skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I can’t see Apple building its own search engine, but perhaps they really are building their own maps service — hence their purchase of PlaceBase last July."

I found this paragraph towards the end interesting: I was thinking recently about how it can sometimes be difficult for two guys in a garage to get traction on their ideas/products, because to really leverage them you might need a whole set of products around it. They're good ideas but would be a part of a big system that you can't build unless you're Google, Microsoft, etc. (e.g. if you want to do something where you access the data of emails, you need to piggyback on other companies' email systems)

So, I found this last part interesting because it puts Apple in a similar situation as the two guys in their garage, at a larger scale, where they (might) have to develop their own map service, where they have to get involved more in online services (MobileMe), etc., even though it's not their core competency[1]. The same way I would not use the two guys' product if it doesn't work with my existing email account, some will get an Android phone just because it integrates perfectly with their Gmail and Google Voice account.

That's something Apple will need to focus on more IMO. We're heading towards having everything just online (pictures, documents, backups, music…) and Google definitely has the advantage there.

[1] I'm not saying they don't know how to build online services. iTunes is a proof that they do, but it doesn't (really) have an online front-end.
> I'm going to code like crazy to get my game ready to go, just in case.

You'd be crazy not to.

Some people consider the App Store a gold mine, and while you might not actually make a fortune, being an item from the all-time lowest selection of apps will be a good thing.
If you have a decent sound-system, I wouldn't count driving as a distraction; I've often been behind a wheel when I first noticed some detail of a song. And then, sometimes I've set out to listen to music while doing something else and really mostly just listened to the music.

But even granting those points, it's been a few weeks. Shuffling among new tracks or listening to streams is just so easy.

(The album in question was Oil and Gold by Shriekback, an old favorite.)
Sprouting a science revolution
Oops didn't mean to dup! I came across it because of all the cloud computing stuff that's happening - and reminded me of when all the powerful computing came down in price. Just wanted to go back in time to see how people used up all the extra computing power.
Where's Rework?
It's not abnormal, but it sure is amusing.
Well, if there is something to be learned from this experience, it's that unless you are prepared to be a felon, when at the border, always immediately comply to the best of your ability, and never, ever, question what you are being told to do.

I'm not saying it makes sense, I'm just saying it's my takeaway.
Novell To Release Pulse and Federation with Google Wave
The Five Stages of Data Loss Grief
1983 Apple Event Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
The Silicon Valley "Bubble"
But what if Google lose? Interesting graph I found today:
http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/scr...
This is a fair point.... when you start running businesses you start realizing how little journalists really understand the industry you're actually in and how it works.

There are exceptions like John Markoff from the New York Times, Peter Rojas of Engadget/GDGT, Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg, Henry Blodget and Michael Arrington. all of those folks have deep knowledge... many other folks are simply rewriting press releases.
I asked Tommy--it's had 12 returns (which is ~20%).
If it was my personal site, I would serve flat files. The fundamental problem with Wordpress is a design decision to have live code serving what could easily be static content. If there is no code, there's no exploit.
It seems Groupon is hot right now but I'm still not on the bandwagon. Most of the deals I see appear to be along the lines of "2 week membership to gym/yoga/karate for $X" or "Some tourist attraction for $X (normally $2X)"

Basically, stuff where the vendor is trying to get your foot in the door or simply selling you an attraction where the "an $X value" may or may not be accurate.

The helicopter one is interesting, particularly because this is something those 2,600 people would never search for in Google. But then end result shows that deals like this benefit Groupon much more than the vendor.

If stuff like this keeps happening, are people going to want to continue offering deals on the site?
I know there are like a million Google Employees here, what do you guys think of the 'competition'? Is it real or just convenient?

Any Apple Employees?
Why would I care if people hate me because I'm honest? I can tell you I would have been one of the worst NBA players of all time and one of the best business journalists of all time with a straight face... because both statements are true.

rock on
HTC malware issue source discovered
I like to talk with folks.... it's the journalist in me. I don't consider you guys/gals serfs--far from it. I consider you guys the real people who actually do sh#$%t. Most of the folks I get to hang out with are CEOs and VCs who talk about the sh2@#$t their people do. I'm all about the doing....

... thus the reason I'm here with the doers. I'm from the bottom, so I still feel it for the bottom.
Fake Steve is already writing it: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/16/fake-steve-jobs-larry-charl...
Hm, a bit slow on my top of line MacBook Pro, Chrome, latest Flash... just trying to draw on a small PDF...
I remember being surprised when I first figured out that Apple didn't really bother with license keys for upgrades to OS X, and academic upgrades are free or have hardly any license fees. I was also surprised when the Intel version wouldn't run on non-Apple hardware, when they could easily have sold it for use on Dell boxes. It was explained to me that Apple is a hardware company. They want to make a great operating system and great applications so you will buy more of their hardware. It was the first example I saw of software selling the hardware, where generally the two were sold separately.

Mobile devices has always been a little different. The hardware is very different from device to device and screen realestate is precious, so each handset has its own software. Some might argue that the reason many mobile phones have crappy software is because the companies are hardware companies tacking on some software, but it's always been that the software and the hardware are sold together and are under heavy constraints.

Until recently. Now we have much more powerful devices in our pockets and our purses. When your "phone" can run a browser, email, games, and media player, you can start thinking about what other software you could run. We have enough power and flexible inputs such that we can handle the overhead of generic software. Suddenly there's the opportunity for phone hardware and software to become separate markets.

It would if it there wasn't the rise of media stores and DRM. To have good DRM you have to own the whole device. To sell the media producers on digital distribution you have to have DRM.

I think that the popularity of these media stores (ebooks, movies, music) is the largest reason why we won't have root access to our (semi-)mobile devices any time soon.

And that's why I think iTunes is locking me out of my tablets.
I loved it. David is a smart, passionate guy... you don't see that too often in our business. he reminded me of a young Mark Cuban
Consider the early-tryouts section of American Idol. Americans experience so much Schadenfreude at watching the unskilled singers because it's considered terrible to sing if you don't know how. We're commonly too scared to try karaoke without some liquid courage.

Sad, really - we end up terrified of making music.
British Airways strike to go ahead as talks collapse
Uh, very no.
I submit most people don't like what they think is jazz. Jazz is a very big label.
It's definitely interesting, but I've seen way too many papers that never actually release something useful.

The primary goal of academic research isn't to build a production-quality product. The hope is that in 5, 10, maybe even 20 years, entrepreneurs will comb through the good ideas from academic papers and get the inspiration to build real usable marketable products from them.

Edit: One example that comes to mind is all these JITs that are being built for dynamic languages like Python (Unladen Swallow), Ruby (Rubinius), and JavaScript (Tracemonkey). They all were heavily inspired by research done in the mid-90's on JITs for the Self language, which nobody in the real world actually used :)
The comment similarity problem is a lot more interesting than the is-swombat-just-being-coy problem...could you just tell us?
Imagine the possiblities the future holds! What if we could use a 3D printer to build collagen (or similar) base strucutre, then simply deposite the raw cells onto it and expect it to grow into a new organ? Organ donors would be obsolete!
Yeah, I didn't want to use the Kettl but CodeKettle seems to be taken
An old, but excellent article. I had the good fortune, in ancient history, to get some hacking time in on the first type of Connection Machine (the SIMD one). And the best part was, wait for it ..., was that you programmed it in *Lisp.
Dunno, I did one this past summer (concurrently with a GSOC project) and I found it to be a good experience, and a good way to get some real world experience on my resume to pad a ton of open source stuff. That being said there's no way I'd take unpaid work anymore.
Really? Seems to still work for me. Anyone else have it down?
Art of War? Anyone who posts an "of all time" list should be required to pick something at least a millenium old.
If anyone has more information about the London Javascript Group I'd be really interested.

I thought the old one had died, and I haven't had any e-mail from the list in ages.
Simply saying that would have been ok--a little cocky, but excusable in my book--were it not immediately followed by your statement that you were "cursed with being a CEO/founder."

If you really wanted to realize your potential as a tech journalist, you could have. No one forced you to start companies.

Saying that you're "cursed" by achieving one of the top goals of half of the people here (having a wildly successful startup)--and becoming orders of magnitude richer than the average person because of it--isn't going to help with all of those "haters" who downvote half of your comments to -4.
Thanks for reposting... It's new to me! I'm instantly thinking about IBM's cell processors and how much the connection machine parallel concepts fed into their design.
Hmmm, in the last few months

* OK Computer (by Radiohead)
I've probably done 3-4 dark rooms listens through this in the last year alone.
* Venomous Villian (by Victor Vaughn aka MF Doom)
* Timeless (by Goldie)
* The Stone Roses (by The Stone Roses)
* Tranceport (by Paul Oakenfold)

I try and turn out the lights and listen to an album or two whenever my wife has Yoga or dinner with friends. Ideally I do this slightly drunk which helps me really lose myself in the music and keeps my brain from ruining everything.
I don't have a problem unpaid summer or other short-term internships, although I can't afford to take them. (I'm a junior in college right now.)

Asking someone to work from 9-5 with no pay for 6 months is completely ridiculous though.
Wikipedia says yes:

"In 1997, in U.S. v. Thomas, 116 F.3d 606, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law"

"In 2001, a California Supreme Court ruling on a case involving statutory rape led to a new jury instruction that requires jurors to inform the judge whenever a fellow panelist appears to be deciding a case based on his or her dislike of a law."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unite...
> Even if you write a purely stateless function, it would still be useful to write a unit test to check for correctness.

Indeed. Tests are a good idea in, say, Haskell, too.
I would have preferred "DasPad" though
These are substantially similar terms to YC for a program with essentially no track record in a geographic area that is not catnip for investors. Accepting these terms --- 5% for 15-20k --- seems like effectively saying "I'm as likely to get funded in Chicago after being 'mentored' by people nobody has heard of as I am to get funded in the valley after being 'mentored' by PG, PG's friends, and 100 entrepreurs PG & Co kickstarted."

I'm very cynical about the YC value prop. But even I don't think it's worth nothing.

Interested in this because you don't think you can get into YC? Let me introduce you to a concept called "adverse selection". These programs are like b-schools: who you go with is as important as who you go for.

Chicago is a wonderful place to bootstrap a company in. I did it (well, with partners in NY --- but my office has more people.) If you want to start a company here, talk to bootstrappers. You don't need to give 5% of your company (a CEO's grant later on!) to get traction.
And something that will only appear 1000 years in the future.
SproutCore (Web App Framework) 1.0 is Done
Make a whoopee cushion app.
Sorry, it seems people missed the <sarcasm>. I really didn't mean any disrepsect.
see careercup.com ... Its already a huge site catering to the same business as you are.
We are living in a golden age.
Sadly, it looks like that gets syndicated through Kodak's website, which isn't kosher for my needs. Sigh.
Our difficulties often may be imaginary but that doesn't make them any less difficult or easy to let go.

Just because our difficulties may not be as bad as another's or may be easier to overcome does not mean that the burden we feel is any less.

It's about the burden one feels and their own ability to overcome. People have a hard time accepting this and that's why people rarely simpathize with the rich kid.
Eh. People love to talk and repeat jokes they heard on the TV or the Internet. If someone was actually offended/upset about the name they certainly wouldn't be happily joking about it in public. Just a classic "I have nothing else to say so let me repeat something I heard once" type of reaction I suspect.
Seems kind of light on the financial / accounting / capital allocation side of things.

Graham and Rockefeller's biographies do expose readers to these topics, but adding books like How to Read a Financial Report and the Accounting Game would be helpful to any entrepreneur.
Sadly, most of the statistics community continues to ignore your pithy lesson, to the great distress of all involved.
The blogpost bases an entire conjecture on the "bubble" of Silicon Valley life around the quirks of one calendaring system. While the point does have merit, might it not be stretched a bit past the point of credibility?
Do note the Ken Jones comment on that article basically repudiating the crude editorializing of the main article.
This is way, way over the line. "I want to be clear that my team is a fast-paced, hard-working, hectic environment. I am going to work you hard...". There are places where you can lose your job for publicly describing an internship that way.
You know, we really do not want to see you. There isn't a great need for that. I could do it 7 years ago with my motorola e1000, never used it once. Now, I am sure some people would, but the market is not huge (my prediction).
Meaningless, more than difficult.
JavaScript is weird about truthyness / falsyness of arrays:

if([] == false){
// this code runs
}

if( [] ) {
// this code also runs
}

if([] == true){
// this code doesn't run
}

From http://nfriedly.com/techblog/2009/06/advanced-javascript-ope...
Considering that the author of this world in which we are meeting is P.G., are you sure we don't already :-)

And I'd be delighted to live in a Wodehouse novel.
i see your point, and it was wrong of me to describe the context in that way.

on the other hand, your previous statement was qualified with "in the real world", and to some extent the "real world" includes people using linq.

having said that, i agree that the consensus - if i haven't misunderstood something else - seems to be that sql engines don't do what i expected because it's assumed that people will use compiled statements. i don't use linq myself so am having to infer a lot from the article, but at some point i plan to check django and sqlalchemy to see when they use precompiled statements and when not.
Why don't you tell me? What's been your experience?
Except that Jobs wasn't at Apple between 1988-1994, when the lawsuit was in progress. But maybe he still had some emotional investment in the matter? :)
I know we throw around the word innovative a lot these days but what exactly is innovative about this? A webcam? Memory card slot? There's no details on the software so that can't be it. Not that the iPad hardware itself is innovative either -- just evolutionary.
Competition never hurts. I hate the way careercup displays comments/answers to questions. With this site, I like how people can up or down vote to help filter out the bad solutions.
Yeah, but was it only for 45 minutes of music? That's how it is at the Blue Note or Village Vanguard. When I saw glasper do a night of both the experiment and trio, with maxwell and bilal, it was $25 for about 4 hours of music
BDD encourages the developer to define a clear behavioral specification for the unit of functionality before you implement it. By first focusing on the usage I find that the abstractions I produce are simpler and in turn have fewer unit tests. I think the author is saying that TDD done well results in fewer tests for simpler code.
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...
It does make sense, considering the notepad vs a notebook. Slate harkens to the old single room school days. Frame might make you think it's only for pictures or be hung on the wall.

Pad's pretty good I suppose. People will get over the hygiene aspect of it.
Opera != bel canto. True, the classic opera (say, late baroque through Puccini) was written specifically for the bel canto voice due to the increased size of the audience over the previous, more intimate pieces, the unfortunate lack of amplification, and the relatively few vowels to be found in Italian (and French, for that matter) but there's no real reason to equate a genre of theatre with any particular vocal style. Hearing a Purcell piece sung with the English-mangling roundness of vowels required for the italianate style is as disturbing to me as Nixon in China. Even loudness is not an excuse -- the reverberations of Ethel Merman's last "on with the show" have not yet died down.

There's no need for opera to become fossilised, nor for it to aspire to an audience of fossils. Jesus Christ Superstar should have changed the world -- not that it was the best that could have been done, but it should have opened doors everywhere to the possibility of actually keeping opera relevant.
Smelling like shit isn't going to turn any heads? No one will notice that.
Maybe not a scam, but it really limits your options for talent to those who can support themselves for 6 months. Maybe they are looking for some potential investors kids or something. Not many individuals still working on internships could afford 6 months on their own.
This is exactly what I've been looking for -- I've been trying to find a way to collaboratively edit a draft PDF of a newsletter, without dumping a lot of money on Acrobat.
I am sure, that will be the name for the international release. (Because DasPad sounds absolutely phony in German. But at least the grammatical genders match.)
Yeah it's definitely not my premise that art = emotion + entertainment, that was the GP. I would, however, divide art into "art that is/can become enjoyable" and "art that cannot be enjoyable (but may be thought provoking etc)". I'm definitely not being fair to John Cage, I am far from well versed in his music and since he's an experimental artist I know his pieces have different levels of accessibility. I would group the 4'33" piece into the "interesting but not enjoyable as music" category.
I wonder what Groupon's repeat business is like. Do they convince some small business to price their service incredibly under cost, take their rip, and leave the business to deal with 2,000 loss leading customers? I'd love to hear from this helicopter company again in a few months after they've worked their asses off to give out 2,000 cheap lessons all for 2 or 3 repeat customers. That model simply isn't sustainable.
While reading all the examples of arguments he wasn't going to make, I was really expecting something new to be added to the debate, instead, he recycles this argument:

it is not reasonable to expect that the current patent
system, nor even one designed to improve or replace it,
will ever be able to accurately determine what might be
considered legitimately patentable from the overwhelming
volume of innovations in software.

Unfortunately, he's wrong -- again -- and has failed to convince me that discrimination against software engineers is the solution to the software patent problems.

The simple solution would be to charge more for software patents and use the money to hire more people. Patents, if you aren't aware are under $1,000. That's ridiculously cheap compared to the attorneys, writers, and engineers who invent the code. As a comparison, attorney's in California charge about $20,000 to write a software patent.

For $850 (the basic filing fee) how can anyone expect the office to afford to review such patents? Someone capable of understanding them would easily cost $100,000 a year outside the USPTO. If it takes 10 hours to read one of the patents, then each patent would cost the USPTO $500 to review and that's not counting all the bureaucrats involved.

The answer is, the USPTO cannot afford to review software patents. Plain and simple. Instead, they just stamp "Approved" on them and let the litigators argue it out in the courts -- adding more millions to the cost, which of course go straight into the attorneys' pockets. If there is anything stifling innovation, it's the attorneys, not the patents.

My suggestion: Raise the basic filing fee from $850 to $8,500 or $85,000 Or 0.01% of filer revenue for the previous year.

Obviously we have a supply and demand problem. The price is simply too low. Solution: raise the price. Use the additional revenue to hire more software engineers who can better judge the validity of the claims.
When I said religious, I didn't mean one of any organized religion that begins with a capital letter. I meant it in the sense of social construct. By my definition, atheism is a belief construct and falls into the subcategory under philosophy as a 'religion.' This is a pretty unpopular assertion, so I don't make it often, but it helps for clarification. To wit, legal constructs should be as abstracted from a single belief system as functionally possible, since beliefs vary so widely from one individual to the next. And because any legal system based on ideology is fraught with bugs. The description of a ship with no captain, in Plato's Republic, describes this in a way that is still disturbingly applicable to our modern political and social dynamic.

A more simple way of putting it would be, "if you believe marriage has meaning, then it has meaning." True for anything, right? Now if we could only agree on what is meaningful, and what is not...
The US border guards are nowhere near as bad as the Canadian ones, and the Canadian border laws are worse too: having been barred from entry by one shitheaded guard in the past is grounds to be barred automatically in the future.