skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have great respect for how Gates is spending his money now.

But, in all seriousness, Windows (including Office etc.) is morally questionable. Grant me two points:

First, it could be better without serious harm to its success. Over the last 15 years, Microsoft could have funded security and usability a bit more and saturation advertising a bit less, and it would have the same market share but save its users something like 10% of their use time.

Second, it hasn’t competed ethically. Microsoft under Gates did things that were only slightly to its medium-term benefit and very much to the detriment of the market. Many products that were clearly better for the user never got a fair shake. Cutthroat capitalism has its place, but Gates went further.

Given these, the opportunity cost of Windows adds up to a huge amount of inefficiency – time spent needlessly fighting computers – for which Gates is significantly responsible.

Some back-of-the-envelope math: If Windows has an install base of 1 billion, and the average install is used for 4 hours a day, that’s about 150 million Windows-years per year. If Gates is personally responsible for 1% inefficiency there, that’s about 1.5 million person-years of waste per year.

Would that particular time and effort have cured cancer? Or made the Linux kernel twice as good? No. But it’s still a lot to waste.

I’m trying not to be glib. I know it’s not original to say that Windows sucks. My point is that when something really big sucks preventably, we’re talking about significant amounts of resources burning away, and that has a moral dimension. More power to Gates as he eradicates malaria, but as far as I’m concerned he started with a big debt to society.
Putting a giant funnel on it and then pumping the resulting oil through the funnel sounded like an even better idea than these plans...

... except when they did that, the flow of oil pulled water into the funnel, formed methane hydrate crystals and caused the funnel to start fill-up and start floating away. They might have tried to melt the crystals but I'm guessing there a chance for them to explode or something...

So it's a messy problem - at 5,000 the behavior of every substance involved is different. Imagine trying to use a baseball mitt to staunch an open wound (or whatever metaphor for awkward futility you'd like).
Facebook claims 500 billion minutes a month is spent on their site. That's roughly a million man-years.

I don't see a lot of civilization-advancing going on with Facebook, however.
Here is a simple solution might help...Get a vacation out of China. Setup a VPN and done.

If you love Chinese culture and freedom, you better try Taiwan. It's a republic (100 years mostly), democratic little island with Chinese traditional culture inside. I think if you want to do a startup for your future business entrance into China. Taiwan might be great for you. Although the market is small, but you can think that's an exercise/evaluation in China market. After all, you won't sacrifice your freedom and social justice.

Oh, by the way, there will be a FTA (ECFA) coming up between China and Taiwan. Sooner or later there will be lots of trade activities going on between the strait.
Steve Jobs Offers World 'Freedom From Porn'
Everyday I feel less sympathy for Adobe.
> He [Alexander Slocum] has a lot of creative ideas. One in 10 are really brilliant ideas, but nine are dumb,” said MIT professor Wai K. Cheng, a colleague in Slocum’s department.

I don't understand why some scientists come public with this type of negative commentary. It only reinforces the type of closed-off competitiveness that plagues academia. Sometimes I wonder what great advancements haven't been made as a direct result of the lack of collaboration and inherent selfishness within scientific fields.
Ask HN: Any OC-based people interested in a Hacker News meetup?
I'm looking to meet more people in the web realm in the OC. If you're in Orange County, feel free to email me at me@scottscheper.com -- Perhaps we could get a Hacker News meetup going or something.
I always thought Intel was under-appreciated and under-noticed, though maybe they prefer it that way.

Clearly the revolution that started with the first tube in 1908 and progressed to fancier tubes, to transistors, to what we have today, points more to Intel than Microsoft.

Compare yourself and see that they are pretty big and content to stay out of the limelight: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=INTC+Key+Statistics vs. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT+Key+Statistics
You have also the option of compiling from the sources rather than relying on the OS-provided packages.

Another advantage of compiling from the sources is enabling exactly the options that you need, with a software such as PHP with so many options the packager may not necessarily activate what you want.
I wonder how many people here would actually benefit from running CentOS. The first thing I need to do on a new CentOS machine is install newer versions of PHP, Python, and Ruby. It's kind of becoming a pain in the ass.
from: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7636561&page=1

"According to a survey from National Association of Colleges and Employers, the class of 2009 is leaving campus with fewer jobs in hand than their 2008 counterparts. The group's 2009 Student Survey found that just 19.7 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job actually have one."
It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it.

I have a hard time believing that. Sophisticated and effective encryption techniques are well-documented. There are thousands of bored teenagers who could write malware that uses sophisticated encryption. Successfully spreading over the whole Internet while being unobtrusive enough to not be noticed by most victims is, perhaps more impressive.
The Top Reasons Twitter is Beating Facebook?
Oh cool.. do you have any of your photos online?

I'm also into street photography: running a photoblog where I post a photo every workday (http://journal.boblycat.org/cosmozoo). Still going strong since 2005 or so, and I concur it's a great compliment to screen-gazing.
I'm not familiar with any of the people involved, but it could just be an accurate statement.

Also, you left out the last part of the quote: You can’t miss that one that is brilliant.
I've always wondered what the employment / income benefits for a degree are once you account for intelligence. It seems to be that there is a lot of schooling that goes unused.
Hm... did anyone notice how this is a repost of a post on ubergizmo which starts with:

"We have word that Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 might not feature Firefox as the browser of choice, ..."
In your case I would do a couple of searches on Youtube for video and Google images/Flickr and compare the number of results that they report. That should give you a high level idea on the amount of content out there for your topics.
_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius
The distinction comes from the fact that Goldman Sachs is an Investment Bank so there is inherent risks they engage in.

JPMorgan is (mostly), a Deposit Bank, a place where clients store their money - there should be little risk in that.
It's layman writing. The worm uses RSA and RC4. SHA1 or MD6 as a hash. Designing these would obviously take a very skilled cryptographer (actually many, many cryptographers). Implementing it just requires a smart programmer who knows a decent amount about cryptography.
This could use a spell check. I was uncertain about a few, but I'm pretty confident that "sacralize" is not a word.

Spelling things correctly is pretty much a solved problem; the automation is there.
Actually, didn't mention that, but I have one :) Massively reduces my book collection, and it rocks. But, I also have a sizable collection of textbooks I'm keeping as reference books.
This seems like a neat idea, however what are the chances of other browsers supporting this? Since IE is still the dominant browser, I don't see many companies wanting to go for this since it would isolate all non-chrome users.

How does Google plan to spread adoption of this technology?
Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but a retail distribution channel is necessary for physical goods (the 70% component you mention), unlike electronic products, which can be distributed at close to zero.
I'm at my college graduation ceremony right now replying on my phone, so bear with me. I'll try to expand on my posts when I get home.

I didn't do anything with the information from this question for several months after asking it. Then, at a university programming competition one of the problem sets included a problem on implementing a simple virtual machine and interpretting a set of instructions. My team solved the problem in about 1.5 hours and it gave me a renewed interest in writing a game emulator. I also spend a lot of time studying reverse engineering which is somewhat related.

I decided to write an NES emulator as my first serious attempt. Emulating the processor in my opinion is one of the easier tasks and I was able to bang it out in a couple weekends. Now I'm focusing on the graphics and sound systems and these take a little more effort. Also, emulating the system timing of the original CPU is a key consideration as well.

I only wish I could somehow turn my emulator / reverse engineering hobbies into a career. I find the work much more rewarding than the typical software shop crud apps.
I dislike Facebook for many reasons, but I think there can be a lot of value in idle socialization. It may be encouraging people to express themselves, to respond civilly to other opinions, to keep in touch with acquaintances, and so on – and while these may not be civilization-advancing in the way of things like highway systems or space exploration, they strengthen the foundations of a healthy society.

I’m not saying Facebook is necessarily a net benefit for society, but it’s also not a total waste. If nothing else, I’d rather people were going slackjawed in front of an interactive screen than in front of the TV.
I think it really is junk. The NYT(? I think) had an interview with someone who used junk shots to close wells in Kuwait, and his favorite junk was lamp cables because it contained both soft plastic and harder copper wires. My understanding is that they are looking for something that they can pump into the BOP, and that once inside will form a nice big tangle and hopefully plug up the leak. What to use depends on the specifics of each leak and is more an art than a science.
Customers love openness and transparency
Does anybody know how this compares to AIM screen sharing with audio?
Ask HN: How do you market your web app near launch day?
I'm looking to launch a web app soon, and I was wondering what were some ways people marketed their app.

Thanks!
It would be nice to see some sort of Timeline or list of To-Dos right after login, probably in the whitespace on the right hand side.

Another good feature would be denoting which projects have outstanding todo items on them to differentiate them from those that don't.
I agree with you 100%.

That's why I co-founded Fifobooks, which is a new DRM-free ebook marketplace, where authors:

- retain all the rights to their work

- maintain full editorial control

- set the price at which their ebooks are sold (and keep majority of the revenue)

- there is no fee to publish

http://fifobooks.com
I took a look at node.js for my latest project because it could seriously benefit from the asynchronous nature. I found that the ecosystem was too fractured for me to be able to quickly determine what would work best. What's the best node stack for someone coming from the rails world to use?

Sometimes no options is better than many options.
It's definitely not bad to have stuff. Owning what you can carry on your back is not for everyone.

I'd say this kind of minimalism is more aligned with optimization- realizing that you have a lot of stuff you truly don't need, and getting rid of it. You sound like you're in the middle of the curve; you have no stuff, then you have some stuff and then more stuff. Eventually you'll discover you have 9 frying pans, and say 'man when I had 2 extra frying pans that was ok, but this is just annoying' and then you will go through a reduction cycle. It's natural, imho.
Soccer player here too. Love it, but my knees are a bit messed up now.
I enjoyed it. I would've liked to see pointers/comparisons to such libraries for other languages -- that is, ones that export usable regex/finite automaton abstractions, not just the usual Perl stuff.
I'd say the difference is I had enough space to carry all that was truly important to me, whereas two suitcases is enough for some clothes, a laptop, and maybe a couple other things.
I think you've pointed out the elephant in the room. In America it is politically incorrect to believe that some people might not have the cognitive capacity to excel in college and in jobs requiring college degrees. Every American is above average. If each citizen is not Bill Gates, it is because they are the victim of circumstance. Other people held them down, the system failed them. The successful must be condemned for prospering at their expense and another reform must be tried.

We would rather the vast cognitive middle class take out thousands of dollars in debt and drop out than "admit defeat" by encouraging them to pursue skilled careers in nursing, maintenance and repair, and etc. I am skeptical that the billions of dollars of tax money and individual money spent on the pipe dream of sending every person to college has been worth the expenditure.

Plans that ignore reality are doomed to failure, no matter how well-intentioned. And the reality is that not everyone is cut out for Harvard.
I think what bothers me most when I read this sort of article is that it treats all college degrees as equivalent. They talk about average earnings potential and average unemployment rates, but they never break it down. If you get a B.Sc. instead of a B.A., how does that effect your chances?

Almost all my friends without some sort of technical degree (Chem, CompSci, Physics, Math, etc.) aren't working anywhere near their field of study. They paid tens of thousands of dollars so that they can be secretaries, waitresses, and ice cream parlour cashiers.
There is nothing such as foolproof technology - that's why a large part of the firewall is powered by people. It helps develop computer skills in a large part of the population that would otherwise be out of work, and you reach your censorship targets at the same time. I think tens of thousands of young people (if not more) are employed as "firewall monitors" in China.
Maybe he was joking. But whether it was joking or accurate, that was probably a comment he could have kept to himself.

I guess I hear those types of comments all too often in academia from scientists who are trying to make a name for themselves at the expense of others.
I understand your current frustration. If you expect everyplace you go to be just like home, your bound to be frustrated.

As far as "quality" IT solutions go. Well, lets see here: I helped the Shanghai gov make an e-workflow solution for procurement. This cut down on costs and kickbacks a lot. I helped several Chinese banks become online banks. Some of my middleware code processes billions in transactions without breaking a sweat.

I'm sorry you don't feel safe and secure in China. I was at Home Depot last week with my son. About an hour after I left, a guy shot and killed another man on isle 13...same isle we were on. I never feared for the safety of my family in Shanghai.
I've been seeing this a lot recently, and I find it really annoying. The reviews are not the place to voice your pricing concerns; they should be used to review product quality. This sort of abuse completely undermines the usefulness of the system.
When it comes to authentication, wouldn't it be rather easy to subclass the ModelBackend class to simply use email instead of username if that's what you want? And if you want to extend user.Auth with more user data, they have a way of doing so as well, without subclassing: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/jun/06/django-tips-extendi...

Could you be more specific as to what kind of things the Symfony/Doctrine model level validation can do?
Krav Maga and lambada (on separate nights of the week) so I get a good balance between acting like I'm tough and feeling all loved up
Ask Yourself, Is this Data Useful?
(Not OP, but I do work with Django every day for the past couple of months):

1. Django docs, while great compared to many other projects, are still quite lacking, especially in examples.

3. It's probably true, compared to the quantity of PHP coders out there. The average Django dev is probably better than the average PHP dev - again, quantity - but you don't always need the skills/costs of a really good dev. Sometimes you just need someone to install & customize Wordpress.

5. Not sure how memcache is related to that, but in any case - if your app can use significant caching, framework/language performance isn't an issue to begin with.

6. I don't really get the Pinax - RoR comparison.

7. See 5.

8. Honestly, coming to Django from RoR, and knowing that they both got going around the same time, I sometimes wonder what Django folks have been up to all that time ;) (To be fair, there are definitely things Rails could learn from Django)

9. Templating was just a poor design choice for Django, IMHO. Instead of using Python in the templates, as RoR/PHP do, you basically need to learn a new single-use language, which in time will inevitably get more like a real language anyway.
Efene tutorial first chapter draft finished, need reviewers
Shouldn't the degree reflect intelligence? If not, wtf is the point?
Yes, that's why the publishers do it but they get away with it because many people see a hardback book as being more valuable than a paperback one despite the fact that they both cost about the same to make.

Sure the only people who regularly but hardbacks are early adopters but they don't see themselves as paying extra because they are early adopters they see themselves as paying extra because their buying a better quality hardback book. This is different from a tech early adopter who knows that they are paying extra for the same thing in order to have it first.

Yes it could work if people accepted it but I don't see people accepting it without there being something extra (maybe a forward from the author where the story only version of the book isn't released for a few weeks) that they can justify paying extra for.
For anyone who is using Beanstalk as their message queue, I have an incomplete-but-functional node client and worker on github:

http://github.com/benlund/node-beanstalk-client
http://github.com/benlund/node-beanstalk-worker
Blogging With Jekyll, Git and a VPS
The web does have costs and they are not "close to zero". People cost money either in salary or contracting.
How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
Parkour. Just make sure you have decent health insurance.
I think the primary reason for its existence is complete binary compatibility. I think they may even say that on their website. If you don't need the compatibility, there are probably better options.
One reviewer mentioned it, though: you can give a paper book to a friend, sell it on ebay and what not. So even if production costs are neglectible in both cases (?don't know), the paper book is still worth more than the ebook.
We should have never left the oceans in the first place.

Anyway, yes, that's true, people can move civilizations forward with the worst of intentions (assuming that I read your point correctly). But it would be nice if one or more of them did it with a little more style and less disregard for the rest of us.

There has to be a better way to go about this. Or is it really true that nice guys finish last?
I don't believe that they are doing this but I am not sure. They certainly have the reach to dominate the space if they switched it on.
How about no default browser? Offer a browser selection screen during the install process or on first login. Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Opera, etc. Offering a level playing field for browsers is very important. I don't see any good reason Ubuntu has to dictate a default at this point.
Avoid Decision by Indecision
Better still, every hour there are probably more new signups to facebook than have cancelled in the last months because of this flap.

That doesn't mean it is wasted time though, facebook is a brand and brands are vulnerable to more than just absolute numbers of people leaving.

Advertisers will take note, for instance.
I recommend Express.js ( http://www.expressjs.com ). It's Sinatra-like and gives you static pages, sessions, and HAML/SASS templating. I've been using it with the project node-mongodb-native leveraging MongoDB as a datastore (although the Mongoose project looks like it might be a cleaner interface: http://www.learnboost.com/mongoose/ ).
Isn't it relatively brutal, though?
UI needs work. How is this any different from Google Tasks? Most people would like to incorporate it in their emails - so Google Task already fits the mold.

Might be useful for a desktop app - maybe AIR?
People seem to be responding to the title rather than the content of this article. Funny enough, but the linked post is actually not about that thought experiment. It's Winer's response to someone else writing about the "What if?".

Winer more or less defends Zucker via the Joe Hewitt argument that the web is stagnating, that the web is not a sufficiently rich platform for apps and that the only (best?) way to move forward is to innovate on one's own without (any? too much?) consideration for standards.

I don't even understand this argument, to be frank. Winer says "We were making richer software than the stuff you can run in the web browser 20 years ago." But he gives no examples. I don't know what he has in mind, but really? Richer than 280slides? Richer than Gmail? Richer than Etherpad? Really?

As for the stagnating web, I don't buy that either. Even if it isn't all rainbows and ponies, there's a lot going on with web-based software in the last few years - arguably far more than on the desktop.

Edit: here's the original thought experiment post

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2010/05/15/if-mark-zuckerber...
What's the point of encryption if you don't know what server you're connected to? Somebody could be intercepting your traffic, and you wouldn't realize it.
It is really amazing. Kudos to you as I really still don't get it how to emulate hardware in software... you are a man!
It is since lucid.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/chromium-browser
Fred is right on the money here. Facebook was the original private channel in the space. It gained an enormous amount of trust and users as a result.

They don't seem to realise that the social graph was not their competitive advantage for the endgame: that can and will be duplicated. The diaspora bonanza indicates this.

Trust is the ultimate lock-in for any consumer product or service, especially one dealing intimately with people's social lives! It is the hardest advantage to build and is nearly impossible to regain.

The diversion over the past year of trying to be the jack of all trades has cost them a lot and they haven't stopped the hemmorage. The fact that they've waited till this week to realize they have a massive problem and call the rumoured company wide meeting indicates that these people are asleep at the wheel.
802.11g network can broadcast 33.75Mb during 5 seconds. That's quite a few e-mails.
My browsers include CACert's root certificate -- therefore, I use it for securing any of my private websites. It's just like using a self-signed certificate, except not stupid.

If you need to support the general public, pay the $20 or whatever for a certificate with a widespread root.
I do not wish to state an opinion on whether the old WASP establishment was prejudiced and insular. I just want to point out that we are just as ignorant about the question after reading a snippet of dialog from a movie as we were before reading the snippet. If it were a quote from book that claimed to be factual, different story.