skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It will be very interesting to see what XNA support is like on the final model. There's a strong community of developers accessing these tools for free, which would allow Microsoft to roll out a full and lively app store quickly. I would be highly optimistic about Microsoft's ability to run an app store service, based on experiences with Xbox Live, Xbox Indie Games, and Rock Band Network. Since they're building from scratch, they could analyze and avoid legacy issues present in Apple's iTunes App Store ecology.

Converse to their potential strengths at running an app store, Microsoft has a difficult decision posed by marketing. There are a lot of people out there addicted to Xbox Live Achievement points. If MS allows you to earn achievement points via games on it's new mobile phone, it will get a tremendous boost in market share.

The risk present here is that the achievement points system requires additional overhead and review by MS, in order to prevent system breaking games. There's no feasible way for them to populate their app store with indies and approve achievement points for all of them.

In order to have their cake and eat it to, MS needs to be able to differentiate achievement point games from indie games, but without turning indie games into an unshopped ghetto (see Xbox Indie Games). My best resolution would be to offer a small differentiation to icons on the store, specifically take those icons for games with points and apply a smaller logo to the corner, much like on a shortcut icon. Perhaps make it a little gold medal with a green ribbon falling in an X shape ;)
Can't you get banned from the application store if you use undocumented ipod features?
Montreal Nightlife
You could thank him more effectively by linking to it somewhere in the margins of HN (and http://searchyc.com too).
Another scenario of the automation vs jobs is, very unstable economy job-wise, for long terms. many many people would experience large periods of unemployment , a constant need to shift jobs and professions , and all the psycho-social negatives that come with this.

This might become a basic nature of the economy as automation becomes more rapid. some might even say it's already happening.

I think we would need to optimize economies for well being , instead of GDP to solve this.
Advertising on SO. Sure, you can get highly targeted advertising that could help solve peoples problems. Converting Oracle to MySQL could have Oracle promoting tools to do just that on that very page. However, all those impressions are essentially people coming to the site, looking for an answer, and leaving. If the answers aren't there, they go back to Google and look for another answer.

Advertising on something like SO is almost like advertising your latest application on the Pirate Bay. I just don't see the value.
The twist here is that StackOverflow is its own company (of which Joel is a founder) and StackExchange is a product of Fog Creek, currently available to everyone. If their pitch to VCs is "we can add sites for XYZ topics" what's preventing a competitor in that vertical starting up a StackExchange site on the same topic?
Human perspective, no question! But the PR goal is to "not have bad news in the news", basically. Zero crashes gets you there, but, regrettably, that's basically impossible. More crashes would make a mere crash "not news". But, like I said, probably wouldn't work anyhow. "An auto crash" isn't much news, but bad enough things still happen that they still show up on the evening news with some frequency.
I'm not sure I've seen anybody report hard numbers on this, but anecdotally what I've heard is this: geeks don't click on ads. Any site that targets geeks has a harder time making revenue from advertising than one targeting non-geeks, by a significant margin.
I agree with many of the points in this article, but this:

"You’re asked inane questions about what you want to study (unanswerable at that age), shown some brochures, and make a fundamentally random choice about where you want to spend the next four years of your life."

is lies. Lots of upper class and upper-middle class children are told explicitly by their parents that they should go into the most prestigious college they can get into, and most follow that advice. The middle class doesn't as much, which helps the upper classes preserve social immobility.

"Is it so hard to see now why so many wealthy, jet-setting people are unhappy and commit suicide? "

More lies. Rich people are, in fact, happier (on average) than non-rich people. See, eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ub/competent_elites/.
What I don't get is the difference of timelines in his argument. Considering all the fields where supposedly humans are to be replaced by robots we are talking about a point in time probably still a 100 years off. (And we just cannot say for sure that all those activities ever can be sufficiently performed by robots, probably until it happens.) So how are we supposed to know what kinds of jobs there will be in a 100 years time?

My (imaginary) farming and livestock-holding greatgrandfather probably didn't ever imagine someone could make a living out of Search Engine Optimization. Still, despite machines ploughing our fields, we still have jobs. So we probably will have jobs in 100 years time. We just have no idea which ones.
There are ways of provoking it, and given the context, it sounds to me like someone knew it.
There's a question mark missing in you link. Hopefully it will work this time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdDAeyy1H0A&feature=404
While the launch of buzz really is a big disaster, i still think most of the errors that were made, were not because of a manager saying "hey, great, lets publish all privacy information of our users to the internet, thats a great business model!" (think of it, the users data is probably the most valuable data an internet company has today). It looks to me, as if a team had a good idea (yes, i think buzz as an idea is a good idea, the launch was not) but it was not properly tested and thought of such cases. All in all it was released far too early for far too many people. I still wonder why they didn't roll out buzz on an invite only base like they did with gmail. All this negative press could've been avoided and most people would be like "yay, thats cool!" without the "oh shit"-effect.

But that attitude that google fucked up your privacy on intent is just stupid. I agree, Googles power is scary: Think of it, google may control a lot of users internet experience from end-to-end in the future (ISP->Search->Mail->Mobile->Android->Netbooks+advertising = omg, scary!). They will eventually end up being split into many companies if the trend continues. But to say they fucked up your privacy on intent is just wrong, imo.

Thanks for the upcoming downvotes in advance, because i don't just repeat what every little blog is already writing over and over again.
Yes, and in 1981 it was ~$800. Which means a return of ~50% over 29 years while paying no dividends whatsoever.

You can make pretty much anything look like a good or bad investment if you pick your start and endpoints carefully.
The wave of amazed astonishment today at Microsoft actually announcing an innovative mobile OS really should be shared with this.

"Fusing" Maemo and Moblin seems about as straightforward a process as merging Android and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Sure, they're both based on a Linux kernel, but... isn't that about all? They have entirely different UIs, different software stacks, and are targeted at different classes of device.

Both Moblin and Maemo have looked very promising on their own, and I hope this is the right decision for both of them. It just seems very strange for Intel and Nokia to attempt this.
I'm glad someone responded to the original post, after so many years of java, I can't really say I ever enjoyed factories they always seemed to solve a problem that was a weakness in the language itself.
Joel's going to the Valley to pitch SO while Jeff's off in New Zealand at Webstock/on vacation. Do VCs care if only half of the founding team is there? What if one of them is 1/3 of the development team and the primary technical driving force?
They're not trying to save money; they're paying a tax to raise money from the capital markets.

I'm aware that USG doesn't pay a dividend; it's probably not Buffett's only stock. Your argument is that Buffett gets most of his income from stock options (which he publicly condemns) not from dividends and capital gains (even though he does have his own portfolio).
That's a good idea. Perhaps a link on the guidelines page would be easier & less abrupt.
Seeing how it consistently happens on the horizontal, I think it's by design. It probably tries to suggest with some degree of subtility that the UI goes on in that direction.
No VC would invest based on one meeting. Nor would they expect the guy who is building the site to schlep along on every pitch meeting -- Jeff has better things to do!.

Presumably if we found some interested parties, they would want to meet the key team members, in a second or third meeting.
Streetview takes my picture
Not sure it matters much either way, but fwiw, BHL (as he seems to be known) isn't associated with French philosophy in the school-of-thought sense Americans use the term, although he's clearly French and a philosopher. That is, he isn't associated with the prominent intellectual currents that characterize post-WW2 French philosophy (post-structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, etc.). Rather the opposite; he's mainly a critic of the mainstream of French philosophy, and politically somewhat towards the right, e.g. opposing socialism and supporting the Iraq War.

(This episode will probably strengthen his critics from the left who tend to accuse him of being a media-savvy intellectual lightweight.)
This makes sense now, was thinking 500c seemed a bit hot!!!
Geeks can be interested in status. It's a purely achievement based status, but it's a form of status.

Also, I'm a computer programmer, and I have bad concentration.
I'm surprised anyone bothered; the original post was so very obviously troll bait. People who've been in the Ruby community as long as Yehuda should know better.
Show HN: Unit Testing in VS2010 (Native C++)
What do you guys think? I'm really putting my ego on the line here.

Sorry for no x86 build. My 2010 is glitched using 2008 files for all configs except x64.
It can't hurt to make the call to action to make quizzes more prominent. "Make" listed among other plain text menu options hardly screams for action. Perhaps put some sort of call to make a quiz along with the list of quizzes. Or put a big "Make your own" at the end of the list of quizzes. I also really like the idea JangoSteve suggested of creating incentive (in the form of bragging rights) for making popular quizzes.
I meant smaller things then houses or and eduction. Things such as TVs, PCs, Ovens, ect. Items that are not as expensive as college or a house but are in the under $3k range.

I agree that some debt it unavoidable and did not mean to come across that ALL debt is bad and should be avoided because well some of it cannot (ie the house). However buying many of these sub 3k items that are not needed then paying them off over 3 years is crazy. Thats more what I was getting at.
No, the easiest way is just to be explicit.
On the other hand, trying to chase pixel perfect look in different web browsers is just a waste of time these days,
so having slight differences in whitespace is OK, imho.

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/
It sounds to me like you need to start a long haul company that uses robot drivers.
Thanks! This is great, it found a few problems with my stuff.
Hope you guys like it. I really put my ego on the line for this one!

Sorry for the lack of an x86 build.
One of the problems it found with a site of mine was that it doesn't send Vary consistently.
> ...geeks don't click on ads.

I think it's rather "geeks don't see ads".
If you leave off the doctype, you are put into quirks mode, in which browsers try to emulate bugs from the Netscape 4 and IE 5 era.

The biggest difference is probably the IE 5 box model (also called "traditional box model" or "border box"), which doesn't comply with the standard CSS box model. In the IE 5 box model, the size of boxes includes their borders and padding, while in the W3C box model, the size of boxes includes only the content of the boxes (the IE 5 version actually makes more sense, but it's not what's in the standard). In later versions of IE, the standard box model is used, but only if you're in standards mode; the IE 5 model is used in quirks mode. Nowadays, almost all browsers support a CSS3 property, box-sizing that can control which box model to use, so you can actually enable the traditional box model in a standard way (though it's prefixed -moz-box-sizing or -webkit-box-sizing in Gecko and Webkit, as that's the preferred way to implement standards that aren't yet finalized)

For more detail on the differences between quirks and standards mode, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode

and

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html
This assumes the Teamsters have no power, which they do. The power of the Longshoremen to prevent substantial automation (compared to other major ports) in the Port of Los Angeles and the resulting productivity deficit vs the Port of Rotterdam for example appears to be realtively durable.
Right. Another big thing I didn't mention explicitly is that college exposes students to people outside their comfort zone. Cross pollination of ideas and culture are hugely important if we want to stamp out racism, ignorance, and intolerance.
Exactly. Many (most?) geeks use an adblocker.
It's static.
Introducing Trails (twilio-on-rails)
Ugh... hopefully it doesn't come to that, but I know if it does that it'll be the first thing I do.
Are you sure it automatically followed people you weren't already following on Reader? If they were, the behavior makes sense.
I was wondering the same. I imagine the material structure is tiny, multifaceted particles that reflect a different colour / value at each angle of incidence. I'm not certain how you'd do that with a realtime display. but if each of those particles had an OLED on each facet it might work. Extraordinarily expensive, mind and even then it's a pretty big if.
How weak is Facebook's XMPP security?
Gameloft Made $25 Million From The App Store Last Year
Hmmm. Upvote because it's fascinating, yet very troubling. I'm as free-market open-borders as one can imagine, so I'm having trouble reconciling this with my world view.

On the one hand, I'd like to think that the benefit from immigration due to a broader base of consumers might bring about enough additional prosperity to offset that decrease in trust.

But on the other hand, a necessary precursor to a functioning market is that the participants trust one another. If the effect is as this short article suggests, then maybe it does cause more damage than good, at least in the short term.

I note that the article is a bit aged; I wonder if any further research has been done.
At first I thought, what an amazing coincidence. But actually the odds of this happening are reasonably high.

I can't quite tell who I'm talking to without seeing their faces. From the postures it looks like it might be the RethinkDBs.

Edit: No, turns out it was the Picwings.
No, in fact I think it's expected that only one of founders be present for initial meetings. If I were a VC I'd wonder why they were all wasting their time when it could be handled by one person.
On the usefulness of Monads in Clojure
If they don't have their SCM act together and won't let you fix that, I'd pass up such an "opportunity", you're going to have a lot of pain. That's items 1 and 2 and source code control is non-negotiable for me (unless that alternative is starvation).

Daily builds are an it depends, bug database is something you can probably do yourself at worst case, schedule and spec are also things that will make your life miserable if they don't have anything there.

If you don't have quiet working conditions, they don't care about your productivity or the quality of your work (so why should you???).

The rest except for the last are just damned good ideas: good tools shouldn't be a problem today, but your superiors might have funny ideas about what's good. EMACS is non-negotiable for me plus access to a Unix or cygwin on Windows.

If you don't have dedicated testers, more misery, but in a startup that can be finessed.

If they don't take care in hiring programmers (no writing code during interview test), they're going to hire plenty of duds, and getting rid if them is no fun ... assuming the company survives. A startup can't afford very many if any dud hires.

Let me close with one of PG's observations about dot.bomb failures: a whole lot of them were technical failures. Failing to do enough of the Joel Test items makes technical failure more likely and requires heroics to advert it.
Most, not all. Movie downloads have it, but not all music videos do.
ChatRoulette should start each connection with a vastly downsampled image which you can then advance to native resolution if you actually care to see what the rest of the pixels look like.

This should also be disableable, of course, as I imagine the risk that you will see something you didn't want to is part of the draw for a lot of users.
It's worth noting that the sorts of ads most non-enterprise programming sites run aren't the sort of ads that the adblockers strip out by default (major networks, Flash, etc). You could manually add them, but I don't know if people go to the bother in large numbers if they're not horrid, intrusive ads.
The Keillor takedown of Levi's book (I had the misfortune of reading it serialized in The Atlantic) is even better than this article. You'll find it linked to the article. Click that link! What a schmuck.
You seem very relived. Would this have actually directly negatively affected you?
see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269
Note that this is a different .com boom magazine publisher than the one of the same name from Wired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson_(TED)
OT but the bronze statue of the two "guys" with the coin... anyone know what that is? There is a similar style statute outside of the ICC in Indianapolis.
You're the one on the left, right?
> It looks to me, as if a team had a good idea (yes, i think buzz as an idea is a good idea,
> the launch was not) but it was not properly tested and thought of such cases.

I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I feel they're evil. They believed that their idea was a good one, and so forced it on everyone without bothered to test it. Even if you don't attribute their mistakes to malice, the other option is to concede that they were 'merely' careless and reckless with our personal, private data.

My issue with Google isn't all the privacy issues around Buzz, it's that all the privacy issues around Buzz came after no outside testing, and with no choice on the end-user's part. They made a string of assumptions that turned out to be false in a not-insignificant number of cases, because no one thought 'hey, maybe we should ask people before we give other people information about them.'
Nope, don't blame the site, it wasn't funny.
I think that was the point. Can we trust MS to maintain their platforms such that money spent now on media and applications isn't wasted when the device is replaced?
My parents are on StreetView. It would be interesting to try to calculate the odds of a given individual being caught.
Not if you're Apple, and this is Apple's app that the author is talking about.
Out of curiosity, I just tried it on an account with an existing Google Profile that doesn't have buzz set up and it did not add followers/followings to the existing Google Profile. It added the status message to the buzz feed, which isn't a privacy problem since contacts can see it anyway, but it did not fully set up a buzz profile. Clicking on the Buzz status textarea brings up the normal "How do you want to appear to others?" form and still won't let me use Buzz without setting it up.

Also, I can't see the following/follower lists from another account; it just shows the name, a link to the google profile and the fact that the two accounts are following each other, but nothing about any other contacts. It does, however, appear that the profile is fully set up from within the account, showing the follower/following lists, but outside accounts can't see this info.

I also follow someone who hasn't created a Google profile or started using Buzz. She changed her status message and it showed up in the Buzz feed, but when I click on her name it goes to an empty Buzz profile view that says "This person does not have a public profile." where the name usually is.

TL/DR: I looked at accounts both with and without an existing Google Profile and although a status message change is posted to the Buzz feed, in neither case did it fully sign the account up for Buzz nor did it expose contacts, despite the fact that it looks like it does. YMMV, but probably not.
If you want even more power / better search results, you can use this query:

site:news.ycombinator.com intitle:"ask hn" topic

While I do not use "intitle" very often, I use the "site" operator all the time. It's often even better than using the search boxes provided by some web pages.

More examples here:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/operators.html
I think CSS itself isn't so complicated, but the whole different support in different browsers thing certainly does make a mess of it!

One of the most helpful things I ever did with respect to CSS was read the apress book on html/css patterns (just ignore the parts that use javascript).

http://books.google.com/books?id=xq9IOomk1tUC

(I never realized that standard CSS actually operates with 6 box models!)
The second video says a real-time system is in development for DARPA.

Of course, who knows what that really means.
You're right, but since you follow me on Twitter, you must have missed my numbers on this.. ;-)

On Ruby Inside, Rails Inside, and Ruby Flow, I run a cpl million ad impressions each month and make an OK amount of money from it despite the CPM being deathly low (say $2-$3 on a per ad basis). The CTR, however? It's south of 0.5%.

I also ran an Adsense for Feeds experiment for a few days recently. Don't have the numbers to hand but it was 1 click in approximately 16,000 impressions.. and these are real, unblocked impressions. I made 40 cents. Developers don't click on ads. "Geeks" do, though, IMHO.. otherwise sites like Slashdot wouldn't bother.

Compare this to Adsense ads on my old, archived personal blog.. and they run at over 20%.
To be honest I imagine that a robo-shipping vessel would be easier to create than robo-trucks. for several reasons:

* The ships are larger and more expensive and hence the add on expense is smaller, comparatively

* There's less traffic around and the traffic that is around is likely to have on board beacons, etc

* The ships already have more sophisticated instrumentation than trucks (radar, etc)
100 years ago they were predicting that the world would starve to death because of the industrial revolution. "All the people are moving off the farms, who will grow food to feed us? We will all starve to death. More and more babies are being born. The sky is falling!!!" They did not count on technology increasing food production and making it more efficient. Today, food is so plentiful and convenient that we're all too fat.

To hell with economists and meteorologists too. Both groups attempt to predict the unpredictable. Why believe anything they say... ever?
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