skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you had asked in 1994 what would kill Windows/Office, would you have understood the answer of "people want to socialize with their friends"?

The same thing will happen here for a timeline of 5-10 years: Facebook will likely be the dominant player in an old and boring space called social networking.

Maybe virtual reality will be big (people walking around with really helpful devices in their pockets/on their eyes), or something you can't even think of.
If you're frequently on-the-go, without your own laptop?

If you're on a restricted machine where you can't install anything, or have other install restrictions (hello, iPad! ;-))?

If you're on a shared computer where it wouldn't be nice to overwrite someone else's config files?

If you're on a mobile device?

If it allowed you do stuff that would be difficult or impossible to do with a local text editor? Like editing and testing web code live, without even perhaps a "save" command?

[Note: I'm not the OP and I don't actually want a web-based text editor for myself, but these are reasons that came to me in the first 2 minutes of thinking about it.]
uhhhh that seems incredibly unlikely to me, given his public persona, at least. i can't imagine how a man who started the Gates Foundation would ever do such a thing.
Interesting. guess I should keep my half baked theories to myself. :)

That said.. I wonder what in the world the browsers reporting themselves as 3.6.5pre actually are...
Robert Shiller, Long time Professor of Yale University does economics the best justice I've ever heard.

http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets/content/down...
You might feel that way, but lots of politicians and commentators would decry that as "evil, greedy drug companies making a profit off sick people".
See my other reply:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1465601
It's not just in the math sense. Everyone I know who's met him (including some of the very smartest people I know) have been very impressed by his ability to quickly grasp the fundamentals and even the minor consequences of a particular idea or action.
Here in Australia, the quad-core Mac Pro is $3600 AUD, and I've built myself a similarly spec'd machine for about $2000 AUD. This included some extras, like an external pro sound card, which I highly recommend to hackintosh builders as it negates having to mess around getting the chipset sound working. That said, in my case getting onboard audio working was as simple as installing the VoodooHDA kext, but as mentioned in the article YMMV.
You're Going To Need A Bigger Boat: Solving Biz Problems Before It's Too Late
Software doesn't require clinical trials before it is approved for use. So this argument really doesn't convince me; the capital bar to new products in the medical field is truly staggering.
The "pre" version numbers are used for nightlies and are not always kept up to date. For example, current nightlies are still labeled "3.7a6pre" even though Firefox 3.7 was renamed Firefox 4 weeks ago, and the next release will probably be Firefox 4.0b1.
The fact that I instantly recognized this problem case (having had it many times myself) makes me sad.

I'm so incredibly happy that 95% of the code I write now is in Python.
This article reminds me vividly why, at my Alma mater, EVERY engineer (even EEs and CEs) were REQUIRED to take a class in their freshmen or sophomore year called "Manufacturing Process & Materials Design".

It was basically a fancy academic term for "shop class".

We made gears, arc welded (still have a scar from that), cut screw threads, riveted sheet metal, worked milling machines & saws, turned fixtures on lathes, and glued/bagged/baked carbon fiber.

At a very visceral hands-on level were introduced to the materials, workflows, and structural fastening tech that makes up the shells and supporting frameworks of physical goods.

At the time, it was a royal pain in the ass (I'm not a natural kinesthetic learner) and I didn't "get it", but looking back it was an extremely valuable experience.

Aside from the welding scar on my left thumb, I think the biggest takeaway was gaining an appreciation for the EXTREME ROI gained in designing processes which have "loose" tolerances where it's acceptable and "tight" tollerances where it's required.
I was simply making a point that there are people that have a strong financial interest that a cure would compromise. That's simply a fact. I didn't go any further than that because I'm sure I'm less qualified to do that than many others here.

My cynical side might think that there are people that would go a long way to protect their financial interests.
Your business idea probably sucks.
Coral snake antivenom is a similar thing - the last manufacturer left a supply of a few years that is now running out, but the process for approving a new manufacturer for the same drug is so expensive that the market won't support it.

So first responders in Florida have a problem. No coral snake antivenom.

A similar market situation applies to flu shots.

The current system favors "maintenance pharmaceuticals", not cures. Who wouldn't prefer to have a cash cow that costs the customer a few hundred dollars every month for the rest of their life, in comparison with something that actually cured them? A cure isn't very lucrative at all.

Generally, free marketeers protest that this isn't true, in the face of all evidence I can see, but look at the business logic; it's inescapable.
No idea, Apple may require a valid OSX/Mac serial number before registering a developer.
I had a job where my boss expected our small group of consultants to maintain this "talk to clients a bit and then pull a rabbit out of your hat without further feedback" approach. It's good to hear it broken down in the article.

For my ex-boss, this "magician" image was what justified a consultant's high fees. Our actual assignment was a complete failure on multiple levels. Among those levels, what I think is the most awful part of the create-a-gold-plated-thingy-that-'just-works' paradigm is that it discards the human interaction part of development.

"Make it 'just work'" is a problematic meme now that it has come to permeate society (Apple Computer's huge prestige clearly being a driver of this). The problem I see is that algorithms/designs/platforms/technologies that "just work" make the trade-offs involved invisible to the end user but the end user is still effected by them and sooner or later they need to actually think about the trade-offs. Certainly, making your program "just work" - ie, not require excess thought, training or manual configuration on the part of the client, can be a good thing. The problem is when this approach dominates the entirety of design and development.
I rolled my own little web IDE back in the day so that I could build out a PHP project while backpacking around the world. Part of that was a text editor that handled block indenting correctly and corrected for TEXTAREA's annoying way of dealing with doubleclicks to select text.

It was actually pretty nice, traveling without a laptop and simply dropping into an internet cafe and firing up any browser to get to work.

Naturally, the main issue was that you could only use interpreted languages like PHP with it. Django and Rails weren't even on the horizon at that point, so once I conclusively proved to myself that PHP is just not worth the hassle, I picked up a fast laptop and a copy of VS.NET and haven't looked back.
That's Toronto on the second item.
Drawings of Scientists by kids
Filing bankruptcy on student loans
It seems to have worked! Bovine are plentiful, but you rarely see cloakers :-D
I think this approach also works very well for post-alpha projects. Often enough, the secret to satisfaction is patience combined with low expectations.
> The largest freshwater lake is not lake Superior, but lake Michigan-Huron.

It's actually neither if they are compared by volume and not the surface area, in which case the largest lake is Baikal.
Pro Tips:
- You may be tempted to get a shiny new GTX 480 (Fermi) or Radeon HD 5xxx. They don't work yet, not even in a real Mac Pro (despite Apple's recent 10.6.4 update.)
- You can actually clone your previous Mac's OSX install and keep all your programs and settings. No need to install from scratch most of the time. The real issue is getting the bootloader to work and your hardware working.
I just cannot get over this one (it is 3rd on the list in the Physics section) -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_transit-time_fallacy#.22P...
Here in Germany studiVZ is the leading social platform. studiVZ started off as a clone of facebook and they're still pretty much stuck on the initial version.

facebook only recently started to slowly gaining traction here.

Given that facebook is functionally (news feed, apps) and visually (less obtrusive adds) way superior to facebook the main reason for the slow adoption is surely that "everybody" is on studiVZ.

Given that facebook is real good executed I don't see any way it's getting serious competition anytime soon.
Foursquare Poised to Get New VC Funding
Absolutely, someone who uses only Microsoft technologies and tools is... impaired.

On the other hand, perfectly good things like C# (especially with LINQ and ASP.NET MVC) are being dismissed out-of-hand by otherwise reasonable people just because they came from Redmond.
Misleading HN headline...should have kept closer to the original.
Or talk about your Business constantly to iterate on your idea to help achieve a better product/market fit?
It's not significantly cheaper or less risky than developing and deploying a completely new type of car or space ship. So Tesla and SpaceX should not exist.

Developing a drug is also not cheaper than developing a new type of computer chip for use in tablet computers aimed at disrupting the PC market (all attempts thus far have been failures). So by your logic, Apples A4 chip should not exist.

Amazon received about $100 million at their IPO, and considerable pre-IPO money in the hopes of disrupting retail. Also a very risky proposition, which by your logic should never have occurred.
echo "http://news.ycombinator.com | sudo tee /etc/host 127.0.0.1 $1
(Meta: Why is parent on -4? This comment is relevant, and in the light of the article, it might make sense for the OP to discourage themselves from slouching if they associate that with not working hard. If you think garply needs a more comfy chair, don't downvote him, tell him where to buy one!)

It's interesting to see research on this, since it seems to confirm some ideas from NLP on anchoring. I wonder how strong the effect is, and if multiple techniques can be combined, e.g. give your interviewer a soft chocolate cookie and hide a cushion under him when he's not looking? Also, I'd like to know if you can do it without people realising they have been manipulated? Actually, look at Derren Brown's The Heist -- people can be manipulated to an extremely high degree in this way, without even noticing (well, they noticed once they had robbed the security van and met up with Derren...)
Yep, this is as spammy as it seems.
Infecting malware, exploiting holes in the browser, storing data via local/session/appCache, tracking me (google analytics), loading flash, displaying ads, redirecting me to see an ad before the content...

The list goes on and on, sure you can do most of these without javascript, but by that point I've moved on and blacklisted your site.

Is it better to be overly secure, or underly secure?
What killed Windows: the Internet and mobile devices have made the desktop OS less relevant, combined with healthy competition from Apple.

What killed Office: once again, the Internet is making desktop applications obsolete. Enter Google docs.

Socialization is in a different market than office productivity, so "people wanting to socialize with their friends" killing "Windows/Office" seems a non sequitur.
What I mean is you could have full voice signal with no data signal and not know it if you are connected to wifi too. Most areas have at least GPRS, but you can still find some towers that are voice only. Because of this you really don't have an indication of your cellular data. You can assume you have it, which is true most of the time, but you can't know for sure.
Squad, you're killin' me. Couldn't they figure out how to handle the tab key???

If you hit tab, it just eats it (which I guess is better than tabbing you out of the window), but why not simply insert a tab while you're at it? (or is it taking sides on the tabs vs. spaces debate?)
Also, search engines still aren't to the level of a "full browser", meaning that your site should fall back so it can be indexed properly.
If you're willing to spend a bit of time following a guide to set it up properly, your performance shouldn't be much worse than the cards that ship with real Macs. Comparing with Windows, games performance is pretty average (on par with genuine Macs) but I have no trouble with video playback, window draw/effects, and even 3D work in Silo.
No one cares about privacy. At least no significant number of the 500M users of Facebook. At best, maybe a million cares? And I'm being generous. Not even a thorn on Facebook's side.
More like: it's a drawback.

I have a hard time believing the shorting-the-antennas issue was unforeseen by Apple. I give a company that just pulled in a $63.5B year a little more credit.
I went back and edited my comment to include the qualification figuring that someone was eventually going to clarify this. Looks like you commented at the same time I was editing. :)
Both a hackintosh and a VMWare install can be used to develop iPhone apps. (I tried both, before just buying a mac for dev purposes). However, VMWare lagginess and bugginess is a pain even on a high-spec'd machine. And having a real mac is much nicer.
I'll second this. I built a hackintosh 2 years ago that ran 10.5 beautifully (leopard), with quad core, 4GB RAM, 750GB hard drive, for only $800. The problem is that now there is no driver support to run snow leopard, so I'm stuck running an OS from 2 years ago that probably won't be supported much longer, and I can't even install point releases very easily without risk of breaking my system.

So, 2 years later I've got a system that runs Windows or Linux beautifully but isn't really a functional Mac. This can be great for a short time, but just keep in mind that anything you build now will probably not run 10.7 when it comes out next year.
Taste Tests
I do think that this is a somewhat pointless discussion, but it's less a question of preferring another brand to believing that the Apple brand is increasingly harmful to free speech, and not just in a GNU all-software-must-be-free manner, but hewing to the American "I can say whatever I want so long as it's reasonably not going to hurt anyone seriously" manner.

So, it's not just a question of brand, and I think there are some rational reasons to dislike Apple, which may cause irrational outbursts of nonsense.
I look forward to benchmarking the SQLite WAL against the newly integrated Berkeley DB and SQLite. Berkeley DB's btree is also a WAL design with many many years of tuning. It's good for SQLite users to have choice. (Disclaimer: I'm the product manager for Oracle Berkeley DB)
Somewhat OT, but what's the difference between solipsism and solopism? I seem to get the same search results for both.

Just two different spellings of the same thing?
An asteroid.
The main problem with running OSX in VMware is that quartz extreme is not supported, which means many of the apps that support video acceleration are broken. I would imagine that you could do some limited development of iphone apps, but you can forget about doing anything that uses OpenGL or OpenCL.
A lot of the ideas behind very successful businesses suck, so that's not really much of a filter.
And the $1350 build is rougly equivalent to a $3650 Mac Pro.
Well, since Perl was first designed by a linguist, one might think they aren't all of one mindset :)
IF (big if) Facebook's profitability is only illusionary[1], then Facebook could die in an instant. If Facebook's profits only come through churning advertisers, FB could die if the growth that pulled in those advertisers stopped.

It costs real money to keep Facebook's servers running and Facebook's employees working. If a market shift revealed Facebook as a money-sink "as far as the eye can see", then the folks other than Zuckerberg who control that money will want to use it for something else.

One might ask what magic does FB really have for profitability that Myspace didn't have? I'd like to hear how this magic will come from more users in and of itself.

[1] http://blog.jperla.com/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme-0
Throughout history people have refused to submit to immoral government controls and have suffered the consequences. They are to be admired by people who aspire to be free.

The income tax is an assertion that government owns the work of its citizens and has a right to take as much of it as it wants. The majority of citizens accept this claim because they don't want to be fined, imprisoned, or otherwise mistreated.

Taxpayers are slaves on the government plantation, forced to work for the government. When a slave protests and is punished, he should not be called a crank by the other slaves.
The best way to shorten the sales cycle
Quantum memory stores light
Microsoft dubs Windows Phone 7 'ad serving machine'
Men Shop and Women Buy Gadgets: Gender Differences in Shopping Part 1
Ask HN: french HN-minded forum or site to suggest ?
My wife is looking for a french forum/site that would be somewhat similar to HN (she's a lot more fluent in french than in english).

Would you have suggestions ?

thanks!
Pure, naked politics. Flagged.
You seem to have assumed something over here. That,

a) A Start-Up has that type of money
b) They'll be willing to invest in something so risky.

As others have pointed out there are StartUps with the money, but somehow we still don't hear about orphan drugs with potential to make it burst onto the scene. Why not? I think that the second factor is more at play over here. Ultimately it comes down to the cost vs. benefit analysis.

Imagine this you are a VC with a $100 mil. to burn will you support a long and twisted development process of something that might not even work at the end?

You might argue that the benefit is that you might become the up and coming Google of pharma, but try telling that to any smart VC.

This is why we need something more than a profit based industry for something that forms the basis of our society. On one hand people talk about freedom, and especially how it's related to the freedom of the markets, and on the other you trap them with the very failings of their bodies.

Perhaps, I am wrong, but this is something that we all need to think about. What do we value more as a species money or wealth? I wish I knew the answer.
Canvas is not hard to learn: See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/drawing_graphics_with_canva... as a good starting point.
I disagree. People do care about privacy, they just have no way to show it other than to quit facebook and that's something they're not prepared to do.

They'd rather put up with poor privacy controls and keep their account than have no account at all. Just because they're not leaving now, doesn't mean they won't leave when a viable alternative to facebook comes up.
Bill Heller's book A Good Day Has No Rain points to a cloud of radioactive fallout raining onto the Capital District region of New York.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Day-Has-No-Rain/dp/0878755462/ref...

Wood ash from burning firewood can concentrate radioaction levels found in some parts of the Eastern US. Enough above background levels to trip various radiation sensors. Here's what US EPA has to say about this:

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/marssim/docs/marsame/appendixB.p...
well you can disable all the bling-bling, so not so much to worry. IMHO is the new version of konsole really nice, which is actually the KDE program I use the most.
Excellent examples.

A free marketeer, as you say, would say that the reason nobody is making more antivenin is because the "process for applying" is so expensive - but of course, there has to be quality control, and more importantly, there's every reason to believe that the manufacture would be more expensive than the applying.

Govt regulation is used as a scapegoat. The market for creating this product is just not desirable, because snake bites are extremely rare compared to just about every other medical malady. There was a reason the original manufacturer willingly gave it up in the face of no competition.

Public health is a public concern, and should be funded with public money. It is cheaper in the long run because of increasing working years/tax dollars, and reducing bankruptcies, and reducing the number of orphans, etc.

Even Mr Invisible Hand, Enlightened Self-Interest himself wrote that the whole edifice of his economic philosophy had to rest on the foundation of respect for human life -- and compassion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
I'm using it on http://Newsley.com. I'm particularly interested in building support for the events/facts OpenCalais extracts, but I'm only part way through rebuilding the back end. I'm also really excited to use it along with publicly linked data sets.

Currently, I'm extracting entities that are above a certain relevance threshold for each article. e.g. http://newsley.com/articles/developing-countries-set-to-acco...

It's a great api. You can push 50k articles a day through their system for free. 2 million articles a day is $2000 a month.
<pedantic>So data throughput is still 90%? That's not too bad</pedantic>
I'd be interested in some discussion about the specific problems over long sessions with keyboards considered "crappy" -- we can't all be annoyed by exactly the same things, can we? Tactile feedback isn't everything, especially with all the goofy layouts everyone seems to be coming up with these days.

As a PC user and occasional twitch-gamer, I personally stick with plain 104-key USB keyboards from Dell or Microsoft (quiet you), since they're fairly cheap to replace at local thrift stores. If my keyboard happens to die by misadventure, I'd rather not drop another $60+ just so I can use my machine comfortably.

When it comes to notebooks, the answer for me is and has always been ThinkPad, though the MacBook Pro/PowerBook keyboards are pretty solid as well. Sadly, nobody seems to be donating any MacBooks to my cause... :{
Foursquare would probably beg to differ. As would Zappos. A host of other success stories as well.
I think in the immediate feature innovative mobile products could unseat a lot of the current platforms, many of which have been slow to (or done so poorly) implement mobile interfaces.

I think just like we've moved from desktop to web applications you're going to see a similar move from web to mobile interfaces. This is will be especially true of social networking platforms.

Google has direct control of one of the major upcoming mobile operating systems and because they host the contact/relationship graph I think they could make a confident push into Facebook's space if they were so inclined.
It seems like we can also forget about MS being an autoimmune disease - but rather a mechanical issue caused by iron deposits in the blood vessels leading to the brain:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/researchers-lab...

http://www.webmd.com/multiple-sclerosis/news/20031022/multip...
Man I doubt some people get tired of Facebook. I see some users who have more updates in one day than I did the entire year. I am not joking btw.
As a community can we please come to an agreement to not submit and upvote misleading and link-bait headlines? I wish I could downvote every "Your X sucks" headline posted in the last month or so. There is no new content in the entries. If this a community of hackers, then can we not expect every hacker to know and understand the basic tenets of business and entreprenuership? Otherwise let's ask PG to rename this to Dummies Guide To Making Money On The Internet.
flag it. Eventually it will die.