is not a particular series; it doesn't follow that people who hate TV must hate The Wire. TV as a whole, as a linear, inconvenient way of displaying content which doesn't allow an easy way to filter out the crap, is what it's being biased against.
How is this that different from radio? Is radio not a free music streaming service?
Re: Skype Founders: Sweet Revenge
"A group of senior Chinese military officers" sees US debt as a weapon. Which of course they would, however, whether the civilian leadership shares their view is far less certain. I suspect that China's civilian leadership are far more worried about maintaining sufficient economic growth to avoid civil unrest and uprising, obliterating the US economy is about the last thing they will want to do.
Ask HN: new facebook layout better/worse?
As with any change to layout I immediately get frustrated not finding things where I expect them to be. What are your opinions?
New Russian botnet tries to kill rival
Clearly, Einstein wasn't a professional researcher at the time; however, he wasn't an outsider either, having gotten his PhD.
Yes, I did watch Micro Men. That was great. Downloaded it on the iPlayer Desktop and watched it on a long flight to the US.

I've watched Newsnight twice in the last year. I've never watched Question Time. Is it good?

Mostly, I feel I don't need to learn to use a TV guide because the people around me are constantly saying 'Did you see X?'. They are doing the filtering for me.
I don't think there is anything they can do to get me to switch back. Out of every VCS I've tried, Git seems to be the most flexible and advanced.
I see the same NaNy on Chrome 4, Windows 7.

It's an excellent idea, good work!
My problem with TV is that I turn it on and it just seems to drain my attention. What's more, it actually makes me less creative.
I would guess that the bigger trend is a switch from broadcasting to on demand usage of video content. Broadcasting is really only better than on demand video in very specific and rare circumstances. But until a few years ago cheap (free) and convenient on demand video was not available. The only (cheap) way to get video was broadcasting. My guess would be that in the next ten to twenty years broadcasting video will shrink while on demand video will grow.
China also really can't afford to lose its accumulated savings, since they'll need every saved dollar to deal with the massive demographic problems caused by the one child policy.

While the U.S. short term demographic issues will be bad when the baby boomers retire, the changes are going to be even more extreme in China. When their population ages enough, those accumulated savings will be absolutely critical: http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2010/02/globalizing-austra... .
Can you give example of innovations that bubbled from the bottom like that and that were shipped?
Watch out you're not clicking the third one in the list. They're disabled, but don't look like it.