skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice post, Mike.

The software complexity realm is a bit more enduring compared to other industries. Complexity here survives better and lasts longer probably because the demand for software in general is so huge that even the ugliest dinosaur can live a long and happy life: think Microsoft, Oracle - still the richest companies despite overwhelming complexity of their software and the process itself.
The death of Netscape, I think, can possibly be explained by the incredibly poor quality on top of complexity. (Which is a hint as to when to expect the death of Microsoft and Oracle.)
If you're an American citizen, you'll be paying tax in two countries anyway.
You are making a typical startup mistake. More features doesn't mean it's better.

Every MP3 player until the iPod showed up kept adding more features, more buttons, more stuff... rather than do one thing and do it exceedingly well.

For one of many detailed articles on the topic: http://gigaom.com/2006/04/17/make-that-device-simple/
yPr = y!/(y-r)!
Hilarious! It took me a few minutes to notice all the subtle puns everywhere.
I doubt many people would want to make a glider out a 747!
That's my main issue with all this UI twiddling that Canonical are doing at the moment - the left hand buttons, the notify actions removal, removing tooltips from indicator items, and gnome's great menu-icon removal of the last cycle.

There's absolutely no data, no testing and no rationale to backup any of these changes. No-one has been able to point me to impirical data, or any user testing to explain why these sweeping changes have been made, because there hasn't been any. Some XU designer thought it looked 'cooler' or 'cleaner' that way, so it got changed - end of story.

I really tried with the left hand title bar buttons - but after a week of 15 years of muscle memory putting my mouse in the wrong place every single time, I just had to change it back. Even if I had got used to it, so what? They're the same buttons in a different place - why is it an improvement to move them? If there's no demonstable benefit to moving them, why is it worth making all your users retrain their long established muscle memory? What's in it for them?

If there _are_ demonstrable benefits to these changes - then tell people what they are - demonstrate them - rather than just telling people to shut up. That will cut down on the bickering comments no end.
A $500 laptop has more functionality in the sense of features (maybe), but not in the sense of how you physically interact with it.

The is like the "no multi-tasking" argument. I have been working to get my laptop to be more single-task. I don't want continuous partial attention, I want partial continuous attention.

So, maybe I am a "fanboy" but I do have hopes that the iPad may change how I interact with my computer. I hope it provides such a compelling browsing experience that when I am sitting at my desk with my laptop I no longer have a desire to browse the web (instead of working).
Subtle prank in there: if you look at the CHANGELOG diff, the date format is different for April Fools' day. "April 1st, 2010" vs "February 4, 2010"
'People will get used to it eventually.'

I expect you're probably correct. What's the point, though? Why is it better this way? Why should thousands (millions?) of users retrain their muscle memory? What are the benefits to moving these windows controls from one side of the window to the other?

Are there any benefits?
I have a Mac I use regularly. I have a Ubuntu machine I use constantly, and I have a Windows machine I use when I have to. I love the Mac UI in general, but I've always had a slight preference for the menu buttons on the right. It just makes more sense to me. To close a window, I click on the right-most corner of that window. I read from left to right, closing the window is the last thing I want to do with a window, since by that time, I'm done with it. The buttons on the right mean that the X to close comes last in the order of all of the info/tools in the window chrome. To me, this just makes more sense.
Those problems are software based, which can be fixed with an update.
Next step - keyboard shortcuts! :-)
Altair developer Ed Roberts dies in Ga.
Why is it that the only products I ever want to buy from ThinkGeek are their April Fools jokes?
With Advent of Mobile, Liquid Layouts Grow More Important . . .
Why would you buy a car if you care about the cost of fuel?
I'm hoping WebGL and the other technologies pick up penetration.

I'm starting to see more browser-games using Unity and i'd really like to not have yet another proprietary plugin to rely on (and all the issues they bring).
> "which can be fixed with an update."

Yes, but what are the odds of that happening?

I don't mean whether or not it will get an update - I'm sure it will - but whether or not they will ever go back and re-do significant amounts of engineering for usability.
Not only do I not give a crap about you not giving a crap, I also don't give a crap that you don't give a crap that I don't give a crap. Are we done?
Right you are. I've read both, and knew that Ostrom got hers recently, but thought that Olson had received one as well. Oh well, still a tremendously influential book.
I'm pretty sure one of the things you can't do with Mame is bundle ROMs with it
And oddly, this repeat of it appears in the future: the byline says it was published on May 1, 2010.
Well, I'm glad someone appreciates it.
It seems like these collapses are not caused by bureaucracy. Rather, they are caused by an inability of large companies and complex systems to focus on value creation for the market/group/people/person they are serving. People pay for things that add value to their lives if they can't do it themselves for free. These large corporations seem to focus too heavily on improving the bottom line, which is another way of saying "raise revenues above expenses, or cut expenses below revenues". Both of these are by products of real value creation, and should not be the focus, but the realized result of a focus on serving the target.
All his complaints about managing a "datacenter" also apply to colo.
wow, that's definitely interesting... after reading the bios of both on Gilt, you can definitely notice the nuance of the language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_P._Ryan

"Gilt Groupe is an online retailer based in the United States. Founded in 2007, Gilt Groupe stages online 'flash' sales, offering women's, men's and children's designer apparel and accessories, designer home goods and high-end travel destinations at discounted prices in a limited time sale format, typically 36 to 48 hours.

Kevin Ryan founded Gilt Groupe in 2007. Gilt first launched women's clothing and accessories in November 2007, men's in April 2008, Gilt Groupe Japan in February 2009, Gilt Fuse in August 2009 and a travel site named Jetsetter in September 2009. Gilt Groupe is based in New York, NY with warehouses in Brooklyn, NY and Andover, MA.

Gilt Groupe has raised a total of $48 million to date; its investors include Matrix Partners and General Atlantic Partners.
[edit] "
..
thx for the heads up.
I would imagine it would take a quite a while to run, as a whole level's worth of resources would need to be loaded. Id's style of game engine precaches all needed resources at the start of a level to avoid glitches when using a resource for the first time, where the game would need to wait for the hard drive to fetch the resource..

A game that doesn't do this is Far Cry, for example. When you first fire a new weapon in that game, it can pause for a few tenths of a second while it loads the sound - just when you need the weapon most.
This change really irritates me, as does the styling changes of the tabs. Enough so that "customize ubuntu" goes from the fun list to the todo list.
I also don't. I use a 5-year-old laptop and 3-year-old non-smart phone, mostly because I don't see any reason to upgrade. New software is interesting, but new hardware, at least over the past 5 years or so, makes me yawn.
I'm pretty sure someone could edit the line of mame source that does 'fopen(argv[1], "r")' and replace it with something more suitable for a bundle.
Incidentally, if any hackers are looking for jobs working on an interesting problem, I know the Rethinks are hiring. It would be the perfect job for a lot of hackers. You'd get to solve big problems starting with a blank slate, and you'd get to work with smart, totally pragmatic people (Slava and Mike). Plus they now have enough to actually pay you.
I was going to say his partner is smoking the crack. That design would have been atrocious in 1996. I see frames that aren't sized right on my 1920x1200, a 404 AND a goo goo dolls song that I somehow think they didn't pay royalties for. Borderline illegal and ugly, but hey at least it's free.
I'm not even sure it'll get an update.

They'd only sold 75 as of the end of February and only 12 of those in the month of February itself (it went on sale at the beginning of January and the iPad was announced at the end of January). I find it hard to believe sales recovered all that much in March.

So if I'm Fusion Garage's backers I'm looking for a jump in sales after it ships (because people will at least know it's not vaporware at that point). If that doesn't happen I think they bail at which point that joojoo is as good as it's going to get.
No, the software is blatantly inspired by Palm WebOS. :-)
I'm loving Rails 3 Beta 1, but I'm surprised they've broken Ruby 1.9.1 compatibility with today's release. Not to be a hater, but I don't see the point of releasing a new beta after introducing a regression so serious that it causes the framework to segfault on the current stable Ruby.
Are there any benefits?

It's now easier for people that decide Ubuntu wasn't everything they wanted to switch OSX?
Anyone else who immediately thought "John Titor!"? :)
I can't related to this. I switched to OSX fully time over two years ago after using Windows most of my life. I adjusted to the close button being on the left in about a week.
Dave Lifson, a Postling founder, describes the process from his point of view:

http://caterpillarcowboy.com/post/489762022/the-inside-story...
Building this on a proprietary platform, instead of a customized version of Android, is what is going to kill JooJoo, not the iPad.

Trying to support a proprietary OS and convince developers to build for an unproven platform (is this even possible with JooJoo?) put the nails in their coffin before they even started.

Hopefully they have the budget to live out that mistake and relaunch because their hardware looks slick, and they have some interesting UI / OS ideas that I think could catch on.
My own experience in this area suggested another, more fundamental problem.

In the commercial world, we expect any idea to fail many, many times before we figure out how to make it work for the market. We embrace, rather than stigmatize, failure. Academics are conditioned to view failure as, at best, deeply embarrassing and, at worst, career-ending.

My experience is, of course, anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth. The researchers I met cared more about science than money, and because they perceived the commercialization process as potentially damaging to their academic careers, they threw a huge fit when technology transfer was broached. In the end, the university backed off (which warrants another discussion altogether).
Not to mention they are very transparent with their compensation and stock options (Scroll down - http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/). People who run their hiring process and business like that seem like very good people to work for indeed.
You can get free shipping at the xkcd store.

cheat mode
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I very rarely use the file menu either, its hidden on firefox/terminal and emacs, which is 95% of my computer time
time travel is the most believable aprial fools joke you have read? zz....
It's simply a web browser device, not a platform waiting for developers.
I think that he meant complex in terms of inner structure, not user interface. Many of the previous mobile operating systems were pretty complex (from a user interface level) even though they only had a limited number of tasks you could do with them.
i was looking at this the other day. how do they address (what i assume are) the larger space requirements of append-only databases with the lower capacities of ssds? am i wrong about the space requirements, or is moore's law going to fix it, or is there some kind of background compaction?
I used to. For instance, it was fun to have a Palm Pilot back when few people had handheld devices.

But then somewhere along the way I came to realize two things:

1) The fun of getting new gadgets tends to be short-lived. Unless I absolutely can't find my away around with it (like my TomTom GPS), any device I get eventually ends up wasting space on some corner of my desk.

2) Most people worth talking to are more interested in what you do rather than what you own. As the guy from Sh!t My Dad Says put it, "You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."
I don't know why anybody would part with $500 for a JooJoo in that case.
Its hard to say - but spend some time running through enough VC's and C level execs resumes and Harvard/Stanford B School seems to turn up a lot. I don't know if its the actual degree that helps but it certainly doesn't hurt.
It's not that bad, since this is the web, the game runs as soon as the geometry is loaded, textures are loaded on the file like images in a web page, so you don't have to wait (a hologram texture is shown for missing textures that haven't loaded yet). About 10-30 seconds to start depending on bandwidth, and once started, the resources are cached by the browser until they expire.
I don't know about that... The current generation of ARM processors are pretty fast. And you can't beat their performance per watt, so an ARM tablet will get much better battery performance. So long as an ARM tablet can display video well (which will require a dedicated chip for either) does it matter how much faster the processor is? Especially when battery life is taken into consideration?
No, the story is someone _claimed_ to be a time traveller.
Considering that browsers allow for such plugins to be installed almost painlessly, I don't understand why we don't see more of these plugins ... so be grateful for that.
Of course! iPad has shut the door on the remotest chance that JooJoo wouldn't bomb hard.
I dislike the devices limited features but understand the reasoning for it. I also dislike the iphone for the same limitations. I'm personally waiting for the Notion ink Adam which I understand has been delayed today as well. A more powerful tablet with a longer battery life and a daylight readable screen for about the same price (estimated $350-$800US). Then again I'm one of the 'geeks' that want a feature set and not a carefully controlled user experience. And yes I own a jail broken itouch and the experience is not compelling enough to buy into the larger unit.

It is a first generation Apple device - you're essentially testing the product - no guarantees that it is the polished product you would expect. Knowing the amount of users I will have to support that will purchase the device scares me - we ran into the same issues with the hinge fiasco on the Macbook airs. Yes they eventually warranty covered those repairs, but for at least 6 months we were dealing with "accidentally damaged" $1700-$2700 bricks.

The hype is scary and some universities are already jumping the gun, see seton hall: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10471690-17.html
The problem is they're showing off their school site on the device as a mockup, however their site has flash. This could be corrected before they are deployed - but what other issues with that approach will there be?
This is a huge mistaken on their part. At least if they made it more "hackable" then they'd have a shot. We all saw how the original iPhone worked out without apps. It was nice, but with apps it became so much more.

The joojoo isn't competing with the ipad. It's competing with android tablets. And android Is a pretty robust platform.
But Kevin has an INSEAD MBA that's right up there.
Well, the search seems to be working now.
That's one of the beauties of a turbine engine. If it starts and N1, N2 RPM and fuel flow is within spec, and you don't exhaust the fuel, the chance that that engine will run for another 5 hours is extremely high.

If my experiences with my own (single piston engined) airplane are in any way representative, I would be surprised if the first flight out of major maintenance isn't statistically significantly riskier than a random repo flight.
There was an article about this a while back (whose link I can't find).

Microsoft's Silverlight-to-iPhone streaming is basically 'Microsoft implemented in IIS Streaming Server a streaming standard the iPhone already supports'. It doesn't require any approval from Apple. It's just streaming h.264 over HTTP.
A couple of points:

- We garbage collect (see Mendel Rosenblum's Ph.D. thesis on log-structured systems)

- Our customers care about cost per IOPS, not cost per GB.

- The hot real-time stuff is usually handled by a different database and/or storage system than the older, less frequently accessed data anyway.
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Of course it works on 9.10. We are talking about 10.4.

I'm posting this from 10.4 Beta 1, where Alt+Space does still work. All they did was change the arrangement.

I use it to move a window to a numbered workspace. The Ctrl-Al-Shift-Arrows moves the windows AND switches the workspace. My use case is restoring my many Chrome browser windows to their proper workspace after restarting.

Good point.
I'm not really sure if this is true. The Chrome mac snapshot is built on April 1st ...
I've had a friend with an iPhone how to cancel sending an email - she's inadvertently hit the send button presumably several times when composing an email there.

Having a "sending in 10 seconds" option may well be useful in her case.

In my case I sometimes squeeze out an email at a subway station just before my connection cuts off as we head on to the next station.
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I just turned the minimize/maximize/close buttons off completely, since I just use keyboard shortcuts for everything. Chromium uses its own, which is annoying.
This is very interesting project, all the current DB are optimized for normal HD(and the standard HD is the slowest part of our PC). But with development of the Solid-State Drives we will have more and more fast drives. So the Database who will take advantage of the these new SSDrives will lead the way in Database design technology. It is right time to invest in this technology.
I don't think it's a counterpoint. Avatar relies on a whole infrastructure to amortize its costs, specialisms that make it feasible to create. But that infrastructure wasn't built to make Avatar. It gets by on regular fare - and the profitability of that regular fare is fading.
I think you night have missed the point of my post.
In the book Fat And Mean, (http://www.amazon.com/FAT-MEAN-Corporate-Managerial-Downsizi...) David Gordon essentially argues that corporate downsizing often involves survival of the most bureaucratically adept rather than the most productive. Overtime, more complexity and less productivity result.

You could apply this reasoning in the rest of the article also...
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Similiar ideas came up in the Mix10 talk "Cloud Computing Economies of Scale": http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX01
Cloub Based iTunes in The Works?
Application shortcuts remappable from Ctrl+ to Alt+, lake BeOS would be sufficient. Application shortcuts remappable to Super+ would be awesome, then you could do Super+C to copy and Ctrl+C to send kill in the Terminal, Super+H to hide an app window and Ctrl+H to delete char backwards. Ahh…
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CloudApp is live
But really, rotating disks are not that bad for most database use cases. B-trees, the usual on-disk database structure, are designed to keep similar data on the same disk page, which means that if you request row 42, row 43 will be in memory by the time you need it. So the slowness of the disk is abstracted away; iterate over your data in index order, and it's always fast.

Hash tables have a theoretical advantage over balanced trees, and an SSD would make a naive hash table implementation easier to implement. But if you are smart (like, say, BerkeleyDB), hash tables and balanced trees have almost the same real world performance.

RethinkDB might be better for write-heavy operations, but that's because SSDs are better for random writes.
Which reviews have you seen that discuss these maladies?
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Technical_documentation

http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Machines-Versatile-Platforms-A...
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If you think that's wild, check out nativeclient (http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/); it makes WebGL and HTML5 look like a quick hack. Not that I am hating on either one, but nativeclient could certainly be the end-all-be-all of disseminating between which applications your desktop is running and which applications is the web running on your desktop.
Scientists stumped as bee population declines further
But not an R&D mecca . . .
From a recent New Yorker article: "Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_...
Ehmm. For this thought to make sense, all your windows would have to be text only, one line that you always want to read and doesn't wrap, with no other way to dismiss except the close button, and with your cursor always following along with your eyes.

By your logic, actually, the close button would be best placed in the lower right for any window with several lines of text.
I believe the previous poster meant that the license of MAME forbids bundling it with ROMs.
But the lack of locking is potentially big for multicore applications.
Not sure if they had a part in this, but I found it through MetLab Design's founder/CEO: http://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/11446214489

MetLab: http://www.metalabdesign.com/
Well, much of what made Avatar special was actually built just to make Avatar; that's what Cameron does. But I get your point.

It's complicated, though, because while the budgets for movies continues to climb, the individual production costs continues to go down. Businesses like Industrial Light & Magic keep building blockbuster special-effects laden movies, and the techniques that they use to accomplish that become a less expensive foundation for future projects.

So, so far, I don't see that the profitability there is fading. Pixar is certainly doing fine, and I suspect that Cameron can pretty much work on whatever he wants after this.

And, as the technology continues to progress, the need for other aspects of costly production will go down: movies will require less actor time, fewer cuts, fewer sets, less props, fewer models...
Canonical thinks Ubuntu is better than Windows now. Next target to catch up: OS X. This is just the first step towards that goal.
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So that data corruption can scale linearly?

(Disks vs. SSDs and transactions vs. "eventual consistency" are orthogonal.)