skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any thoughts on whether this would be saturday or sunday if you do do it? I'm moving that saturday, sadly.
Sometimes I read The Onion and 3 paragraphs down I wonder if I am reading The Economist.
Paul,

As always it is a very thoughtful and incisive article. However, I have certain reservations on Google trying to sell out, especially after I read The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed.

I believe for young people (especially tech students), the idea is not to make a lot of money. It is more of a passion, a will to change the world. Yes, they may have failed as well. I may not say the same for people who are in the industry for long or MBA types.

Also at the same time it is a bit of luck, destiny or hand of God. More @ http://satya-dash.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-we-do-not-see-mor...
I don't think Occitan had shrinked that much before the French Revolution?

My guess is the author is assuming that everyone knows where the dominant, 'imperial' languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Russian ...) are spoken, and aims to represent the deltas from those. Either that, or it has an exaggerated anti-imperialist bias.
To be fair: about a week after my initial comment, I've adjusted to xobni and I'm pretty sure it has saved me some time in sifting through e-mails.
Sure. Thanks for replying. That would be interesting. Send me an email at amrithk(at)gmail(dot)com and I can try and see if there are other people who might be interested in this sort of thing closer to the time.
It's certainly fair to have different opinions. For one thing, Apple themselves probably have different opinions: they probably have debates like this where one manager screams at another that there is One True Way to manage iPod/iTMS and the other throws a stapler at her head.

For example, I wrote that essay as if there is one, coördinated strategy with iPod and iTMS. In reality, there may be iTMS managers who are trying to maximize profits for their division while the iPod managers are trying to undermine iTMS and commoditize it for the benefit of their division, just as if they we in coöpitition as independant companies.

So... the truth is probably way more complex than we imagine, or even could imagine.
The Difference between Real and Protected Modes
Without leaving your full-time job start developing (part-time) ver 1.0 of one of your idea that has market and can get some revenue (either by ad or subscription etc.). As soon as you start getting revenue you may leave your job and find a loan that has minimum interest rate - on the other side start looking for angel investors to expand your startups. Make sure you do this with minimum debt and maximum chances of revenue starting right away so that just in case if you cant find angel or if your startup doesnt get you the revenue enough to sustain then you're still safe as you can go back to your full time job. Alternatively you can start thinking about increasing your household income by selling stuff on ebay, preparing your other family member to start working (may be part-time), if you have extra space in your house then rent it to earn some money, etc.
Rise and shine -- and find that clock
Ambiguous headlines are a classic technique to get people to read your work.
This really highlights just how tricky the video game business is. If any other software product could sell $500M in one week, the company would be in a great position. It makes one wonder if the current trend of such grand-scale commercial games is sustainable.
MySQL To Remain Open Source
Rich Consistency
Comcast Considering Hard Bandwidth Limits and Overage Charges
Your Favorite RSS Feed Swap Meet
Share and exchange your favorite RSS feeds through this little blog comment project!
The other thing I would like to add to this understand the real reasons a client buys from you, it's usually different for different customers; and more importantly ask why when a prospect says no.
In childhood, in early years of school, I perceived teachers as evil and good. In the last years of school we used to label them as "normal" and "crazy" (or "idiots", if one preferred).

My grades were exceptionally high with "good" teachers and low with "evil" throughout all the school. Only recently I liberted myself to start seeing that as a good sign.

I guess, "good" or "normal" teachers in our perception were those who procrastinated from teaching these lessons.
Putting an NDA as a click-wrap? That seems really sleazy to me. Especially since nobody reads them and (IANAL) they are of dubious enforceability.

But it is interesting that the form something takes can change its perceived cost.
It looks like that the language map is very approximate and in some places covered with non-existent artifacts.
Curious - would people pay $50 a month for 300GB of SSH-able space?
Agreed. If you assume that the dominant languages have been 'colored in' first and the lesser dominant languages have been laid on top then it works.
They're skipping nyc, huh?
The author makes a blanket assumption that because you release something as open source, you will get feedback from other developers. From experience this will not happen unless the project reaches critical mass. Even then, the ratio of people that help to the people to use the software is always huge.

Some of his arguments for releasing open source are very weak, excused documentation and liberation from delivery schedules especially.

The authors main open source example is Pantheios which is a library. There is no market for libraries. Using an open source library to enable consulting gigs is a common business strategy.

This posting is fairly weak.
jQuery has been immensely helpful in speeding up our development. Can't wait to see a stable jQuery UI 1.5 and then what they come up with for ARIA support. It's awesome to see accessibility get some love from the modern JS libraries and browsers too!
I'm inclined to agree with you. It also occurred to me that the quinine could be disrupting fly DNA. I don't expect the journalist to detail all the researchers' lab controls but it certainly appears these biologists negligently compared multi-generational quinine exposed flies with a pristine fly colony. If that is true, I hope their paper defended the methodology or significantly hedged the results.

In humans, it is usual for small doses of quinine to cause cinchonism. From Wikipedia: "Symptoms of mild cinchonism (which may occur from standard therapeutic doses of quinine) include flushed and sweaty skin, tinnitus, blurred vision, impaired hearing, confusion, reversible high-frequency hearing loss, headache, abdominal pain, rashes, lichenoid photosensitivity, vertigo, dizziness, dysphoria, nausea and vomiting, and diarrhea. Large doses of quinine may lead to severe symptoms of cinchonism: skin rashes, deafness (reversible), somnolence, diminished visual acuity or blindness, anaphylactic shock, and disturbances in cardiac rhythm or conduction, death from cardiotoxicity. Quinine overdose can also result in a rare form of hypersensitivity reaction termed blackwater fever that results in massive hemolysis, hemoglobinemia, hemoglobinuria, and renal failure.
In very high doses (higher than those used to treat malaria) during the first trimester of pregnancy quinine may act as an abortifacient, or cause birth defects, especially deafness."
Ask YC: Thoughts on newest comments being obscure from start
If a thread has been around long enough for comments to earn a few points, when I finally make a comment it's never given a chance because it's placed at the bottom immediately. I'd like to request a change to the comment system that takes newness into account.
It's a good lesson. I'm converting my EULA's now: By reading this document, you [THE CUSTOMER] agree to give us your first born, and some cool stuff.
Lisp will hardly ever make it into the corporate hierarchies, where non-coding bosses want you to write in the dumbest possible language. And unfortunately without conquering this market a true boom is impossible.

Perhaps for this reason Lisp became an individualist, niche language.
I love seeing inside people's workspaces! I stare in people's apartment windows as I walk around too. So interesting!

Hmm... neat idea. Maybe a website that puts rooms on display for people to critique and adjust.
Let's say you want to sell something to a business. You use your connections to get a meeting with someone who works in the company, but who isn't necessarily the person who would make the final decision. Here is the general list of questions you might want to ask after giving your pitch:

Do you like the concept? why or why not?

What are the obstacles that would prevent implementation?

What metrics would you use to judge the effectiveness of our product / service?

What does your decision cycle look like?

Who'd be involved in making the decision? In other words, who would we talk to if we came back, or what parts of the organization?

What would they be considering?

Do you foresee any difficulties? Do you have any other suggestions?

If the decision maker likes the concept and the sale is potentially feasible, how would they evaluate it? What metrics would they use? What would they charge end users? What profit targets would they need. How would they make their decision?

Can we talk in the future?

Unfortunately one of my startup advisors for a previous business idea gave me this list and I forgot to write down their name so I can't properly credit them. Really good stuff though.
sms: celebrating character restriction since 1992
there's always going to be a set of criteria where you don't get a fair chance with a commenting system, imo.

chronologically, late posters get ignored because there's lots more content for people to get to. earliest posts tend to have the most attention.

reverse chronologically, early posters eventually get ignored and people who duplicate/repost early content tend to get rewarded for doing so. conversations tend to be more circular and rehashing happens often.

weighted, late posters get ignored because the quality posts rise to the top, and people tend to not read down far enough to hit the new posts. quality posts get more attention and replies, further pushing down later posts.

LESSON FOR HN POSTING: early bird gets the worm.
I think you overestimate the number of people who care (or even know) about this kind of stuff. I suspect that most of the people who buy the multiple-platinum-selling crap would just buy their music elsewhere if Apple stopped selling it. Initially, it would hurt Apple (due to reduction in revenue) and then it would hurt everyone because the music industry would probably get to bully everyone around even more.
Yep. It'll probably happen in conjunction with The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
Community Engine: A Social Networking Plugin for Ruby on Rails
Dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183166
Aim for the edges.
They're going have plenty of angry customers because many casual users with large harddisks and fast connections have no concept of file sizes. I previously mentioned this a while ago regarding similar plans from Time-Warner ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109743 ).
non-coding bosses

My impression is that non-coding bosses don't care that much, or, they care enough to recommend what they read in trade journals. Solution: Talk up Lisp (etc) in trade journals. That java is a standard because it is "dumb" is a myth. Not one CTO in a million went through a catalog of languages and said, "Nope, this has closures. Nope, this has eval()..." Otherwise, they would have come to, "Nope, this has garbage collection... We're sticking with COBOL."
Startups | What kind of business?
end users.. why?
kidding :)
Milgram experiment participant who refused to administer shocks (2004)
Google Reader Down?
On multiple accounts all that loads is the top switcher bar and the logo. Otherwise, it's a white page with javascript errors. Anyone else seeing this? It was doing this to me last night too.
I highly recommend taking a skim through Seth Godin's "The Bootstrapper's Bible".

http://www.changethis.com/8.BootstrappersBible
He didn't put a time line on things, but 10K a year is relatively common. 10K a month is a different matter altogether.
This weekend I updated 2 Windows XP VMs and one XP computer. I would have eaten up my monthly bandwith allotment in 3 hours.

Great.

Edit: re-read the article. I obviously didn't eat 250gb in a month. That seems somewhat reasonable. I mean, 250gb is a lot of torrent activity!
From my experience in different companies, big and small, decisions are made based on the number of factors:

* Trade journals, as you said, which appeal solely to the corporate bosses; although I'd give this a lower importance among others.

* Wages and availability of programmers in the job market.

* A chance for the boss to understand the language and/or to talk about architecture on the meetings easily, if needed. This one is interesting, as, I think, that's the main reason Java is popular. Smarter bosses can read some semi-technical journals, where "patters", "methodologies" and "common practices" are explained well for them -- just for them.

So, Java clearly wins in all 3 points, while Lisp loses in all 3.
Make something of value.

It's as simple as that. People will pay for something that they think is worth their money. When I made www.friendfury.com it went completely viral and made $600 the first 8 hours and about $200 a day for a few months afterwards until we stopped promoting it heavily to focus on other projects.

People paid for our subscriptions because it was worth the money to them to get 500+ friend requests a day on Myspace for whatever reason.
The word on the web: 7 keyword trending tools
This site has many special features, like rewriting of the post titles by stealth moderators, extra weird pagination with expired links? but newest comments are usually at the end anywhere.
Actually, there are many people in Twitter from Boston. Also the UK, Japan (so many that they've started Twitter Japan), New York, Kansas, Louisiana, and more. Twitter is the web. It's way beyond "California".
I'm more likely to accept a click-wrap than a physical document I have to sign, because I believe click-wraps are of dubious enforceability. That's why the perceived cost is different for me.
And... not only do yu decide if updates come to your phone, you do that on a per-person basis. So you'll only see what that friend is doing If You Want To. That's about as non-intrusive as it gets. It's entirely under YOUR control.
I'd rather see hard bandwidth limits than the soft "you may be using too much bandwidth (but we won't tell you how much that is)" policy which is used at present.
No errors, no problems. Reader was fine this morning, and last night too. I'm running Firefox. Are you running anything like greasemonkey? Anything that would modify the results? Can you try another browser?
But again, if You don't care what I am doing, that whatever possessed you to "follow" me? You only follow the people you WANT to follow. You only read what you WANT to read. You turn on SMS (or IM) notifications at YOUR preference. The only way Twitter can be a "big giant intrusion" into your life is if YOU turn that on!

It's like saying, 99% of the stuff on television is crap but failing to realize that you control the tv and you don't have to watch that stuff!
They'll have very angry customers if they want to charge US$15 per 10GB. When you take into account the cost of harddisks and bandwidth, legal purchased film downloads could be more expensive than buying physical media from a retailer. The granularity of the proposed charge exacerbates the situation. US$0.15 per 100MB would be preferable.
Is that before or after Duke Nukem Forever?
Some of us find that, as we use Twitter, we make new friends.

Not all of my friends need to be people I see (physically) just as not all of the people, I see (physically) are my friends.
Their enforceability depends on how they are presented to the end user. On the extreme, if you are forced to scroll it, click a check box, click continue (with a cancel/no option as well), then it is almost certainly enforceable to the extent it would be if it were on physical paper (at least in the US).
good but reasonably priced cars, period.
So, you saw one person use Twitter in a certain way, thought that way was silly, drew a generalization to the entire service, and you decided you knew everything abut it?

Someone uses the telephone to do telemarketing to try to sell you carpet and from that you understand what the telephone is "for"?

IM/IRC/email/blog are all different - from each other and from Twitter. As is the telephone. Or SMS. Or...
pg said it best "The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it."
I get the same result in firefox and safari. Well, i get the google logo in safari, and not firefox, but neither load the actual app.
Make new friends. :)
As long as they can't continue to call it "Unlimited high speed broadband" .. and say it up front, they should be able to do whatever they want.
An Oddpost Reunion Of Sorts
How about other Google services, gmail, documents, etc. ?
Details of Toyota processes applied to chip fabrication was recently posted on this forum ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180671 ).
Twitter is stories, vignettes, small slices of people lives.

Twitter is a 24-hour come-as-you-are blockparty. People come and go, talk and listen. Some of them already know each other, many of them don't.

Twitter is lifestreaming, 140 characters at a time.

Twitter is quick updates, questions, answers. Twitter is "I've got a 2-hour layover at SFO. Anyone want to grab coffee?"

Twitter is microblogging. Twitter is nanoblogging!

Twitter is writing practice. How much can you say in such a small space?

Twitter is a tool. Use it (or don't use it). As you use it more, you may come to see its value to you. If you don't, that's alright too.
620,000,000 profiles
Programmer Productivity: The "Tenfinity" Factor
Programming contests used to be fun. Now they're a commercial software business—and still fun
Microsoft May Build A Copyright Cop Into Every Zune
If your list is permission-based, try out Constant Contact. If it's not permission-based, you won't like Constant Contact so go with a different company.
Sigh. I followed this discussion on c.l.l and it was too painful to contribute to. I was hoping it wouldn't follow me here, but since it's here, I guess I'll put in my $0.02. I trust HN readers more than c.l.l.

No one denies the power and goodness of Lisp. Also, everybody knows its issues

1) misconceptions based on its history (it's a slow, AI language)

2) portability issues among implementations (pathnames, sockets, GUI, etc

3) lack of standard implementation

#1 is a marketing problem - tractable with effort (just look what pg's essays alone have done). #2 is a coding resource problem - many hands make light work.

For #3, once there is a platform implementation with all the right features (threads, unicode), this problem goes away. If CLisp added threads or if SBCL worked on Windows, the game would be over - other implementations would continue but there would be an unambiguous choice for n00bs. De facto portability standards would form around that implementation and the burden would be on other implementations would make it compatible with the de facto winner.

I'm not invested in any of the implementations but it looks to me like SBCL is the closest to being the full featured, cross platform, open source implementation that is currently lacking. So as a pragmatist wanting Lisp to become bigger, I have three choices:

1) through my writing, encourage people to choose SBCL

2) contribute coding help to the SBCL windows port

3) whine

Most people choose #3. I'm not confident in my coding chops to do #2, so I'm focusing on #1. I have the time and ability to write well and I hope to add momentum to the front runner and make choices easier for new users.

Of course, the foolproof way is for someone to make something indispensable using Lisp so people can't help but adopt it (like Unix/Linux did for C).

-see also Bill Clementson's take on this from a couple years ago http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060403.html
Windows For Robots Touts Device Driver Support And Parallel Processing Libraries
So it sold more then Halo 3 in its first week? (Halo3 sold $300 million)

There is hope... Halo 3 is the most overrated game... but of course sales don't equal quality. Mainly hype. So far GTA has delivered.
Additional reading: "The Idea of a University" by Newman (http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/)

To see the roots of many of the pernicious practices: "Democracy and Education" by Dewey (http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/...)
Bill Gates wrote a book in 1995 entitled, "The Road Ahead".

Guess how many times the word "internet" was in that book.

That's right. Zero.

So maybe it is only 10 years old for Microsofties.
Xobni Acquires IP From Failed Web 1.0 Startup FireDrop
They're talking about charging $15 for each 10GB over the 250GB limit. At 5GB per DVD you can still download 50 DVDs per month (ok, probably less due to protocol overhead). That sounds reasonable.
How about another one that also applies to open-source software:

* Corporation to blame for its problems and shortcomings.
Starting a High-Technology Startup -By Ben Casnocha
"But my theory is that a school system cannot be designed in a one-size-fits-all sort of way."

It can be, and was for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the practice of the assembly line was forced on education that the breakdown began. The justification, though obfuscated, was something like this: "We can't have thinkers in a world in which we need lever pullers. Well educated people (in a classical sense) won't ever be content working on an assembly line (or other modern equivalents), so we must make them functionally literate, and not actually literate. Then they can be happy pulling levers and pushing buttons, and society can flourish." It's no wonder that the school day is 'assembled', so similar to the factory that we even have bells moving people in shifts governed by a bell.
Mistitled post if there ever was one.

I was expecting some good sales advice (which we always can use).

Instead, we got a "gimmick" to facilitate a transaction.

The gimmick may work but the title is still misleading.
The Art of the Business Card
ok. To clarify... I've seen many many articles showing how you can use twitter to do X. When it just seems that there's already a far more suited way to do X.

I'm sure it's sort of useful for some things for some people, but I can't see it going mainstream.
The idea that a very large company can constantly improve their quality and productivity while maintaining focus on customer value is a compelling one. I'm guessing that a company managed in this Lean way is also a good one to work for, and may serve as a counter example to PG's assessment that working in a traditionally structured top-down corporation is mind-numbing, which is true. In a Lean company the best ideas win, while in the top-down company politics wins. The Lean company manages the system, not the people.

Toyota has demonstrated the efficacy of a new paradigm in management - they use Lean for all functions including engineering, design, finance, production. The big news for us small companies is that the same techniques can be used at any scale with the same positive results, as has been happening at my architecture firm and startup.
Startups giving back
A Look at The 5 Coolest FlashMobs So far (The Flash Mob is Turning 5 Years Old)
Ask YC: Stats on Commenting before Reading
Occasionally, I read a comment that seems to plainly ignore the main points of the article: the comment seems to have posted, a'la Slashdot, before they've even read it.

I wonder if my impressions are correct? Do many people comment before clicking the article, or within a minute or so after they hit the comments page? We could filter out replies to subcomments -- I'm just interested in whether or not the Slashdot peanut gallery is starting to be replicated here.