skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a difference. The solar panels in Europe go up everywhere nothing compared to US you see. Some countries in Europe have a highly subsidized government programs where you get paid 50c per KWh for so many years. That spurred a rush to install a panel on the roof top and with it came many small solar installers/companies.
"It takes a lot of hard work to understand the universe well enough to be able to be properly productive in the zone."

Does he really mean "the universe" or the "space" of the task at hand?
Both of which is as of yet only available in the US :(

I also don’t hope that the future is exactly like YouTube, just that there will be YouTube-like (i.e. on demand) services – like Hulu or Netflix.
I must admit, "3 pages left in chapter" is kind of nice.
Anybody knows the font and color scheme in that image? Looks really pretty!
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"You're doing a software/Internet startup with low marginal costs."

I know this is where a lot of the media focus is on software and internet. But I think there is still a good number of service or product related start-ups, although I don't have actual numbers.
I'm curious where all the data is about "expressiveness" being so important. I'm yet to meet the person who can churn out functional solutions quicker than imperative... but I hope this is my naivete and not just the CS bandwagon effect.
Zuck's email to Scoble sheds some light on how they (FB) are trying to make this situation better. They want to react with actual product changes that sound like they are coming soon. (http://scobleizer.com/2010/05/23/when-do-you-throw-a-ceos-pr...)
---------------------------------------

Hey,
We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.
We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.
I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.
I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.
-Mark
This is another one (of many) viewpoints that would seem to argue against institutionalizing the concept of "intellecutal property".

"The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex", "In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange" and other similar phrases and sentences permeate the article.

Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?
> You're right he didn't backtrack in the sense of actually admitting he was wrong or that he'd changed his mind, he just started doing the opposite of what he previously said, possibly also claiming to have invented it at the same time.

That's seems like a snarky way of saying that an executive changes direction at a company when the landscape changes.
When it comes to reviewing SSD's I don't think there is another source that comes close to AnandTech.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-revi...

TL;DR: The review is still favorable, just with more meat to back it up.
Help Wanted: "Hackers" (e.g., Network Admins)
I just don't understand iPhone/Android Fanboys.
Thought provoking article but I am not sure -maybe it is true I don't know- that human individual is the "planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies." An alien civilization hoping to buy Earth as a planet would not negotiate with human individuals as the owners of the earth but with global organisms. These organisms own the earth; as a human individual we do not even have the freedom to travel on the planet. If humans owned the earth no doubt we could freely travel without registering with global organisms.
Startups Meetups Everywhere
Yes yes yes, but being able to do something like shrink a PNG every so often with a thread could be the difference between being able to use Node.js.net and not. And later you can slide in a async solution later if one develops.
Let's face it: humans have to learn all interfaces. Nothing is intuitive, not even the nipple.
Your thinking is correct, though I agree with spencerfry that you are taking this a bit too far to prove the point.

However, there is nothing wrong with building a business and relying on another service to provide key functionality.

When people say 'built on the back', I am visualizing that like an elephant with a bunch of people riding on its back.
Don't be amazed when the elephant changes direction and you get bumped off.

If you can find a way to harness the skill and capabilities of the elephant, then do that. If you can help the elephant and yourself at the same time, you could be the next summize.

So, I would urge peole to leverage apis and platforms, but maybe don't build your business solely trying to get a piece of somebody elses action.
> Adobe is doing it with Flash. Sun/Oracle does it with Java. FOSS projects do it even with C/C++ code. Javascript, HTML, AJAX, PDF, .doc.

Adobe is doing it because its in their direct interest to port to as many platforms as possible.

> Microsoft claims that they have developed a "standard" called .net, so it's their responsibility to maintain the ecosystem in a manner that makes .net code portable.

When google started Android shouldn't they have used the already existing open standard J2ME for their stuff? But since they're google they can ignore any standard and fragment any space.

You cannot actually expect microsoft to invest millions of dollars into platforms where there is guaranteed to be no return. It is a standard, if you want to use go ahead and implement it yourself. Mono does this, they even get help from microsoft, including the testing suites to silverlight etc.

> Now you're just trolling.

No I'm not trolling. My point is its alright when google keeps its core revenue maker, its search engines, code and algos top secret. If however microsoft does the same for their core revenue streams they get called evil.

Also, even microsoft encourages people to use their stuff to build on top off, its just a different view point where a lot of it isn't open source.
Not that it needs to be said, but this is exactly why building on top of somebody else's platform - where policies like this are a work in progress - can be a very bad idea . . .
However, those browsers or operating systems are written by companies. See Apple and iPhone OS for a recent example.

Building on top of anything is risky unless the platform (whatever that be - OS, Facebook, Twitter) provider gives you some guarantees (and you have enough trust in them that they will stick to those guarantees).

If you build your app on top of someone's service and the terms of use say "we reserve the right to change anything", it's like loading a shotgun, giving it to the service provider, and hoping they'll be nice to you.

If you don't/can't accept that risk, don't build on top of them.
I think that this may be a side-effect of the literature, which is very lispy and computer sciency. For someone like me, that's exactly the right tack. For someone who may not take for granted all the claims Rich and his book-writing compatriots are making (let alone take for granted the lisp code-as-data is an foundational revelation of computer science), it may be a problem.

Because really, Clojure is in many ways simpler than both Scala and Java. You can ignore the hard parts (agents, deftype, macros, de-chunking seqs, etc) and just cruise through the easy parts with a fair degree of ease. Everyone understands functions, after all. And Javascript has really pushed the "use functions for everything" approach into the public eye quite nicely.
buzzword buzzword-pair based on buzzword...

yeah. thats my review. sorry its terse, but the title really put me off the product that much...
I know it's been said so often before, but "specs don't bring in the general public."

For B&N to make any inroads, they're going to have to do something more than build huge, dead product display areas like the one at my local BN store. Anyone see action around the "Nook" displays at their BNs?
Goodbye Ad.ly.
TL;DR - Fuck off, ad.ly
I just can't imagine Apple saying "We know that's your trademark, but you'll have to buy the name from some random parasite who typed it in first. We can't just take it away because we don't want iPhone OS developers thinking we're capricious and heavy-handed."

Edit: including Mickey Mouse, crown jewel of Disney's IP? When they get done with him he'll wish they just had him whacked.
Craig Newmark on How to Simplify and Reset the Facebook Discussion
Oh horseshit. Apple's model could easily be extended to allow apps to register code that is executed when something is pushed to the phone.
He's now updated his post after Google contacted him to say:

...there is no 15% serving, or any other, fee for those online publishers
I used to do the same thing, but I missed out on a lot of good emacs shortcuts. Today I use the dvorak version of Xah Lee's layout. You get vim-like navigation by holding Meta.

http://xahlee.org/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html
What evidence do you have that the insurance companies are price gouging? FYI, insurance companies have very low profit margins.
Predict Whether a Startup Will Succeed or Fail
I used LinMint for about a year in an emulator. I've since switched to Crunchbang Statler (xfce) but might recommend LinMint instead for folks who are looking for the most polished and immediate experience possible but aren't as interested in staying lightweight or tweaking the UI (or staying linked to Ubuntu).
Somewhat specious, since Emacs can be run inside Vim too.

This is a screenshot of Vim in Emacs in Vim: http://i.imgur.com/fxlm4.jpg
I think you missed some reports that Nook has been selling better than Kindle: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20003387-17.html

So, it seems to be doing OK.
Many project float around my head for a bit of time. If something seems persistent I tend to make some notes on it to track ideas, features, core concepts, whatever.

If I decide to actually do it, I kick off a Ramaze project. This lets me start fast, light and simple while giving me a solid migration path should the app get complex. Last thing I want to do is have to change frameworks midway through; it'll be an excuse to not do stuff. I can start with a single-file app and build out as much as needed.

I use Rhesus to jumpstart such things, with personalized templates for assorted needs. I get the layout I want with the core files I know I use, skip the cruft.

Then I iterate. I put pretty much every app into a git repo so I can easily try stuff and not get lost down some dead end.

I also like using Selenium to drive test cases from a user perspective, see that I have important site-wide behavior in place and working. And it lets me automatically "walk" an app and mull over the big picture.
Followed by: "I meant that one."

Given the line of questioning and the audience I don't really think the response was that horrible. It makes her seem a little more human, which played into a comment that Arrington made at the beginning of the interview as well. There was also her "What the fuck" to the audience when her mike stopped working almost immediately after sitting down. I think Arrington set the tone for the interview and she just went with it.
I wonder if Scoopler's @WTF tweets count.
Maybe this is just my programmer mentality of making abstract connections between things, but is building on top of another software company's platform really all that new? What makes an operating system platform different than a web platform, other than the fact that OSes have been around much longer?

Any business needs to mitigate risks, and I'm not trying to downplay that. You can see this with Zynga and Facebook, for example. At the same time, you have to remember that the platform is also a business, too. Platforms don't have a business without customers to build on top of them.
Those are exactly the two issues I had in mind, too.

For touch devices, Android's policy seems to be click+hold to enable context menus.

And the issue with the browser's context menu is the reason why this probably needs standardization.
For this kind of interview you really need audio. Not hearing her inflection makes me wonder... why did Arrington/editor put her instruction to him in quotes?:

> CB: ... You are involved in a very tiny company.

> MA: Very tiny.

> CB: It probably takes some time just to convince yourself what to do. “So f*#k off!”

Anyway... enables him to provide a link-bait title to the "interview."
“Yeah on these seats the ejection sequence automatically starts when it grabs your legs. The rocket fires in 10 seconds.”

10 seconds to start the ejection? Ah, come on, that would just eject the dead body of the pilot from the plane wreck. You should have known better.
I hear about the viper-mode and vimpulse stuff a lot, and while they go a long way towards helping emacs be more useful for text editing, I find the discontinuities disturbing.

For example, I am no longer in vi-mode if I end up in a help window of some sort. I cannot just Ctrl-W+Ctrl-W my way back to the original window; that suddenly deletes words. But I like working with multiple windows in vim sometimes. This gets frustrating for a vim user.

Also, macros are still not fixed, still using the emacs assumption of what people want for an enhanced vi. We want the easy qq and @q.

Definitely, if you are going to try it out, grab vimpulse. viper-mode is a joke to the developers coming from the vim world. vimpulse makes visual mode highlighting sensible.
That's a fantastic link. I just spent ten minutes reading through each version and checking for how Scott Adams reorganized the story. What program did you use to generate that view?

While looking at the diff, some of the edits struck me as overly formal - such as the hyphen, the elimination of the preposition at the end of a sentence and especially the use of the word "whom". I didn't notice a single one of those things while reading it in the article, though. It just flowed nicely.
Blame is not the point.

Assume that the original authors aren't stupid. Maybe they were, but assume they weren't. Now ask - how did this get in such a mess? Why did this get in such a mess? How do I know that if I rewrite it I won't make the same mess?

If you can't answer that then you can't decide whether to re-write or refactor. Knowing why it got in a mess is a crucial piece of information.

Are you cleverer than the original authors? Do you know more than them about the problem? Remember, they spent ages writing that code - they know lots about the problem. Are you sure you understand it better?

Unless you can answer absolutely, unequivocally yes then you shouldn't rewrite. You should work to improve the existing code in small pieces. Only when you believe you understand it better than the original authors should you make the decision to rewrite.

Otherwise you are mostly likely to spend a lot of time recreating their mistakes.
I hate buzzwords as much as you do, but this is the best description I could come up with. I'd love to hear if you have a better idea.
i've used word on mac, and it kinda sucks (even has data corruption problems). even if microsoft is trying, it doesn't mean they are nearly as good at making mac apps as windows apps (let alone fast mac apps, which is not their area of expertise).

and there's a world of difference between "intentionally slow down" (that's crazy) and neglecting to put a ton of work into optimization of startup.
BTW, vim is the perfect editor for tablets and similar devices with a shrunken keyboard.
Ah yes that's true. You can use Protocol Buffers but still over HTTP. You'd have to use Erlang to get around HTTP, which obviously won't work for everyone.
Tom's Hardware also has a review:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-momentus-xt-hybr...

"At this point, we realize that reaching a verdict is not so easy. The new memory management technology is complex and hard to benchmark, as optimizations take place in the background, because we don’t know the performance parameters of the flash memory."
Ask HN: How much time do you spend reading HN/Blogs/News/Articles?
At this point, even quickly skimming through HN's top stories takes me about an hour. Then I also read regular news and some other blogs that don't appear here very often. Sometimes I spend a couple of hours each day just reading.

This is of course very interesting and I learn a lot, but is it really useful? How much time do you spend on this? Is it time well invested?
One of the most interesting trends that I don't see a lot of people talking about is Mass Customization. Part of this is because people haven't fully figured out the answer, but that just means there's a lot of money to be made.
Indeed - and any mistakes which need to be rectified later will come out of the founders' cut. This is easy to miss amid the excitement of getting properly funded, but can become expensive later.

In the film industry (where I work), indie firms are thrilled to get a distribution deal, but many fail to realize the importance of legal and technical diligence early on and are later surprised to find find anticipated revenue drastically reduced by various compliance issues - for example, a producer might get releases from their main actors but not have all appropriate paperwork in place for professional contributors, or the acting releases may be legally inadequate. The distributor will cheerfully supply all the necessary paperwork to cover their potential liability, but then subtract the cost of its preparation before royalties are paid. What seems like 'mere overhead' at the deal-signing stage can turn to be extremely expensive later, and few people want to share the details of such mistakes in public.
This is a very nice article. It does assume a significant knowledge of Haskell -- more than the average HN reader has, I imagine. But for those who have it, this is the best introduction to iteratees that I have seen. (Somewhere, someone noted that dealing with the iteratee literature "requires a saving throw vs. confusion".)

Thanks for posting.
"So we better be careful of how we make our laws. A law with good intentions and made with great moral conviction may end up doing the opposite."

I absolutely agree, and offered the explanation as one I've often heard, but it isn't one I can get my heart into. But even if it's true in general principal, the idea of trying to do good by roundabout methods is indeed tricky, and if you cannot accurately measure the results you're doing witchcraft not statecraft.
>If you write parallel code you'll get a lot closer to free lunch.

That's like saying "if you spend lots of money on good food, you can get a pretty good free lunch". Good parallel code is hard, to varying degrees. I'm in agreement, its going to be the future, but development is going to get a lot harder in the next few years.
AFAIK the "theory" in clojure also stems from the scala world in that clojure data structures are based on work done for scala or by scala affiliates.
Also pilots might be worth more to the military ( cost of training + scarcity of a good pilot + experience )
Start-Ups Surge in the Great Reset
Has anyone created a startup with the Sun Spot?
Newest Pligg Venture BizSugar: Social News for Business
Intel ships Core i3, i5, i7 for ultraportables (tablets, etc)
I actually found it rather refreshing that a CEO is speaking frankly. Regardless of whether I agree with her or not, at least I know she's speaking her mind rather than some made-up typical HR/Press-speak.
Patented inventions can still have sex; in fact, patenting requires them to be published. It's trade secrets that enforce celibacy.

You don't have to be able to use an invention commercially to learn from it, combine it with other ideas, improve on it, invent around it.
or sexier? Like http://bit.ly/rr
It was left off the base load of the device so that it could be revved quicker. If there are bugs in an app store application you can push a fix, if there are bugs in mobilesafari or the maps application the only way to update them is to cut a new release of the OS.
Google Apps Script Hackathon NYC, June 24
Has anyone created a startup with a product based on the Sun Spot? The Sun Spot sounds really innnovative for creating electronic prototypes, but I haven't heard of any startup using it yet.
Most lawyers I have dealt with for business needs like commercial leases, liability waivers, etc all use boiler plate documents for a starting point.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think the bulk of the cost that you are paying as their customer isn't for the text of whatever document you need to procure, but rather for their professional analysis of your business's specific situation and any changes that need to be made to that boiler plate.
Startup and to JIT the code. I bet if they accounted for that, we'd see Scala even more performant.
There's nothing wrong with it, but when it's phrased in the form of "undoing some of the nonsense" and "backtracked", it seems like a hostile issue. It's perfectly ok to admit you were wrong about something -- in fact, I tend to respect people that can do that more.

However, in Steve Jobs' case, I don't know if that could really work out too well. He's built up the reputation as a visionary, and publicly admit he's changing his mind on an issue like that would probably do him more harm than good.
This will be possible when the new annotations API is live.
Flash 10.1 sluggish on Android 2.2? [video]
A New Style of Russian Roulette?
Go uses a primitive garbage collector also, so while Scala can create boatloads of extraneous objects, their allocation costs are negligible and their collection cost is 0.
"If we imagine a universe where age isn't a protected class, your professor's secretary would cause just as much trouble -- she'd still lose, and she'd still have her day in court while doing losing. Unfortunately, it suddenly becomes possible for Foogle to start firing people en masse at age N, simply by fictioning up a few bad performance reviews. But now nobody can prove it, because age isn't a protected class, and will be ignored by the court."

Do you not think that part of a person's motivation for suing is their perceived odds of winning? There's still a cost to the accuser to bring a suit.
Well consider: have you every upvoted a comment you disagreed with? This one for instance. It was worth responding to, but not worth a vote.
This is exactly my point: karma is a popularity contest only.