skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems very similar to our basic design and usability at Eat.ly, but I think I understand the use case. Would love to connect if you are interested in speaking further - couldn't find your contact info via profile, so throwing this out there publicly.
Like IE 5.5? Microsoft doesn't do cross platform 'right'. If they did make a Mac version, it would render things differently than the Windows version and give developers yet another browser to test for bugs.
This is some seriously trite advice, and from a spammy site no less, who upvoted this?
The guys over at Humanized (now at mozilla) did this for plain javascript about two years ago, FWIW. It's not quite as awesome when you don't have a sweet parser DSL.
I don't believe it's primarily about advertising.

Chrome startup on my Ubuntu and Windows boxes is an order of magnitude faster than Firefox, and significantly faster than IE. I can open a Chrome window and navigate through two pages before FF even opens--even if I started FF first.

That's a tremendous incentive to switch, even if Youtube videos are broken sometimes. :) I haven't looked back.
Design is what matters you just have to change your perspective on what design is all about.

I understand what design is - I'm not trying to claim it's just aesthetics.

My claim is merely that this part: "he applies design thinking to his company" is less important than this part: "Apple have almost complete vertical integration both on the hardware and the software side" - it's exactly this integration makes QA's job easier, I would guess by several orders of magnitude.
I see Microsoft is piling up every buzzword available on top of IE9.

After you watch them for a couple decades, they become amazingly predictable.
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought.

By the way, docco is behind this: http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/
(again pointed by http://tomayko.com/linkings/9f266cc6a6118995e75ffb963a7dce3e)
I too have a hero and updated to android 2.1:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=519

(Obviously, most people won't do it, but at least those of us who visit HN can).
This is one I remember seeing, never used though.

http://programmermeetdesigner.com/
The challenge of engaging African-American men in computing
That sounds like a lot of work for 10 people, or a normal amount for 20.
It's not so much the stagnation, or even the technical flaws, it's the lock-in. That's the ultimate source of most people's problems with IE, it's the tight integration with IE6 and enterprise apps. That's why dealing with IE6's technical flaws is still a problem, it's difficult for users to switch due to lock-in. That's why MS's browser development stagnated, they had obtained the browser share and got lazy. And that's why standards are important.
not-ebay.com?
ms demo of border radius works in Chrome as well
This seems like more of a problem when you have a more obscure name. I think Google is becoming less and less effective as more and more people use the internet and you get name collisions. It becomes harder to tell if the person whose name you googled is the actual person being referenced or not. At one point I knew all the links on the first page of Google were me - now it's about half. The less you use your real name the more that helps as well as the other people who share your name float to the top.
Yes, IE9 will support SVG. Check out demos such as http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/35SVG--oids/Defau...
There's almost a 1 in 10 chance of seeing any 9 digit string (according to the website), so it might be a little bit surprising at least.
That was the question posed by Hawking back in 2003(?). His assertion was that the device would have to be considered intelligent, albeit another form of intelligence, and possibly deserving of rights.

It does seem as though we're getting there.
> If you won't forgive me for saying dumb shit years ago, I'm not so sure I want to be your friend anyhow.

The problem is that if you decide go into public service and run for office, your opponents won't forgive you. They'll be more than happy to dig up that one tiny moment when you were off guard ten years ago, take it out of context, and hold it up as an example of how you must really feel about the topic du jour.
It's not less important at all.

The very fact that he uses design thinking means that he will try to do everything he can to control the process. Vertical integration is a byproduct of this thinking not the other way around. It's not just something they accidentally happened to have.

Why do you think they have introduced a processor that they are involved so heavily in?

None the less this post is not about Apple but about Microsoft. So let's just stop here :)
> grid of icons that iPhone pioneered

What? Every color screen phone I have ever owned has had a grid of icons.
I think a better and more pro-active approach is to completely own one's past. My blog goes all the way back to shitty poetry I wrote and delusional statements of grandeur I made when I was 15. As far as I'm concerned, all they indicate is that I've come a long since way since then.
I wonder what the stats would have been if it hadn't been plastered all over the media as the 'new cool thing'.
Richard Feynman on getting laid: "You Just Ask Them?"
Did I really make my point that badly? What you're saying is obvious; that's where I started.

The point is that the end of Friedl's post shows that the quote antedates JWZ, but he's not really interested in tracking it down any further, presumably because it was JWZ who applied it to regexes, which is Friedl's area of interest. Personally, I'd rather know the origin of the quote itself. I like knowing the sources of things.

As for what I was "claiming to have discovered" (though I hope not nearly so pompously as that), I would have thought that was obvious too: additional evidence that the line was Tilbrook's. I noticed later that a commenter to the OP cited the same link I did, so it's pretty findable.
Freebies - Your Marketing and Customer Service Tool
There are a lot of great prices in Europe (OVH in France, Heitzner in Germany), but not in the US to my knowledge. I've tried to run a server in Germany (Heitzner). The latency + newtwork issues (dropped packets) was not worth the price difference if your audience is in the US.
It designed what experiments to commence to solve the problem. No biology undergrad was able to do it so far for "orphan" yeast enzymes.

I think this is significant and that such automated experiment design and execution might replace some researchers.
I found that one but it seems more like a place to meet founders and/or find gigs than a straight talent swap kind of site.
Check out nameboy.com and sedo.com. Enter keywords and see what's available. I find that helps with generating ideas.

And a lot of times someone might just want ~$100 for a domain which should be easily justified if it's the right name.

On nameboy.com you can quickly see domains that just have a .com taken, those are probably easier to get under your control.

Recently I got a domain name I wanted by emailing the owner and making a proposition because I noticed that it was just some default GoDaddy page. Turns out he was indeed just a random web developer squatting on the name and was happy to get a few bucks, not some nefarious domain squatter.
Undercover Feds on Social Networking Sites
Agreed. Running some basic math, let's say the business has four divisions of equal size and one cafeteria. Every single person might be viewing the homepage for their division, but only 3 in 10 view the cafeteria menu; that means the division pages get 25% of traffic, and the cafeteria menu gets 30%, is still be 'most popular', but only because it appeals to the widest base.
You could squash parts of a single bugfix, sure, if you end up with multiple commits. Still, though, I would leave the spec you wrote (you write tests or specs for bugs you find, right? Right?:) in a separate commit - in case you for example need to revert the fix at some point, or someone else just wants to cherry-pick the spec.
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

It is possible, but a bit of a hack.
I don't think they want to remain incompatible anymore. This has been true for a long time, but you have to look closely at IE8 to see the signals. They're really trying hard to change.

I suspect there are some execs who are still not so eager to support open standards, but the IE devs are very willing to change for good.
Ask HN: The value of ideas
I'm new to this whole startup thing, and the one thing that keeps getting hammered at on all the websites and blog posts and expert advice I've been reading is that, basically, ideas are useless. You need a great team and great execution.

I agree that great execution is essential, but I think that the value of ideas is being unfairly put down. You need both a great idea and great execution to fully succeed. They are both necessary links in the chain of success. If one of them is weak, the chain breaks. I don't think saying one or the other is more important is correct.

For example, if you do a web search for "Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution" you'll see tons of examples. My take: Ideas may be a dime a dozen, but great ideas are rare.

Look at Google. It was based on their idea for PageRank. Of course it required great execution, but without that idea, it would have been just another search engine, instead of the phenomenon it is now.

It is like if carpenters said that furniture design is nothing, the key is the craftsmanship. Yes, craftsmanship is necessary to make a good piece of furniture, but if no one designs a good piece, they will just make crap, and make it very well.

Another area is movie-making. Today, studios have gotten excellent at making good-looking movies. From set design, to costumes, to special effects, they can construct any scene you can imagine. But, without a good script the movie is crap.

The same thing holds for startups.

Execution in want of a great idea is sterile. It is useless. (Of course so is a great idea in want of a great execution)

Is the "ideas are useless" meme being put out there just because so many newbies to the startup culture are too enamored with their ideas and think that the idea is all that matters, and so they have to be hit hard with the "ideas are useless" to snap them out of that thinking and start valuing execution?
'Repairing' the world with LEGO bricks
The article did not say that it "designed" anything.
Just FYI, I used the word 'handicapped' in conversation recently and brought it to a grinding awkward halt. The preferred term is 'disabled', apparently due to the 'hand in cap' associations of 'handicapped.' YMMV :-)
Facebook.com overtakes Google.com as most visited USA domain.
I don't think that's the deal breaker for experienced players. That'd be pretty to solve with a bluetooth foot-pedal. Here are a few of the things that come to mind that pro-level folks would have hang-ups on:

• Typesetting: I don't know what score format they're using, but this can be a big one. There's a big difference between a professionally engraved score and just having the right notes there.

• Annotations: From the conductor, self, whoever.

• Overview: Professionals scan a score looking for key parts. This seems virtually impossible in iPhone format, but would be workable on the iPad.

• Size: Even the iPad is small compared to a performance sheet music page.

I suspect the three big market segments are hobbyists, children and church musicians. There are relatively few professional performers.
Ideas are useless in the sense that at any one time, many people could have the exact same idea. Ideas do "get in the air." So in that respect, ideas can be seen as commodities. It's getting the idea out there as something people can buy/use that matters. All writers understand this. It's not the story that was never written or never published that matters -- it's the story people can read or buy.
Or buy a Nexus One and just don't put a simcard in it, and use a mifi for sharing a data connection... or just get a data plan from tmobile cheaper than what att and verizon charge....
The stats that Techcrunch cites don't actually match up with its conclusion. If 13% of ChatRoulette users are perverts, and of the perverts, 8% are female, then 0.13 * 0.08 = 0.0104 (or slightly, barely, more than 1%) are female perverts. If it had been "of the females, 8% are perverts", then it would be under 1%.
It's kinda sad for Win7 Phone. Right now, all the browser innovation is beginning to have its base on mobile devices. I think it's thanks to the webkit implementation on the iPhone that traction for HTML5 has accelerated on the last two years.

All modern smartphones have some kind of HTML 5 support and most mobile websites use the iPhone as their main target. So it is sad to see so many good decisions on Win7 Phone going to waste because of really old/legacy technology.

I guess it's impossible for Microsoft to use Webkit, politically speaking.
Yeah, this is known :) but an algo that incorporates HN karma wouldn't be the best thing :P
And the solution to that is pushing out a security update that turns IE6 into something like Mozilla Prism, where you have to set it up for each individual enterprise site that relies on it, and can't use it for "free-range" browsing. Pack that update with an alternate-browser-download tool as well, with a system-tray alert saying "Your computer will no longer be able to connect to the World Wide Web until you have selected a browser to install" every hour or so. I think they just don't want to start up the pre-XP updating machinery again.
It may be harsh but this alone made it worth flagging the article for me. It is patently ridiculous to suggest the grid of icons is something new when every Symbian Series 60 (including quite a few with a KHTML based browser and 3G connectivity) did this before the iPhone.
Don't people use png's for that, at least? With flashblock it's really terrible...
There's a superb documentary called Boogie Man about Atwater, who died horribly and spent his last years seeking out everyone he had wronged with his ads and asking for their forgiveness. He was an amazing, contradictory character, a larger-than-life sort who holds far more interest than the pusillanimous toady Rove. I watched that documentary late at night in a hotel room during the 2008 campaign; I was on a consulting trip and had to get up early the next morning, but I couldn't turn it off. It explains a great deal about how all that dirt became commonplace.
Noam Chomsky interview at reddit
[..searching...]

Are you talking about code-illuminated? [1,2,3] Interesting approach - works right in the browser.

For some reason I prefer docco output. I'm not sure why. Maybe the design is better. Maybe the code being annotated is better.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/code-illuminated/

[2]: http://www.toolness.com/wp/?p=441

[3]: http://code-illuminated.googlecode.com/hg/index.html#docs/do...
MIT researchers enable self-assembling of chips
That was the model tried by Noteheads back in the day. It failed miserably: http://noteheads.com/
That's not easy to do in retrospect - both because the technology may not have existed to do so (automated blogs), or the content may be scattered in many places (message boards, listservs, etc.).

Also, you may control the source, but not its dissemination. Once your stuff makes its way onto archive.org, removing it from your won blog won't make a difference.
When your iPad battery dies, dig out $99-plus | Crave - CNET
Agreed. But I find it amazing that a browser that has roughly a 5% user share has had so much impact. I surmise that it's really the weight of the company behind Chrome that has scared its competitors more than the adoption of the browser itself.
Let's take "The Da Vinci Code" as an example. How many people had the idea behind that book? Not that many. Yes, Dan Brown had to sit down and write it, but it's the storyline (the "idea" behind the book) that got millions of people hooked worldwide.

From what I have read, it seems Dan Brown isn't that good of an author anyway. Thousands of other writers could have written the story better than he did, if he had commissioned them to do so.

There are tons of excellent writers out there that would write "the Great American novel" if only they could figure out what to write about. So, it's not the execution but the great idea that is a more rare resource.
Sounds more like delusions of grandeur than a real plan.
True. The underlying assumption in bolting the interactive conference onto the rest of SXSW is this:

Interactive apps are entertainment properties and will have a similar development trajectory to bands and films: experiment -> indie -> niche hit -> mainstream hit.

If you're building a piece of software that actually delivers value, this is not a likely trajectory for your project. And if you're a techie building something that actually is an entertainment product, SXSWi is a great way to see how the industry funnel operates, and just how brutal it is in culling thousands of conference wannabees (these are the people giving out shirts and stickers) to just a handful of big hits (people who draw the biggest crowds at sessions and parties). The 2008 iteration was a pretty convincing argument that the startup I was then working at wouldn't win at what it was trying to do.
You certainly can't run it in conjunction - i.e. gmail in one tab and google apps in the other - it only handles one acct (unlike Rapportive). I didn't try just a google apps account.
Douchebags ruining things isn't unique to SXSW, it's more a universal constant.
Congrats. I'm not a girl, but my co-founder for my startup was (I say "was" because I've since bought her out).
Actually it says that in the first few paragraphs; and the rest of the article heavily implies the same.

Reading more on the original sources and I think it's a bit of both worlds. The robot was given a set of initial data plus the problem it was facing and it iteratively created experiments - at each stage deciding which experiment to do next to improve it's "knowledge" and progress towards the goal.

From sciencemag.com [1]:

The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both.

1. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5923/85
It's not very well documented, but BiteScript looks very interesting:

http://blog.headius.com/2009/03/bitescript-001-ruby-dsl-for-...

http://blog.headius.com/2009/05/bitescript-002-scripting-exa...
Too much rambling, not enough concrete info on the front page. And I hate video product introductions. Show me a screenshot or two instead, please.
Yes, because the presence of a Mafia in an area is really the same as the presence of a prison. That's outstanding logic!
Ideas matter, but not that much. We'd all rather have good ideas than bad ideas, which proves theres some value in the idea itself.

But GREAT ideas usually come from some form of execution and iteration. Great ideas just don't come from sitting and brainstorming what to build your startup into. Using your comparison of Google's pagerank, PageRank wasn't drummed up and perfected as an idea before it was executed. Sergey and Larry probably had a concept (born from their research and creativity) and executed it. What evolved is what we now and call PageRank. So great ideas are really only recognized after the fact.
just promise you wont resort to stripping when it does work out, k?
Is that a MacBook?
I couldn't give a damn about supporting unfinalised
standards the ACID3 tests

MS too sometimes speaks of Acid3 in dismissive terms as having little relevancy. Let's see and then decide by yourself, is this stuff important:

DOM2 Core
DOM2 Events
DOM2 HTML
DOM2 Range
DOM2 Style (getComputedStyle, …)
DOM2 Traversal (NodeIterator, TreeWalker)
DOM2 Views (defaultView)
ECMAScript
HTML4 (<object>, <iframe>, …)
HTTP (Content-Type, 404, …)
Media Queries
Selectors (:lang, :nth-child(), combinators, dynamic
changes, …)
XHTML 1.0
CSS2 (@font-face)
CSS2.1 (‘inline-block’, ‘pre-wrap’, parsing…)
CSS3 Color (rgba(), hsla(), …)
CSS3 UI (‘cursor’)
data: URIs
SVG (SVG Animation, SVG Fonts, …)

(Taken from: http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/)

Looks important to me.
Thought-provoking stuff.. While the intent of the fourth amendment is obvious and noble, I wonder whether, given the accelerating pace of creation and processing of information, it still makes sense to rely on legislation to prevent privacy violations. How can there be any hope of enforcing such laws in the face of the increasing complexity of worldwide communications, where (as one of the commenters on the article points out) the routing of any given data is nondeterministic and temporary copies are made at every step? It seems to me that the law is hopelessly on the wrong side of technological evolution here (I would make a very similar argument regarding copyright law).

Looking at it from a different angle, perhaps (note a hint of devil's advocate here) we should be glad that modern cryptographic systems (enabled by the very tech that seemed to threaten privacy) offer the potential to make old-fashioned laws superfluous?
I have access to the full article, and they do phrase it that the robot "designed" the experiments it carried about. But it didn't conjure these designs out of thin air. The specific experiments it performed are a result of the general rules given to it by software created by the human biologists. (Some of which was coded in Prolog, which I think is pretty darn nifty.)

The amount of information they had to provide the robot was significant - both in terms of raw data and in terms of the software controlling it. All of that requires humans. I doubt tenured professors will be the ones writing the software for such robots.

edit: This is what they cite as the software they used for the model: Philip G.K. Reiser, et al., Developing a Logical Model of Yeast Metabolism, http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/epa/cis/2001/024/tcover.html
here's a clickable link to the story, which is worth reading:

http://blog.theprintedblog.com/

quote from the blog: "Everyone said I was nuts, but I did it anyway." sorry for being indelicate, but given the outcome, perhaps "Everyone" was right? heh!
I wouldn't have high expectations. It's par for the course for the people running http://pinboard.in. Honestly one of the only reasons I haven't bought an account.
Actually, the average price of a paid app in the Android Market is lower than that of one in the App Store. Also, there is a higher number of free apps in the Android Market.

Source: http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/android-market-has-the-...