skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You people at Microsoft seem to enjoy making really bad comparisons.

The Kin was based on the same kernel as Windows 7 phones (Windows Mobile 6.5), has a lot of the same cloud strategies as each other, and social media integration. The ROKR was a phone built by Motorola, that happend to integrate with itunes and playback media that you had already bought. It was a standard Motorola phone (E398) that they happened to paint white and add in some software to work with itunes.

Also, the kin was a nice idea, that price itself out of the market. It is exactly the phone my nieces and nephews would love to have, and had great online integration.

I welcome finding out more about the Windows 7 phone, but think it is too little, too late.

I don't think anybody who works at Microsoft should be allowed to make any comparisons anymore, you just don't seem to grasp the concept.
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I don't understand the gains for the economy as a whole of smoothing out the price curve in the sub-second range.

I'll make it simple for you. There are none.

HFT traders as a whole make no gains from trading in microseconds as opposed to milliseconds or even seconds. If an investor wants to buy 100 shares right now with a spread of $0.02/share, market makers will earn $2.00 over the next few seconds. The only question is which market maker will earn the $2.00, and the answer is whoever is fastest.

Trading fast doesn't increase profits, all it does is redistribute them. Of course, one HFT firm could also outbid the rest, lowering the spread to $0.01/share and allowing the retail investor to pay only $1.00. That's why competition among HFT firms is good.

But you are correct that all the effort put into lowering latency (rather than improving trading strategies) is a deadweight loss to society.
You could scribble using a pen with ink that doesn't dissolve in water but dissolves in e.g. alcohol. Might be a bother, but could be better than nothing. I'm gonna try this.
Scaling Facebook to 500 Million Users and Beyond
You're right in that the old docs had really bad searching. That's much improved in the new docs.

I might be different. I came to learn jQuery through the raw docs, not through tutorials, and found that the old docs' organization was more friendly for casual browsing & exploration, and the new is more amenable to API lookup ("I already know the name of the method").

For example, compare the selectors page:

New: http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/

Old: http://web.archive.org/web/20080516171346/docs.jquery.com/Se...

(The CSS is very broken on the archive--) but you can see that you used to have it organized functionally, not alphabetically, which was great for me as a learner to see at a glance the different axes of capability for jQuery's selector engine, instead of a alphabetical mash of selector operators, some titled by the operator, others by a description. If I didn't already know CSS thoroughly, reading your selector operator list now would be very disorienting.

I have to say jQuery and its community is amazing, without it QuickFuse (http://quickfuseapps.com) would not have been possible. But one of its strengths was being able to be grokked so quickly by newcomers, and I was a bit disheartened to see the docs stray away from a introductory format more in favor of a reference format. It's a bit more intimidating to the newcomer to have to wade through categorical tagged lists of methods with brief descriptions, instead of a human-organized page on each aspect of the jQuery object that presents the methods in a sensible order.
Have Generics Killed Java?
You're still selecting for those with favorable startup employment experiences, so the problem still stands: excluding them does not give an accurate picture of the typical result if bad experience is what's typical.
On the contrary. This article is great personal marketing -- who can deny the hook of "from phone to Porsche?" He gets a great anecdote and branding angle for the rest of his life. I'd say the lifetime value of appearing in this article is easily worth the trading down.

And besides, we can't necessarily exclude the possibility that he negotiated a little cashish on the side while trading down.
We've fixed the scrolling issue now, and added better event handlers so most things work on the iPad. Try it out now and tell me how it goes!
Every company is in the business to make as much money for themselves as possible.

When the market works this creates an incentive that is very closely aligned with doing the best for the customer as well. But the market isn't perfect, especially the approximations of markets we have today.

I think Apple does legitimately care about satisfying their customers with their products, but they are just as capable of falling into the trap of treating their customers like passive revenue generators as any other company.
Facebook Says Membership Stands at 500 Million
sendgmail - Send email from Arc through Gmail via Perl
Algorithm for GeoLocation
What is the best way to geolocate an IP address. I see various websites which offer such services and wanted to know how it is done.
Comments on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
I don't think that's it. Back when I was tracking tweets/sec on twitter's streaming API (which is supposed to be proportional to their real traffic) the pattern looked pretty circadian. Take a look: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hoop2w1/4208393947/
Now imagine you are me and this is the sugar-coated version of your story: http://www.totlol.com/t/story
Yes and no. If a library assumes a lambda is easy, you will see a lot of code like this (using somewhat bastardized OCaml types):

interface 'a collection {
void sort(lt:'a -> 'a -> bool);
}

So, if you want to use lambdas, you would get:

foos.sort(fn x y -> x.bar() > y.bar());

And if you don't want to use lambdas, you would get:

bool sort_by_bar_gt(x:Foo, y:Foo) {
return x.bar() > y.bar();
}

foos.sort(sort_by_bar_gt);

And that is assuming you can nest functions, but chances are you will have to put that function somewhere removed from the actual call to sort. This is the exact problem the STL hits: it assumes, for many things, you want a functional style - and then it doesn't give you a way of writing lambdas. You are left with one-off functors littering your code, wishing you could write that lambda.

I would like to stress: I think lambdas are a requirement for any language, I just take issue with the argument presented to convince lambda haters.
My good friend recently made me signup w/dropbox so he can get more space, and I'll probably do the same with my friends.

The main reason why it works is because we're helping each other achieve something; we're making an existing process easier/more convenient. It's a MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL activity (ie, it's easy for us to share files with each other).

Dropbox is a platform product like Facebook (ie, join this site, and we can keep in touch together easier). This strategy would work for all platform products.

As for your startup, you have to ask why would I would recommend someone a product that eases remembering japanese/chinese chars, there's no process after that at all. There's nothing MUTUAL BENEFICIAL here at all. If my friend is using your tool, why do I care? It doesn't help me at all.
Agreed. Welcome to the internet/technology committee of correspondence.
The problem isn't that the FTC needs to be educated. As part of the ruling class, facts are irrelevant. It's just one part of the ruling class (the FTC) giving aid and comfort to another part (the newspaper moguls). They form and mold the facts to fit whatever conclusion best increases their own influence and power.
Sounds like Vala: reference counting instead of GC (full pointers underneath if you want), zero cost to call C, lambdas, generics, signals/properties, native unicode strings and other sugar such as foreach.

Can't do operator overloading though because they want to compile down to C without mangling names
It is large, but it really doesn't feel like it. I still have to pat my pocket to make sure it is in there, probably because it is so thin. The only time I think of how big it is, is when I am pleasantly surprised at how much fits on the screen, or when I'm trying to operate it with a thumb, holding it in my palm.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. I wasn't claiming that being a driver is a bad job in India. My point was that most Indians cannot afford to have a personal driver (or even a car), whereas most Americans can afford to rent a ZipCar.

FWIW, I was born in the US but go to India regularly to visit family. My dad grew up in a mud hut in a rural village in Tamil Nadu, where much of my extended family still lives.

(Sidenote: How did the son of rural farmers get the kind of education that allowed him to immigrate to the US? It started with government programs that were put in place to bring affordable education to everyone.)
The most interesting thing with this article and the discussion is the up/down-voting. Here is a (half joking) idea for a startup:

Automatic "correct" voting from employees on discussion web sites.

Two plugins.

In the first, an administrator marks a comment and say +/- 10, or something similar.

The second plugin is run by employees. When the employee opens a page with discussion, it checks if there are votes to be done and automatically votes. (Optionally, if the employee follows the web site, it could open a page automatically.)

Who voted are (optionally) kept secret from the company management, in the interest of employee integrity.
+1 for Vala
Well I'm not a lawyer, but from a complete laymans point of view I'm not sure I agree with all your points. I don't expect my opinion to be worth a lot to anyone, but I still think there are a lot of questions I'd want answered if I was financially invested in facebook.

Firstly the contract is only a couple of pages long and the point about owning 50% of thefacebook is right there in the first paragraph. It might seem ridiculous now that thefacebook was only valued by them at $2000 at that time, but thats only in hindsight. And at a valuation of $2000 1% a day is only $20 a day as a late penalty.

No idea about the timing issues, but if the guy thought the deal was successfully completed (afterall he paid Zuckerberg, we have no idea if he cashed that cheque) then as far as he was concerned all was fine and he owned 84% of the business. I don't see how a problem arose until Zuckerberg incorporated and didn't give this guy his fair share - and that happened in summer 2004 (according to wikipedia).

As for the unreasonableness of it all, Zuckerberg obviously needed the money at the time and thought that's what thefacebook was worth at the time. Arguably facebook wouldn't be in the position it is now without that guy's money. Maybe he's only entitled to 84% of Zuckerberg's personal share, but thats still pretty significant. Who knows, it might all be a forgery, but it doesn't seem that frivolous to me anyway.
Do you share revenue if/when the iframes have ads? Or where is the incentive other than engagement (that might be enough)
Er...[if you have the misfortune of being paid to work in Java] they remove a pile of type-casting cruft and make code more useful to large and/or transient teams.

The author conveniently glosses over the type-casting from pre-generics Java and instead compares to Ruby. Duh...of course Ruby is a cleaner read. But compare learning a new API:

// pretty evil
List<Thing> getTheThings();

// really evil
List getTheThings();

Or iteration:

// pretty evil
for (Thing t: getTheThings()) {...}

// kill me now
for (Iterator it = getTheThings().iterator(); it.hasNext()) {
Thing t = (Thing) it.next();
...
}
Also, the Pope is "Catholic".
The reason Dropbox works is simple: it's a carrot on a stick. Most invites don't have that and provide no incentive, either for the inviter or the invitee.
From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1533796 :

The Mountain View Hacker House has a room opening up August 15th, if you're interested (or know someone interested) please contact jake@noteleaf.com. Thanks!
Even better: remove the <a> tag altogether when a comment hits -4, like it is in self posts (Ask HN). Just light-gray on less-light-gray, someone might click on it inadvertently, because it becomes almost invisible.
Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook effect and everything else
I definitely agree on #2, that your product needs wide appeal, but #1 (fremium) seems not to be the case.

You can find plenty of places out there that do a refer-a-friend in exchange for the referrer receiving something in return. My gym (24 hour fitness) does this and I have referred people to it before.

I suspect in this case the problem mostly lies in the product being too niche, not that it costs money.
Just adopt WebKit already. You would all get infinity karma points from the web development community.
This is an awesome piece from PG. I have known/felt all of the stuff but was never able to articulate it as well.
well, I'll agree to that! Especially the factories :)
In my experience, having python as the root node for multithreaded C/python programs generally doesn't present a problem. When calling into external C functions through ctypes, the GIL is released such that multithreading at the C-level is unaffected. I personally use this feature heavily to perform numerically intensive work with multiple threads as directed through python with C doing the grinding.

Additionally, all IO code in the standard library and most C-extensions that I've seen release the GIL around blocking IO calls. This allows multi-threading to be used for the standard blocking IO use cases. Further, the computationally intensive routines in numpy and scipy that I’m familiar with also release the GIL to facilitate multithreading at the C-level

The GIL only becomes an issue if you want multiple threads to be executing Python bytecode concurrently. I don’t believe this is a common problem as one rarely runs computationally intensive code at the python level. Such computationally intensive work is generally performed through C extensions or through external C functions (as accessed through ctypes). As long as such C extensions properly release the GIL, multithreading at the C-level is unaffected.
full of passion for gaining and keeping values
Very true, jscore, referring people to Skritter has no network effect at all. We do offer extra subscription time to both the recommending party and the new referral, and we spent a long time trying to figure out the right mix of benefits for both, but I think you're right that without the networking effect there's a lot less interest to recommend people.

As you say, it doesn't help you to recommend anyone to a site where the primary activity is independent learning. Now, we could alter that and some social features, but my best guess is that it's not just "social features," because tacking that stuff onto Skritter probably wouldn't help too much! To get maximum gain, we would have needed Skritter to be more easily spreadable from the get-go. :)
Agreed. This whole article is uncharacteristically beautiful for HBR.
A person has to start somewhere though don't they? And why not begin your career at a start-up instead of a large corporation?
HN shortens URLs automatically when you paste them in.

Obnoxious example: http://www.hugeurl.com/?YzUxNzllMmZjNTk5ZDBjYzIwMjYwN2VlZjFk...
To me, all an iPhone says nowadays is "I may be out on the town right now, but if my boss emails me I'll be able to reply within seconds."

That sounds more like a Blackberry
To refer to chorale melodies as "popular music" is really a stretch. For instance, Wikipedia tells us that "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" was in use as a chorale by 1656. You'd be really stretching to call this and other chorales a "popular input". I've never read or heard anything to indicate that church melodies were significantly popular in the 1700s.

Popular music was stuff like song, opera, maybe some easy instrumental stuff (though I can't remember when music publishing took off). Bach wrote few songs, no opera, and his instrumental output was very difficult and went largely unpublished.

Also, I don't know what the 'Christmas Cantata' is. Google wasn't any help in clarifying it. Bach wrote about two billion settings of that chorale, so that's not much help.
Yeah I had a good laugh because it explains (at least some) of the times I've seen my shell behave like this.
Theory test booking appointment with DSA 
Theory test booking online. Driving test booking is also available over the phone, by post.
Holy crap. US cell phone plans are starting to almost get as expensive as Canadian ones. I don't like this trend. I was hoping Canadian plans would move closer to US!!
Good point usaar333, I don't know if I did a good enough job making that distinction clear. In our case the niche product is a big referral buzzkill. My thinking though was that niche/non-niche aside, it seems like referrals would spread more easily (they wouldn't necessarily be more monetizable) if there was a freemium version though. Do you agree or disagree with that line of thought?

For instance, if your gym had a "2 weeks free" and didn't require me to take out my credit card, I think I would be more likely to try it out all things being equal.

Then again, my personal experience is often totally biased. I am trying hard to give up thinking that I know what our customers really want and let testing show the way!
Wikipedia says 24%.
Back in college we did something similar, but much less technologically advanced, to a roommate's linux box that he hooked up to speakers.

We found a lot of fun sounds to blast at him while he slept. :)
Not hard, no. And expectable, yes.

But by the same token though, why document any code? It executes the same no matter what comments are around it, and all the underlying operations are well documented.
Paypal is a positive example of what can happen. The founders/execs became angels/VCs, and many of the 'exploited' employees got funded.
Motorola sues Huawei and ex-employees for stealing their trade secrets
Funny solutions for the iPhone 4's reception issues
> But it also served as a portent that the hands-on way of life RadioShack embodied would become irrelevant.

Well; yes and no. I think a lot of 'tinkerers' now spend their time hacking. I know I prefer programming to fiddling around with little bits and pieces that have to be bought and assembled. It's a much more "self-sufficient" world in that you don't need to pop out to Radio Shack to buy that little piece you're missing.
I don't buy the theory that the product needs wide appeal at all (#2).

Gym referrals work because it's mutually beneficial, "hey, come join 24h fitness, so we can workout together". I win, and my friend wins.

It's much easier to go the gym with a partner for motivation, etc. than to go by yourself.

Now, let's take travel, which is also not niche. If I'm lonely planet trying to sell travel books, referral won't work because it's not mutually beneficial for both of us to have the same book, etc.

Good discussion going on. I'm actually brainstorming on a referral strategy for one of my sites (travel based).
Hmm, but from a monetization point of view it makes sense why they would trade off page (read: ad) views versus users paying.
"It seems to me that lots of small to medium webapps..." from the OP doesn't sound like enterprise to me.

If you load lots of data in your app, it will use lots of memory. Doesn't matter what language it's in. It's a poor measurement of Java's memory requirement.
Just curious, how did you conduct a market survey and what made you conclude that there's no demand for a personal expense tracking site?
I thought for digest auth, it the server sends a new nonce, and then asks for md5(md5(username:password):nonce:md5(something i forget)) - you couldn't verify that unless you had access to the raw password, no?

summon @tpateck
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HuffPo Inches Closer to Goal of Becoming Internet Newspaper
As long as IE can perform well and implements modern features expected of mobile browsers I'm all for the competition. If we can say anything definitive about browsers it's that competition and multiple popular implementations is a good thing.

I like WebKit as much as the next guy and the idea of deploying to a single rendering engine (on mobile) is nice. The ecosystem is more important though.
its not an algorithm, it is database lookup
It sounds like the problem you are having is user retention. You get people to your site, but they don't end up sticking around to use your tool/service on a daily basis. This means that you do not have a strong enough value proposition (or you are marketing to the wrong people, but more likely the former).

Try to get feedback from the people who tried your website but then left. Repost to the blogs you posted to and try to see what the people who tried it think, and why they didn't up leaving.

Also, make sure your website is solving a real problem. Your site may be 'useful' but unless it solves a problem that currently really really frustrates people, nobody is going to want to spend the effort to go to your site and use your tool unless the problem is solves is really big, and your solution is awesome.

I could give more specific advice if I knew anything about your site. Good luck!
They've been doing subscriptions for more than 1 page at a time for at least 6–7 years, and it’s been working out okay. Do you have a reason beyond the anecdotal that makes you think it’s one of the worst ways to monetize?

FWIW, I think giving everyone access to the full content but a page at a time while letting subscribers see a nicely formatted PDF is a perfectly reasonable perk. Cutting the reviews in half and only letting non-subscribers see the first half seems like a terrible idea to me.
Clickable: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/new-search.html and http://indextank.com/
Blame executive leadership / legal and corporate affairs. My understanding is that the engineers and several VPs TRIED to adopt WebKit...
Pattern Recognition in Texts Using Complex Networks
Do you know anything similar for Chrome? Firefox can't handle 50+ open tabs.
:-)
One can argue about the validity of "tiobe", but still...as much as people would like to see that "C and C++ are on the decline and they're just going to get smaller," it somehow just doesn't happen. ;-)

Even in my case, I was happily coding in C# in the last 3 years, and in January - bam! - I am on another project written in, well, C++.