skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article doesn't really make it clear, but I suspect (hope) they are entirely replacing the old BIOS with Linux (see http://www.coreboot.org/ ), which means something far more important than merely having a micro-Linux available "instantly". It also means that the BIOS boot time is reduced dramatically. Going from zero to running a full OS (whether it's Windows or a full-blown Linux) will be faster...possibly shaving minutes off of the boot time (but usually only 30 seconds to a minute).

The closer to instant-on PCs become, the more likely people are to shut them off when they walk away, which is great for the environment. It's also great for HTPCs to allow them to be more like traditional DVD players and VCRs.

The micro-Linux is just a funny side effect of replacing the cranky old slow 2 stroke BIOS with a new jet engine. It's about damned time the BIOS gets an overhaul, and since Linux already has most of the device detection and setup that a motherboard needs (or can have it added with no more pain than the BIOS, which have code bases that are reportedly extremely difficult to work with) why not?

The article isn't very clear, however, so I can't be sure the old BIOS isn't lurking beneath the surface just waiting for a "full boot" to kick in.
For me, I get beta testers for a site I'm working on through my blog. I never advertised it (other than a link in my "Projects" page), and admit up front that it isn't even beta-quality yet. Still, I get about 10 signups a month.

Write a blog and publish the articles on social networking sites. You'll get beta signups naturally from that.
Multi-touch Mac OS X framework - written by one guy
Surgery to implant a sense of humor?
...better get that cough looked at.. ;-D
Adwords/AdCenter has worked for me as well so far.

My tips:

1. Use conversion tracking. Dump keywords that don't convert. Try to come up with keyword combos that beat the keywords you currently have.

2. Use negative keywords if needed.

3. Try different ads. Dump ones that don't work and try to come up with ones that can beat those that do.

4. You don't have to be the top bidder to get clicks and conversions. I've done better in terms of conversions and cost/conversion in 5th place than in 1st.

5. In my case, avoiding the "content" network was a great move. My ads only show up in search results, not on parked domains. I refuse to use Yahoo! Search Marketing for the simple reason that they don't let me turn off the so-called content network.

What you're doing is direct marketing, so your ad copy in the ad is important as is the copy on the landing/conversion page. Don't be afraid to do A/B testing to see what copy works best and dump the old copy. Write copy that tries to beat the winner and test it.
We have a hosted content management system at Servee.com
Keys: If you're in a market where there are many competitors, separate yourself by doing SOMETHING better (price, features, experience or a combination)
Designers like it, so they sell it to their customers; They like that they can give their clients full content control and powerful tools, but not design control.
End-Users like it, because we test it on people that have very minimal computer experience. This means it becomes very intuitive to use. Our UX is excellent.
While TextMate is nice, and I paid for it myself, I recently decided to start learning Vim because you can essentially use it on any platform. It may take some time to learn, but I believe it will be greatly beneficial in the long run.

I urge you to check out MacVim (http://code.google.com/p/macvim/).

You can add many of TextMate's features to Vim using plugins like snippetsEmu.
Am I the only person who wondered how an aging NYT columnist managed to write an iPhone application framework?
>I'm arguing that it's wrong. That's all.

I'd read all your posts and you only "declared" that it's morally wrong. You didn't present any argument to support your claim. I am not saying that there is no existing valid arguments, just pointing out that you forgot the most important part in your post.

That's why people are second guessing you by asking "who is hurt?" and things like that.
1981. What is that in Dogbert years?
Web 2.0 and the end of advertising
So perhaps point #8 should be:

don't use a touchscreen when you shouldn't.
Ask HN: How did you do on the Android Dev Challenge?
for those that didn't win, google is apparently sending emails to let you know more or less how you did. My entry got the following:

Effective use: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Polish: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Indispensability: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Originality: In the 25th to 50th percentile of all submitted applications
Overall: In the top 25% of all submitted applications

That's nice, but I'm not sure it means anything given that a lot of the entries must have been quick and dirty crap ;)
It may not be all that useful to you or me, but it would be all my wife and youngest son need. I would count it as a big plus in a purchasing decision.
I meant it solely in the sense of deriving pleasure from the activity, and not at all in the sense of gloating or competition.
Up until "connection machine," I was thinking that this seemed naive even for an MIT AI researcher.
I find her resembling Hillary Clinton...
Amazon has a wide selection of books on CD. "Good To Great", "Getting Things Done", etc.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/69726/
Google. It started and grew completely via word of mouth. Whilst Yahoo and others were spending big $ on advertising, Google quietly grew and grew. Granted, it only happened because they had a much better product (search) than anyone else, but it was still word of mouth that did it
Not new at all.
What? lol
Yes, so long as you don't rig the game to keep them poor.
Well done - that's impressive.
You're right.

OP asked A or B. I said neither because neither addressed the fundamental underlying issue: that it's wrong. I changed the focus of the question without backing up my claim by presenting an argument. So I got second guessed, a logical development.

This presents me with a dilemma. I could present philosophical arguments about why it's wrong or I could just "wave my hands" and say it's outside the scope of this thread.

People may not like it (and I may lose this "debate"), but I choose to do the latter.

I could cop out and claim that Hacker News is a community for fellow hackers and business people to learn and share together, so a philosophical discussion of right and wrong borders on the religious and doesn't belong here.

Or I could say no one would win such a debate, so why bother just getting people upset?

I think I'll take the third option, which probably puts me in the worst light, but...

If I have to debate right and wrong with you, let's just say that I'd rather not debate at all and move on to doing business with someone who thinks a little more like me.
Kids don't get "tanked up on sugar." That myth was disproved many years ago. No doubt, replacing empty calories with healthy foods is good for children (and adults).
Dream on. I have dealt with the BIOS world, and if it ain't completely broken they won't touch it. They aren't even willing to adopt EFI.
Install Emacs... It's free and every editor is trying to reinvent what this one already does.
It struck me as quite clever (perhaps too clever, which seems to be a common thread in these recent Thinking Machines articles...).

His point, if I'm reading it correctly, is that we treat wires as an ideal and instantaneous transfer medium. In reality, however, wires take up physical space, so there are physical limits to the number and length of wires you can actually have. The more wires you use, the longer they need to be to route around each other, hence more time needed to transfer the data, breaking the abstraction.

Analogously, a memory location ideally represents something you can dump data into at one time, then extract it instantaneously at a later time. In reality, however, processors need to address memory via the bus. With a single bus, processors will have to queue their requests -- resulting in longer "time wires" and a slower computer. The alternative is to have multiple memories/buses (more "time wires"), but since the buses are constrained by physical limits, the number of "time wires" you can have is constrained just like the number of real wires. So our abstraction of memory is broken -- the amount of time it takes to access a memory location depends on how many locations we need.

You can see a similar result in today's machines, in the behavior of cache locality: if your algorithm tries to access too much data (many "time wires"), it overflows the cache and you're forced to wait (use longer "time wires"). Algorithms designed to exploit cache effects are sometimes an order of magnitude faster, illustrating the leakiness of our memory abstraction.
About Thinking Machines:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Thinking-Machines.aspx
One other thing I've learnt - think carefully about how technical your users are.

When I started out I knew my users wouldn't necessarily know what HTML is, or CSS, or DNS, or FTP. But I did assume they'd know how to crop a photograph; have some understanding of what a web browser is; know the difference between the browser address bar and the Google search box; and know that you may need to press Refresh to see changes to a page. All those assumptions proved wrong for a significant minority of my customers. Which (at the risk of stating the obvious) isn't their fault for being non-technical. It's my fault for not understanding my customers.
VCs charge far more than 70%. Is that fair?
I would agree, for all values of "willing" that don't involve some sort of coercion. For example, if someone is "willing" to pay $100 for a loaf of bread if you have a gun to their head, then I would question the use of the word "willing." Likewise, if a group of people controlled the food market in a region and used that power to force the people to hand over their life savings in order to buy food and avoid death by starvation, I would question the use of the word "willing."

As always the question is -- can those involved opt out of the transaction? If the answer is yes, then there is probably no evil involved.
Feel free.

Nothing is stopping you from loaning your money at a lower rate, from providing education, etc.

What? You only tell other people what to do with their money? If your advise is not good enough for your money....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Safire
I think it would be acceptable if the people were still poor but significantly less so.
This actually looked like a good list. I'm doing some of the items, but I really need to work on building a team. My current partner is dead weight.
There has been many requests for this feature; they've heard the knock.. but aren't answering (probably a good reason).

- until then perhaps SearchYC.com should be put on the FAQ page for this site,
You would need more than 10 years for that...
I can't make the meet&greet scheduled for tonight, but is anyone interested in a post-BarCamp news.yc gathering tomorrow evening?
I'm already very familiar with Emacs, but I picked up TextMate anyway. I'm happy with my decision when working on a Mac.

TextMate has a free trial, and the Pragmatic book on it is a solid introduction. But since you're just starting, the price might not be worth it.
"My lawyer would beg to differ with you."

The constitution doesn't agree with your lawyer.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

That established copyright. It doesn't say anything -- direct or implied -- about "property". And if you read the letters of Jefferson, you can see that the idea that an intangible item cannot be treated as property was very much on the founding fathers' minds.
Watch the film Thank You For Smoking and find out.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...
We actually already do that with our API version of the plugin. We're currently working on a new plugin which should deprecate our old JavaScript version.
There is a free 30 day of demo of TextMate. Why not try it and then ask nomad whether it's worth it? The relevant thing is what works best for you - if you are a programmer then the price of any of these is inconsequential (yes, even BBEdit) given how much you will be using it. On the Mac, more so than on other platforms, you will find that shareware apps are frequently best-of-breed.
Sure, but they're sketchy because they're sketchy, not because they're targeting the poor. They're sketchy because they're bait-and-switch -- fooling people into signing a pretty onerous contract without reading it properly.
From the description, it looks a little too "be everything to everyone", but that may well be a mistaken impression.
Fifty years of DARPA: A surprising history
Also check out the list of hits and misses:

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13907-fifty-yea...
The upside to buying software as a student is that these companies sell them with a massive discount..or give them away for free. The downside being it's usually only for noncommercial usage.
Actually, it's interesting. If you look at prosper.com and people-to-people loans, the high risk loans run at exceedingly high rates. It's easy to assume lenders are sharks until you look at the interest rate required to make a profit which will offset defaults and try it yourself. As for who would agree, anyone who can get a greater than 70% risk-adjusted return on their money who has no other source of funding.
The Most Popular Twitter Apps According to the Blogosphere
I don't think it's strange.

The odd thing is I have literally a dozen legitimate serials (at the least) of Windows XP through MSDNAA and other sources, but I will still install a pirated copy with an activation crack. It's just waaaaayyyy less hassle in every way (plus the downloads tend to be slipstreamed with the latest updates, which is something I'm too lazy to do on a regular basis).
Both my Hecl entry and my client's entry were "top quartile", but... yeah, top 25% is still more than 400 apps. A "quick and dirty crappy" app that I also sent in for the hell of it placed in the 50-75% quartile, meaning that the last quartile was probably full of applications that simply didn't work.
The card - Please, don't get me wrong, it's not something that will get any usage. It was thrust upon both of us, not secretly slipped to me under a table.

Alcohol prohibitions have more to do with the cultural perception of drinking as "sinful," than the danger of driving. And, of course, setting something up as a taboo gives it a more powerful draw. Same with sex.

I don't think the argument that teens are mostly suited for manual labor is correct. The amount of homework many teens get and complete is a testament to how well they handle boring paperwork. I'd argue that they're suited for entry level positions in many fields, even as young as 14, and not allowing them that opportunity is not the same as enforcing child labor laws to protect the easily exploited.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...
It's not just with music. it happens with books and movies and...name anything.

Also, depending on your school and how you got it, those three apps can be free. They were free for me from the school, and dreamspark is also free.
Yeah I have an uncle that does that in his free time. I think he makes decent money. It seems like a lot of work though. I've only done about 20 or so transactions on eBay in the 10 years I've been a member. I'd say half of those have been more trouble than it's worth.
I was also reading this hoping they were talking about coreboot (or LinuxBIOS as I knew it), but the entire pitch was for a browser and skype in the bios. Am I the only one that doesn't want to flash my bios every time my browser has an update?

I could see it maybe making sense for true appliance PCs, but you make special mobos for those anyway... no need to stick a browser in every mobo you make.

There are lots of reasons that I'd like to see things like coreboot succeed, but having Firefox in my bios isn't one of them.
Yeah, only 17 yrs, 11 months left for the younger one :)
Go Away From Your Computer, Now. | Tech Jaws
Creative come on
yeah, searchyc is good. I never knew it before. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93938 This thread has the list of YC searches out there lol.
Android Judging Panel Is Full Of Crap
This might be a relic of the industrial age. Every thing I see in manufacturing today seems to be drifting toward the "customized" product. The more options and customizations available to consumers, the less we'll all have "the same thing". Are black macbooks really worth more than the white ones? What if I get mine laser etched or painted red?

This depends on everybody having copies of a limited number of mass produced products. I think (and sincerely hope) we're headed for a much brighter future.
So teach them. Small charities such as that are perfect candidates for Open Source solutions.
Yes, it's wrong.

But in a way it's also right.

Take a random episode of "24" for example. There's a big ole crisis going on, and some nasty terrorist is withholding important information which could save millions of Ameerrrriican lives :p

Most of us watching are lead to feel like it's "morally correct" to torture the terrorist to extract the information that will save lots of innocent peoples' lives.

It could be the same kind of "morally correct" that downloading a song is, when the party _potentially_ losing money is a multi-gazillion-dollar corporation that's suing children and grandmas left and right for a little pocket change.

Actually I happen to like buying good music on CDs, so that I can enjoy it at maximum sound quality and all. DRM and lossy compression make iTunes totally irrelevant to me.

And the other classic pro-piracy defense, that it works as a "try before you buy" has come true many times in my case. If I download a song that I really really like, I'll want to buy it too. If I don't like something, I won't listen to it either.

So let's not forget that when someone downloads a song, the record companies are not only potentially losing money, but also potentially gaining some.

On the other hand, the re-use value of even a good movie is pitifully low compared to good music.

A movie is simply not worth buying at 22 euros (Finland).

In Finland, all empty recording media such as CD- and DVD-Rs are sold with a sort of "piracy tax" included in the price.

Basically we're paying some kind of "royalties" to at least the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA, but I doubt that money ever goes anywhere else.

This tax was ushered in accompanied by a lot of moaning about how piracy is hurting the artists. "Every time you download a song, a baby seal is forced to listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit for five hours", and so on..

What it all means is that every single person in Finland who buys a CD-R is considered a criminal in advance, and pays a little tax for it.

So if we're already paying for being dirty criminals, why shouldn't we download things too?

Well, I've ended up rambling quite a bit about random thoughts, but the idea is to offer a different point of view.

The point is that piracy can be both right and wrong. There is middle ground.

People want entertainment, and many of us are willing to pay for it.
Startup that Makes Scheduling Appointments Simple -- Great for Freelancers and Consultants
Depends on what you're doing. I like WriteRoom if I'm writing prose. I like TextMate for generic code viewing and editing (e.g., random XML docs). I still prefer IntelliJ for Java or Arc coding.
As a sidenote, could someone (PG?) please do something about the "Unknown or expired link" error we're getting?

Maybe increase the session's lifespan a bit or something?
Snackr is an RSS Addict's Dream Come True
Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast is a good one. Each is about an hour long, so it helps that you have lots of time:

http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
smultron has been good for me, although i am not familiar enough with textmate to compare the two.

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
The learning curve for Vim, Emacs is much higher than textmate. If you can afford to buy Textmate, then do so. It is well worth the money and will increase your productivity.
Ask YC: Anyone built/seen any cool Wikipedia apps? (e.g. WikiScanner)
I'm interested in building some applications that can try to make some sense from a given Wikipedia entry's edit history. There could be some cool integrations with Mechanical Turk or nat'l language eventually, but the basic idea is very simple for now.

- Has anyone seen an app that does something along these lines? (aside from WikiScanner, and more interesting than FoxyTunes Planet)
- I could have sworn I heard some noise about a Wikipedia API...was I imagining that?
- Does anyone here have a desire to work on a project like this, or have a recommendation of someone who might?
- What potential problems do you see in building something that crawls Wikipedia?

This ain't Powerset ;-) ...but could be cool.

Thanks! Hacker News is the shit...
Emacs.app is your friend. Seriously.
In my opinion, it would be a lot more productive to learn one of the "standard text editors," namely vi(m) or emacs. The learning curve is higher, but it will allow to be very productive on almost any Unix-based operating system.

Textmate is a great product with a lot of useful features right out of the box, and it very Mac-like with its UI and Apple-style keyboard shortcuts. It also has a lot of macros, and you can access a lot of shell commands straight from the menus. However, by hiding all of these details, it makes it more difficult to use a computer that does not have Textmate on it.

Thus, if the "Macness" of a program is very important to you, and you don't mind being dependent on one machine and one proprietary program, then Textmate is certainly worth the cost. If not, then I recommend you save the money and build skills for the future by learning how to work with vim or emacs.
TextMate is my first choice.

Also, SubEthaEdit is nice for collaborative editing.
well, for a start have a look here:

www.betterplace.org

and if you like it, register and give me your feedback at
jbe (at) betterplace.org
Assault on Reason by Al Gore.
Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum (the movie retains only the name and a basic profile of Jason Bourne, almost none of the plot)
Land is a rivalrous good, whereas most digital products are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

Some information goods are excludable, but not easily, and less so with fast internet connections. This pushes them towards the category of 'public goods':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

Copyright is "legislated exclusion":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions

Anyway, copyright is a compromise, and I agree that people should respect the law, but the law should also change to fit the facts. The Mickey Mouse copyright extenions, for example, are what might be described in technical terms as "a load of horse shit". 100 years is way too long. I think that we should look at how to rejig the compromise, without eliminating it completely, for the moment.
> So now insisting on honesty and ethics in business is "self righteousness"?

Well, are you talking about business, or private home use?

The examples you gave were more deplorable than someone downloading a song (for personal use) is.