skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nicholas Carr is excellent at being reductive -- that is, intentionally leaving out important facts in order to make a successful argument. He's pretty good at red herrings, too.

For instance: he wrote a whole book about why the day when you get an automatic advantage against your competitors because you're using technology is over. (And that, he strongly implies, is the whole point of technology: to get an advantage over competitors.) Red herring. That's not why businesses use technology; they use it so that they can do stuff they could never do before. No one orders MS Office because they think they're doing something their every competitor hasn't done.

He was being reductive when he wrote a book about why IT services will quickly become a commodity the way electrical service did. (The analogy does not fit; few people need "custom" electricity, but most business have special needs and will need something beyond standard installs of software.)

I'm willing to bet that he's using one or both of these tactics here, in order to get hackles up and sell books. I find it hard to take him seriously.

It turned out that a whole lot of people were just then realizing that, like Carr, they had lost their ability to fully concentrate on long, thoughtful written works. "I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do," Carr wrote.

Really? I'm probably better at reading long-form prose now than I've ever been. It's like saying if you spend some time as a sprinter that you will completely lose the ability to run long distances.
From the article,

Re: real benchmarks

If you are interested in a more direct comparison of performance between various multimedia technologies, then check out the tests done at themaninblue.com [http://themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/]. This is one specific test but it shows that if anything, Flash performance is on par (if not better in some cases) with comparable technologies.

and

Re: what does this have to do with Flash?

So, when looking at Flash CPU usage compared to other multimedia technologies, then no, Flash does not use an inordinate amount of CPU. While Flash content can at times use high amounts of CPU, this is a result of the nature of the content, and not necessarily specific to the Flash runtime.

Edited with some original content: I think he has a good point that there's a lot of blind anti-Flash rage without actually thinking about what Flash competes with. Yes it's better to design websites so they don't tax your processor, but we're probably going to see the same issues people peg Flash with when sites use open alternatives for multimedia.
I don't think this needs to be anymore of a problem than working in an office building which has rooms and companies that are nothing to do with your work.

You don't continually go into the janitor's store room every time you need the toilet, just in case it might be there. You don't go to the toilet everyday cursing the existence of the nearby janitor's store room for making things complicated for you.

You maybe go in there once, then realise it's not relevant, and put it out of your mind. You never even venture to the mail sorting office on the third floor or the canteen kitchens or the legal department if you have no reason to.
heh, thanks for the heads up! A habit from other threaded boards, even though the syntax is twitter. Some folks still manage to get confused about who is speaking to whom- but point taken, this isn't slashdot. :)
why all the hate?
I think the thing that feels most uncomfortable is that the first sentence is basically an outright lie. It's clearly, as you say, the standard "you're cool, so are we, let's play" line. The issue, I guess, is that they've tried to masquerade that as something else.
"I am not sure if disqus has a way to import older comments. I would guess not."

This was a long-standing request (http://disqus.disqus.com/how_do_i_import_comments) but it seems there is a solution for the past year (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/give-your-wordpress-comments-a-...) Tell us if you try it out.
My 2c on that topic: http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/05/10/c-40s-dynamicity/
But some people will admit to loving crap. Lots of crap, the more, and the more crappy, the better. Some people will wax enthusiastic about the crap they love.
Fair enough (sort of), but if I were to start a business in a language that I'm not a native in, I wouldn't try supporting those people using non-native speakers. The languages and idioms of cultures differ greatly around the globe, and sometimes you may need to tweak your site to meet the expectations of your customers.

Then again, I don't run a business, so the costs of localizing customer support and "fit and finish" for Zendesk may be justified by the benefit.
What the 9900 AT&T Backflips you can buy for the price of 1 iPhone look like.
C# 4.0’s dynamicity
In reply to http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/archive/2010/04/12/get-ready-for-c-4-0.aspx
Fourteen Android Phones in the US since the iPhone 3GS
In a sense it did - the "open file" dialog in most modern programs is filtered to only show files the program can use - .doc or .bmp or whatever.

It's not precisely system wide tags or categories, but it's a closely related solution.
The placebo effect is remarkably powerful, so I know I'm not going to convince you. However let me say that I took my phone off the charger at 8:30am, and right now my battery is at around 95%.

I never manage processes or services. I use apps and leave them and allow Android to manage the lifecycle.
Sure, but how is this line crucial? Do you disagree with the analysis that 3.3.1 clearly bans his company's application?
Please elaborate. Even if I concede that my problems with multitasking are imaginary, I'd love to find out how I can enable built-in support for Exchange calendaring, copy from emails, and make the N1's screen readable in bright sunlight... Believe me, I'd love to find out there was just a preference I missed!

I understand how Android's multitasking is supposed to work, but in my experience it isn't up to snuff. From your tone, I imagine you'd ask me to put up with a sluggish phone rather than doing something to deal with it. Maybe it'll get better in 2.2.
Do I read it right that your bill is about $10k/year?

Given that their profit margin on a paying customer is not 100%, more like 15-20%, they would probably need 5x as much, or 10k paying customers, to cover the costs.
Jumping to conclusions about the quality of research when you have not seen said research is in my opinion a non-scientific approach incorporating personal bias.

A better statement you could make would be "I would like to see the methodology of this paper, as it's assumptions are very far from what I expect as a practitioner in the field". This statement shows us that your experience in the field leads you to a different personal conclusion, but you are not jumping to the conclusion that the research is false because of this experience.

And I just checked my universities news section and they don't provide links to the original research. Most of the time I assume the article is in press.
Warning: Content-free post.
I use tmux plus a full screen term(s) in stumpwm a lot but I can't use plain virtual terminals as I enjoy 256 colors with nice fonts.
Many websites have had serious security issues that make this follow bug look trivial in comparison, but they haven't felt any effect from it. For instance MySpace had a XSS vulnerability that added the XSS's creator to everyone's friend list. Facebook has its share of viruses that spread themselves by getting the user to click a link which then causes the virus to send itself to all their friends or write on their friend's walls. None of these problems have seriously effected the sites usage and it won't effect Twitter's either.
another reason to http://lookafteryourdata.com
The latter sentence is actually true. It is a well known fact. That is why long distance runners make sure never to practice sprinting and sprinters as well as athletes that have to run short distances only (such as American football players) never run long distances during practice.

Anyways sorry for going off on an OT tangent. The internet must be rotting my brain.
I almost always use a terminal window in the GUI. The programs I am writing aren't graphical though, so they would work just as well in a terminal. The thing is, I write in emacs, and then save it, switch to a terminal window, and run the program. I could easily switch to another terminal in terminal mode, but I have heard that you can run your programs from inside emacs (I think I heard that anyways). I'd rather learn how to do that.

Anyways, I'm going to try this tonight, and see if I can avoid the distractions that my GUI presents me with.
I currently live in NYC, so I mainly climb at the Gunks. However, I am moving to Boulder in a month after a road trip to Yosemite. I look forward to expanding my crag options.

Have you been to Seneca Rocks? I had my first trad experience there. The exposure was awesome.
Have you heard the CPU fan when watching a video using flash?
Twitter doesnt make much sense to me-exactly what is the gain there?
One company he didnt mention which I think would make sense is Amazon-I beleive Dropbox runs entirely on the AWS stack already, and the service drives decent consumer growth for S3.
The Lost Tribes of RadioShack: Tinkerers Search for New Spiritual Home
Indeed.. it is a sad state of affairs when GoboLinux ( http://www.gobolinux.org/ ), though innovative, call themselves the alternative Linux distribution. They are one of the few unique Linux distributions, and all they do is redefine the filesystem hierarchy.

There are an abundance of 'niche' distributions (focusing on size, audio support, etc) but none that really attempt new things. Actually, I'm sure there are some more but I haven't heard of them.. please inform me.

But of course, why are we complaining instead of thinking up possibilities of our own?
Silver Lining has some similarities: http://cloudsilverlining.org
The trick with the free apps are, that you only have one dyno. And after a certain amount of inactivity it will be shut down. Next time somebody tries to reach your app, it will automatically be started again. So, the majority of these free apps are practically no-cost for Heroku.
yeah, a bit more than that, I use it for GetAppsDone.com.

The basic bill would be much lower but I once you start adding addons the bills adds up quickly.
The point? To rag on C# for introducing dynamic when others already had it? He even poked at C# not being serious, as he put it, because the FRAMEWORK didn't have IPC. Um, okay?

Look, with some portion of dynamic being usefel everywhere and with the growing demand thereof, it was prudent to add these features. Heck, optionals and named were hotly contested features since 1.0 due to introducing mechanisms that were ultimately not important at the time. It introduces complexity, etc.

Maybe C# should give him a pony, too.

There were many other trumpeted features in C# as well as the framework as a whole.
> 41% of Entrepreneurs succeed on their first go;

That's awfully precise. Not 40%? Not 42%? What is the sample size? Where did you get the data?
Thank you. It occurred to me that it would be nice if the pre-generics artefacts were somehow erased from history. (They're essentially clutter in a space that's getting fuller and fuller, right?)
A Sobering analysis of the current Android market share
China drops Dropbox
> On the other hand, the technology that Dropbox has mastered is so important that there should be an open source equivalent that we can all deploy, so we can have Dropboxes for sensitive info we don't want to share with them.

FTP?

Yes, I understand that Dropbox is a lot more than just FTP, and I love it, but if you're asking for a non-Dropbox dropbox... then you should just put an ftp server on an old box and be done with it.
Dropbox has saved my arse multiple times.
I used to, because the second or so pause it takes to switch back to X was a nice deterrent from leaving my vim window all the time to check the internet. These days I've switched back to using a full-screen xterm (well, rxvt-unicode), mainly because configuring a terminal emulator is easier than configuring the actual terminal (e.g. changing number of lines/cols in a real terminal is a driver-dependent hassle).
I'd argue that phones are becoming a lot less like computers and more like cars. At least the iPhone as an example, phones are becoming more and more an information appliance, taken for granted to "just work."

They might be able to do a lot of the things that a "real" computer does but you don't have the power to treat them like regular computers. You can't easily put a new OS on them, write software for them without going through a central market place, etc. Apple obviously has this vision, but it's becoming clear that Microsoft shares it, at least for Windows Phone 7.
Why did these guesses get downmodded? Is it an HN customs thing or did none of these come close enough to the mark?
I like to believe that sex is an expression of romantic love and not just a commodity to be exchanged for social status.
My N1 arrives tomorrow so I have no first-hand experience, but I assume you can access gmail through IMAP on the phone like you can on any other mail client if you don't want to use the Gmail app?
Fabrik - A Visual Programming Environment From Apple (1988)
> Is it a behavior that, in my estimation, a rational person would be ashamed of? Yes.

please provide a rational derivation of this shame.
I seem to fairly regularly get my X server locked up or otherwise unusable. In those circumstances, having the real terminal mode is a life-saver.

Also, when I was using a laptop to take class notes and such, I often booted into text mode because I didn't need the graphics, and they took longer to start than I wanted to wait.
It's time for Google to kill the Nexus One
I don't mean to be hating on the people. I hate the culture of casual sex. The culture is disgusting. The people are mostly not disgusting, just misguided. I don't mean to imply that they're morally depraved people for participating in something stupid; I've certainly done my share of idiotic and embarrassing things and don't consider myself immoral for it.

Really, though, I don't care what people do, as long as it's not in my face and doesn't affect me. I'm five years out of college, so I don't really care that much. I think it's a shame what a farce college has become for most American students, but that problem comes from a lot of factors, most of which have nothing to do with sex.
In order to be qualified to make these sorts of comments, you either need to either (A) submit high quality links or (B) create something front-page worthy. Your last submission (out of a total of 3) was 59 days ago. And I don't see any links to projects in your profile. So pretty much all you're doing here is being negative; you're not taking any action to correct this quality "problem" that you perceive. DDG is an entire search engine coded by one dude in Perl. And it's pretty good too. I personally don't mind if it gets some time on the front page, even if just for the discussion.
How to get rid of DM spam on Twitter
The Hirsch conjecture has been disproved
No it's not. I'm not exactly sure why, but issues are dated a week ahead. Visit your local bookstore/magazine stand if you don't believe me.
All right, cool. You've convinced me to have a second look.
Nice, but it's using WebSockets so that means it only supports tracking clients with recent webkit based browsers (no IE, no Firefox, no Opera). Unless it uses some kind of emulation - I couldn't find anything about this in the docs.
I didn't see anything in that post that disproved that Flash is a CPU hog.

I work with Flash and AIR apps on a daily basis, and I can tell you that invariably by the end of the day my browser's Flash plugin is using the majority of my CPU time and RAM.
My point being? You gave yourself the answer.

If I may quote: ".. were hotly contested features since 1.0" This was around the year 2k IIRC. They honestly took ±10 years to include basic features while claiming to have a businessproof framework? Yeah, maybe - for ex-Java golems who still have WinXP developing _and_ server machines. As we all know, those would be.. the real business guys.

As to the "other trumpeted features" - I can't recall any on the beforehand mentioned release notes. Maybe the "improved COM" support. Have fun calling Excel for generating your CSV files.
Become a wage slave to software
No, the same thing happens in a mirror.
He reminds me of moot, the founder of 4chan, only he seems to be more technically adept. The key story is the same, though: "I created this side-project on a whim when I was young; now it's taking over the internet and I have no idea how to properly monetize or grow it. It's reached critical mass, but it has also grown beyond my ability to analyze and change its direction in meaningful ways. Also, it's full of dicks."
Toto might be a "WordPress Killer" for hackers, but that's just about it.

There are two reasons why WordPress is wildly successful...

(1) It's built in PHP so it can run on anything. Any webhost out there will run it, and 99% of them will have a "one-click-install" button for you.

(2) It has a pretty damn good admin interface and theme/plugin community. Anyone can install themes and plugins, either thru the interface or with some simple FTP knowledge.

All of this aside... I can't effing stand WordPress. I've been developing for it since it first branched off from the b2 blogging engine many moons ago. For a developer, building a complete site in WP generally consists of hacking plugins to work with one another, or writing your own modifications.

I built this site (http://arbesko.com) in WordPress because the client wanted it. Only about 10% of it is WP. I extended the URL rewriting system and wrote all of my own template code, most of the queries were written by hand. An experience WP dev might frown upon this because of "future incompatibility" but honestly, if you want to write good shit you're not gonna find it with WP's built in tools. The only thing left that isn't my own is pretty much the DB.

For a super simple blog, go with WP. For a "WP as a CMS site", don't fall for that bullshit. Write it in something else, anything else. Write it from scratch in Perl for all I care, just stay away from using WP for anything more than a blog and/or very simple site.

And again, these kinds of things (toto, jekyll, etc...) are fun for hackers, but they will never kill WP. If you want to kill WP you're going to need to attack it from the perspective of an "SEO Marketing social media expert from Tampa FL who has 2 kids and runs the Tampa Tweetup every weekend", and not that of a hacker. The most you can expect from someone is installing an FTP client and uploading it. These people don't play with terminals or git.
"If I were a Twitter board member I'd seriously consider merging with them."

can you explain this a little more?
Well, I think there has been a kind of "wait and see" attitude to see if 3.3.1 is really about the language it was written in or if it is just a means to ban flash.

We know PhoneGap is in which is designed for cross-platform, but only uses Javascript in Webviews. What about Titanium which creates an xcode project?

I for one am really curious for any official information on the application of 3.3.1 and that line seems to imply official information.
A WordPress killer has to be useful for the average joe, the soccer mom, the "social media expert". You're not going to take it down with git and gems. This works for a hacker, but that's it.
There's not a single good reason in this post why Dropbox shouldn't sell to anyone interested in paying, nor are there any reasons stated why Dropbox should open source.

Here's a good reason why Dropbox should never open source: Dropbox can never loose my files. Ever. If they do my trust in them is gone and I go elsewhere.

If Dropbox where to open source and then some dipshit provided a Dropbox based storage solution with a flakey backend, then Dropbox's brand trust is (almost) equally fucked.
Are YOU Looking for PHONE DOWNLOADS ?
Android overtakes iPhone in the US market
A product that has been actively developed for over 14 years had sure as hell better be able to say something more than "our performance is on par with" an emerging technology that is still being developed and isn't even standardized yet.
Unless you're building a site for a client, a user isn't going to install it locally. They're going to pick up some piece of crap commodity webhosting account on Godaddy or Dreamhost, and use the one-click-install.
Ah. Don't I feel foolish.
The reason that people are hammering at Flash so much is that there's one implementation of Flash and, for years, Adobe and Macromedia actively tried to stifle alternative implementations. Why does this matter? Over time, when there's competition between implementations, they all tend to get worked on and improve. Look at Apple's JavaScriptCore and Google's V8. Heck, even Firefox has improved JavaScript performance a lot compared to previous versions and Internet Explorer. The competition is so important that Microsoft has put a lot of effort into IE9 making JavaScript a lot faster there.

Right now, most implementations of HTML5, Canvas, and SVG aren't so fast. I've seen demos that show them getting fewer frames per second than Flash for animations. But the point is that they're open technologies whose implementations can and will improve. Flash has been a closed technology for so long and Adobe has taken that lack of competition and ignored performance concerns.

With video, it's the same situation. While browsers might not be using less CPU right now playing H.264, there's the potential for better decoding in the future. VLC uses very little resources on my Mac decoding H.264 video. It's not merely Safari's access to hardware acceleration since VLC doesn't use hardware acceleration.

The problem with Flash is that it doesn't allow companies like Apple, Mozilla, Google, and even Microsoft the opportunity to increase efficiency; it doesn't allow an army of volunteers to improve a code base. It's just stagnated since there was no other way to do animation and vector graphics until recently.

The problem with Flash isn't where it is now in comparison to other techniques. The problem with Flash is that the other techniques are open and improving at a rapid pace while Flash isn't. The problem with Flash is that open technologies have lots of smart people working to improve them and make their implementations better while Flash is remaining much the same.

Our objection to Flash is that we can see what happened with JavaScript and Ajax (from apps like Google Maps and Gmail to toolkits like jQuery and Prototype) happening with vector images, animation, and video if there's an open standard that all companies and individuals can freely implement and use; with Flash, all we can see is Adobe continuing to feed us the same product we've had for years.
And ESPECIALLY not to Microsoft. Please.
Letter to Russia with krokozyabry
When I worked at IBM, one of the guys I worked with worked from home pretty much all the time. Distributed teams can work if the people are highly motivated and responsive, but in my experience it bogged things down since I wasn't able to get timely responses to questions.
Down Economy + Scrappy eCommerce Startup = low-budget video gold
I don't think that they use web socket for tracking. They use it only for showing the realtime stats.

Edit: check out the client tracking js. No web socket is used.
Ask HN: Is there a place for developers/designers to meet and barter services?
As the title suggests, this will involve no money exchange. only services swapped in return for the desired skills/services.
Win-Win for both parties and a possible method for bootstrapping a MVP.

Is there a current website that does this? I'd be the UI/UX Designer in that picture, looking for a developer.
I took a look at it. It seems like a Smalltalk IDE for java... does it offer innovations besides that?