skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think at least this part is a valid and solid reason for Apple's new developers agreement.

"So, if you will indulge my claim that backwards compatibility is hard (even absent the private API issue) it is pretty easy to see why supporting other runtimes is ceding a lot of control to a 3rd party. Imagine if 10% of the apps on iPhone came from Flash. If that was the case, then ensuring Flash didn’t break release to release would be a big deal, much bigger than any other compatibility issues. Since Apple doesn’t have access to Flash CS5’s runtime library code or compiler frontend, they might be put in a position where they would need to coordinate with Adobe to resolve those issues. Shipping a new release where Apple breaks any specific application, even a top seller, is not an issue if the release is compelling, most apps work, and Apple has the option of working with the vendor to help them fix their app. Shipping a release where they break a large percentage of apps is not generally an option. Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working."
found some concrete info from Scott Guthrie's twitter feed (he's the VP of the MS Developer Division).

-------------------------------

MSDN Subscribers & WebsiteSpark/BizSpark members can download VS 2010 Monday morning.

The final release of VS 2010 & .NET 4 will be available ~10am PST.

Free VS 2010 Express Editions + VS 2010 Trial editions will also be available for download.

-------------------------------

http://twitter.com/scottgu
Google Developing Tablet to Take on iPad
I'm surprised to read such an absurdly simplistic idea from such a celebrated "smart man". Note how he glosses over, entirely, any possible unintended (yet certainly foreseeable) impacts on the economy, infrastructure, culture, and societal stability -- somehow a slowly recovering (and still weak) economy will make any concerns moot.

And, what kind of immigrants? Any? Really cheap labor forces that will drive down wages? Mediocre talent? Maybe just anybody? If he wants to make a proposal like this, he should elaborate a bit. It reads like a late night "brain fart".

Overall, it sounds like he's all for anything to make _his_ generations' retirement easy...too bad for the generations to follow.
Tweemp - Awesome Twitter Search Engine
This is exactly the problem the CIA had under Clinton. Forced to rely on electronic intelligence as it's "the future" and not human intelligence, years of accumulated experience, they were taken completely by surprise by the Taliban and Al Queda, who it turns out weren't using the latest Soviet tech, they were simply riding their motorbikes into the desert and chatting face to face.
My first comment is "I get it" which is great. Simple and not overly engineered. Seems like a great method for tutorials and how tos created from content experts.

I think the problem will be to engage people in creating the routes. What incentives are there to create routes? I see you get a "stamp" but is that enough? It isn't for me.

Also, is being dependent on Facebook for create routes going to hurt you? I get it that it will help this spread virally (almost required these days) but I would be interested in seeing if this prevents people from creating routes, especially since Facebook is blocked in some businesses and schools.
Part of what Christensen (any relation, pchristensen?) talks about in The Innovator's Dilemma, which covers disruptive technologies ( http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dil... ) is that more often than not, incremental improvements are dominated by existing companies, because they're operating in a space they're comfortable, and good, in. This makes it difficult for new companies to compete.

Now, there's a lot to be discussed there, and a huge need for actual statistics, but I think the idea isn't without merit.
There are a lot of motivations behind the anti-drug movement, many of which are ignoble, but I think genuine concern is one of them. Most people don't want their children using them, and the drugs are dangerous, at least when used recklessly as they often are. Also, most people don't make the distinction between "hedonistic" drug use, such as using cocaine, and exploratory/psychedelic drug use, which is a different lifestyle altogether.

Most people who have a problem with LSD aren't worried about the "free thinking", because they don't associate these drugs with expanded consciousness. They're afraid that their kid will have a bad trip and develop long-lasting psychological problems (which is unlikely but not impossible).

People who are aware of the power and potential benefits of psychedelics are generally against criminalization, which decreases drug use but increases drug-related harm substantially.
I guess I'm curious what the line is between disruptive and incremental, assuming of course they are only separated by a line.
That's probably a reference to their new Code Contracts feature:

Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/dd491992.aspx
It looked for a moment like they were actually selling a book of these stickers. A second glance showed me that I was wrong. Anyway, I imagine a book of stickers like this would be a make a neat gift for a FOSS fan even if he didn't actually put any of them on his computer.
.NET is for sure a right tool and a good one on that and Django has its own merits but here I am more interested in popular technology trends.
Will it work on Google App Engine?
And combine that with the fact that Apple is just now shipping a release that depend entirely on application/platform support for its most important feature (multitasking), and the fact that the TOS change is tied to exactly that release.
Fuji cameras | canon camera lenses
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integrated tools to support full software development life-cycle: things like version control, test runners, parameterizable builds, etc.

plus the option for commercial support.
"Disruptive" is popular because it implies the product or service can generate value on a large scale without playing catchup to existing market leaders.

If you're going to make an incrementally improvement, you have to first catch up to the pack, and in an established industry, this can be (or at least seem) cost-prohibitive and risky. "Disruptive" startups, in theory, do an end-run around the barriers to entry.

The article suggests that we replace disruptiveness with usefulness as a criteria for evaluating startups. I think we need both; disruptiveness ensures the startup has a fighting chance against the incumbents, and usefulness ensures the startup has a market.

Incidentally, several of the author's supporting arguments can be applied to the term "useful" as well. "Most technology we now consider 'useful' wasn't conceived that way", "the creators of useful technology often don't make the money".
Prisoner's Dilemma Mastered by Rats
I can't speak for Assembly 2007, but generally the rule is that if it's installed by default on whatever OS the compo machine is running, it's fair game. Some compos have restrictions on using .NET (and Java, but it's not installed by default in most cases), but they're the minority.
I agree with this as well... I'm sure Apple wants more apps for the Mac, and if someone were to create a 3D modeling tool targeted for iPhone apps that could produce cross platform Android apps, they'd welcome it into their Mac family.
Apple Doesn't Owe You Anything.
10AM Pacific
If you're a new entrant in a field, you don't usually have a choice.

I think of some non-disruptive spaces, such as job shops that make web sites for other businesses, that are boring businesses... boring businesses because they never get big, and because a number of factors work towards their inevitable senescence. There's a low barrier to entry, margins are low, and there's no possibility of making a killing.

Now, it would be wonderful to have an incumbent business that dominates a space and commands ludicrously high margins: like, say, Salesforce.com. The trouble is that you've got to ~have~ that business. Unless you've got some way to claw your way up, that's about as practical as chosing to have rich parents.

Salesforce.com got that business by being disruptive, by being disruptive to traditional CRM software. At $250 /month*set, Salesforce.com is 'affordable' as a CRM product, since that's a fraction of what you pay the salesperson. As a cloud computing platform, however, Salesforce.com is absurdly expensive and highly limited.

If Facebook couldn't provision similar (but less reliable) services for 1/1000 the price, there wouldn't be any Facebook. Pretty obviously there's a market for a platform that's maybe a factor of 10 or so cheaper than Salesforce.com that's still pretty reliable.

Somebody who wants to get into the cloud space isn't going to get the high margins Salesforce.com gets... They've got no choice but to be disruptive.
Well, from the past few months of use:

* C# (and possibly others) compile faster
* Startup slower than VS 9 (marginal)
* Human perf is higher due to better auto-complete etc

Bottomline, if you're happy with VS 9 on your machine (you don't find it too slow), VS 10 is going to be similar.
And how is this better than twitter's search?

http://search.twitter.com/
I don't think anyone was claiming that being moral about the NDA does "weigh up" against working there in the first place. If he were trying to paint a glowing picture of his own morals, he wouldn't have written the article in the first place.

(Since he appears to have been there for something like 6 months before getting fired, I'll hazard a guess that his severance pay wasn't all that spectacular.)
It doesn't contridict that Deacon didn't have a say in the creative direction: having written one song that was popular is not the same as having influence on much of the band's output. I don't know enough about Queen's history to say that Deacon did or did not have creative influence, but citing one song isn't support.
>//does exactly what you think

Bring the database to a grinding halt when it tries to service 1000s of request for different rows in the same table at the same time in parallel rather than just access each line in order and sum them?
It can't as long as I know. :(
Looks buggy, tried several words, the last was "studio" - getting 'Page not found'
Comparing the writing there against the versions published in The Tech is a good case for the importance of editing.
Have you seen the app store lately? Check out this link:

http://appshopper.com/music/a003-guitartube

Scroll down to see the other apps created by this developer. They're all cookie-cutter apps, each one for a slightly different genre of user. He has a Picasso video lounge -- for all those users who want to join the Picasso social networking video channel. I think the number of apps is pretty meaningless when you have dozens of crappy apps like this.
No Break: A web design anecdote
Perhaps, the truly disruptive companies don't even start out necessarily knowing they are going to be disruptive but instead just grow into it. By the author's observation of the word change from "paradigm shift" to "disruptive," this makes sense, for the great scientists (technologies and other ideas included) didn't necessarily know they were "disrupting" when they discovered (or invent) something.
It was by Barbara Kingsolver, a great author and biologist in her own right.
Typically you'll get a selection object, get the range object, and .execCommand("Copy") on it. Unfortunately it only really works in IE (afaik); it used to work in FF if you got the Allow Clipboard Access plugin, but even that's been disabled.

It could potentially be a huge security risk, which is why it's had to be sandboxed into plugins like flash.
How American girls (Girl Guides) learned to make a mint.
Google developing <X> to take on <Y>:

example:

X = 'buzz', Y = 'twitter'
The Novel
It makes it difficult for new companies to dominate.

The case studies in the innovators dilemma (eg for the disk drive market) show many niche players trailing the leaders.

I think the blogger is making the 37signals point that you can have a satisfying, profitable and useful company without dominating. Of course it's thrilling to dominate; just very hard.
I like the idea of guided tours through the web.
Tried searching for something with a bunch of oldish results in search.twitter.com and got "no results"
Apparently, http://flask.pocoo.org/deploying.html#cgi
Really? I am not aware of a way to do this (other than just making the line longer relative to the font size, which statistically makes the breaks more even)
tl;dr have a to-do list and always carry a pen or pencil.

(Pen seems better since there's less chance of putting holes in clothing or stabbing oneself.)

Not that I would recommend it. If I'm truly into my work then I'll have sufficient integrity and memory to operate intuitively, from a rapidly evolving mental to-do list.

If I want to achieve, better would be to have a to-don't list. It might include things like don't drink too much, eat too much, consume too much entertainment, porn, etc. This is what focus means: to gently exclude stuff.

That way vitality and creativity will flow into my work. Any other approach is implicitly enacting the theory that work/learning is painful. Which is false. Nobody is taking my cookies away; I'm switching to a different flavour. (They say a Zen master can see and feel the beauty in everything. That must include creative work.)

It seems to me that alcoholics, the obese, etc, have a certain thing in common with brilliant, creative achievers -- they know that the fun has to be here and now. We say to addicts who promise to quit soon that "tomorrow never comes". Why don't we say it to people who show us lists of goals? In reality the concepts of procrastination, time management, memory management, rewards, rule-based living, etc, aren't very helpful.
Palm makes eyes at possible purchasers
Yes, but they are well made and in colors that coordinate with the computer.

Stickers are in whatever eye popping nightmare color scheme the marketing people dreamt up for web/print ads, are generally unintelligible without a magnifier, are cheaply produced and show it, and are glued down with some substance whose residue yields to none of:

water
isopropyl alcohol
methanol
acetone
methyl ethyl ketone
toluene
mineral spirits
ethyl benzene
xylene
acetic acid
diethylene glycol monomethyl ether
nonylphenol polyethoxylate
ethylbenzene

It took me 15 minutes to remove the stickers from the last Gateway I bought. I finally resorted to mechanical means, and still left a ghostly outline of one of sticker. In retrospect I should have checked that the machine worked first before I bothered to desticker it.
plenty of Flash developers will continue to be employed, and plenty of Flash advertising will be directed at those ready to ignore it

Nice :-)
Quick-MI. Quick Heuristics for Modular Innovation.
How do psychedelics get people thinking for themselves? I've been in and around that culture, and I still wanted to go work at some crappy job so I could be a consumer.

I've found that a having clear mind is a much more conducive to uncovering the matrix than being high is.
I could be wrong, and I stopped using recreational drugs altogether after developing panic disorder in 2008-- I don't know if there's a connection between my past drug use and the disorder, but I thought the first attacks were bad salvia "flashbacks" or possibly God punishing me for being reckless-- but I think that everything beneficial that can be achieved with psychoactive drugs can be achieved, in time, with meditation. The difference is that meditation takes time and discipline before you start having experiences, while drugs provide experiences right away, but aren't always safe.

I've often made this analogy. Meditation is like riding your bike into the woods. When you start out, you're not in shape so you don't get very far, but you don't end up farther in than you can handle. Psychedelics are like hitchhiking: you get a lot farther, don't always know where the fuck you are, and can usually get back safely (but not always).
And of course a 60year old might question something they found on facebook/google - whereas a 6year old will be quite happy to believe it, if it's what their bosses want to hear.
With some distinction, 750words is more as a de-stressor.
I also don't owe Apple anything. For instance, respect and understanding.
Windows 95 on iPad completes the Bill Gates vision
How to tell a compelling story?
"Microsoft has had a Mac development team since the very first Macintosh. They write native software that is not a port of the Windows versions."

Minor nit: these two statements are true separately, but misleading together. Many of MS's early Mac programs were written to a bytecoded abstraction layer. The results were distinctly non-Mac-like, which is why MS eventually switched to fully native apps.

IIRC, this was true from the very beginning, while Jobs was still in charge the first time. Here's an anecdote from Andy Hertzfeld that mentions the abstraction layer in passing:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
Shashi Tharoor Partners IPL Team Behind Sunanda Pushkar?
I'd be disappointed if they weren't. Unfortunately, it seems like this will be based on Android as opposed to ChromeOS. After playing with ChromeOS on a Dell Mini for a while, I can say that it is just screaming for a tablet to put it on. Choosing Android is probably the smart thing in order to get apps on it, but I'd love a Chrome tablet.
Another Nexus?
Isn't web.py already Python's Sinatra?

examples here: http://webpy.org/ http://sinatrarb.com/

(I really want to know - it seems very similar to Sinatra to me. What are the differences?).
You don't need to hit quirks mode for cross-browser CSS. Stick to standards mode wherever possible.
A Sysadmin's Unixersal Translator (ROSETTA STONE) OR What do they call that in this world? http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

Quite helpful if you find yourself having to deal with some ancient box from the age of the Unix Wars.
That assumes that the product or service that you are providing needs to duplicate the efforts of established players in order to be useful. What if, instead, your product or service worked as an add-on to existing products? Like, for example, all those Twitter apps. They don't replace or compete with Twitter (currently) but they do provide additional functionality.

What if your product is genuinely new, but doesn't fundamentally change the way people live or do business?
Profile of Wikileaks founder
Great article.

keeping this advice in mind can help alleviate entrepreneur paralysis; instead of wasting time trying to discover the next big thing, just pick an industry which you have some interest in and improve existing tools in some way (through automation, usability improvements, pricing etc.)
Can you expand on your Titanium Android comment? I am about to embark on building an android app, and was leaning toward using Titanium, so would appreciate hearing about any roadblocks I might encounter.
> I talk to a lot of them through my job, and almost all of them would prefer to return to their country if it were safe to do so.

That's a bit like "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
John Deacon did write songs, so he was not completely out of the loop. But just look at their discography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_discography

John Deacon had a very small part in their total creative output, and so, his contributions to their creative development wasn't comparable to that of the other members.
80% of the market? Where does that come from? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone RIM's blackberry still has more market share than Apple.
I don't usually try to make pointless posts, but this is a BEAUTIFUL application, and there is almost no aspect of it that I do not love, even if I will likely never use it.
Make it easy to buy your stuff. Stop with the why's and get to the how's.
Thats true-you don't have to respect or understand their point of view. If you don't respect or want to understand their reasons for the decisions they're making, perhaps you shouldn't be developing apps for the platform. And if you're not developing apps for the platform then you have no grounds on which to bitch and moan.
"This story is written with a wonderful naivete."

Exactly. Another case of idealism colliding with reality. It's refreshing and makes me sigh at the same time.
Ask HN: Does anyone here watch offline TV anymore?
I haven't bothered to subscribe to cable the last few years. It's overpriced and irrelevant for me these days and made me wonder if anyone else has done the same?
This guy is truly a keyboard-o-phile. Well done.
Ask HN: Is there a new stage in online forum evolution?
Reddit is discussing the prospect of buying a private island and turning it into a research/vacation spot. (http://www.reddit.com/r/redditisland/)

This makes me ponder if this is another natural evolution for an online forum, another epoch after the community saturation from other broken communities?
Will one be able to get paid-for apps that aren't ad-supported, mewonders.
A slightly better implementation would have been to have a JavaScript click event on every colour and then use a JavaScript to Flash function to do the copy to clipboard. Then only one Flash file would have had to be loaded.
I just use ColorCop and drag the slider up and down to change luminosity.

That "ribbon" design is becoming popular...
http://0to255.com/
http://blog.metalabdesign.com/
http://www.movenetworks.com/
I've been playing with Palm's WebOS. I think they've made some good trade offs in their development stack. I see no reason Palm or someone that acquires them couldn't upsize the Pre into a tablet.
> And in any case, not being "uniformly positive" doesn't require being uniformly negative. They may consider the U.S., overall, a better place to live, while on the whole still giving it very mixed scores.

I never suggested otherwise. In fact, I actually wrote the equivalent. "Almost all the time, it turns out that whatever it is that they're complaining about is less important to them than something that they get where they currently are. Often they're embarrassed by what that says about their priorities."

> But a decent number of immigrants to the U.S. do leave again later. There's a particularly large number of Chinese immigrants who've returned to China in the past 10 years.

In other words, they see the US as making it possible for them to get ahead enough so that they can live in China the way that they'd like.

I've no doubt that being rich in China is more appealing to many than upper middle class in the US.
A 200kg fat man can drive a bus just fine ;)

On Emacs ... you still have to pay attention to the loaded extensions, and if you've got dozens of them (especially the Jdee extension, with all the dependencies) it can be as bloated as a full IDE (and it shows in startup times).
This sites switches to a mobile version when I browse there on my iPad. Maybe they haven't noticed the iPad release?
I took a loock at the code but I'm not sure i understand one thing: why one class per file for case classes, scala is much cooler than that :)
I don't think the app is meant to be a whole color scheme design tool, so much as a helper that solves the specific question: "What is one shade lighter of this color?". "How about two shades".