skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you describe more about what you see as this originally-envisioned user space?

Briefly, yes.

Two aspects were of particular interest to me, although if you ask the HURD developers from back then they could likely point out others:

1. Interactive programs should be uniformly customizable, extensible, and self-documenting - roughly in the manner of Emacs. That sounds like a trite thing. After all, the programs we wound up with have all three traits. For example, Gimp can be customized, new commands can be written in extension languages, and it has a great deal of on-line documentation. I mean something more specific but hard to convey concisely. Most of Gimp is not written as extension packages, which betrays an architectural weakness in contrast to emacs. Gimp's interaction model and customization model is awkward and ad hoc, compared to emacs. The on-line documentation of Gimp is not designed in a way such that its enhancement is a natural part of writing extensions. I don't mean that Emacs is perfect in these regards - it certainly isn't. I do mean that the architectural approach it takes is vastly more sane than what the interactive programs we wound up with use. (Don't mean to pick on Gimp. The observations apply as well to the Open Office suite, to Gnome, to Firefox, and more. We have a big, barely maintainable heap of discordant and vaguely conceived functionality.)

2. On a more mundane level, even the command line got horked. You know how (nearly) all GNU command line programs have --version and --help options and so forth? At least when I was working at FSF the notion was that that coding standard was a stepping stone to a shell much more like the much-loved shell on the Tops-20 operating system. The standard was supposed to be gradually refined so that those standard "--help" messages could be automagically used by the shell to intelligently prompt for arguments to a program.

I guess I should add that a lisp - most of us that I knew assumed Scheme - would figure prominently as the main extension language (rather than Emacs lisp). Why a lisp? Well, it had a proven track record and that was our aesthetic -- I'll leave it at that.
I really saddens me Plan/9 went nowhere (parts of it went everywhere ;-) )

I am uncomfortable having what amount to be sci-fi versions of Unix and VMS to chose from. What would be a cutting-edge, legacy-free OS these days?
If you don't get sued, who cares? :)

That aside, I would go for it. As gizmodo article said, the patent covers what is essentially web-style advertising in a book. Nothing about it is mind-boggling, earth-shaking, or otherwise patentable [i.e., no reason to sue]. Even if there was reason, you could implement it in a method that is entirely outside the umbrella of the patent.

As for the idea itself, it's definitely not whiz-bang. However, it's workable. It's low-overhead. It's tenable for content producers and content consumers (read: an eBook turned offline webpage).

Bottom-line: if you have a passion for it, just do it.
From the section "A language-advocacy digression":

This article doesn’t attempt to suggest the addition of an until statement to Python. Although I think such a statement would make some code clearer, and this article displays how easy it is to add, I completely respect Python’s philosophy of minimalism. All I’m trying to do here, really, is gain some insight into the inner workings of Python.
Patent application != having a patent. Regardless of what's in the application, you shouldn't let it stop you from fleshing out the idea. It's a good market, and a good idea.
Where was the dba-running-with-scissors photo taken? Also, could we get the performance charts in your slides without the 3d-perspective? It's hard to tell relative performance from the angle.
Massive data (#hadoopsummit)
I think Business 2.0 was pretty close to that. Personally I enjoyed it very much, but sadly it was shuttered several years ago.
MicroSoft Kin is dead to no suprise, not even MS
The margin of error is often meant as one standard deviation. And for normal distributed data, only around 66% of values lie within that.
I'll be happy remail copies (of both issues if you want) to anyone who wants to PayPal me the money for the mag plus shipping to their country (from the UK). Email is in profile.

Just ordered my copy, last month's was great!
Perhaps A was even derived from some real results? And they just made up A for the cross tabs?
See my reply to heresy :)
Considering Google has only paid out approx $30 million to Apple's $1 billion in app sales, that's pretty sad considering how many android devices are out there. An app developer might make more money on BREW than on Android.
Man, Microsoft seems desperate these days. It's getting sad, really, like watching someone grasp at straws as they sink into quicksand... albeit the quicksand is made of gold.
Popular Haskell Packages: Q2 2010 report
Forgive me if I am making a baseless accusation, but is your sketch art copied from XKCD?
Based on administering some 15 or so servers at work, I'd full-heartedly recommend Ubuntu Server. We started out with CentOS but are now (slowly) migrating to Ubuntu Server.

Ubuntu has a wider selection of more up-to-date packages and lots of handy helpers (like tasksel and other config wizards) that will make your life a lot easier.

For anyone who suggests that Ubuntu is for desktops, not servers, remember that the Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia exclusively on Ubuntu servers. [Citation: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/wikimedia]
I wonder if its just coincidence that the cursor is on column 42 of the first line in the image?
I am sorry for all those talented folks who work there that have to endure this kind of mismanagement. Keeping their faith must require almost toxic quantities of corporate-issued Kool-Aid...
Well ... Scheme is the only big Lisp that guarantees TCO, while Clojure provides a recur special form plus a syntax for mutual recursion, since the JVM as of yet does not directly support TCO.

Obviously some (many?) implementations of Common Lisp provide it, but I'm not sure it's something you can particularly depend upon (I got out of the Common Lisp community in ... 1984 and haven't seriously used it since then).

Then again, I myself wouldn't necessarily describe Common Lisp as a modern Lisp anymore, it's essentially been frozen in amber when it standardized and it's filled with legacy cruft, perhaps most especially it being a Lisp-2. Scheme's standardization process has become glacial, but there is one (well, two, RnRS and the SRFIs). Clojure is much like Lisp Machine Lisp in the early days, although it should be past the worst of breaking changes by now.
I imagine this was a case where everything was in planning and development for a long time and they thought maybe they could take a shot in the dark at recouping those costs, knowing full well that it would probably fail. Should have just canned the project and devoted the resources to Windows Phone 7 as soon as that was deemed the future for their mobile division. Textbook lesson in how not to handle sunk costs.
In Canada this largely comes down to a question of intent. If you set up your website with the intention of making money from donations, the income is taxable. If you set up your website because you wanted to tell the world how fantastic your cat is, it's not taxable income. The same rule -- "are you doing this with the intention of making money" -- applies in deciding if expenses are tax-deductable.

Of course, I am not a tax lawyer, and the laws in the USA are probably different from the laws in Canada -- but I'd still guess that you'll probably have to pay tax.
Yes please! I would also like to subscribe.

And please do charge more, I'd like to think you're getting something out of this!
It's a great question. The same should be asked of many recent Microsoft initiatives. It's okay to roll the dice, but someone somewhere should have noticed.

My friends on the Kin team seem to have been caught by surprise. Those of us who watched for years from the outside: less so.
I'm kind of tired of AdMob numbers being trotted out to show Android is gaining. As others have pointed out, AdMob is primarily an Android thing, so of course they'll see growth. I love to see Android growing and succeeding, but these numbers are basically useless as a comparison. Perhaps once iAds is out, comparing the iAds numbers and AdMob numbers could explain some stuff, but for now they can't paint a good picture of the numbers for Apple.
Swedish Furniture Name Generator
You should delete this post immediately. The penalties for knowingly violating a patent are much higher.
Funny thing about Motley Fool and Apple.

In 2005, I took Motley Fool's advice and sold my Apple stock. Their argument then was that the company had nowhere to go because the Windows PC market was too entrenched, especially with businesses. Maybe they could sell a few more iPods or something, but no real big growth potential. I had gotten about 50% growth to show for my investment, so I cashed out while I was ahead. 30-some bucks a share.

I wish I could find the article, but it's ancient by internet standards, and probably buried by a couple of CMS migrations. My experience is only one data point, but oh wow were they wrong on that one.
It is; actually there should be an attribution somewhere on there - thanks for the catch (not sure where it went)
Well ultimately you'll be the judge of whether a market is large enough--it just depends on your goals really. As far as actually quantifying it though, there's several methods.

I personally think the easiest traditional way of doing it is called the break down method. This involves taking a total population, and then applying various percentages to whittle that number down until you got your target market. To illustrate, lets say you're selling an iPod hookup for cars. You're targeting US only so you have the total population n. You also know that x% of people drive cars and that y% of people own an iPod. To get your market size you multiply n by x and y--voila.

A less traditional way of doing all of this involves a little facebook hack I've been tinkering with. If you go through the process of creating an ad on their network, it will give you the number of users for the various filters you place on it (you can specify your demographic by location, age, sex, keywords, education etc etc). In certain areas of the world the % of people on Facebook is so high that you can basically use this figure as a solid estimation. I haven't tested this for accuracy but it works well enough for most purposes.
I always thought one of MS's great strengths is that they stick with things, even if early iterations are not successful. Windows and the XBox being two examples. Here they dipped their toes into into a whole new market (phones -- but not smart phones), and just a few months later they drop the whole thing. Not what I would have expected from MS.
keep in mind, being cool doesn't always make you a good leader, but being a good leader is always cool.
Foursquare Hides Privacy Breach as it Gets $20M in VC Funding
The problem is that the shot and its planning sure inflated the loss of the whole mess.

You work for a company. There is no reason to keep your project, or your division, running longer than its useful life.
Google News Has Major Redesign: Personalization, Sharing & News Stream Offered
I'm sure somebody made a wonderful PowerPoint presentation for it.
No, but that's the only contact info listed for Dixon on his homepage or on Hunch. I say this as the author of the article.
Amarino: Android meets Arduino
That's what I generally do as well...
July winner of Intel Atom dev program $10K: Snapact Photo Manager
> A shift from red to a green will make babies cry.

Yes. I want to share a design an unqualified team member once seriously proposed: http://img.skitch.com/20100630-m473a35wsrcwsis547mmxjetcq.pn...
> My friends on the Kin team seem to have been caught by surprise

And that's the whole point. There must have been some serious reality distortion inside the company for this project to go on for as long as it did. It was obvious, from anyone but the most clueless on the outside, it was doomed. Why smart people inside the company could not realize it will be studied for decades and will spawn many papers and books.
It sounds like you've observed some of what's going on at MS more closely than most of us here. Care to elaborate?
Solitude and Leadership: If you want others to follow, learn to be alone
Yes, Tesla is cool, but it's also likely several years away from profitability

I think an investment advice without a timeframe is not good advice. So for someone who is expecting a capital gain in 10 years from now this is not the best advice.

I'm all for buying into Tesla when it's at least closer to proving itself

This contradicts two rules of stock markets: (1) Buy the rumor, sell the news and (2) Buy cheap, sell expensive.
CatN: PHP Platform as a Service
You might want to have a look at Haskell's Software Transactional Memory (STM).

It solves all your concurrency problems in the same sense that garbage collection solves all your memory problems. I.e. you can still make a mess, but it's harder to do so, and it's less effort to build something that doesn't break.
Android 3.0: leaked details hint at tablet potential
http://programmerpuzzlers.com/

Contains logic and (eventually) pseudo-coding puzzles, but all fitting into the realm of brain benders and technical interview questions.
ok, thanks for the clarification :)
Out of curiosity, does YC give have a marketing team that helps the startups get this kind of publicity?
It would be fun to see these all expressed in Common Lisp's LOOP language, and interesting if any of them didn't work very well.

LOOP is a form of crack.
Such languages often gladly borrow ideas introduced by Lisps and make them available to larger groups of people. While the world would be a very different place if more people used Lisp than other languages, half a century of history suggest that that will not happen soon.
MeeGo for handsets makes its first appearance (Intel+Nokia Linux phone UI)
Um... that's true of buying any stock, right? So I'm not sure the logic allows you to make any kind of comparative decision.
and...you wont get shutdown :)
When I imagine riding the bus, I would never expect fancy web pages and automated credit card processing. You want modern efficiency, try the airport.

Bus travelers purchase tickets in person, on the day of travel, with wadded up old paper currency. That's the way it's always been, and always will be.
We do introduce startups to reporters, but we weren't responsible for this one.
"Several months ago, when we were all sitting on Jeff Bezos’s bumper drinking orange Mad Dog and trying not to be noticed, we heard a voice in the distance yelling "You kids better not scratch my Mercedes or I’m calling the cops!"

We ran. It was later that night when Amazon came by the house and said they liked our style and also wanted to get that money we owed them for messing up the chrome. We like to think that our relationship with Amazon will continue at this level for many, many, many years to come."

I just thought this deserved a special space on the HN thread.
This was a disconcerting read - as I read it I realised that I was used to skimming over paragraphs to get the important point of each. In this article every sentence, every clause, is important. I had to concentrate, and I enjoyed it.
Wow, that was fast. Maybe I should buy a Kin as a collectors item.
Difficult is totally subjective. It's probably the most resource intensive just because of how many different pages there are, but to me that's not what makes a problem difficult.

Also, I could see this ranking high for consumer-level problems, but there are way more difficult (both resource intensive AND hard to figure out) and interesting problems when you look at some of the business applications.
Bah! Not only is slow shipping disturbingly cheap, but it's like Christmas when it finally shows up because you completely forgot that you'd bought anything!
Science and code writers. The perfect combination.
I think coding assignments should also include style check/marking. A university should pick whatever standards out there and follow it for most of the situations. Preferably a standard that is used by the industry (For Java, follow SUN/Checkstyle, for C++ follow Google or some other open source project)

Students should write assignment code as if it's their professional job to do so even if they're not majoring in CS.

They should:

- Write unit-test (doesn't matter if they want to practice TDD or not, as long as when submitted, there should be minimum X unit-tests or so)

- Be given access to source code repository, and they have to write informative logs

- Write decent comments and learn how to use a template license at the top of their code (make all code GPL or BSD, doesn't matter, it's just an assignment and it's just a way to show them the importance of code license).

Yes, it sounds silly for just an assignment, but then again, they are students. Most of them needs to be taught/told.

And yes, sometime these things could be gamed as there is no hard-fast rule especially in terms or marking (i.e. subjectives), but the TA and instructor should mark them based on their effort (for the subjective parts)... even if it's just a checklist.

At least we're forcing a bit of a good habit to them.
I wonder if Roz Ho will resign or go into early retirement...
First - do everyone a favor and throw this "If I say bullshit enough people will think I'm good at spotting it" mindset out. While you're at leave the "there's a lot of loser talk in this thread" talk to trolls.

Second - Why in gods name would you teach yourself to view people so one dimensionally? You sound like a College Admissions rep only interested in a persons GPA.

I appreciate the basic notion, that execution matters more than words but I wouldn't waste my breath telling my naive self that. I was far too naive to take that advice to heart. And I surely wouldn't tell myself to not be the first to give someone a second chance.

I don't know what I'd tell myself, I haven't put my mind there yet, but I do know for damn sure that it wouldn't involve such a cold finite tone.
Thanks for the interest guys, but the job is coding for a large, very expensive machine. No way to do this remotely.
Looking at the raw numbers from Apple and Google (not AdMob's!), Android's supremacy is looking increasingly inevitable.

At the Droid X launch, Google claimed 160,000 activations a day, which translates to a run rate of almost 60 million devices a year. More importantly, the Android growth rate looks like an exponential curve up at this point. Google's announcements show a 60% growth in Android over the past 3 months.

In the long run, Apple simply can't match those numbers. Their install base will give them the lead for another year, and their total unit sales will continue to grow, but the marketshare future looks like it belongs to Android.
Alternatives to Google’s Feedburner
Wow, this thread seems so bizarre to me. Basically a collective sentiment of "I can't believe how stupid they are for having tried this thing that didn't work out."

"Failing" has become such a well-liked buzz word in the last couple years, unless you're a company people don't like, in which case it is awful.
I know. What's next, enterprise microblogging in Office?

zing
I'm curious as to what made anyone there think it was a good idea to introduce a new line of phones with a new OS separate from their main phone OS. WP7 seems like it's going to be a hard enough sell already; the smartphone business looks like it's going to be between Apple and everyone else, with everyone else running Android.
Facebook App Is Finally iOS 4-Compatible. Fast App Switching, High Rez Graphics
I tried to register and the verification link from/for the mail gives me a 404.

Edit: Easy to fix. Replace http://metaoptimize.com/qa/qa/account/validate/ by http://metaoptimize.com/qa/account/validate/
Thank you so much for your comments. Btw - am adding push for locations so you will know when you are close to a tasks location
Oh hey! This is my project! (Actually its really Jeremy Ashkenas', I just ported it to Python).

Please fork it on GitHub and make it cooler!
That might be a sign that your typical workweek is too stressful. For most jobs I've had, it took zero or one day to wind me down. My most stressful job (as a middle school teacher) took me two days to wind down.
Untreed Reads Launches GreenPass Discount Program | Untreed Reads Publishing
Or am I wrong thinking that MySQL has more and different scenarios production install than PG?

Yes, you are wrong.
You should look at the total market for the parent product, and come up with a reasonable percentage of those users who will buy your add-on. For example, if there are 5 million iPhone users, and 5% buy a screen protector, then you're looking at a total available market of 250,000.

From here, you'll have to figure out what percentage of the market you can reach, etc.
And devoting resources to Win Phone 7 is going to be a big win? How does one know? What if Kin caught on and Win Phone 7 flopped? Some people would be praising the Kin team and others would be making fun of MS for wasting their time with Win Phone 7.

I think all of these mobile efforts by MS are doomed, but I don't see why Kin was a worse idea than WP7.
I don't think that starting late would have been your issue. Most people tend to avoid risks, and like to live easier life any given day.
I am 26, and I asked my friends to join my startup when I was 25, still no one seems to want to take that risk.
Also, location might be a big factor. Here in Dallas, Texas, not many people want to jump into startups straight away.
In my case, the problem was also not so well defined, and there's not too many people working on this. Except some BIG corps.

I am also doing everything myself, until this point at least. i do have a co founder, but he is a busy man (Department head of CS form my university.)

I am also doing everything alone, that too on the side (I had to start doing a job some 6 months after starting my startup, due to financial and immigrations issues).

So, here I am , a 26 year old, immigrant startup founder, who doesn't know how to get more people (or if I want more people).
I am getting to know and learn a lot more, and I am doing it very cheap. So successful or not, personally I think I will gain a lot.
My question really was due to the fact that I might be failing soon enough, and more and more I see my friends and they all SEEM to be enjoying more and relaxing more doign their regular jobs.
So, I am more afraid I might not be able to do more later on, and do any more startups if this one fails.

Somewhere in my head, at least I know one person who did it in his 40s. Gives me some level of confidence that it's not too late.
Also, hearing all these stats about younger guys doing it and succeeding, Zuck and the likes, doesn't boost confidence either. Quite few times, I end up thinking, maybe this is it, after I am old, I might not be able to do it, since not so many people seem to be doing successful statups, or at least we don't hear about them much.
Senator Leahy on Bilski - "it's time for Congress to act" on patent reform
A request for student pricing to Panic was denied last March :(

It would be awesome if more smaller dev companies remembered what it was like to be college students.

http://imgur.com/46bQA.png
being a good leader is always cool

like when you need to make tough decisions and fire people?
Cheers for all the comments guys its great to get feedback - will get back to fixing up the not so good bits
Indeed. It'll be interesting to see if people use Maxine VM a lot to run Java stuff on a xen/micro-kernel environment.