skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That web gateway has to be maintained and that is one of the biggest drawbacks over a hosted service like Gmail. If you don't constantly upgrade your server and your software one day you'll get rooted by some exploit bot.

Sure, if you have the time and patience to constantly maintain your servers, and you think your web gateway's UI is as good as Gmail (I don't) then go for it. I want to spend my time doing actual work though.

> but opening a pdf with google docs is about 5x slower than downloading the pdf and opening with evince

And yet I keep using their preview feature because it somehow feels faster than opening it in a native app. The actual stopwatch time doesn't matter, it's the perception.

I think this is the reason why people like Gmail so much: it feels fast, it feels comfortable to use. It's not so much the features; strip out a few features and I'd still use Gmail.
Mangoes in India - Adding the cooling effect during summer
This would really annoy me if I had a posterous blog. In my writing I always intentionally make sure links don't contain any affiliate tags to make a point that I'm not writing about some product with the intention to make money but strictly out of interest or because the product is awesome.

If that tag is added for me I lose that advantage in credibility AND I don't earn the money either, but somebody else does with my content and apparently without my knowledge.

That is annoying.
Hmm, messing around with this at the moment. Your test case works in IE 7 (fired up VMWare to give it a spin -- noticed my example code actually doesn't, but the real widget does), but I still haven't gotten it working with real images. I'll update here once I see if I can get that going.

As an addendum, in the non-contrived case (the one the widget actually uses) it also allows text to spread beyond the width of the image above it unless it's on the extreme edges; I haven't yet thought through if that'd be possible with this or using td spacers with a little extra finageling.

http://blog.directededge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/reco...

Note the Coffee > Everything label.

Edit: Reason it wasn't working in IE 7 was because I didn't add a doctype and it dropped into quirks mode.
I agree with all of these points except for the part of Steve Jobs being wrong somehow. Not that Jobs isn't wrong sometimes, but he had nothing to do with any of this.

Most major companies keep prototypes under wraps for a myriad of reasons. There is nothing new or dishonorable about it.
Make a fancier version that can hop. (When this robot was sketched out in the "Inventions of Daedalus" column in Nature a few decades ago, he went into the how-to-hop issue too, though I don't remember any details.)
I would recommend: The power of unfair advantage ( John Nesheim).

Note: Founders at work is available online (pdf)
Demonware - Irish video game network middleware startup acquired by Activision in 2007.

We develop custom client and server side software in C++ (client/server) and Erlang, Python & Mysql etc (server) for the biggest games in the world.

We solve a bunch of hard problems and have some fun along the way.

We are a small team and we work hard to keep our startup ethos.

We are hiring for multiple positions in Vancouver, Canada and Dublin, Ireland.

See our website for some job listings (not much else I'm afraid) - www.demonware.net
Innovation Starts with Empathy
احبك خائفة ودون خوف - منتدى إمبراطورية العقول
That's what she said.
Has someone done a rewrite of 'The Art of the Metaobject Protocol' in the intervening years since this talk or are there any recommendations for something similar?
No. Perfection implies a scale with a top end.

We compete for spaces in a niche, we don't compete to be all round "better".
I quite doubt there's a way to do overflowing text like that with only CSS without nastiness. Though, someone, correct me if I'm wrong; I'd be fascinated to learn how, if it's possible.

With images, I've managed this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/temporary/justify_images.html

Though it's giving me a 4px taller container for the images than is needed :\ (forgive me if I'm missing something obvious there) It works on Safari 4 w/o the widths or the height, too, all that's needed are justify, inline, and that spacer (nice catch, that).

edit: via browsershots: http://browsershots.org/http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/tempo...

looks pretty consistent, for the most part. Probably breaking on inline-divs where it's failing. (and Opera is the only top-aligning one...? maybe that's a user stylesheet issue.)
Has anyone found the video for Randy Komisar's talk?

I can't find it on justin tv.
Isn't it available or am I just too blind?

Here's the link to Steve Blank's talk:http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262670582
I forgot to say, any questions drop me a mail ook-hn@yumm.ie
> Either you embed the js in the html, in which case every page is larger than necessary, or you put it in a separate file

Which is different from CSS how exactly?

Text is small and most sane server configs are gziping it on top of that. We're literally talking about 500 bytes.
OpenDislike - One Button to allow sharing the things people DISLIKE
window.setTimeout(function(c){return function() {
c.doSomething();
}}(this), 1000);

Mine usually look like that. Using any library to do that seems like overkill to me.
Maybe they can go for a near-homonym pun? A nested grandmother doll with butterfly wings?
Design for Impact: Emergency housing
How putting the facts straight entrenches deeply-held prejudices
Oil May Be Leaking at Rate of 25,000 Barrels a Day in Gulf
Bank of Japan Considers Venture-Capital to Spark Economy
Yes, We Have No More Research Breakthroughs
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They can't. No one can.

There are open source alternatives like Gnash but they are reverse-engineered runtimes. And like all RE'd apps they are at the mercy of Adobe. It already has problems with Flash 10. This is why Jobs argument is so valid. Anyone can write a swf file but it's restricted to running on Adobe's Flash runtime.

PDF is a special case. I still have an Acrobat 1.0 disk in storage with my Photoshop 3.1 floppies, somewhere. Adobe was giving it away at that point. They also gave licenses to PDFs. Only one company took the offer, Next. Apple bought Next and inherited that license from '93.
You tried to get away with it under the radar, succeeded for four months and someone found you out.

The fact that it took four months is a testament to how well you did what you could to hide it.

If you really want to be transparent you do these things in advance, and you make that a big part of your mission statement.

Four months is not an experiment, an experiment is something you do for a week or two, maybe a month.

Links should point to their destinations, any trickery under water to redirect links to something else than what the browser says it will do is well across the line of what's ok and what is definitely not. If you did that on your own content it would be bad, to do it on other peoples content is even worse.

Maybe YC should add a 'business ethics 101' as applied to the web with their investment package ?

Or do they encourage this sort of thing ?

Why not simply shut it off by default and allow your content producers to enable it, that way you take the sting out of it.
I've been trying very hard for the last decade to stop being 'that webcam guy' but so far without success.

Diversification is a lot harder than it seems!

Best of luck, I'll be following your adventures closely, maybe I can learn from you where I'm going wrong, one very big selfish reason why I hope that you will succeed ;)
You couldn't pay me to use an existing desktop mail client over Gmail, either.

Other than reasons you already iterated, the killer feature for me, the one I truly cannot be without, is the threaded conversation view. I know some desktop clients have threaded views, but unlike Gmail's implementation, they suck.
Interesting argument. Perhaps developers should be more critical of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft for their closed gaming platforms.
It depends on the apps you want to write, as well as what you already know. (For example, if you know your way around Javadocs and Java classpaths, Clojure rises as a possibility.)

I suggest skimming through a few pages of Planet Clojure and Planet Lisp, to get a sense of the apps people are writing. As a rough rule of thumb, if one excites you much more, that could be the better choice.

If you end up going with CL, you'll likely have a better time asking newbie questions on LispForum (or mailing lists like the LispWorks one), rather than on Usenet. And there are alternatives to SBCL and CMUCL, such as ECL and LispWorks: http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html

As for prototyping-then-rewriting, I think there are a few situations:

1) nontechnical reasons (such as, the maintainers can't be expected to maintain a Lisp app)

2) because the Lisp implementation is missing some convenient functionality, and it isn't easy to call an existing one in another language

3) the Lisp doesn't interoperate well with a given technical ecosystem

I think the probability of rewriting is less with Clojure, due to its Java interop, long-term goals of interop with other platforms (like .NET), and the increasing number of teams using it.
Well, you can't reasonably avoid external CSS, but you can reasonably avoid external JS. I still have tons of pages without external Javascript. I'm fairly sure I don't have a single one without external CSS.

As for gzipping etc. it's the not the actual size that matters it's the latency + the fact that it's a new connection. TCP/IP connection takes a while and then (for larger files) you have to deal with slow start. This wouldn't be a huge deal if everyone supported pipelining, but they don't.
This is exactly what bothers me: Talking about open standards and then making their own versions of them. The Redmond strategy.

Makes me want say the same comment about Jobs open standards sweet talk as he made about Google's slogan... That's BS.
Developers apparently love .NET, hate MFC, Ruby on Rails
Family disputes Verizon's $18,000 bill
Unfortunately, the actual report itself is a paid for report at about $595.
This is just Ars' "review"/summary of the report..
Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 to get Exchange ActiveSync support, SSL, and more
This is in addition to the stupid application release name:

Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4
Because something is not cross-platform then it's not innovation?
There is a potential danger with Skype. If I know correctly, phone companies (at least in eastern Europe) have to meet some standards set by the government. Since Skype is not a phone company, it does not have to meet any of these standards: http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/what_happened_on_august_1...
Yeah don't you know that neanderthals just one day were like "you know what you guys are better go ahead!"
I've been learning common lisp for a while now. I know clojure, and i thought it would be beneficial to learn common lisp so I'll be able to learn from all the existing code and read all the classic lisp books. I'm surprised at how good common lisp is, i think it's one of the most misunderstood languages, its not a pretty language, but its a good one. Its problems seem to be mostly cultural ones.

If you have no exposure to lisp or functional programming i would suggest scheme as a first lisp, after you feel comfortable with lisp syntax and functional programming you should learn both common lisp and clojure, in whatever order you like. At least thats what i did, seems to have worked out well for me. Learning either of those as a first lisp is possible though, you can just ignore my advice and start with whatever you like.
I would eat a wooly mammoth steak, or liver cake, well maybe I should take another peek...
Your description of Microsoft might be true for recent years but their dominance in the Market was through business practices not through superior technology. I think back to DOS and windows3.1 and the PC software was terrible. I'm not just thinking about apple here, there were a number of good microcomputer operating systems in the late 1980s.

Getting the best software developed on your platform is half the battle and history of Microsoft is to develop to market trends not to enter the market first.

Computing would not have been so ubiquitous without IBM, credit where credit's due.
BBC Horizon - Psychedelic Science - DMT, LSD, Ibogaine
Of course posterous has to make money somewhere. But they should clearly spell out in the terms of service of the free product how they intend to do that.

And they should allow people to opt out of this, either by going for a premium product or by switching it off on an account-by-account basis. And given the nasty way in which this was introduced the default for all old accounts should be OFF, new accounts know presumably what they're getting in to after the terms of service are modified to reflect reality.

Nobody wants to withhold income from posterous, it's just that this is about as bad as it gets when dealing with the trust of your users.

I'm personally pretty pissed off about it, I did a speech here in NL not that long ago comparing Ning and Posterous and presented posterous as a very good alternative without any of the nasty tricks that Ning has used over the years to lock in their users.

I wished I could eat my words now.
Yep. And for all the handwaving about transparency and 'going forward' there is no real offer of a solution for what they've done to date, in other words, they did it and intend to continue to do it.

If they're serious about this they'll switch the feature off for all accounts up to the moment of modifying their terms of service, and make sure that new signups are properly informed.

This so called apology seems to mix up the meanings of the words 'unobtrusive' and 'sneaky'.
MPEG Issues Resolution on Type-1 (Royalty-Free) Standard
From the Information Age to the Recommendation Age
I would say that's a fair statement. Much of the impetus behind of innovating outside of standards is the idea that it may one day be incorporated into a standard. It's hard to define a standard that cannot be reliably implemented across platforms.
Because something that's not cross-platform is not and cannot be a standard.
What Hackers Can Learn From SF Fandom: Conventions at Light Speed
I'd be really, really interested to know if anyone here has experience of this. I'm running an event in November, and I'd like to know how well these suggestions and guidelines work in practice.

They sound great in theory, and are allegedly born of practice, but does anyone has any personal experience of this?

Thanks.
Samsung LN40C630 40-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV (Black)
I really don't like the downvotes just because you express an unpopular opinion, instead let me try to show you what is not good here.

A free service does not mean there is no understanding between the parties, it simply means the price is '0'. Even if you paid or got paid, there would still be an unwritten set of expectations underlying your usage of the service, and these should be clearly expressed in the terms of service (not the corporate blog).

If the service goes out of its way to make it seem as though your content is still intact, but in fact changes it underwater then that is 'sneaky'. If the service profits from that they're not 'clever', 'smart' or merely trying to make ends meet, they've changed the terms of the unwritten agreement, after the fact.

That is what is wrong here, not that they decided to charge you.

By your logic google can turn around next month and suddenly charge you for your gmail account, after all, you don't really have any say on the matter. Or they might decide to decrease the size of your mailbox to 10 MB. But that breaks the unwritten contract, just like this does.

Sure, your 'service' continues uninterrupted, but the fact is that they added something that changed users content without 'informed consent' on the part of those users, and they did everything they could to cover their tracks. The latter is advertised as being 'unobtrusive', I read it as 'we tried very hard to make sure we got away with it'.

It's double speak to present it as a way to make it transparent to the user, after all, changing the links inline and visibly would have been more transparant, not less.

Any change to the content, especially one that you profit from should be made explicit, it's part of the 'terms' of the agreement between the users and the owners of the service.
No, but innovation limited to single platform is violation of standards and used to rack profits from the lock-in. But cross-platform innovation can lead to easily adoptable new standards.
87% don't?
If you read Opera's statements, they are not going to change the service. It's going to keep running as it always has. They are just going to use the technology to build other stuff or something.
Just upgraded from 9.04, took about 2 hrs. Finding the the left side windows icons a little unnatural, but going to stick with it for a couple of days. Otherwise it looks great, and no issues at all.

Great work Canonical, also I see linode have 10.4 vm's available already, fast work guys...
MARCY FITNESS EQUIPMENT
MARCY FITNESS EQUIPMENT
Or because they think it benefits them. Might be a tautology, though.
The founder hasn't been involved with the service for years. The people who actually ran the service are still running it, and will keep doing that as Opera employees.

Also: Opera doesn't just make browsers. Opera also makes all sorts of services for both users and b2b customers. The browser just ties it all together.
No, Opera has a very clear focus. They are not only a browser company, but also provides browser related services. They make money off of those things. With this they can offer better email/messaging services to their business customers.
We should campaign for female companies. Like ships, or countries used to be.
Speed up the Web Using Google AJAX Libraries API
There was no way to give people time to figure it out. The acquisition needed to remain a secret until actually carried out, and once it was carried out, this was the only way to inform people.

Also, Opera Software has an excellent privacy track record, and is located in Norway, which has some of the world's strictest privacy laws.
Bejeweled Blitz World Record
The T2K Experiment - From Tokai To Kamioka - Where is the anti-matter?
I guess the comment was meant as "[...] only Apple and Android will remain [with any significant market share]."

Today, Linux is a popular alternative to OS X or Windows on the desktop---but the market share is minuscule.
Absolutly - JavaScript was a bit pants before jQuery, but now you can see it's influence everywhere.

Node.js is an example of 'jQuery-like' JavaScript on the server side, and pretty much every JavaScript book out there since 2005 has included a chapter on jQuery.

Big congrats to John on this achievement.
I think most complaints I have seen/heard about IE are not about innovation but about violation (of standards) either by deviating from what the standard says or simply not implementing certain portions. Innovation without violation is great for developers.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021570
I use SIP with Localphone as long as I don't need the video features of Skype, mainly because it's more flexible for me (SIP integrated in my desk phone, Ekiga and my S60 phone) and for the called party (not needing a computer)
As of March 4, 2010 posterous has no way in their interface to delete your account.

If you want it deleted you should mail vince@posterous.com or help@posterous.com and ask for it to be deleted. I've just done so.

Citation: http://inbtwnrthedoors.posterous.com/3604263
Don't worry, I am sure your next initiative will be even more successful and you will be called the "whatever-you-choose-to-do" guy.
He said a plus, I take that as a great filtering mechanism.
Wow, I missed the new pricing on MongoHQ. Having Heroku and MongoHQ free for basic setup is pretty awesome for trying out new stuff.
Mashable just toast Seesmic
Nice ... may be later on some work of photoshop guys will come on to Web Developers
... and vastly better products. Plus: they don't lie and cheat, and they are not convicted criminals. But still, you made your point.
Not at Best Buy, apparently.
I probably still would have chosen the smaller one and then lived to regret it, though.
i hadn't thought about caching results from a function before. that's pretty cool.
Incorrect. Free services have terms and conditions just like paid services. If they change your content on the fly that's part of the agreement and it should be disclosed. Whether you pay or not is immaterial, if you paid they could do it just the same.

There is no 'legally speaking' here, this is not a lawsuit, it's just against the expectations that you create in the heads of your users, and that is always bad for your business.

That's why you disclose stuff, to make sure everybody is on the same page.
Wow, I'm surprised street view has such a remote location. That begs the question where is the most remote street view location.
One more thing they should mention in their terms of service.
The google bot is capable of running some javascript, whether link juice is unchanged or not does not really apply here because they're simply adding affiliate codes, the destination page is unchanged.
Were you on IRC anonymously?
I must admit I would probably have opted for a simpler solution, like a fixed spacing and just centering the whole group horizontally.

Also, would it look good with multiple columns? I think items would have to be aligned vertically for it to look OK?
They probably have a natural affinity to clubs and clubbing, at least judging by popular movies.
Hi Jach. I work for Localphone, so it’s nice to see us mentioned here! We are definitely cheaper than Skype to most destinations - on a crude country-by-country basis we’re cheaper to at least 95% of countries.

If you weren’t aware, Localphone-to-Localphone calls are free too when using VoIP.
I could stand the cold, but the winter darkness would get me. Or do you adapt fast?
Active SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) could be courting trouble
well they already sell those ...

http://shop.skype.com/phones/

i think i even saw some phones branded as "skype ready" or something similar in brick and mortar store
As far as I know, the way Gmail handles conversations and archiving is unreplicated by any desktop client, and single-handedly the most powerful thing about Gmail. I now have a regular habit of archiving any message that doesn't have an actionable item, decluttering my inbox. If another message should arrive in a thread, I have the entire conversation history right there. A good desktop app could replicate it, but I could see this behavior being difficult to map on top of a standard IMAP server.

In addition, there are a ton of innovative small features (especially in Labs - Don't forget Bob!/Got the wrong Bob? have saved my ass multiple times with new clients) that I just don't see other e-mail clients implementing, and they're constantly rolling out new ones. The fact I can get the exact same functionality on any computer I happen to be on is just icing on the cake.

Ultimately: it feels like desktop clients have largely stagnated, while Gmail has an incredibly effective way of thinking about e-mail.
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You should generally find that we’re cheaper to most countries than Skype too, with equal or better quality.

Do you consider video to be a must-have feature? It’s something we could look into supporting since it’s all just SIP to us.
As a SIP user, this disappoints me; it's just one proprietary network to another.