skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One company, Microsoft, currently controls how most people use their computers. As mentioned in the RFS the iPad is likely a challenge to this near monopoly.

Also, I think more technical use cases where a larger touch device can be a control surface could be important as well. A few obvious applications are MIDI controllers, video application controllers and others applications where complex mechanical controllers are used.
I wouldn't say it was an innovation either, but Github just works and it makes life better... and this makes Github even better.
ClojureCLR in an ASP.NET MVC app
Backpack Hydroelectric Generator for 500 Watts on the Move
Inside the biggest tornado hunt in history
What do you mean, he was "pushed into only doing physics?" Are you reading another source? In the Wikipedia article, it doesn't imply that he was pushed, and it doesn't imply that he gave up other pursuits.
i expected a lot more. this is a google analytics screenshot and some obvious "reduce friction" speak. I want Mixergy level details. What specific hook did you guys have? Who DID you contact? Why were there SO many direct visits (print/broadcast pr)? Guide us through day 1 through 30. hell make it a four part post, ill come back to your site four times.
That's different than claiming that people with IQs of 150+ "[will] virtually never be selected as leaders, and always be outsiders. People usually aren't comfortable with a leader who is that smart." Regardless of his accomplishments or the obstructions thrown up by Republicans, a _lot_ of people were comfortable having him as a leader.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
One company, Microsoft, currently controls how most people use their computers.

No, they don't. Microsoft got raked over the coals in both the courts and public opinion for making it somewhat more inconvenient to use third party browsers and media players. Under Apple's policies third party browsers and media players are entirely prohibited, and that's just a side effect of their complete control. If Microsoft had that kind of power 20 years ago, the web wouldn't exist. Likewise if the iPad and similar devices take over, Apple will be in excellent position to block the next major innovations that might interfere with their established business models.
Rules for Writing Fiction
You could just use a Lenovo X-series tablet that's been around for years, runs PowerPoint and every other Windows program, has a fold-out full-sized keyboard, and already connects to existing projectors and printers without dongles.
I like the rational in this new RFS but don't like the idea of building a biz that gives 30% to Apple and lets them cut me off anytime they wish.
I can't imagine they'll be putting down their Windows PCs in favor of iPads.

They won't be putting Windows PC's down in favor of iPads, they'll be picking up iPads in addition to using using Windows PC's.

I agree with pg's suggestion that something organic is going to evolve from the new form factor. I also think it's really hard to imagine exactly what that will be until you are using it and developing for it.
Ken's Proposed Solution to the App Review Situation
The ideal laptop and electric car battery existed in 1901.
MarchFIRST
Your original comment:

> "Municipalities would miss out on a lot of traffic ticket money if laws made people wear seatbelts; not the best example."

I thought that the original sentiment you meant to express was that municipalities have an economic incentive to create seatbelt laws, in order to fine people who break them, with the implication being that seat belt laws are made for selfish reasons, not reasons related to the public well-being. I parsed the sentence, as written, as saying that the presence of an additional fine-worthy offense would somehow lower the amount of fine-generated revenue, and inferred the mistaken absence of a negation. After scrutinizing your comment and follow-up for some time, it's possible to parse the sentence as saying that if seatbelt laws were more effective at making people wear seat belts, this would reduce revenue. This sentence, while correct, does not seem more than tangentially related in context of replying to the parent. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm missing something.
I'm sort of in the middle of this with my much-more-niche fun-side-project site http://www.b-rhymes.com (while we're whoring). It's an algorithmic rhyming dictionary.

It's post metafilter spike. Twitter chain reaction has died. Not sure what to do next.

I've been wondering how to approach bloggers, as in the article, to try to get them to cover it. More difficult, I think, is finding people in the right niches.

I kind of feel like this stuff just happens, and I have no control.
Flash Player Polling: Timing it right
Date calculation bug locks out PS3 users around the world
There's nothing in the article about "How Google Works". Nothing insightful either. "We are going to be a great fit", "we are excited to work together", etc etc
Namely? And based on what?
This was actually previously discussed by Twitter's Evan Weaver. I can't find the article I'm thinking of, but this is close: http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-runnin...

My understanding is that it came down to Cassandra being the only one that was well tested in multi-datacenter configurations. I think there were other reasons, but that was the big one.
I can barely read in a moving vehicle, let alone launch a start up.
I'll put it simply: if seatbelt laws made people wear seatbelts, municipalities would not be able to collect revenue by ticketing people for not wearing seatbelts.
There's "some group of kids" that acts like assholes in general, of course--"Anonymous". Not to blame them in particular, but it's not exactly difficult to get a vaguely-defined, poorly organized group of bored kids on the internet to hate you if you have any kind of notoriety.
Don't forget Chrome Frame.
How to be a genius (2006)
They did let it stand alone. And what's wrong with attaching it to a google account anyway?
It’s Patent Season: Google Scores Major Patent For Location-Based Advertising
Someone idly trolled her; she took the bait hook, line, and sinker.

Her reaction attracted more trolling, kicked off distressful public discussions of the value of her work, adding fuel for further reaction.
I didn't say go become a gymnasts. Anyone can do many of the conditioning routines gymnasts do to improve strength and technique. Push-ups, dips, crunches, v-ups, etc. are the most basic things most gymnasts do to strengthen their muscles and since most people are not going to be pushing boulders around I don't see a point in doing any kind of heavy lifting if you're exercising simply to reap the benefits of exercise.

Also, I didn't make a claim about accidentally adding too much muscle. I simply stated that the kind of muscles that weight-lifting builds is different from the kind of muscles you will build if you don't use weights. I've done both and simple routines that I can do at home exercise more muscle groups without isolating specific areas and overall I feel much better.
Ugh! I hit a similar problem in Chrome beta, where I could only recurse 20 levels deep when calling functions across frames ( eg top.window.foo() ) before it blew up.
Two unrelated comments:

1) In the book "Outliers" there's an interesting profile of Langan that looks more closely at the ways in which Langan has been unable to capitalize on his genius, and why.

2) Am I the only person who thinks Errol Morris is the worst filmmaker on the planet? The constant filler images and incessant, droning new age music makes me want to crucify the innocent.
Post or tweet some novel or amusing combos you've found. Even something like 'flexible' and 'indelible' from your FAQ might be of interest to some.

Two to three times a day, tweet two words and ask followers to submit the best use of them as a rhyming couplet within 140 characters. RT the best efforts or put them on your blog. Phrase your responses so that the best submitters are likely to boastfully RT your flattering award to their friends.

Have a comp for the worst attempted rhyme out there in mainstream music. Or the most inventive.

I'm sure there are other similar things you could try.
The pain is the inability to quickly and easily send passwords to users. Faxes used to be the original way to send passwords, but now many places no longer have fax machines, and giving passwords over the phone leads to mistakes and it is often hard for users to recognize long passwords with upper/lowercase as well as punctuation.

The main reason that sending passwords through email is insecure is that :

a) the password stays in the mailbox of the user, and can be read at a later time

b) if the mail is intercepted by a hacker, the user will never realize that the mail has been read, and the hacker has access to the username/password

SendMyPassword.net produces a link that is safe to send to your end user over email.

a) The link can only be used once, so the user can be sure that the password was not intercepted

b) The link will expire after a certain amount of time, so that even if the user does not view the password, no one can come by later and retrieve the password.

c) The entire site is SSL secure, and all passwords/links/etc are encrypted, as security was our main goal.

I'm curious: How do you mean that this is not a secure solution?
February 28th, eh? A leap year bug, perhaps?
March 2010 Planners Available
Yeah, which is fucking stupid. If you don't have the relationship to know what the person actually wants or needs, why bother with giving them something that's kind of like cash, but can't actually be used to pay for what they want or need?
Maybe one explanation is that people who can focus very well on a problem can see it best and solve it best, thus have high IQs. Since their minds focus so well, it is hard for them to lose focus and loosen up, essential for socializing. Thus, people treat them as weird, they feel rejected, and grow bitter.
I'm feeling like conservation of energy wouldn't work out. Can anyone do some envelope math on this?
I actually have an immediate need for this - need to turn folders of robot project pictures into web pages. Thanks for posting this.

(I know there are services like Flickr, but I set up my own server because I would rather copy whole folders of project pictures onto a local hard drive than wait for pictures to upload to an external site. But then I never got around to writing my own gallery pages to display them, so this might get me to finally put them up.)
There are a lot of fungible goods that get sold on eBay just to perform arbitrage on discounting and get around sales tax.
Actually the metafilterers kind of did just that:
http://www.metafilter.com/89217/BRhymes

The problem is I'm just a geek with an algorithm that's kind of fun, definitely not a rapper poet.

I like the twitter idea though. Definitely worth a try.
By comparing their stats to other successful companies you
sure would think so. I would still be looking for that killer income app that can be connected to: per person, per hour,
per link, etc, before I jump all the way in first and declare them the winner..
Purely subjectively, I feel the busy work in school made me stupider, whereas once I've been out and learning on my own, my mind feels better and sharper, and I'm more interested in learning.

My opinion is that two really big factors are desire and free will. People need desire in order to really excel, and they need to think for themselves to quickly see good solutions. Both of those are hard to capture on an iq test.
Extending PHP 5.3 Closures with Serialization and Reflection
Upvoted, but I was hoping for something with a little more of Meld and a little less of color-coded diff -u.
if the number of users drops below 50, will the bus explode?
oDesk and RentACoder
That's a leader in the popular sense. But if being such a leader means he can't think deeply, then he'll have to rely on the intellectuals to provide him with the deep ideas he needs to lead.

At that point, who's the leader?
I'm surprised this article makes no mention of CSS3, which has a solution to equal column heights. Besides, didn't the promotion of CSS-only layouts for tabular content only come about after the introduction of CSS2, with predictable results?

These are the options I see in decreasing order of immediate utility:
1. Use tables if that's the most elegant solution.
2. Promote/advocate for adoption of CSS3.
3. Propose another means for layout.
4. Complain about CSS2.
What Makes the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition Special
I want a "print to iPad" printer driver.

Just use the "Print" command in any application - Word, OpenOffice, LyX, Dia, PageMaker, whatever - and choose "my iPad" from the list of printers. Then the document is wirelessly synced to an iPad app with a simple browsing interface. Basically like Instapaper, but it could work really well with complex graphical documents.

Feel free to steal this idea. :)
Cool beans, thanks for posting this. Hopefully they determine the exact location soon -- I'd buy a ticket right now, but I'm bike-/bus-bound, so that could turn out to be a bad idea.
You don't have to assume that. Maybe the biggest company that grows off the iPad will be one that merely uses an iPad app to acquire users for something else.

Plus, is it better to make $10 and give $3 to Apple or make $5 and keep all of it?

Being at their mercy is a little more worrying. But if you had enough users you'd be much less at their mercy.
Ask HN: Getting a job with few references?
I've had my current job for the past year, and the work itself is great. Plenty of autonomy (I get to lead development), a project that is genuinely interesting, all open-source technology, etc. However, It's run by a very old-school fellow who has made things increasingly difficult over the past few months, gradually moving the goal posts when I'm already working out of my mind.

This is a startup (good), but the owner is not familiar with the challenges of development (not so good). This becomes an issue when he is unaware of the shoddy worksmanship of the previous developers (the last of them was gone before I started), who left for me a rat's nest of some of the worst front-end code that I've seen developed on a large scale. Rewriting this has been a considerable trial, with considerable intrinsic rewards so far.

The real trouble is that this company is small enough that I couldn't possible ask for a reference. Second, the job was a major step up, tech-wise, from what I was working on before, so I don't think that my references from previous jobs would contrast well with my current responsibilities. And because I've been so engrossed in my work over this past year, I don't have any new references from that time span. Having been in the industry for just under four years, this is a significant gap in my opinion.

Are there jobs available for a very skilled individual with solid experience but who is light on the references? How does one go about covering up that blemish when job-hunting? I interview well and seriously know my stuff, and I'm well-versed in a host of technologies, specializing in JavaScript development.
I am uncertain why he is terming the Zune as being a catastrophic failure, interface-wise.

To the best of my knowledge (not having owned one but knowing people who have), the interface is quite nice and easy-to-use. (Not sure if it is good in a Humane Interface/Jef Raskin-sort of way, but my friends who own one never have issues with it)
There is virtually no content in this post. It basically reads "hey guys, we had 1k visitors in month X and then grew to 35k visitors in month Y by trying to reduce friction and reaching out to a ton of small bloggers."

What does it mean to reduce friction? They minified their Flash app from 1 MB to 0.45 MB and don't require user accounts.
I meant real root. It's a bummer to think Apple could get away with giving people sandboxed root, but maybe they could.
Always good to make pages smaller and limit friction, but you should really subtract the 7,510 visitors from Stumbleupon.
Ruby on Rails Limited Progress
Muggles don't have a technically informed imagination.

If you've had a boss or consulting client asking for convoluted features (or more likely solving the wrong problem), you know what I'm talking about.

Can a supportive cofounder be better? If they listen to what you have to say. But there's another category of failure with a tech-biz duo: they won't know to ask for the really simple to implement but insanely lucrative features.

In my first tech job, I had a conversation with a person writing specs. He was explaining what he was going to put in for the next version.

-"Have you thought of Y?"

-"Maybe for the version after that, it would be really useful but I don't think we have time to do it before X"

-"Y is 10 times easier to implement than X"

-"Oh..."

Laziness and domain knowledge are a great combo. I'm sure several others here have had the same conversation.

Doing customer discovery recently a customer told me: "That would be the holy grail of retail". None of my likely competitors are showing any signs of tackling the same problem. Maybe my strategy is dead wrong. I'm betting my competitors are all techies with little in the way of domain knowledge.
This is the old hard work vs. talent/intelligence debate. It's a combination of both (kinda like what the article describes), but such an old argument.

(By the way, Malcolm Gladwell spectacularly failed in Outliers with his "10,000 hours" principle.)
> One particularly interesting subproblem is how to introduce iPads into big companies. This will probably have to be done by stealth initially, as happened with microcomputers. They'll have to be introduced as something individuals use, and which doesn't really count as a computer and thus can't be vetoed by the IT department.

It almost sounds like pg is trying to encourage us all to become iPad evangelists. It kind of feels a bit like a paid promotion to me. I'd understand the attitude if it was some kind of non-commercial product or an open standard. But suggesting that we shill this locked down, DRM infested thing is not what I would expect.
So, 27 out of the top 30 were were written in C++, including all the top 10.

What's the lesson from this?
Ditto.

I also have to ask, how many of the list of items are customer friendly, or low-income friendly? Can't pre-pay earlier? A few oligopolist banks that are all-powerful? Public housing instead of the opportunity to buy? Bank re-negotiates the interest rate every 5 years?

Dealing with Canadian banks is quite irritating because they always have the upper hand on you. No 10k in the bank? Then that US$ check that you just received is going to take a month to clear. (This is in the information age!)
Microsoft has a 90% market share in PC OSs and 80% market share in business productivity software, see, http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20091111232207_Mi... and http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/060409-forrester-micro...
Contrary to the title, this talks about how Aaron Wall transitioned from eBooks to a resources/community site model with a recurring revenue component ($300 a month currently -- disclaimer, I moderate for his forums). This is a subject he is very, very passionate about because he spent way, way too much of his time and energy on pathological customers at the bottom of the SEO market, which is filled with scum and villainy.

"Charge more money, get better customers" is a repeatable effect I've seen in my business and in several other ones. My anecdotal sense is that every time Aaron ups the price, the quality of his forums go up. I'm not saying that to shill, its just that when folks got in for $50 we got a lot of "I have a website about Nintendos how do I make $1 on AdSense A DAY?!?" and now that it costs $300 a month it is mostly people with real businesses who have existing SEO strategies and want feedback on improving them. This makes me happy because it means I spend less time writing newbie advice and more time writing intellectually interesting ideas for e.g. how to execute linkbait better.

I think this is probably applicable to most of the SAAS businesses here. Every time I see stats published from a SAAS business -- every single time -- the most revenue comes from the most expensive plan. That and the pathological customer bit suggest that one could probably just ignore the $9 / month crowd and concentrate on more well-heeled customers. Some people will scream bloody murder: invite them to use your $9 / month competitors. Now they're somebody else's problem.
Yes. The problem went away a few hours ago when March 1st/2nd arrived.
Most resistance to 'Aurora' hack attacks futile, says report
The pdf report https://www.isecpartners.com/files/iSEC_Aurora_Response_Reco... is the report referenced.
FYI, you'll be slapped with a ticket if you drive without a seatbelt it New Delhi. Guess governments are right sometimes :)
An Android Success Story: $13,000 Monthly App Sales
3D Printer Creates Fully Articulate Metal Robot Figures (Video)
I would suggest software businesses think less in terms of "traffic" and more in terms of qualified prospects. "Traffic" harkens to the Bad Old Days of selling eyeballs to visitors, but if you're selling software eyeballs don't make you money. You can goose "traffic" by appealing to the desires of StumbleUpon visitors (7.5k in a month: that and $4 will buy you a cup of coffee), but that can lead you to pessimizing for the business.

For example, and I'm about to say something heretical: forcing people to give email addresses prior to use seems to be a bit of a win for me. It filters out anyone who is insufficiently skilled with computers to type an email address, for one thing, and for another the opt-in permission many of my users give is empirically worth its weight in gold.

I also have anonymous "guest" signups. They convert about as well as trial users from mainland China and they cause a disproportionate amount of my support headaches. I've got an A/B test in the works to see if nixing them entirely hurts total returns or not -- I'm guessing no. In that case, I'll happily nix them, and if those users bounce rather than use my software -- "Oh well".
I would say that the postscript of that license is the one thing that I consider missing from the original WTFPL. If I'm giving away my software for free without restrictions, I sure as hell don't want to get sued over it.
"If you’re a brick-layer who employs other brick layers and also employs a sales person, driver, accountant and all the other business components so that your business runs while you’re not there, you CAN scale."

So yes, Chili's scales. The owner(s) of franchise granting rights makes money from franchisees while they sleep. The owner of each franchise makes money from wait and kitchen staff while they manage their money and buy another franchise.
try this.

http://melikyan.blogspot.com/
Memorandum submitted by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Fedra Hotel website - Thessaloniki
Ah, my mistake, not pyramid scheme. Just pyramid sales (if nested within itself).
There are plenty of examples of building codes (here in the US) that are mostly union motivated and actively discourage the adoption of safer buildings and new technology. It works both ways. Codes can be great, but they're also an excellent place to hide graft and selective enforcement.
I co-wrote a book ('Web-Graphics for Non Designers') and later tracked it down in a Borders/similar store in London and got my photo taken with it there. Certainly a novel experience for anyone who's not a f/t author, but not so exciting that I'd be dreaming about it! I was writing to a very difficult deadline, fried my brain in the process and it was hardly lucrative.

From my experience, I'd be hard-pressed to be convinced to do it again. I got a few thousand as an advance for writing three of the books ten chapters and it involved research, a plan, fleshing out the content, providing supplementary assets and then a couple of rounds of editing. I've done better out of non-spammy MFA sites in terms of return on time invested.