skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't mean to say deal making was the biggest reason, just a big reason for Microsoft's success. As someone else pointed out in this thread, while Microsoft did indeed supply the hardware makers with an OS, they very quickly made sure it was the only OS those hardware makers would be able to sell. Also, my understanding is that the Mac OS was let stagnate in the 90's and that most people actually thought Windows was a superior choice anyway.

Is it really the case that Android is the only option at this point for hardware makers who are not Apple? That seems silly to me. The other choice is to compete with Apple by building the whole stack. My worry is that Palm's apparent failure is going to put the rest of the industry off of the idea. It doesn't seem ridiculous to me for a company like HTC or Motorola to either buy Palm or start from scratch on their own OS so that they actually have something to sell their product with instead of just selling yet another android touchscreen device. Is that not an option?
Depends on what you mean by originally, really. Originally all this was intended for sharing scientific research and no one cared about crap like fonts, or almost anything else we take for granted now; it kinda used to look like this: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T...
Official Google version

http://googlecodesamples.com/docs/php/ocr.php

Now integrated into G Docs already.
I believe I speak for all the bootstrappers out there: we prefer the term "broke".
The New San Francisco Suburbs, a Plane Ride Away
This seems to be a bit of a mismatch between NASA engineering and the emerging trends in web scale computing: statistically speaking, the hardware is broken. That doesn't mean you can't get work done with it.

This might be a wee bit of an adjustment to make if your engineering model is "four redundant systems which vote on outcomes plus a backup and SCRUB THE LAUNCH if anything looks anomalous."
The echo chamber of the Valley - great point. There are a lot more companies than we care to admit that fall into this category IMHO.
Hacker News - and blogs in general - are another way to live vicariously from your couch.

(Thank goodness for noprocrast!)
Wanted: The world's best candidate
We have nested comments here. You can reply directly to these users.
Linux is not attracting young developers because most young developers don't have problems that need solving in the kernel.

The amount of change an individual developer can effect on a project is inversely proportional to the amount of code already written.
JQuery flot stacked bar chart example
Read Later: my Instapaper-like extension for Mobile Firefox
I took a look. Your approach is to detect requests from spiders and respond with plain HTML content rather than the content wrapped in Javascript, etc., that a normal user would get. You address the obvious question, "But isn't that cloaking?" by saying no, the content itself is the same, so nobody should object. Fair enough, I happen to agree with you, but our opinion is irrelevant; what matters is whether Google consider this practice legitimate. Can you (or any HNer) tell me definitively whether they do or not? And has their policy changed recently with the introduction of this new crawlability spec?
The Flash Player 10.1 release moves to a single codebase for all supported platforms.

I would guess part of the reason for the delay is that they are rewriting large chunks of it to work consistently across very different hardware platforms -- and they've done a lot of performance and security related work.
Changing The World - for computer scientists
At least for KDE it feels like they are on the 3rd or 4th generation of developers. I am not sure how many of the developers from 10 years ago are still around.
He's talking about the BrainTrust.io logo in the sidebar. They do look quite similar, though it's not relevant to this thread at all.
I'm glad they've delayed. I saw it in action at Flash Gaming Summit last month and the performance was not impressive, better for them to get it right then to get it wrong right now.

Also what a dumb article. I don't have high expectations from the ad-farming apple rumor blogs but this is pretty lame even for them. The only people missing out because of Apple's decisions are Apple's customers.
Before anyone complains about roc's multi-column layout, let me preemptively link to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
It sounds like the author is reacting to the flood of ooh-shiny iPhone app kiddies that have captured a lot of media attention lately, but I don't think these are the people who would have been attracted to Linux anyway. And I don't think it's fair to lump all this together into an amorphous concept of "Linux" when the problem is a bit more nuanced.

Linux, as a kernel and as a platform, has matured, but there's still plenty of opportunity for new people to explore new territory. Some of it may be extending the existing "boring" infrastructure, which the author seems to blame for turning developers away, but nobody should feel restricted to working on those things. There's still a lot of exciting application development to be done, and as an added bonus, if the platform needs improvements to support your application, you're encouraged to contribute those as well.

Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly makes me feel old already: http://www.archlinux.org/developers/
How Businesses Are Utilizing Foursquare to Drive Sales
The satisfaction, or lack of, one gets from a 9-5 or any form of work is related more to the attitude one applies to the work than from the particulars of the work itself. At least that seems to be the conclusion drawn from the research done on "flow" states by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It seems to correlate well with my own experience and seems to be a recurring theme in shows such as Dirty Jobs and Undercover Boss.
Ruby Best Practices - Full Book Now Available For Free
Dr. Seuss meets the iPad
No idea. Perhaps they should, now that all the devices they make are so shiny :)
The "$2.3m" thing is a fabrication — Dodd's bill leaves it up to the SEC to adjust the old figure for inflation as they see fit. The original $1m figure was set by the SEC, not legislation.

This whole 'issue' is like DEATH PANELS for startups, and this community is taking the bait enthusiastically.
The User's Manifesto: In Defense of Hacking, Modding and Jailbreaking
Practical Ruby Training Exercises
IMHO -> ideas != product. if she could find a way to shape her ideas into actual product plans then maybe it would be easier for other people to realize their potential. more often than not, ideas are only as good as how you're able to convey them to others.
The hyperinflation of coastal real estate and the super-concentration of talent in these places is getting absurd and insane.
Ars reviews Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended
Somewhat OT, but I got weirded out by the story for a moment. It turns out that Scott McNeely != Scott McNealy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy -- who almost certainly does not have any money woes whatsoever)
This is a how a once-venerable tech city loses its significance. Suffocated by incompetent governments and an unwillingness to build, talent is forced to move elsewhere and ultimately shifts the center of gravity toward their chosen destinations.

I for one look forward to Portland, Austin and the rest picking up where San Francisco left off.
ASUS Eee Keyboard Promo Video Launched
It's Official: Groupon Announces That $1.35 Billion Valuation Round
Actually the region seems more prosperous than ever.

I've never heard of an example of a city that died from high real estate prices. Do you know of any?

Empirically, what seems to kill cities is crime, or the death of some industry they depend on.
Microsoft was able to make sure that they were the only OS mainly because of hardware makers' tendency to accept the solution that everyone else was going with. If your main competitor offers a Windows stack, why risk going with something else? I do agree with you to the extent that it all started with their landmark IBM deal. In today's landscape, why would HTC or Motorola or some other hardware maker risk developing their own stack and maintaining it when everyone else seems to be offering Android? I think its more about minimising risk than innovation. Who wants another OS/2 on their hands?
Unlike an iPhone, the iPad is not designed to be carried in a pants pocket.
Surely this won't be confused with Twitter's xAuth system, oh wait... - http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/...
How to start an EC2 Ubuntu Server for your developer in 6 minutes
It strikes me that the problem PC hardware vendors have is their own short sightedness in supporting only one supplier of chips, operating systems etc. It took a long while for their margins to shrink.

Maybe the smarter play is to produce high quality, good value Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile phones that address the market.
Ask HN:Harvard Business Review Case studies worth reading
I just subscribed to HBR and in generaly, looking through the treasure trove of case studies and articles on HBR (recent discovery for me :( ).

Are there any case studies/compilations that you folks would particularly recommend? Startup/product related would be nice but just anything interesting/insightful would be good
Another advantage with the locations of Seattle and Portland in particular is that they're in the same time zone as Silicon Valley.
It is certainly possible that the center of gravity may eventually shift to Portland and Seattle. However, I'm not sure what you mean by "unwillingness to build": Twitter, the main company in the story, is located in a repurposed warehouse/industrial district where you can't walk a block without passing residences and offices built or renovated within the last ten years.
The hole near the headphone jack could be a secondary noise cancelation input like the N1 has although in that particular picture it almost looks like a notification light. A few people have commented on the lack of a SIM tray -- could be a CDMA model.
Time Traveler Caught in Museum Photo?
Can anyone explain the theory behind why this works?
I've wanted to get involved sometimes, but I always hear only the best developers get actual commits, and I know I am not an amazing programmer so I haven't bothered :(
that urls don't have the exact thing that I want, but are very near of the kind of content that I'm looking for.. thank you so much!
He's comparing KDE and Gnome core components (window management) and the linux kernel with developing iPhone apps. That's a bad comparaison in my opinion. Hacking on an operating system kernel or a window manager requires great skills that most kids (and adult devs) do not have.

A fair comparison would be iPhone apps Vs KDE or Gnome apps. And here KDE and Gnome get tons of new contributers each months, check how active is http://kde-apps.org for example, or the Ubuntu developer activities. Tasks that require less skills will always attract more developers or cooks or whatever in all professions.

Here's a Graph of KDE contributers http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributor... up to July 2009. As a KDE dev that follows the mailing list, I can tell you the list of contributers is still groing well. Not to mention all the people that build KDE apps without being official KDE devs.
Isn't it a bit pessimistic to call it a landing "attempt"?
The hyperinflation of coastal real estate and the super-concentration of talent in these places is getting absurd and insane.

The latter leads to the former.
"I know everyone isn't suited for entrepreneurial life..."

Is that because they started out that way, or because society tells them they should get 9-to-5 jobs and be happy about it?
I think it has more to do with relative demand than SF having too much regulation, although other cities might have better regulation. One of the cities mentioned here, Portland, is actually one of the most strongly central-planned cities in the U.S.: http://www.oregonmetro.gov/index.cfm/go/by.web/id=277
Reminds me of Yogi Berra's famous quote: "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
> Empirically, what seems to kill cities is crime, or the death of some industry they depend on.

That second cause is interesting. What if, instead of dying, the industry were to just leave? San Francisco's benefits are built on network effects, and if the network shifts away, why remain?
Banned Books ? U kn0w we g0t iT
I wonder if that will convince my wife. Probably not.

Her stats superstitions drive me crazy. Ever heard of the Chinese birth calendar? For example: http://www.webwomb.com/chinesechart.htm.

90%+ accuracy should be an easy claim to bust. Unfortunately for me it's been right for our kids 2 out of 2 times. Why are stats always so hard to sell over anecdotal experience?
The Northwest needs jobs, not parasites further inflating its real estate market. How about you move some companies up there too?
Who indeed? OS/2 is a prime example of what can happen to a hardware company that puts its destiny in the hands of another. IBM got screwed by Microsoft when they pulled out of OS/2. If IBM had their own OS independent of Microsoft, they wouldn't necessarily have had the same problem. Also, the HUGE difference between now and then is that today we have the internet. Incompatibility was a huge problem back then because if you had two people with different OS's, you couldn't share anything, let alone run the same programs. With the web as an intermediary, we have a much better way to share information than we did back then.

Ex: Even if the same app doesn't run on two different OS's, they can both still talk to twitter. Back in the day, if you both didn't have a copy of Word, (and floppy drives) you couldn't share data.

Also, re: why would anyone want to do this, my answer to that is that if they have something different from everyone else who is competing on who can sell the cheapest Android phone, they would have something to sell.
Coming from New York, I can tell you that San Francisco's expensive real estate has almost nothing to do with it being "too crowded."
Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and
get paid just enough money not to quit.

--George Carlin
Do not EVER underestimate the power of beer and MTV again.
I wouldn't want to be the guy holding onto this internet-connected GPS device with a backdoor just for Apple. Lock your door, man.
On the other hand, there were a ton of IBM PCs (and clones) at the time the original Mac was introduced. The Mac never had a chance of catching up in sheer market share numbers.

With the iPhone (and iPad), the story is the opposite: there wasn't any mainstream (i.e. "household name") smartphone on the market at the time the iPhone was introduced. The App Store has a wide early lead in terms of number of apps. Likewise, there hasn't been a mainstream tablet like the iPad seems set to be.

"Where developers went, consumers soon followed."

Is this really the case? I see this sort of thing being said very often these days, but I'm not convinced it's accurate. (Always be suspicious of a group telling itself how important and influential it is!)

Windows took over because PCs running DOS were already vastly dominant. Hardware manufacturers and users of course wanted GUIs and Microsoft made sure Windows was cheaply available as part of the (restrictive and exclusive) licenses the hardware companies already had for MS-DOS — I remember hearing that IBM's hardware division could get MS-DOS/Windows cheaper than they could get IBM OS/2 from their own software division! And Windows had much more mainstream resource requirements compared to OS/2, its only real competitor on the PC desktop. So every PC very quickly started to ship with Windows. The Mac was already confined to a niche, Windows just narrowed it further. Users ended up in a situation where they would have had to have gone far out of their way to get a PC that didn't have Windows, so of course there quickly was demand for Windows apps.

Also, while the PC was widely used at home, it also had the advantage of being even more widely used in business. So people decided to buy a PC at home because they were compatible (disk and document formats, not to mention being able to bring home software from work) and were already familiar with the PC. The same sort of compatibility lock-in doesn't exist in today's mobile space (if anything, there are a ton of apps on iPhone OS that people want and can't get anywhere else); and I don't see many people buying Blackberrys because they're already familiar with them from work. (More like they buy iPhones because they're already familiar with their iPod ... and iPads because they're already familiar with their iPhone.)
A Carlin quote is just cheating. D:
Didn't stop at least the front half of almost every iPod ever, or the hard ridged edges on the sides of the Magic Mouse, etc. I would personally probably prefer the next iPhone to continue the trend of rounded-off edges, too. I just wouldn't put it past Apple to not do that.
Thanks for your feedback; this is very helpful.
I'll work on improving the issues you brought up.
Winscape: the future of your view
Introducing xAuth. A FB Connect for the rest of us.
Thanks; I think you bring up some good points.
I'll keep this in mind as I move ahead.
GnuPlot 4.4 Canvas Export
Thanks; that is a great idea.
CouchPad
Copying a hotel keycard onto an NYC MetroCard
Thanks for your feedback. You've got some great work in your portfolio; I may email you soon.
Except that we remember his name, whereas the average American remains nameless.
And I need a hot girlfriend, but that doesn't mean I will magically get one.

I, like the Northwest, needs to get my shit together and start behaving in such a fashion that I can attract what I want.
An example of a saner way?
TEDxVolcano Put Together in 48 Hours, London
Renovations may well be occurring, but residential housing is scarce, and housing density is low at least in part on account of zoning limitations on building height. San Francisco is unwilling to build up.

The high housing costs are a sign that the region's significance has outgrown its supply of housing stock, which will naturally send folks looking elsewhere.
Most of the type of people that would use/trust a service like Airbnb probably either have a smartphone/iphone or at least a laptop that you could use with free wifi.
Thanks for your feedback.
I was worried about this.
I think I may try out some other ideas which may solve the complexity and other problems mentioned by others.
Or they could just be paranoid that whatever they create on Amazon's infrastructure could turn into SkyNet...
These percentages seem far too low to me. Or, at the least, they only apply to very late-stage companies. If your startup has <10 employees, 0.05% isn't enough for even the lowest-level employee.
I think the other poster was suggesting that students will perceive abstract symbolic manipulation as useless unless they're taught why it isn't useless, probably via application problems. Considering that the majority of students will never have a genuine interest in math for its own sake, I think that textbooks and curricula designed for public education should include high doses of application problems, with enough theoretical problems to interest the true mathematicians and verify the students' understanding of the abstract concepts.
Missing out of what??
There are thousands of great apps written for iPhone & Android without Flash.
Unless you have funding, I say none. Equity reduces flexibility for small bootstrapped businesses. This feels to me like a cultural norm from the VC days rather than a rational way to grow a good business.

Also, most people really don't care. They will treat your equity as worthless unless it aleady has value, in which case just pay cash.
Well if it would make you feel better, you have sucky coworkers :)

It should be obvious that most people don't derive pleasure from the place they live. Better use the money for something else.
Removals France
Professional removal company offering reliable moving and storage in London, UK , France, Europe
Ask HN: Help finding Blog Post
I apologize for the self-serving post but I've tried everywhere to relocate this with no luck.

There was a story here a few weeks ago about a YC startup that might have recently gotten acquired. The story was about how they went to Boston for a trade show and didn't receive their T-Shirts in time, had to get it delivered to an investor's residence and picked it up from there. The T-Shirt had some clever slogan on it.

Could you provide any info on it or bump me up so that the right persons on HN can provide info please?

Thanks much fellas.
He was also one of the original war mongers.

Considering that, I would prefer the average American.
I don't checkout Linux source because I don't have the skills to ...ooo look at that shiny app.
Thanks. I just got it installed, looks good.
I'm currently reading "UML - A beginner's guide" from Jason T. Roff.. the goal of that book is to learn for software design, analysis, and development.
UML = unified modeling language
First off, this is way too hilarious even several hours after the fact. :)

Perhaps one thing needs to be said about the whole high-coercivity thing on transit passes. I kind of figured that the MetroCard (and likewise with, at least, the CTA Transit Pass and the St. Louis MetroLink weekly/monthly passes) used such a strip because of the generally carefree nature that people take with their magstripe tickets for public transit. I can't recall the last time I've handled anything like that with care, but at the same time, it pretty much just works no matter how badly I manage to treat it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is something like "lawl hax." Now, the trick is to do stupid stuff with the data on the card. ;)
Very cool. Are there AMIs that include ubuntu + web framework stacks? (say, rails+nginx+passenger)
LinkPopularityMatters.com – Service Review
A link building firm strategically builds links for your site to attain a significant position in the competitive rankings of search engine listings.
Sure. No offense intended at all. It just struck me as very low contrast and stripped down. And I actually like stripped down sites (craigslist, ycomb, reddit) but your site sort of took it to a whole new level.
$ ~/dev/wasitup cloc .
85 text files.
84 unique files.
20 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.08 T=0.5 s (130.0 files/s, 12730.0 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code scale 3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python 47 688 214 3658 x 4.20 = 15363.60
HTML 14 283 20 831 x 1.90 = 1578.90
CSS 1 66 8 282 x 1.00 = 282.00
Javascript 1 30 2 155 x 1.48 = 229.40
Lua 1 15 11 67 x 4.00 = 268.00
Bourne Shell 1 7 0 28 x 3.81 = 106.68
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 65 1089 255 5021 x 3.55 = 17828.58
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This reminds me of a relevant dual attitude, namely that in the sciences (or at least computer science, physics, math, etc) it is considered to be a good idea to pursue graduate studies at a school different from ones undergraduate program. (Presumably that prevents the phenomena described in the article from persisting beyond undergrad)