skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quote:

It’s not about HTML 5 vs Flash. They’re mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the web...

Look at the iPhone helicopter we just saw — why should I only be able to use an iPhone for that? Why can’t you do that with any phone? If you look at what’s going on now, it’s like railroads in the 1800′s. People were using different gauged rails. Your cars would literally not run on those rails. That’s counter to the web. The ‘rails’ now are companies forcing people to write for a particular OS, which has a high cost to switch.

Translation:

We will lower the cost to switch phones by moving the switching cost out of the hardware and into the tooling. Then we will benefit because you will need to buy our tools to write applications and you won't be able to switch tools.

Adobe will make all the tracks the same gauge, but you won't be able to manufacture a locomotive without their tools.

p.s. I upmodded this post because it's important to hear what they have to say, not because I support what they're saying.
Great article.

To which I'd add:

The only real downside of bootstrapping while consulting is that consulting is a soulsuck, and it's so much more fun to work on your own thing. Or, consulting is so much of a soulsuck, that it depletes your energy to even work on your own thing.

You just have to monitor your energy & passion levels carefully to ensure you make choices that help you keep both balls rolling.

We're doing the same - and I just quit consulting a couple mos ago. It's fabulous to look at my fledgling product, designed just how I wanted to, and know it will start grossing $10,000/mo in just a few more short weeks.
Shouldn't it depend on the crime and the alleged criminal. Chen had already returned the property to Apple so should have been given some credit for that gesture during the search. Also, the crime was for buying stolen property at worst, I don't think that should have involved knocking down doors
The actual amount we manufacture is mostly irrelevant. We are manufacturing much less than we consume, especially compared to previously, witness our terrible balance of trade with the rest of the world. That is the proportion of manufacturing to consumption is too low.
> We’re going to make great tooling for HTML5. We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML 5.

This is a good news. No shipping day: not really a good news, if we are lucky we'll see it with CS7

> We’re focusing on everybody else. There’s a huge wave of innovation, there’s going to be a wide range of devices.

I think it would be fair to say that smartphones have been around for at least 5 years. I can't recall to see a huge wave of phones using Flash in a decent way

> Regarding the prototype tablet that has been shown off at Web 2.0, there are a bunch of manufacturers building devices with those guts.

Prototype =! successful product.
We'll revisit this statement when those manufactures will ship a million of those devices in 28 days.
But aren't these conclusions already in widespread use 24 hrs of the day, from infomercial and advertisements, to talking heads in news and media?
Wouldn't you have to update any index you have whenever the content changes anyway (or lazily at some point thereafter)?

Updating the index should be a simple as calculating the old metaphones, removing from the index, and then reinserting the key based on the metaphones of the new content (multi/exec would is perfect for this)
I think more like what FPGAs could have been. FPGAs today are generally used as a cheap way to implement an application-specific circuit. Once they are programmed, they stay in a fixed configuration. It is theoretically possible for the configuration to change on the fly, but it is almost never done.

Memristors would implement physically what FPGAs could technically emulate using transistors. With this come the benefits of lower power consumption and the ability to keep state when powered down (which FPGAs can't do).

I think cellular automata like the Game of Life are a better mental model for memristor circuits (but I am probably hugely wrong here).
International enrollment in all fields, including the humanities, is up. The Chinese may not be going to the Women's Studies department, but Venezuelans, Jordanians, Canadians, etc.. are. Art school these days must be 50% students from Japan and Korea.
I'm of the opinion that there are competitive-research groups under each car maker that exist for this sole reason.

Someone in another thread replied that such activity would border on the illegal, but I don't buy it.
Google's new look for mobile
It may sound better, but you're slaughtering the root of the word, which is Resistor. Memristors are useful as a storage element but that's only one possible utility, not the fundamental of the device itself.
I'll take this seriously when they support the existing standards properly. Stacks of HTML/CSS/JavaScript books are full of pages saying this/that doesn't work in IE.
Why Perforce is scalable, and Git is not
Hold on there -- I never argued in favor of that!
I have read about it, WRT to the Vietnam war, where Team LBJ's precisely calculated signals and finely tuned bombing did indeed not send the message intended to North Vietnam ... but perhaps it did signal something true.

And I of course disagree with your analysis of our post 9/11 response and how it was taken, and note your complete failure to address our invasion of Afghanistan and decimation of al-Qaeda in that region. That most certainly sent a strong and unambiguous "signal":

Kill "too many" Americans and we will break things and kill people, starting with you and your country. That worked too for Nixon and North Vietnam.

The fact that we got "sandbagged" in Iraq was certainly bad ... but you can't cite it in isolation with the fact that we then stuck to it until we got it right. Capturing and hanging Sadam also sent a major signal.
The most important assumption is that they guy who found the phone didn't make a reasonable effort to return it.

The relevant statute, which has been referenced over and over and over, is very clear. It does not award points for effort. Instead, like Yoda, it says that you either do or do not -- there is no "try". Since he did not do what the law required, he's on the hook for theft.
Full welfare for life? You mean Social Security and Healthcare? Perhaps we just need to make those programs work properly. If we also had some basic legal limits on the way salaried and non-salaried employees work and how much of a corporations tax-deductible costs can go to C-level salaries instead of everyone else's salaries, much of the need for unions would go away.
If anyone stumbles on this with the same question

www.beenverified.com sells them in batches. 1000 hits to their webservice for $150 or 10000 for $1000
Google Chrome Speed Test Final
Lets have some proof rather than sheepish upvotes hrm?
There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer.

Moreover, I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture.
Your "..." actually left out a useful part of the sentence, "— now we’re in the Valley too." This is simply a humorous way to point out that it was harder to recruit people to Chicago than it would have been to Silicon Valley. Indicting him for that seems pretty extreme to me.
The button to the left of the search results has an arrow on it.

In most cases (including Google's new web interface) the button is an action button with the arrow pointing in the direction of future action (expansion or contraction). In this case the button looks like a status button with the arrow pointing in the direction of the past action (expanded or contracted). It feels awkward.
They should start by making the best tools in the world for Flash development! I personally use HaXe, it's significantly better than Flex, which is kind of sickening because it's mainly written by one guy.
I can't upvote this enough, it's amazing.
Your argument seems to be: everybody is doing it, so it's not morally wrong.

Would you feel the same way if it was your intellectual property that was stolen? What if you spent the last year of your life in stealth mode, working 120 hour weeks and Gizmodo published your business plan on the web for everyone to see?
You're supposed to turn it into the police office, or else you broke the law.
Absolutely. The comment was very much tongue-in-cheek. :)
Thin Provisioning Plus VMs – Armageddon in a Virtual Box?
Or idol, depending on their frame of reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P39gP4QnXxE&feature=playe...
I still don't get it.
And here we were talking about how massive Facebook is getting. This is another pedestal higher than Google, Apple, or Microsoft could never reach.
Hey there, thanks for the kind words. Co-founder of Rapportive here. I had exactly the same experience when renting a room in my house. A facebook or myspace link told me more than showing people the room, as people tend to be on best behaviour.

Interestingly, we've had similar stories of folks finding Rapportive useful when hiring. One VC was hiring an associate and found the tweets more telling than the CVs.
The frog one is false

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
Trust would be an issue. In an open system, it would always be possible to set up a rogue server with spoofed profiles.

There are ways to combat this. Using OAuth for authentication keeps them from getting your credentials. It or a similar protocol for data exchange allows you to shut them off if they're proven bogus. They might have limited visibility into your network in the meantime, but that's it.

It will probably end up working a lot like the web works now. You'll have to look at the URL and decide if you trust the provider. You can also send a message along with the friend invite and prior to accepting another's invite, that gives you some confidence that you know that person. Finally, by seeing that you share common friends on common providers will be a strong indicator.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing engineers looking for a change and UW grads looking for a job.
Saddest picture of the century-vulture waiting for child to die
That may be the case, but is it also the truth?
Unions have outlived their usefulness in the American economy. Today, their primary effect is to destroy and bankrupt everything they touch. GM paid many workers full salary to do nothing for years because their union contract wouldn't allow them to fire people. I'm sure those "workers" were happy with what the union did for them. But those of us who don't get a sweet union deal have to live with a bankrupt state of California that can't negotiate their union labor contracts, a broken school system run by the country's most powerful union that resists all reform (except "more money for schools"!), bankrupt unionized automakers, a stale unionized postal system that is going broke, and even union grocery stores with long lines because the union resists putting in automatic checkout machines that they fear would take their jobs.

And when the unions inevitably kill their host, they still aren't made to suffer. The federal government steps in and guarantees their pensions and salaries. Imagine what kind of incentives that gives the union leaders in future negotiations. Oh, and union workers will have lower taxes on their health insurance than non-union workers under the Obama health care plan even though union workers make more money on average, just to rub a little salt in the wound.

In 1900, unions were a great idea. Now they are poison.
They won't have to do this. Most will probably go with a provider such as Google, MSN, or Yahoo!. The "cool kids" will install a Wordpress plugin or set up their own.
This is quite unexpected. I honestly did not think Facebook would move beyond casual gaming.

But videogames are often about escapism: for example, would you really want your real-life profile associated with your MMO account?
Just noticing a similarity...

The housing crisis was somewhat caused by people not thinking of houses as places to live, but devices to make money (see: house-flipping).

The long-term growth problem is somewhat caused by people not thinking of jobs as means to create value, but as methods of making money.
If you're only good when the work isn't a "soul suck", your odds on getting a company going aren't great. The fun stuff is a small fraction of the job. Even when you optimize for "fun stuff". This may be part of the reason Graham keeps saying that the determinant for successful startup people is "tenacity".
That's an easy advice to give when you're not really facing terrorism, but an extremely difficult one to follow when there's non-negligible chance your children's school bus will be bombed.
Conan O’Brien preforming at Google
FOAF has some great ideas. Unfortunately, for a system to have the level of functionality that users have come to expect, it will have to be a protocol run as web services. I think many of those ideas or even parts of the standard can be leveraged, though.
While we're at it, let's hack all the computers of the kernel maintainers every time there's an exploit. Sorry for the sarcasm, but I really don't think exploiting software insecurities is the way to get anything productive done.
Upvoting!=I agree

Upvoting==This story deserves to be popular.
I am sure you have memos from MS as to their formal goals
No, no and no again! This is terrible news. Let me play my games in peace.
Oops. I missed the dup here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321591
Then I'm sorry, but it's still worth saying. DON'T BE LIKE ME.
Where is the FUD?

These are tests submitted by MS. The declare what they are testing, and what they are comparing against? FUD would be MS saying that IE supports standards better than the latest competitors browsers. They aren't saying that. They aren't even implying that. The only way this is FUD is if you selectively choose to be daft about the entire thing and ignore vast portions of the page. It would be if I was selective about your post, and assumed you said:

"I ... Am ... FUD"

Edit: I should note, they are even pretty clear about what they are comparing: "The first table is a summary of the test results with the May 2010 IE Platform Preview and each of the major shipping browsers running on Windows."

They don't pretend to test the latest beta/alpha/nightly release of the browsers. Merely the latest shipping.
How many important W3C tests pass on windows XP running IE9?

None... (IE9 wont run on XP)

How many important W3C tests pass on windows XP running Firefox 3.6?

Most...

-

And according to Wikipedia as of April the XP has a OS market share of 52.94% This value is the median of 7 different data sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

-

What this means is that by Microsoft refusing to make IE9 available for XP, web developers often can't take advantage of CSS3 or HTML5 and still reach even 70% of the audience.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/chrome-continu...

-

I would tend to agree with pavs that this is more FUD from Microsoft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
Could someone explain the author's conversion of petabits to terabytes?

(1 petabit = 178TB)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=petabits+to+terabytes
Ask HN: What is an acceptable starting salary for Upper Middle Class in USA
Being An Indian student studying computer science in a US university (Cornell), what is an aspirational starting salary?

The course i am going to embark upon M.Eng. in CS has 36k$ tuition (its year long course) and salaries are 80k$ per Annum on average. However i know quite a few ppl who went to Microsoft as SDET or Tech Analyst in Amazon who got 85K$ base + ~30-40k$ in stock!

So the question is what is an aspirational starting salary in USA.

I am interested in creating my own startup as well but just to get an idea.
The security will be determined by your web of connections and the quality of their profile providers. For such a system to be functional and have sufficient appeal to 3rd parties such as Google and other systems that will want to crawl the graph, a certain portion will have to be open. Things like your name and connections to others.

Ultimately, a larger subset of your data will eventually become public. This will happen by users installing games and other apps on top of the system that aren't as trustworthy. This can happen today with Facebook. It just isn't talked about much. Writing an app for FB is eye opening.
> Remember, the internet itself is decentralized.

I think it's a common misconception. You can be decentralised with friends. With the whole world, you need a single entity. Just look at Facebook, Twitter, Google, MSN -vs- Jabber (even gtalk is not a jabber in the mind of users - it's gtalk / google chat), money transfer services, iAnything from Apple, etc.

People seem to like centralisation - they know where to go and how to call it.
Nice byline: "Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at Facebook, is moving to Seattle because he couldn't bear to be 800 miles away from Michael Arrington."
Japanese MRI scans are not identical. A typical japanese MRI operates at 0.25-0.5 Tesla. In the US, we operate at 1-2 Tesla and get significantly better resolution.

The japanese love medically unnecessary scans the same way americans love medically unnecessary pills (antibiotics for viruses, etc). This created demand for cheap, low quality MRIs.
Facebook is like a giant sprawling octopus of identity. This I want to keep separate.
I don't think Ted's ignoring that; it's just not his responsibility. If Ubuntu wants wizard-level fixes at short deadlines, they need to hire and retain wizards, and that's that.
Same. I found the option to add the cookie for this new design about 2 months ago, been using it since.

I mostly like that the drop shadow on the logo is gone. I'm so shallow.
So we are going to say that a standard is only a standard if it's considered important by you? A standard is a standard. It's either supported, or not. Firefox devs don't just sit there and say "Hey, we have 80% of the standards done, that's enough. The rest isn't important."

As for the XP talk: wtf does that have to do with IE9?
Skype to unveil group video chat function
Yeah, that's interesting. One thing to note is that they don't sprite their small images, which is one of the first things people recommend for improving page load time.
I agree, I'm not a fan of Apple's recent actions but it certainly doesn't warrant government intervention. Same thing applies to the Google/Admob deal as many have suggested, I'm not sure why the FTC has a hard on for tech companies.
We do let foreign doctors practice in the US. If you go to rural areas in the USA, over 50% of the doctors are foreigners on J-1 visas, because you can't get Americans to practice in those areas.
Australian miners out-earning bankers
Except that the non-failed auto companies have no problems operating in union states or nations. Many of GM's own in-the-black business units are in Europe.

"The unions" didn't cause the failure, nor the bailout.
But, to be fair, do they support border-radius? I understand what you are saying, don't get me wrong. But either a standard is supported or it's not.

If you want to get technical: Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have 0 support for the HTML5 standard, considering HTML5 isn't official yet. But they still work toward meeting proposed standard.

Competition is good. If IE9 supports border-radius, and that pushes FF and others to support border-radius without the vendor tag, might that be a good thing?
so you're proposing that if someone doesn't like software bugs that they should stop using software?

that would be mighty difficult, as software and their potential bugs are present in most every facet of modern life.
This policy was just changed. Now apps can store data as long as they like because they are in a contract with the user.
Reminds me of the "Theory of Relativity in words of four letters or less" (which is also quite readable):

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html
When I say large, I mean about 6 gigs or so. Because your company's source tree is probably that large.

Yes, if your company's source tree is that large you might have to use a different VCS. Or: Come up with a much smarter way to manage large binary assets, which presumably are the reason why your repos are so bloated. (If you've got 6GB of text files in your project, you probably have much bigger problems than your choice of VCS.)

I wonder if one could use the moral equivalent of git submodules. Don't manage giant binary blobs by committing them into git. Instead store the giant binary blobs in Amazon S3 (or the moral equivalent), and write some hooks and tools that maintain a separate local cache of those giant binary blobs, with symlinks pointing into the cache from your local working copy of the git repo. Then assign each version of each blob a UUID, maintain a big file listing those UUIDs and the associated S3 URLs, and check that file into git. You might end up having to run scripts like "blob commit" or "blob update symlinks" now and then, but even that might be able to be fully automated via git hooks.

Has someone written a library that does something like this? Looks like a job for Ruby or Python.
I would be really curious to see how the results from this correlate with actual results.
This isn't just true for middle-eastern types. My girlfriend is Native American, and often has guys trying to hit on her in Spanish (especially true in Spain), even after telling them repeatedly that she doesn't speak Spanish.