skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might be too young to remember the days when MS ruled with an iron fist. When they got IBM to use their DOS, they structured the licensing so that the only affordable one was to pay MS for every box that went out the door, no matter which OS was on it. So a shop could either sell only MS-DOS, or not offer it at all, and any shop that didn't offer it couldn't stay in business, once IBM "approved" of MS-DOS.

When they came out with any software, they chose the most confusing name possible. "Windows" was a generic term for any the panes in windowing GUI, until MS appropriated the word. Then came "Word", which sounded like about all the competition out there. Once they had the OS market sewn up, they used that to make their other software work better than anyone elses, with undocumented APIs. Then they offered "bundles" which meant, if you used their OS, which of course every business had to, you couldn't afford to turn down their other offerings. This might sound like fair, tough competition, but the reality was that they used their money and clout to run the competition out of business, then their de facto monopoly to make a fortune.

And tough but fair, often gave way to threats. If a retailer didn't play ball, getting rid of competition, they would pull their joint marketing/advertising deals. If a small business came up with anything interesting, they'd swallow it, or run it out of business by any means necessary. This did more to stifle innovation for about 15 years than anything else.

This is only the beginning of why people don't like MS. If we were to all post here, it would become an encyclopedia.
"Too Small to Fail"?
Another thumbs-up for WiredTree. Reasonably priced given the level of support you get (even low-priority tickets typically get responses within minutes). Nice control panel, too.
I'm having trouble finding a distinction between crash-only software and software with good error handling. If the software (or bank or government or whatever) crashes and then restarts gracefully and automatically, I don't see how it could be said to have crashed.
I don't think the EFF have a particularly anti-copyright position. I mean, EFF cofounder Mitch Kapor was the cofounder of Lotus, which definitely did not give its software away for free. It seems his main motivation in the early days was a worry that a computer-cracking backlash would go too far and violate civil liberties (e.g. in the infamous Steve Jackson Games case), which isn't the same as thinking that computer cracking is a good thing. The organization now has similar concerns about whether the anti-piracy backlash is sufficiently respecting due process, protecting the rights of people who are in fact innocent, etc.

Somewhat more true of Creative Commons, but they still have an opt-in view of it: they'd like to promote a world where many people give away their music for free, under various definitions of "free" (may include e.g. no-commercial-use clauses), but it's strictly voluntary if you want to use a CC license or not.
Be very wary of SproutCore. It is not only a Rich Internet Application framework. It is also a MVC framework in javascript, which adds a lot of complexity to the design (mostly when compared to GWT and cappucinno).

On the other hand, its designer tool is the only free one among javascript frameworks. However, it is quite new, and a bit buggy.
Thanks. That's what I get for posting to HN via iPad...
In the 1990's Microsoft forced every computer vendor to pay them for a DOS license regardless of whether they shipped DOS on the PC (did this apply to Windows?) They basically killed any chance of a competing OS in the PC world (4DOS, Quarterdeck, BeOS, Unix, OS/2). The US govt eventually forced them to stop this practice, but it was too late by then. Competition all dead.

Another example, they built the browser into the operating system, thus killing of Netscape. Once they did that they let IE stagnate for several years, providing no innovation (IE6 is 2001). We are finally crawling out of that hole. IE9 is going to be good because it has competition and Microsoft now must compete or see further erosion in their browser market share.

In short, because Microsoft has a desktop monopoly (90% for 15 years), and they've used it aggressively, they make people a bit unhappy. Personally, I don't care if people choose to use Windows, but many people don't want to, yet they must because of "corporate standards."

The only other thing that bugs me is people always want the govt to look into Apple and Google. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Microsoft still has this huge 90% market share. If it could be reduced to 70%, for example, everyone would benefit, including Microsoft users. What's the reason to go after a couple of "small" fish nipping at the heals of Microsoft?
My limited experience so far echoes this. I'm in the middle of scratching an itch my wife has in such a way that it's useful to more people than just her, and part of that is a mobile application.

Sencha (and jQTouch before it) is absolutely gorgeous; I wanted very much to fall in love with it. On a webkit browser on my desk, it produced visually stunning results.

And then I tried using it with both an iPhone 3G and a G1. Yes, they're old tech, but they're the hardware I have on hand right now to test on (and not exactly uncommon in the field), and performance is abysmal.

I would assume the same tests run against an iPhone 4 or an HTC Evo would blow me away, but my wife has a G1, and I'm building this for her first. :)
Apache works on Windows too! In my experience, most companies ditched IIS for Apache because it was better. Not to mention a lot of companies building web products for Windows that build on Apache.. That would increase Apache usage numbers too.
Correct, I think for the most part it would be a bad way to test code. The only reason I included *.erb is for when I am editing the content/design of a page. Like changing a h2 to a h3 or something like that.
Thanks for the straight-to-the-point advice, much appreciated!

The home page can be tightened up a bit - message and presentation. You're right about the text contrast, my parents had issues with that too. :-/

5. The name is supposed to be giga (as in billions) and yo as in "hi!". Basically using advertising to broadcast yourself to humanity. Though, we may have been eating yogurt in the name brainstorming session.

7. Tour section is needed. Working on some videos to help with this.
A project that you never start is guaranteed to not be revenue-generating.
As someone who moved from Indiana to NYC, I applaud you. You don't realize how many opportunities you're missing until you move to a big city.

The fact that a week ago, I decided to randomly google 'tech meetups' and find one that was meeting the next morning with 20+ high quality entrepreneurs was ridiculous.
What do you do for a living?
I like the one-liner and the three simple steps. "Beautiful" is a great word, isn't it? Do you have a marketing background? Quick, great advice. Thanks!
I just bought a netbook with Windows 7 starter, and I did not wipe the Windows partition.

That said, the only reason I'm trotting out that installation is to test my sites on IE. Otherwise, It's Ubuntu all the way. Probably Android when Intel releases the Froyo build. Also maybe Chrome, just for fun.

In other words, the only reason I'm keeping Windows is I like playing with barely functional software. (I kid, I kid. Though it did hang for 4 hours on the logout screen.)
We also use Ocaml here (Citrix), and people agree that Ocaml seems to be going nowhere. Some projects have started switching to Haskell.
That's a fair point -- a crash handled gracefully & completely sorta ceases to be a crash at all. I think one distinction the authors of the original paper make is that an app's off switch ought to be external to the app. More like "kill -9" than "exit"; more like pulling the plug than pressing a "power down" button.
> I started off hating Python as well. I could not stand a language that didn't terminate statements without semicolons! :)

I have exactly the opposite heuristic for syntax. The only thing worse than semicolons and curly braces, are `begin' and `end'.
All that is just syntactic sugar.

print "comma prevents a newline from being printed",

print >> sys.stderr, "Any file object can be used"

The change to a function is purely for consistency, not functionality.
for most, that depends on your market / business plan. salary can be the biggest in some cases, but inventory is a big thing for us.
Web Server share is definately going to Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if you could flip those numbers (20% Win, 70%+ Linux)

Server encompasses a much bigger sphere than 'web-server'. It's in the back room of your local council, the car parts company with a few stores across a couple of states, and all those damn sharepoint installs..
Not really broken. BSD-style locks work fine, although I suppose I have never had the occasion to only want to lock certain bytes in a file.
Thanks for the compliment and feedback.

That edit link has been a bit of a pain. Agreed, that we need to make that action stand out.
In the real world, unfortunately, if you need to challenge the faulty logic of your opponent, you already lost the argument.
Can a Fetus Feel Pain? U.K. Report Says No. « Ramanan50's Blog
Strictly 3.0, because of backwards compatibility.
I used to use the same keyboard sequence, but since I started using an editor with the ability to "refresh in running browsers", I can attest to value of the reduction in inane repetition. It's nothing life changing, but when you experience it it, the feeling is kind of like the one you have when you first encounter lights that come on automatically when you enter a room: "Hey, cool!"
The only thing I can think of is if they are taking commercial unixes like redhat and suse and comparing them against windows.

Based on the linked sources from the Microsoft blog post, I'm pretty sure that's what they are referring to.
this is relevant to my interests, well, sortof. do you have a link?
tried some of my neighbors. no luck :(. might be a function of the neighborhood i'm in (which doesn't have many wi-fi signals, maybe because it's so far from downtown)
Yes. CouchDB is designed as crash only software, it detects and restarts immediately on crash, and shutting it down is done with kill, not exit.
What's really fun is watching your typical Apple fanboy's face go pale, then red, then pale again as he reads this post and tries so very hard to understand why the world is throwing these numbers at him which prove how small-time Apple is in any area except the one. : )
The Perfect Pizza
just got a shiny new iPhone 4. does anyone have any experience with the tethering feature on the new iPhone?
Another alternative is to use Playground: http://owyheesoftware.com/playground. It works with any text editor.
Stating P=NP Without Turing Machines
Culture Code does look good. Thanks for sharing!

Fortunately for us they aren't one of our competitors. Give us some time, we'll tighten our design, pitch, and feature set.
In 2.7, print is still the print statement by default:

http://docs.python.org/2.7/library/functions.html#print
Thanks for the feedback.

I've run the site through YSlow, so glad you noticed that. 1,2,3 are now on the task list. Thanks again!
this might shed some light on how M$ used to play:

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
The number of users who want to run OS X, Ubuntu or *nix as opposed to Windows is a rounding error, for good reason. Buying a non-Windows PC is simply a mistake unless you're an uber-technical type.
for the record, i have those =)
I am the co-founder of a pro-active server management company, MNX Solutions (http://www.mnxsolutions.com). So I have a bit of a bias.

The best dedicated server provider that we have worked with to date, hands down, is Softlayer.com.

Couple the best server provider, with the best server administrators and you will be heading in the right direction.
How I learned to become a failure
Thanks. Looks like I am going to go with tethering on my shiny new iPhone 4.
Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous?
Perhaps `zip' could help address some of your points?

> 2. List comprehensions kind of suck. [(a, b) for a in as for b in bs] is a cartesian product and not a zip? Really?

Strange. I would say it sucked if it was the other way round. You can use the `zip' function, if you want a zip.

zip (as, bs)

> 3. Loops don't help this either: There's no equivalent of the Lisp (loop for x in xs for y in ys do (stuff x y)). I have to explicitly loop over the index. This pisses me off.

Try the function `enumerate' and `zip'. E.g.

for x,y in zip(xs, ys): stuff (x,y)

If you need an explicit index for your stuff:

for (i, (x,y)) in zip(xs, ys): stuff (x,y)

> 4. I feel that I am generally shoehorned into creating and assigning more objects than I would like.

I agree, only the other way around. Python is much too destructive and relies on in-place updating. E.g. recently we got `sorted' that doesn't sort in-place but return a sorted array --- but the `shuffle' function still works only in-place. Also dicts are destructive. There should be a persistent (i.e. non-ephemeral) data structure for key-value-mappings in the standard library.
I'm not sure what everyone else's experience is, but the MSN Messenger # feels a bit inflated. I'm in Australia so MSN was the dominant chat platform in the early 2000's. But these days if I want someone to chat to -- they're going to be on FBchat and not MSN. (Which also puts MSFT in second place there behind facebook)
The techcrunch article is full of pointless commentary, I recommend just reading the original article: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/06/25...
Another awesome tool to do this is http://xrefresh.binaryage.com/

No vim hack required. However, this is my first hearing of MozRepl(out of the loop I know). I now have a bunch of ideas for interesting things that I can do with it, thanks!
Wow. You are completely misinformed and, I suspect, just trolling (and presuming to instruct others) based upon events you had no connection with and only understand second-hand from others. By the way, your allegation that Microsoft "stole all the simple-sounding names" is just laughable. I'd dissect the rest of your argument but frankly, I got tired of swatting flies like you years ago. The only accurate statement in your entire rant? MS-DOS. And even that's slanted.
> Ruby is incredibly flexible, whereas Python is not. Often times my idea of the way things should be done is not Guido's idea, and so Python seems a bit lacking.

Apropos: Does Ruby optimize tail calls?
Give the link to your Christian activist friends and point out Book of Revelation 13:17-18. That will get some letters and calls to congresscritters.
I have two recommendations for places to look into if you plan on only working for yourself, and not looking for work (unless it is remote contract work).

1. Oaxaca, Mexico - I lived there for a year while working on a startup and loved every minute. It's really cheap (my wife and I spent about $1100 a month in total, and had a great lifestyle). It's a beautiful city, with lots to do, and is close to some great hiking and only about 5 hours from gorgeous beaches. It's also very safe these days. The drawback is being completely isolated from the tech community.

2. Missoula, Montana - This is a great little college town about 3 hours away from where I grew up. I stayed a couple of nights there in 2008 and was blown away by how much it had changed in the time I had been gone. It's super cheap, gorgeous (great hiking, skiing, biking is all around you), the people are genuinely friendly and laid back, and there are great micro-breweries and pubs everywhere. Again, the drawback is being isolated from the tech community.

I hope you find what you're looking for.
Spoke to my partners and we have a discussion scheduled for first thing Monday. Thanks for the input.
This interview is gold in so many different ways. Of course, there's the predictions that are laughable now:

>We are involved in a new generation of fax machines that we think will be better and easier to use. And a generation of screen phones [a standard phone with a minicomputer] in which the typically cryptic buttons are replaced with a graphics interface. And in the home environment, something you can carry in your pocket called the Wallet PC.

>PLAYBOY: In your pocket?

>GATES: It's a futuristic device unlike today's personal digital assistants.

But it also shows the human side of Gates (his family nickname is Trey) and how really intelligent and quick he is. A lot of clueless people think he's just a corporate raider, incomparable to Jobs, they're quite wrong. I've heard many stories from my friends at Microsoft about him interacting directly with engineers, asking very sport on questions. Believe me, this kind of thing is rare in some other tech companies, where MBA types rule. Not many people could have handles an interview like this one.

I also remembered once again how good the articles and fiction on Playboy used to be. Yea, yea, "I read it for the articles" is a common joke, but do you realize that many top writers, including Oates, Updike, Nabokov, and (this seemed incredible) Borges have published stories there?
haha I would love to see that. WHAT ABOUT A VIDEO TERMS OF SERVICE. you can't click next until the ToS is over
If you ever want to be taken seriously, grow up and knock it off with the childish M$ stuff.
I think that the recent case with Bradley Manning demonstrated that even though WikiLeaks provides anonymity to the people who submit the materials, it is still possible to track down the whistle blower anyway and if cases like this were to repeat, people would not submit anything to WikiLeaks for the fear that they will be discovered anyway.

Edit: Huh, I was not aware of the fact that Manning was caught because Adrian Lamo revealed his name to the investigators.
the best way I've found to get people to read it is to have AT MAX 3 points ie:

don't abuse the site, we will kick you out
don't whine, nobody likes a whiner
if you do anything sketchy, we will remove it

legalease will only save you if you can prove that your user read it... which is difficult to say the least
I think philosophically, it would be wrong to refer to subconscious drives, etc. as "knowledge", much as you cannot know a falsehood (you can only believe in it). That's why there's no category of "unknown knowns".
jason fried is not going to be happy with this guy haha
And the nerds will tear down their walls with the cry of "REMEMBER STACKER" in their throats.
Doesn't Google App Engine provide some of this for free? You upload versions, change which one is deployed, and can easily roll back at a moment's notice. It's not as swift or sexy as multiple configurations in the same code, but still far nicer than managing it yourself.
Hmm...I guess we have a backup plan if things don't work out. Yeah, we may want to up the professionalism.

P.S. To be clear, we don't condone the use or actions of gigolos. And, I am kidding about the backup plan. ;)

P.P.S Thanks for the feedback!
I kinda like the New England exurbs. I went to high school in Central Massachusetts - that area is gorgeous (bucolic farms, forests, fall foliage small country roads), and yet it's still only 45 minutes away from Boston/Cambridge if you want to go to events in the city. There're a lot of towns like that in the Boston area - once you get outside of the 128 belt, the population drops off dramatically, and yet you're still fairly close to the city.

Only problem is property values - the prettier low-density towns that happen to be close to the city (Weston, Lexington, Carlisle, Concord, Bedford) now have houses that are going for $1M+. If you're willing to live an hour or so outside of the city, though, you can still get some really affordable stuff in Groton, Pepperell, Bolton, Acton, Littleton, etc.

I'm kinda wondering if there's anything similar in other metropolitan areas. The Bay Area is pretty much a lost cause: if you want forests, there's Portola or Woodside (for like $5M a house), Marin (ditto) or the Berkeley hills (tritto), while if you want something halfway affordable like Dublin or Pleasanton, it's suburban strip malls all around.

Portland, OR maybe? I know there's an urban growth boundary, but are there any pretty wooded neighborhoods in the Portland area? At least property values there haven't skyrocketed, last I heard.
Yes, FBchat serves as a quick medium to chat with friends; but once I want to go in a long chat (and may be video/audio), FBchat is unreliable (slow/disconnect).
It is an interesting market!

And, best of luck to you!
"To be honest, I just don't like the culture here. Although I've grown up here and have friends, gf, etc. here, "professionally" I feel alone. I'm one of only very few tech-minded entrepreneurs. I hack alone. It's not uncommon for me to go 48 hours without leaving my apartment."

It sounds like you need to put in more effort to find other hackers in your area. Scour Twitter and search for user groups in your area, or start your own! In the OKC area you're bound to find some if you look hard enough. Remember, most hackers take the passive quiet-path (like you) and may not leave their apartment.

There's plenty here in the Midwest, you just have to look a bit harder for it.
There is usually about 1-2 weeks of nice spring weather in May/June. I like spring in New England more than spring anywhere else, because you know that if you blink, it'll be gone. So it's time to have classes outside and enjoy the nice weather and go for a bikeride or something.

Here in California, it's spring all year round, and so we sit at our computers and ignore it most of the time.
A special report on debt. Repent at leisure
If you're on Linux and use a different browser you can do the same using xdotool.

autocmd BufWriteCmd *.html,*.css,*.haml :call Refresh_browser()
function()! Refresh_browser()
if &modified
write
silent !xdotool search --class google-chrome key ctrl+r
endif
endfunction
Thanks for diving into the source and including a suggestion!

I see what you mean. We'll keep this in mind when we revise the front page.
I was very confused when I saw this link. There is another program called xrefresh that forces X11 to redraw all applications.