skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN has a lot of developers who don't use Windows (me too, I'm a Mac developer, in former life a Windows developer). However, it is not the case that most web developers use Macs, and certainly not outside of US. But forget web developers, how about Windows developers?

As for innovation, my opinion is that it doesn't come out of blue. Sit and think about some innovative idea, then implement it? This doesn't work, or at least, this doesn't work for me. What works for me is that I refine something over and over again, and then, accidentally, there will be a thing that people will call "innovative." As pg noted in one of the essays, a lot of ideas come while writing an essay, not thinking of writing it. This is what we are aiming for, and this is why we're releasing this version today, and not sitting and thinking of what innovative things we can do. Innovation will come with iteration. This is why I can assure you that we're not aiming to create pointless clones, I hate them too. This is just the beginning.

Thanks for your feedback, which is very useful for us!
That depends on whether you order by quantity or quality :-)
Noticed my 'go to label' shortcut got updated. I like the new interface much more than what it used to be, but am not a fan of the scroll area jumping around.

The 'gl' (go label) shortcut used to display an auto-complete text box in the center of your gmail window to enter a label, now 'gl' jumps to the search box and automatically prepends 'label:' to the query. It makes much more sense to do it in the search box, but doesn't feel as fluid as the old one.
I've been a huge fan of Civ, I started playing it with Civ I, but have never liked any of the combat models.

The notion of an artillery unit attacking a city all by itself makes no sense, even with the notion of withdrawing. Units need to be grouped, and combat should be executed in multiple phases ( ranged weapons, then melee ). Additionally, if a single marine attacks a tile with 20 marines on it, the 20 marines should take it out with no losses 99.9% of the time. The one on one model makes no sense.
From the article, the complain seems to be the fact that the Segway can be dangerous to the other pedestrians. Don't forget that it can carry an adult, and with it, its momentum is much larger than some small kid in a stroller. Of course, if this is the case, they should also ban the jogging strollers...
Microsoft secretly beheads notorious botnet
Comcast starts public DNSSEC trial
Three cheers for the mixed economy!
The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
NoSQL Protocols Are Important
It seems members of Whirlpool managed to track down the IT guy who made the changed for Sen. Conroy.

http://twitter.com/desko

I'm curious whether it was an intentional "mistake" so that it could be discovered, instead of being hidden serverside.
Minimal application development environments like this are great fun to read about. The attitudes in this paper reminded me some of things I read from Arthur Whitney.

I sometimes wonder if we are moving back in the programming world to the lone, super-smart hacker (or small team) that creates big solutions using small tools. As opposed to the mega-corporate behemoth that produces mega-solutions that could <only> be developed by mega-teams of corporate developers.

Thanks much for the link.
Don’t monetize to cover costs
Classification of HTTP APIs
Trace IP
Yeah I find myself wincing a little every time I go to a page on Sun's website and that Oracle logo pops up in the corner where the Sun logo was.
ENTREPRENEUR SECRET
Keep your promises is a difficult job, especially when we are still a small enterprise, but if we run out to do, it will increase confidence. My experience helping small businesses, the problem of keeping this promise can not be implemented well. And if he kept his promise to I help you again. Not only keep your promises, but instead disappeared from circulation. Some of our small businesses prefer to avoid rather than face the problem, so the problem was not solved, even the complicated and make trust fade. And if the problem we face, is almost certainly the problem can be solved together. Though sometimes, we accept the curse of anger and sometimes insults or insults. But there is one weapon for us, that is to apologize. Insha Allah, if we sincerely apologize, we will be forgiven. We come not to exacerbate the problem, but solve the problem.
haha. I hear you brother. And let me guess, after spending the whole week burning the midnight oil and getting 3-4 hours sleep per night, you catch up by sleeping all day saturday?

Try modafinil.
I did a writeup of this line of thinking here: http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/25/dont-monetize-to-cover-c...
I have a Segway.

I always stop when other people are walking toward me on the sidewalk; it makes them more comfortable.

The other important thing to watch out for are blind corners - where obstacles prevent others from seeing you. I do my very best to stop so that I don't surprise anyone.

Why doesn't this guy just push for the ability to issue tickets to impolite Segway users instead?

Banning Segways has repercussions that this guy probably hasn't considered. Remember that nationwide, well over a third of all Segway users are physically disabled in some way, and around here, at least two of the three owners that I know are.
Ruby’s Implementation Does Not Define its Semantics
Speaking of which, does anybody know how to get acme/sam working on Ubuntu? I'd really like to play with it a bit.
Interesting post, but the first flow-chart seems to perpetuate the (Silicon Valley oriented ?) mindset that a startup should be pursuing:

* Rapid growth

* Frenzied hiring

* Profitability relatively late in the game

What about different approaches to building and running great companies ? Why not:

* Focus on the product and passionate users (ala Paul Buchheit and Gmail)

* Focus on exactly how you make money from that product

* Hire incrementally at (or just before) the point you are profitable

* Accept slower (less fashionable and exciting ?) growth

Maybe that would help align our thoughts around what it takes to build a sustainable business rather than just coding great features ?

It also has the added advantage of freeing you from the hand of the VCs and looking over you shoulder fretting about your burn rate.
SocialMedia Online Advice is Out There
Segways are annoying, but can't Boston just let people figure out how to share space on the sidwalk without more regulations?
"Interesting post, but the first flow-chart seems to perpetuate the (Silicon Valley oriented ?) mindset that a startup should be pursuing:

* Rapid growth, Frenzied hiring and Profitability relatively late in the game
"

If anything, Steve Blank reccomends a strategy completely opposed to the above. Read his book. The flowchart may make more sense then?
Crowds are actually what segways are best at. You can easily control your speed and turn in place. There is a reason mall cops use them rather then bikes.
"Make things as simple as possible, but not any simpler!"
Lessons Learned while Raising Angel Investment
"The only reason to monetize a web project is if you intend to make serious money."

Err, or maybe you just want to break even. If user's find what you're doing interesting or useful, they'll put up with an advertisement or two.
Seems to be a lot of confusion here. If you fail to meet the requirements after two years - you don't get kicked out of the country. You just can't get a green card via this method and you will need a new visa. If your start-up is still viable you could try to get an H1-B etc through it, or go get yourself another job. All visa holders are used to this kind of precarious situation already - loose your job, drop/get kicked out of school etc and it does not matter how long you have lived here, how much property you own, how many US degrees you have, you are on a ticking clock.

Startup visa is a move in the right direction - it adds another viable path to permanent residency. A path other than joining a big company and relying on them for example.
Yeah, the number of upmods that guy is getting is giving me an uneasy feeling. It's about the starkest apples vs. oranges fallacy I've ever seen. Can someone actually present a non-idiotic argument as to why motor vehicles should be allowed on sidewalks? Unless you're disabled, I can't even conceive of it. Nothing but an ugly menace.
Ask HN: Review our iPhone App - quiQR
quiQR is a real-time QR code scanner and creator for the iPhone. Try it out and let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks

http://bit.ly/quiQR

Here are 5 coupon codes for HN:

6YMTK7EA7A94

6H7K6KK9F6TX

E379TH3H669T

EWKEALET9JKY

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link: http://bit.ly/quiQR
I have a bunch of sites, and I don't think that the world is owed them on my dime. If they get free content, they'll have to learn to cope with a small ad at the side of the page.
This plus "Better GMail" from Lifehacker really take things to the next level. They're a "must have" combo as far as I'm concerned

[edit]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6076
So these guys went from the dream company of the 70s to the dream company of the 2000s. Lucky bastards!
I confess I haven't read Steve's book (and probably should), but in the context of this post that flow-chart is misleading if it doesn't accurately represent his position.
After almost 20 years, I still miss the happy ritual of inserting all of the documentation for your new Sun workstation into the zillion folders.

Hell, I still have "borrowed" copies of the PostScript Blue and Red books from my NeWS/HyperNeWS days.

<sob>
Note that the discussion in Boston also relates to complaints in the North End, where tourists can rent Segways and local residents complain about the vehicles and the attitudes of the owner of the rental service. Background here:

http://www.universalhub.com/2010/some-north-enders-fed-tour-...
It's nice to see some competition in this space. Good luck guys.
I'm not saying it has to, but I would like something of the old Civ. Maybe I'm old but I don't have the time/patience for a game that last months. If you prefer a marathon game that's fine, I'm not arguing that.

Conquering the world in a marathon 6 hour session was pretty fun.

I think there's an opportunity for a game that strips away some of the complexity of the new Civ while keeping the fun elements.

Multiplayer isn't that important to me. WoW destroyed the last interest I had in playing with random people on the internet (too many 12 year olds doing stupid things with their Avatars). Felt like I was wasting time rather than having an fun immersive experience.

My time is more valuable now then it was in high school/college. I have 3 hours to conquer the world, not 3 days.

YMMV.
Paul Erdős
60,000 Android phones shipped each day? Wow, that's a lot. I wonder how many are sold each day?
Sans humour.
It's worth looking at the entire thread. Both Cox and Pike point out that life is just easier at work running a well-maintained, supported system (OSX) that can play nicely with other machines.
> My citation says that there are 6 in asian and 2 in Africa. How is this false?

You use an extremely broad “definition” of Asia (i.e. instead of the Africa, Middle-East, Asia) you group everything that is remotely in Asia as Asia. If we take your definition into account, the population of Asia is 5.7 times that of sub-Sahara Africa. You also conveniently leave out civil wars from that list (e.g. Eastern DRC, Zimbabwe, etc…).

Why is Zimbabwe left out? Do you know that thousands of people either die through state famine or killed by Zanu thugs?

> And Iraq has way more than 1000+ deaths a year.

Ahh… yeah an American war in the Middle East. Let’s group that with “Asia” and compare a land-mass of 4 billion people to a continent of less than 1.

> Living in Africa does not make you an authority. Point to some proof for your statements.

I have shown you numerous shortcomings in your Wikipedia article. Yet you persist to compare apples and oranges (sub-Sahara Africa is small compared to Asia).

Maybe living in Africa (and having lived in various African countries) does not make me an expert. But neither is someone who never even visited the continent and relies on half-baked WP articles. You are in denial about Africa and the violence in Africa.

From your posts I cannot determine if you are just extremely ignorant or if you are a troll. For your part I hope that you are a troll.
Just had this SAME conversation with co-workers yesterday. Funny eh.

The fact is, while you chose Rhino to get access to Java libs and frameworks for SSJS development, there is still NO WAY for me to write an open source JS framework that will work in any environment. Not to mention anything I run will probably have tons of different implementation of the same few bits of code, not referring to common libraries for inclusion or whatever. Even how files are included is different depending on your environment. We seriously need a standard. Even if half of it is implemented in javascript like Java Standard Libs are implemented in java (ok lots use java native interfacing).
There is no plaque on that building but there is one in a nearby building called "Engineers club" mentioning Tesla. http://www.teslasociety.com/bryantpark.htm
I would try to market this at the "idea" guys in order for them to make their product more than a crazy idea.

The angle I see is: make it something they can put in front of developers who they want to recruit as founders or design firms for estimate purposes. Plus you can save money because the designer doesn't have to wireframe your stuff from scratch.
Erdős number
Ah, the Segway. Remember when they were saying it was going to revolutionize travel, and then when it was revealed to be this dorky scooter, everyone let out a collective "oh..."?
I think that people use "covering (negligible) costs" as a euphemism for trying to businessify their side-project. Covering these low costs would be the first, modest goal in trying to convert the project to a business anyway. If they instead told their friends or web-colleagues that they're trying to grow their web-trinket into a viable business, they'd probably be criticized and made fun of and ultimately talked out of the idea. So instead they talk about "covering costs," and it's pretty much a low-investment, no-risk way of experimenting with making something a business.
What's sam?
> So now I want to iterate over all original keys, how do I do that

for(var key in obj) {
if(obj.hasOwnProperty(key))
val = obj[key];
}

Or did I misunderstand the question?
US government to review Toyota electronics
I doubt getting a H1B will be an option in this case. If companies could sponsor their co-owners for H1B I bet that is what everyone would be doing.

IANAL so I could be wrong.
Interesting.

They seem to be avoiding the operating system issue by focusing on games from the 90s that can still run thanks to Microsoft's efforts to maintain backwards compatibility. (They may need to do minor tweaks, but basically the OS is still available.)

Wake me when I can legally revisit my Apple ][ memories.
> I believe IBM was the very last vendor of real UNIX workstations.

How about Apple?
Summer Collection Shoes By Valentino | Shoes Blog
Mobile carriers defend early termination fees
The biggest problem with Civ I and II was the combat system. (Not really because it was simple, but because it was broken in every way.) Modern armored units attacking Greek Phalanxes and losing? Modern riflemen being defeated by chariots? Routinely.
Awesome. I am an information architect and I've used almost every tool out there. It's simple, and that's awesome. Needs some serious thought about what NOT to include (as you'll get 1000s of feature requests). Love that it's fast and installs fast. IF you can create an efficient way to share/discuss pages, you are adding value that no other app in this market has nailed (afaik). Feel free to ping me to discuss :)
100% of enterprises experience cyber losses in 2009
Must-have keyboard shortcut apps for Windows
Stacked units should fight one at a time, so Thermopylae can still happen. It adds a lot of depth to the game--particularly at higher levels--when a single unit can can drastically slow down a large group of units, just by staying on defensible terrain in an isthmus.
Mockflow is slower and too complicated. Balsamiq of course is awesome, but competition is good in this space. It can still get a lot better.
Improve Website Usability by Tapping Into Your Own Experiences
Nintendo's DSi XL gets price, ship date
Even at 1c everyone would switch.

They'd all switch to an identical Linux fork though, which I think was part of the original point being made.
Ask HN: Is there an email solution for the private Cloud?
Is there any email solution in the spirit of gmail which
can be installed on own servers. Splunk for email so to say.
Let me clarify: Segway innovated thru dynamic control systems that kept it stable through a wide range of speed, attitude and control inputs. To label something a "Segway" and then find out its just a simple feedback control loop is something like bait-and-switch. I felt the article title over-sold the actual article. Kind of like those highway signs that claim "biggest ball of string in Minnesota". I felt cheated when I saw it.
It's a text editor that I first used on plan9. I tried it out in the 90s, and I didn't "get it" back then, but I kind of liked Sam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_%28text_editor%29

I'm a self-described operating system junkie. At home, I've got WinXP, Win7, OpenBSD, OS X, Haiku (BeOS), FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, and a few Linux flavors running. Yes, all at once. Maybe I should try plan9 again in a VM.
I'm waiting again [for Apple to review my App]
It's hard to take this seriously when the CSS gets in the way...
Here's a thought: make the download free, add an online (simple!) sharing service (to share with teams and annotate/comment, behind a simple password), and charge a small subscription fee for that. Say 9$/month per team (unlimited users), or a graded pricing (9$/m for up to 6 users, 49$/m unlimited team/users) will get you the same price as the app in 7 months or less, and more after that (depending on churn of course). Keep the download app free. Then improve the app a little, but don't add lots of features. (DO add iPhone stencils, and small UI improvements like editing inline instead of in a popup box).
They're all working on Go : http://www.golang.org
This idea is very useful for shop owners too.
We have realised not the customers are coming to your shop anymore but you'll have to go to their space (like Facebook)

Future is about customer driven shops: they define what they want at what price they want.
Shops will be the clients of these groups serving them with lower margins at highest quality.

So the question of the business model shifts to shop owners how they can afford to operate in such (hostile) environment
I wonder would is the percent of revenue from products that originated from the 20% time? e.g. for gmail, its adwords revenue.
Also, Wordpress MU is being merged into the core Wordpress, I believe in the 3.0 release, and the most recent release of BuddyPress is no longer limited to MU.

http://buddypress.org/

http://mu.wordpress.org/
I had no idea that Android was an acquisition.
I think it feels "misleading" because there is no time scale attached to it and maybe the word "Scalable Startup" should be changed. Building a scalable startup is all about the things you highlight... getting to problem/solution fit, then product/market fit... Key is getting there with low burn.

Once you have product/market fit, you have the semblance of a business. You transition towards growth from there.
Caffeine. I know one word responses are generally frowned upon here, but seriously that was how I do it.

I don't want to work on anything. I have just put the kids to bed. Its 9pm. Only a red-bull, or a pot of coffee, or maybe just a diet coke or tea can get me going again. That and music. I'll put on some music with headphones and its kind of like a signal to my brain that its time to start coding again.
Somewhat off-topic question: what are you guys using for your forums? Did you build it yourself or are you using a packaged solution? They're very nice.
Tell HN: Sombody Fix Email
Wouldn't it be great if an IMAP email client could automatically strip email attachments and store them in a file system, ideally DropBox, in a folder for each contact? I don't think all the turkeys I do business with are ever going to stop emailing me images and start using FTP.

If I had this feature, it would be easy to save emails indefinitely, b/c the space requirements would be minimal.
Say I offer to hold your wallet for you while you swim. When you get out of the pool some of the pictures are missing. Is it ok that I wasn’t charging you to hold your wallet?

Is it smart of you to entrust things which you value to a complete stranger whom has made no guarantees to you as to the safety of your items?

This sounds to me like the issue with GoDaddy yesterday, if you don't trust your host, then maybe you shouldn't be using them.
I'd like to make the data a little more portable on my site (http://www.obsidianportal.com), but it's one of those edge cases that always gets pushed to the bottom of the TODO list.

It's not that I'm sitting here twirling my moustache about vendor lock-in, just that there are so many other more-pressing user-facing things to work on.

If my users made a concerted effort to pressure me on this front, I'd probably do something, but so far it's just been a couple of stray "hey, can i get a data dump?" requests.
Scala:

I seem to remember some "Is it ready for the enterprise, programming in the large, giant consulting firms with giant RFP's yet/soon?" threads/blogs which i can't find. Also some "average developers get python, ruby and java just fine, but they're not going to get scala and clojure".

I've heard chatter from friends and on the tubes that they're going to convert their humongous java dev teams "soon" but the main knocks are:

- problems in plugins for eclipse, intelliJ, and netBeans, (assuming it survives in some supported form

- it's taken so long to get 2.8 beta out: Well, nobody said it would be easy.

- OO type inference, FP, scripting, what is scala?; you can use scala as a scripting language, use a small language subset, apply regexes and maps and cut up apache logfiles easily just as in python or ruby.

- Or you can spend a lot of time reading about actors(akka, kilim, lift), and STM / agents and come to the conclusion the language is heavily in flux

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150369

http://www.jroller.com/vaclav/entry/secret_agents_in_scala

(and goat rodeo)

- Or you can read the Oreilly and Artima books on the type system, figure out how it's designed for development in the large. And go back and read Guido's ,um, what do you call them, jeremiads or screed or something like that.