skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect he is. In every email conversation I've had with him since 1998, I get this auto-reply (or something like it; it has likely morphed somewhat over the years):

I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear to be well outside the solar system.

After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your message at some point. If I can write a response for it immediately, the response will go out in the next outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your message, but occasionally sooner or later than that. As a result, you should expect a minimum delay of between 24 and 48 hours in seeing any response to your mail to me.

If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each message you receive from me is probably a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours earlier, and any subsequent mail you sent has not yet been seen by me.
I think MobileMe uses ActiveSync. They were both introduced at the same time. They both have the same exact features.

Anyone running Exchange or an ActiveSync licensee (such as Zimbra) can also support the same features.
Along similar lines, I had thought of a slightly strange idea for a web app where people could sign up to get a "virtual boss" to encourage them in whatever way to be productive (whatever "productive" may mean). A lot of people do much better when there's somebody pushing them.

These virtual bosses would also be people who've signed up to do so. Communication would be in the form of email, or an internal messaging system. The web app would make the experience more like a game, where bosses get points for having productive subordinates, and the subordinates get points for being productive themselves.

This is just a very minimal concept at this point of course. I don't plan on building anything like this, but I thought I'd throw it out there. It could actually work.
How I became Ryuichi Sakamoto's guitarist
Any thoughts ?
I am personally amazed at what the health care community thinks of medical apps.
Android Phone? Want to peep a new type of game that encourages you to go outside
Indeed. Like the first one:

Derek - what a remarkable guy you are. More individuals like you, sharing viewpoints that make the world a more productive place, is what helps shape a culture and push things in a more positive direction. Thanks for taking the time to do so.

If people started posting comments like that on my blog I think I'd be too embarrassed to ever post again.

Continuing on with Derek's theme of naivety though (no, I'm not going to track down the correct key combination for the double-dotted i) I feel privileged to have no idea who Derek Sivers is, and hence no need to praise his rather ordinary and somewhat flawed blog posts. Hooray, beginner's mind!
There are ways around legacy systems not storing certain characters to database field sizes that range from running delegate password serves to hashing passwords into something that an be stored on the legacy system. The one thing this thread does get at is the money involved. To Amex the costs and risks of their "weak" password requirements don't outweigh those of implementing a more secure password system.
This is a great point, and something I struggle with. Although, I think it combines the problem of focus as well.

While waiting for my project to compile and start, I switch to my browser, get lost in HN or e-mail and 5 or 10 min later forget what I was doing in the first place. When this happens several times a day, it becomes a real problem.
Ask HN : The shareware developer apprentice
SwiffOut is an experiment I do to see if I can sell a simple but useful piece of software online and learn about it in the process. I did get some sales but it's not the ultra sexy stuff you see on HN home page, with hundreds of sales on the first week.

That tool is SwiffOut. SwiffOut allows to play games fullscreen. It is simple but it is a better product than anything else that exists for playing flash games.

I plan to blog about things I try here : http://grownsoftware.com/blog/ . There is already two articles, one about my first sells and another about services I use. I'll be glad to have some tips from you about presentation, ads, ignoring critics, or anything else I can't think of right now.

Thanks.
No crazier than Donald Knuth: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

Or all the people who self-impose IP blocks against popular timewasting sites. Or people who have "noprocrast" enabled on HN.

We are not logical creatures, but we cope.
Wall Street Smarts
No, but there'd be a link to tow-truck companies in your area, and perhaps their not-exactly-PCI-compliant handling of credit-card numbers would be exposed.
It wouldn't matter at all if the handler was https. If the form is delivered over HTTP, a man in the middle can make it go wherever they want.
On a couple of occasions I surfed a site from my gmail account. Very nice/different experience. I am not sure how this happened. I tried to do it again but it wouldn't work. I would love it if I could browse HN from my email just as I do on the site itself.
And also they offload most of the risk onto merchants for accepting fraudulent transactions, so merchants have to be extra vigilant.
Is it possible to design a better stop sign?
btw your blogsite is very scammy looking.

I got a message from my host with a link to your site, where you instructed to download and install a file...and I was 100% sure that it was just just a scam, where you sent out spam messages pretending to be hosts, with a link to the blog post where you were asking me to download malware.

In fact I was in the process of contacting customer support of my host, when I noticed the letter I got in recent history.

You should really spend a little time making it look more legitimate,
I feel like this gets brought up every week here, but I'll post it again: If your password is going to be the same for the phone as it is for the internet, it can't have special characters.
No, it's entirely different actually. A lot of applications hook into MobileMe to allow syncing, and don't offer any alternatives.

Address Book, for example, plugs right in. Sure, it's got Yahoo and Google syncing... but they break routinely, and I had to fight with it to not delete everything on both ends when I first hooked them up. I'm now using Soocial to sync them because it was so buggy, and none of the options pass images back and forth. Unless I'm forgetting something, MobileMe does, and it preserves all data correctly, unlike any option I've found.

I believe iWeb also hooks in, letting you make changes to your site and push them out quickly. As do iPhoto, iMovie, etc etc. And when was the last time you could find your iPhone and / or wipe it if it was stolen with a 3rd party tool?

Prior to Dropbox, what easy option was there aside from MobileMe? And remember that all this happens behind the scenes, so you can't throw up dialog boxes ever, and still handle everything.

There's nothing comparable because there essentially can't be unless they allowed you to change what MobileMe server you connect to. And show me something that handles everything MobileMe does, in one site with minimal / built-in setup on a Mac, and I'll accept that Gmail in Mail.app is the same thing (when you can't specify which folders you subscribe to).

---

I'm not claiming MobileMe is worth the money (it's not, IMO). Nor that you can't simulate it with an amalgam of other systems which don't necessarily play nicely together. But how many average-users do you think do that, vs how many would use a 3rd party option if all they had to do was change one text field (ie, mobileme.apple.com => mobileme.anothersite.com)? It's entirely within Apple's ability to present that field.

edit: find me a (single) service that gives you this (see the gallery), and try convincing people to switch: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/me-dot-com.html
Arc's problem is that it is not the only tortoise in the race.
Bloomberg's $31M NYC startup fund
Bloomberg and WSJ seem to have avoided 1->2 aor 2->3.

Note that public media companies are relatively new, and their biggest problem is Craigslist, which is deliberately not maximizing revenue. (CL isn't public, so it isn't legally obligated to do so and Newmark has control.)

Also, the "fact" that incumbents will tend to leave a niche does not imply that new players won't enter. As a result, the niche can stay filled even though the occupants leave.
Strong disagree. In reality, and especially for small-ish transactions, card companies are terrible at detecting fraud and customers are terrible at noticing it. Criminals can make second-order money off innocuous transactions through affiliate scams.

The only reason this isn't a big deal is that it remains incredibly easy for attackers to get CC#'s without capturing packets off the wire.
What gave you the idea that evolution designs optimal solutions? This is like saying a Boeing 747 can't fly because eagles are the upper bound on flight speed.
Well, Paul has a similar "quirk". He uses two PCs. Everyone's seen this by now: http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html Also Linus disliked using Google's net connection for his Git talk. Here's one relevant excerpt:

When I am here (Google) I cannot read my e-mails because my e-mail goes onto my machine and the only way I can get into that machine is when I am physically on that network. So maybe I am a cuckoo, maybe I am a bit crazy, and I care about security more than most people do.
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcr...

In another part he was about to demonstrates a kernel diff, but stops when he realized he's disconnected from Google's net. Here's the talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 One of my favorites; a classic. And I don't even do software.
Yes, I use Vimium when I use Chrome. However, it's still missing a number of features from it's Firefox counterpart, like the command line to input more complex commands that aren't mapped to a single key. Currently, it can only execute commands mapped to a keycombination, but it has no extended commands like the : commands of Vimperator. I should have gone more in depth about what I meant there.
The real cost of US debt
Great name. Looks clean.
I think the difference is that evolution has also created competitors, predators and built in limits to growth that keeps any particular life form from replicating out of control and destroying everything else. With the exception of humans perhaps :)

If the grey goo is non biological, there may not be any form of life that can eat it to keep its growth in check, it might also use some raw material that's more abundant than the nutrients organic life needs (there's a lot of silicon in earth's crust for instance), and it probably wouldn't have any built in limit to its replication like most living things do.
I think that nowhere in the US or any country with similar labour laws would this be appropriate without careful consultation with management.

As pointed out in other posts, the fact he brought in a non-employee and trained her opens up some very nasty legal questions: What if she got hurt during this unofficial nonemployed training? Does the company need to pay her for that training time? I am not a lawyer so I don't have those answers, but I am a manager and know I don't ever want to ask them. I believe it is safe to say that applies to virtually all companies of any size in the US.

Now, what he could have done is, much as Jacquesm described, recommended her the same day he turned in notice and offered to train her. This would have let management make the final decision and get all the papework in order while he still gets to help out a friend by helping her get a job and help out the company by saving them the trouble of finding a replacement on two weeks notice (if they choose to avail themselves of it by hiring her.)

I have taken that second route, and that effort, in full consultation with senior management, has always been appreciated. Actually bringing someone into my workplace and training them would not have been appreciated anywhere I worked (in a couple of them, I would have been criminally prosecuted) and I suspect it would be appreciated by very few if any employers in the US.
Sounds like Instapaper.
Not to mention you're usually out the actual merchandise as well.
He didn't argue against his thesis. When economies of scale are that of Apple's, it can make sense for a partiular devision to lose money if it inreases the bottom line overall for the company. I could see an Apple cloud increasing the likelihood that people will buy more Apple hardware if it just syncs up when you plug it in. Lets face it, setting up the Google cloud on the iPhone with Google Sync isn't something that your non-techie can pull off easily.

Thinking in terms of profit per division for companies the size of Apple, while prudent, isn't looking at the big picture.
The site owner therefore has the right to make provision of analytics data a prerequisite for access to content.

Agreed. I just object to the imputation that it's wrong to provide users with the ability to not provide that data if they so choose.
Why does God need a camel?
IMHO chrome is the first and only serious linux web browser. It doesn't have this sluggish feeling that firefox linux has. The situation certainly isn't the same on windows, where firefox graphic performance is decent.

All in all, a big thank you to the chrome devs from a linuxer
On Mac OS X, press ALT+CMD+H to hide all windows but the active one. I've been doing it the last couple of months and it's a great way to avoid distractions and focus.
Namco Bandai helping to create textbooks with RPG elements
Why not have multi-core version of other tech, unless you are talking Quantum Computing, though isn't that in some ways the ultimate form of multi-core?
The future of monetizing a mobile web app
I am not sure if Perl 6 has TCO.

It does.

I would be a little bit concerned about using Perl 6 (rakudo) in any sort of production system before say 2013 or so considering that Parrot has just started to add some critical pieces[1] like JIT and threads.

Why? Do you use Python or Ruby or PHP now?
Direct link to the comment.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/c7vdo/call_for_interns...

According to the admins, Conde Naste's legal department cleared them, but I'm not sure. It looks like this could get ugly. The reddit community has a nasty habit of lashing out hard when they don't like something, but it usually blows over after a week or two. However, I've never seen it in the case where there could be legal action.
thats so cool - who needs software to draw 3d graphs, eh?
Fraudulent and colluding merchants are a huge part of the fraud problem. You mean to suggest that in a perfect world, Amex wouldn't stick it to good-faith merchants. But for the most part, there are only good-faith customers, so they clearly aren't eating charges, and having Amex eat charges raises price for everyone.
Absolutely... I think something like Growl is useful here to let you know "your compile is done" or "your tests are finished running".
Fire for cause, certainly not. But layoff in a restructuring or downsizing? Many of the better companies will offer some form of support in finding the next job in that situation. What form that support comes in and whether it is really useful or not is another topic, of course.
Probably they should. But what sets Microsoft apart from their competitors is the integration of their various products. Sure, the integration might be weak on some products and cohesive in others, but so far they've done well compare to other companies.
What does Moose's mixins in role form give you over Ruby's mixins, or Scala's mixins, or PLT-Scheme's mixins, or just simulating mixins via a multiple-inheritance hierarchy ala Python or C++?

Safety and correctness.
could you remove the users at the bottom of the page that have no photo?
None of those attitudes drive the design of Perl 6. Why do you believe they do?
Here's another fun thing in Ruby:

irb(main):001:0> x = true or "hi"
=> true
irb(main):002:0> x
=> true
irb(main):003:0> x = false or "hi"
=> "hi"
irb(main):004:0> x
=> false

What? Short-circuit evaluation doesn't work in an assignment..? Oh.

irb(main):005:0> x = (false or "hi")
=> "hi"
irb(main):006:0> x
=> "hi"

In fairness, the || operator does not require explicit parentheses — but I still hold that operator precedence is just evil.
First thing that stood out to me: they still need better fonts. That Wikipedia screenshot makes me cringe.
Having skimmed the PicoLisp interpreter a long time ago, I remember it being like Emacs Lisp in that common performance-critical functions like mapcar were implemented in C. It seems like a very pragmatic way to get the performance you need without getting into byte codes or machine language. And since you are still interpreting the s-exprs directly, debugging and introspection remain easy.
A Boeing can't reproduce, and cannot heal itself.

(edit: I mean to say that there are processes that evolution has evolved that have eluded us and may continue to elude us indefinitely)
Reading the title alone was enough to expect a bit of paranoid schizophrenia to pop through.
This is probably not the best breakdown but just for a record (or to give a picture on their profits)... I talked to one of the Visio SDE in 2007 and he said Visio alone can deliver almost $1B annually.

Their team is about 26 people (26 of probably bottom line, not including Product managers, PMU, and everything all the way up).
Clean design, I like it. I haven't used the service at all but I like the idea a lot and it certainly has potential. You could also do some interesting things with matchmaking based on the analysis of users' twitter streams. I've been flirting with a "Dating Genome" matchmaking application idea for a while, idea being, it would use data points from Twitter, Facebook, etc... to compile a group of users most likely to match your "genome".

Good job!
There clearly are merchants who do that today. Last time we have a card stolen, we got tons of random bullshit merchandise in the mail (weird cosmetics and such), presumably for the affiliate money.
I can't tell if you're talking about Microsoft as a whole or E&D specifically. Because you bring up laptops and Bing, I'll assume the former.

> Microsoft isn't used to being second fiddle. Hell, look at how they're stagnating in the web browser arena.

Microsoft plays second fiddle all the time. Aside from Windows, Office, and (_maybe_) VS, nearly all their products are ranked second (or lower) in popularity. MSN Messenger. Bing. Windows Mobile / CE. Xbox. Windows Server. IIS. SQL Server.

> Bing is an also ran that can't even come close to Google's dominance, no matter how much money they throw at consumers with that cashback scheme.

I've heard good things about Bing. Claiming they bought all their users is disingenuous.

> When the vast majority of users are obsessed with social networking, writing small little text/tweets, bite-size 2D addictive casual games with one-button control, and playing music and youtube videos, how are you going to cash in on that if you're a Microsoft? Try to replicate Zynga and Twitter? Then what?

You don't, and you then compare the current financials of Microsoft, Zynga, and Twitter.

> Maybe -- and this could be the key -- MS needs to start _aquiring_ technologies instead of trying to reinvent them like they're some garage startup.

Microsoft acquires companies _all the time_. It's a common criticism: "Microsoft has never created anything. They've just bought out companies that create things." "Like some garage startup"? Hardly.

> Go buy some big sexy new technology, actually ship it (or hell, ship surface/origami/courier/etc.).

Whatever criticism Microsoft deserves, failing to ship is hardly among it.
I would recommend you hit up Craigslist and start responding to ads under Computer->Gigs. You can often find small and simple coding projects. That's how I got started building up my resume after I graduated.
In America there are some similar things. For instance, my current company is paying the tuition for my masters. I am expected to work for them for at least a year after I receive the last payment or I must repay that money.

In America, I know that there are limits to the types of contracts that can be written, but I am quite comfortable with this one. They didn't have to pay for my masters, and I didn't have to let them. Even the day I graduate I can quit and start another job, I just have to repay the tuition that they gave me.

I have heard from a friend that has done some minor work in film that the film industry also tends to do something similar. If a key actor tries to walk away with the film half finished there are often very large fines involved, at least according to her.
I don't actually know why he does this, but if I had as high a profile, and was as politically active as RMS, I might consider such measures if for no other reason than security. I imagine hacking his system would be a real feather in certain caps.

Then again, he may just be nuts...

----
(I don't really think he's nuts. Toleration of eccentricity is a sign of a high level of civilization.
Unless you need a gem that needs the ruby header files. Then you have to remember to always install -dev for everything, mysql, postgres, libxml, etc...
Google Says It Generates $54 Billion for U.S. Economy
Where are the startup founder parents?
That's not HTML, it's a bunch of JPEG files, one per page.
I found this relevant NANOG37 (2006) presentation pretty interesting about Comcast's IP space problem:
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/abstracts.php?pt=MzQ5J...
"Managing 100+ million IP addresses"
Maybe this has something to do with their big new data center being built in North Carolina: http://www.cultofmac.com/interview-apples-gigantic-new-data-...
Ack! My first search showed an ex-girlfriend in the "Members nearby" section. Time to test the delete account function.
I wonder if Arc to Clojure isn't more like GNU Hurd to Linux.
I talked with a Windows UI designer on the Chromium team at Google I/O who is working on tree tabs. Should at least be an option pretty soon in the dev channel.
@jasonlotito Yes, I do agree that they are doing more for privacy than the rest.
is google spreadsheet working well on Chrome finally (cells selection was broken) ?
Reading the discussion about credit cards number security reminded me of this, that is worse than having some money stolen:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129797
Why? I know short comments are easy, but you have a real opportunity here to teach us something new. Can you elaborate?
> Any programming language you don't know is bound to look something like line noise with some words mixed in.

Nuh-uh, not APL! That looks like line noise with no words mixed in. :-)
You can make "foo" give you a literal ByteString instead of a [Char]. Use the OverloadedStrings GHC extension. You probably knew that already, though.
> This may be true in CS, but in most physical or biological fields is not fully true.

Good point. I'm a mathematician, and the resources that we absolutely must have are even fewer than those of most CSers; I didn't consider life in other disciplines.
If you look at what they've produced (that particular division) so far are pretty much copies of successful stories out there. And they knew they will be in the deep red for a while once these copied-products are out.

This story will be like this for a while and I'm not sure that's a good way to run a business financially or mentally (for the employee).

Yes, they are finally profitable (after almost 9 years?). But sometime you'd have to check the casualty as well. In this case, it looks like the Microsoft brand is the foremost casualty.
Scrapping the Presses to Start HuffPo