skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of people in Microsoft with a wide range of skills. Give MS employees 1 day a week to work on there own special projects and create a "Microsoft labs" page and they would get some great stuff created. But I believe that MS likes to have ideas flow from the top instead of from the bottom/middle. People at the top (likely) want to protect there position, so they do not allow people to "stand out" in any way.
What difference would it make if there were extraterrestrial life?

How would an advanced Alien intelligence view human beings, who exploit and slaughter intelligent life around them on a daily basis, including other human beings, and helpless animals who they raise under torturous conditions and then dismember while conscious in order to consume them -- needlessly, as our physiology does not require animal products.

Not to mention the warmongering, as the majority of the U.S. public supported war -- as long as it seemed convenient. No anti-war stance on principle for most U.S. citizens, bogglingly, especially after the lessons of Vietnam.

A lack of human rights or environmental laws in the most populous country on Earth.

Widespread environmental destruction, wiping out forests and ecosystems all over the globe.

I don't think Aliens would be too impressed with humanity in general, including SETI researchers who retire to the cafeteria for a nice plate of murdered intelligent being on a daily basis.
TechShop: Open Access Mechanical Workshop
The installation is definitely a hard slog for owners of certain pieces of hardware. I had issues with my USB wireless adapter, my recent-ish nVidia graphics card, DVD playback, and flash. However, after I got it all up and running, the experience was worth it.

It looks like the nVidia support got better between 7.1 and 8.04. I was able to get my card running on 7,1 using a little script called "Envy", which can be installed and ran through apt-get. When I upgraded to 8.04, I did not need to make any further changes to get the graphics to work, though I did need to jump through the same hoops for my wireless adapter again.

Coders are now making scripts like Envy to help users install those last few tricky pieces of hardware. It would be nice if the auto-detect, download, and install process were part of Ubuntu itself, but these are available now as a good halfway point.
Upgrading to Hardy borked my nvidia, as well. I ended up replacing /etc/X11/xorg.conf with xorg.conf.1, which used the generic vesa driver instead of the nvidia driver. (If you don't know command line, this is 'sudo /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.new-backup' followed by 'sudo /etc/X11/xorg.conf.1 /etc/X11/xorg.conf'.)

After I rebooted under the vesa driver, I was able to use the Hardware Drivers tool under System/Administration to turn on the normal Hardy nvidia driver.

I also recommend grabbing nvidia-settings from the repository to tweak things like multiple monitors more easily. (Once it's there, you just call 'sudo nvidia-settings'.)
You did in fact say web2py won:

"web2py is the only framework that participated to the www.flourishconf.com rumble (develop a web app in 24 hours) and won because all the other frameworks chickened out."

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2008/04/m-half-baked-thoughts-on-...
This is one of the main reasons I moved to Boston, the #2 area for startups, rather than Silicon Valley, the #1. There's still a huge amount of web tech people around, but not as much of an echo chamber.
I think the problem is not so much that Linux is designed by geeks ignorant to the plight of the common person, but just that software is hard to create and maintain, especially software as big and complex as an operating system.

The biggest system I've ever worked with was a game I worked on with a friend for a year. By the end of the year the codebase was so massive and tangled that the thought of adding a new feature or even modifying a current one made me want to curl up in the corner and mumble incoherently.

I think the big problem to solve right now is simply making software development easier.
No they can't. I just bought a Microsoft Live camera, and I had to install 400mb worth of stuff to get it work, on a pretty patched up XP, and even a Vista!! (which came out a year ago). It should be able to just plug that thing and get going. Ah, and the button on top of it, works of course, only with MSN.

Oh, and it wont even work on my sister's computer, as she needs to install SP2.

MS = crap

And let's not even mention what sorry piece of OS Vista is. It is god aweful, and I regeret not wiping it out from my parent's computer.
Yes, and Django's ORM is also inferior to SQLAlchemy.

If his ORM were better than SQLAlchemy, it would be more widely used. Since it is not widely used, I see no need to look into it before dismissing it.
The Ubuntu team should ditch GIMP and port Paint.NET to Linux.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/May-19.html
Launch: Silicon Valley
"In its 3rd year, Launch: Silicon Valley is now firmly established as the premier product launch platform for cash strapped startups. The event, co-presented by SVASE, Garage Technology Ventures and Microsoft, provides the next generation of emerging technology companies with the opportunity to pitch their products to, and network with, an audience of Silicon Valley’s top VCs, Angels, corporate business development executives, prospective customers and partners, bloggers and media."

"Companies that are interested in presenting their products at Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 should send an Executive Summary of no more than 2 pages to Launchsv@svase.org by latest May 9, 2008"
And they'll do that with the mountains of cash they get from their thriving newspaper business...
My biased guess is that Microsoft is concentrating too much on forcefully extracting money from whereever it can.

Apple has obviously concentrated on making things that people would actually _want to_ use. The truckloads of money they're raking in is just an (intentional) side-effect.

The plan with Vista was to ram it down everyone's throat through Microsoft's monopoly position, but where is the added value for the users?

Leopard received a much warmer response. Fanboys, yes, and bugs, but still - it's something that people want to use.
I wonder how did .NET thing worked out? Someone decided to bring Anders Hejlsberg on board and give him absolute freedom.

It was quite impressive for a company of Microsoft's size to create something like that from scratch.
That attitude should make it easy for smart employers to weed them out.
The remarkable thing about humans is that we're even vaguely concerned about environmental destruction. Out of millions of species, we're the only one that is. So what makes you think that extraterrestrial species we encounter are likely to care more than we do?
Good companies can create fanboys and not-so-good can lose them seemingly overnight. Believe it or not, there were quite a few Microsoft fanboys just 10 years ago, I was one of them: it was a great place to work in early 90s and they kicked everyone's ass on engineering battleground: Netscape, Borland and IBM can whine all they want, but the technology behind NN4, Borland compilers and OS/2 couldn't handle Microsoft's will to compete.

... while Apple was considered to be technically inferior (and it was) overpriced junk for seniors.

When you turn these tables around, that's called innovation: not just 100% technology, but design and marketing as well.
In the enterprise software business (and typically, the desktop software business as well), the most straightforward business model is to offer a product and charge people for it. That way, you get paid whenever people use your software (excepting for piracy).

If you release your software under a free software license, users are not only free to look at the source and modify it, they are free to redistribute it to others who have not paid for it.

If you can find a way to make free software work for you in a way that still allows you to earn a good living developing your software (such as by providing services), then more power to you. But for-profit software companies are not producing non-free software simply through myopia and ignorance.
Frocer, I'm in the same position, minus having had a fair amount of programming experience(only a couple of Java classes in college). Would you be up for exchanging IM or other contact info, so we each have someone to bounce things off of as we learn?

My e-mail's in my profile, and the offer is open to others as well.
I've been experimenting with web2py over the last week and I like it. Simple web apps are easy to create with very little work. I'm not keen on through-the-web code development but that's not essential to web2py -- everything can be edited directly as simple files. The code of the 'gluon' library seems fine to me. It's a very compact style of coding that (IMO) could use a few more comments, but it's at least as good as what I've seen in Zope and Plone. (Of course, web2py has not been around long enough to accumulate the kind of cruft that happens in more aged software). The documentation is pretty good, particularly in its examples and tutorials. The new "manual" is good. The one thing is miss is an API manual such as can be found for the PHP and Python libraries.
> Just as Ubuntu now has "restricted drivers" it should also have "popular non-free apps", and a screen should appear on the first boot that lets the user install flash, skype, etc.

Actually, it does come with a package called "Ubuntu restricted extras" that installs flash, LAME, DVD playback, the JRE, etc. If you wander through Add/Remove Applications, it's there and easy to install. The problem is that they don't follow the rest of your suggestion and make people aware of it on first launch.
Blodget Kills The Term "Startup"
I updated the document and listed 3. When the other two come out I will update it again. Thanks.
Secrets to getting Digg to send you visitors
That's the job of branding. Microsoft, Slashdot, Burger King, Coca Cola, TechCrunch, General Motors, Morgan Stanley and Mercedes Benz aren't particularly forgettable (even though Microsoft is about as generic as it gets!)

I'm not sure there are significantly more successful single word brands than longer named brands, although it certainly seems to be true online.
If you have about 30 minutes to kill, you can try my tutorial:

http://www.instantdjango.com

It's not that great, but it covers the basics. Also, it includes a no-installation-required django environment for Windows, which you can even run from a USB flash drive.

I will be uploading an update sometime in the next few days now that qsrf has been merged with trunk, but it's still quite usable as is.
'“You rely on e-mail, cannot do a lot of talking and the subtleties can get lost. So you do miss things.”'

Having worked remotely for nearly four years, I've concluded that the problem lies with people who are bad at communicating -- at least, bad at communicating in certain circumstances.

Simplifying a bit: Some people are wired such that they can only communicate well face to face. Others only communicate well in writing. Some people are lucky and can do both effectively. (People who work with those people should also count themselves lucky.) And, of course, some people are bad at communicating under any circumstances.

There are also some cases where distantly-located colleagues are cold and unhelpful until you meet them in person, go out for some beers, etc., but I'm pretty sure that's orthogonal.
Aptana Cloud: Develop on your desktop, sync out to the cloud
Its an interesting observation. Not many folks even in the tech industry have any idea about twitter. I guess twitter has become a marketing tool for scobleizers and jasons
Wow, one of the worst SEO articles ever. 3 points, and the author isn't even sure if the 3rd is possible, or how to go about implementing it. The other 2 are lame and likely to have negative impact.

Here is how you get Digg to send you visitors: publish something interesting and relatively current. Note, this is pretty much a universal guide to SEO and gathering traffic.
Agreed. For anyone working with large clients, you have to be careful not to piss people off. This includes situations where it's THEIR fault for being offended.
Being a professor who teaches the stuff for a living and grades other people's work, you remind me of that typical PhD student that knows enough to talk about his work but nothing enough in detail to ever graduate. No offense.

Let me add that in life is the new things that give you an edge, not those things that everybody knows.
Right, that's common behavior. And "I don't have the time" can also just be a polite excuse to get out of doing something unpleasant.
When something is truly important people find a way to make it happen, regardless of how little time they have.
There are a couple of very large business focused projects that work on code escrow and termination clauses.

The general idea is that when you contract for a customized application you get a price break by not taking the source code (as the vendor will expect to get money from change requests, support and selling to other customers). However takeover or bankruptcy of the vendor will let you claim the code under a GPL-type license from third party escrow.

Some of the peace of mind of OSS, but a decent revenue model for the vendor. I would prefer 'genuine' open source but as a buyer I would rank this kind of arrangement far above the normal 'we die and your tools stop working'.
You cut and paste from the article real good.
I believe that the author makes one fundamental mistake: Assuming that there is one great filter, and that its common across all civilizations. It seems to me there are a large number of filters, some of which applied (to dinosaurs, for example). Some filters may cause end of all life (on earth), some others may simply eradicate all human life..

Either way, on a cosmic scale, all this is beyond our control (I'd worry about the sun going nova some day, but I have more pressing things to do), so not much point worrying about it.
That's the reason that I left the design/art world and majored in software engineering. I was repeatedly stumping my teachers by asking them questions like "why would I use a jpg instead of a bitmap" or "which video codec is better for what we are using?" I routinely got answers like, "just use whatever one looks better."

It really starts to get annoying when you leave the 2D Photoshop/Illustrator world and get into 3D and animation design. There's so much animation that has to be automated procedurally or just makes more sense once you understand how the application actually works.
That fallacy only exists when you lump all of software engineering in with shrink-wrap software development. Most people don't think of consultants the same way they do product teams, which is also why people are always so surprised at where Visual Basic ranks among industry development environments.
From personal experience I had no problem learning Mac-OS, which I stumbled around in at first but didn't experience any major problems until much further down the road (when I was capable of dealing with them).

On the other hand I downloaded Ubuntu last month, and after taking several hours just to get onboard wifi working (xps m1330), I lost all desire to use it further.

For me, gradual hurdles vs. massive roadblock after roadblock is the difference between enjoying the learning process instead of dreading it.
Maybe you are a beer or appletiser drinker ;) (SAB Miller has a market cap double that of Ford, if I'm not mistaken)
User testing is one area where free software has a fundamental disadvantage vs. paid-for programs. Programmers can turn their time into code with no need of money. Unfortunately, proper user testing costs real money. Paid-for programs have revenue with which they can pay for user testing but only the largest FOSS projects have that kind of cash. In my opinion, this is one important reason why open source programs have a bad reputation for usability.
Do you seriously want a laundry list of everything wrong with web2py? Would that help you in some way, or would you refute it with a personal attack? If you do, I could send you an email this week.
The fun part is that you can put your ticket in upside down but it comes out right-side up. Very amusing.

It's almost unfortunate that everything is contactless now.
SBCL leadership change
Rubinius Retort : What "Ruby in Ruby" really means
Yet Apple seems to deliver far more innovative products to market

Keyword: Seems.

Yes, if you're preaching to the converted, that's proof enough, but Apple has rebadged BSD and has gotten a large degree of success through a remake of a 1979 device, the Sony Walkman. But those aren't really innovations at all. Shiny object!=innovation. I don't know how else to put it.

Here's microsoft's research page,

http://research.microsoft.com/research/default.aspx

Here's, umm, Apple's

http://www.apple.com/education/research/

...or, at least, that's the 1st link for the search query, "Apple Research":

Hmm, the page you’re looking for can’t be found.

A 404.
Three other people came to pick up the rules and some more were on the mailing list, were supposed to and didn't. I spent 24 hours coding and felt like a fool when nobody else delivered. You are taking a quote I made to my users' group out of context. Why do you turn a discussion about some work of mine into a personal thing?
In its 3rd year, Launch: Silicon Valley is now firmly established as the premier product launch platform for cash strapped startups.

Odd that I've never heard of it then.
Please do it, to my email or to the web2py mailing list. they will be taken care of or you I will explain to you why I disagree with you.
Built-to-flip is an interesting way to put it, since the companies you describe are very similar to individual employees -- productive, but not broad enough in scope to constitute a whole businesses. If that's what makes them built-to-flip, doesn't it apply to every lawyer, accountant, sales guy, or programmer who either functions as part of an infrastructure or can't function without one?
It seems that most people aren't concerned with environmental description per se, but rather how that destruction might affect their own lives. So really it's just self preservation and self interest, which isn't much different from other animals.
I think I just found a possible alternative explanation, which given the odds might actually be very probable: there is one situation in which aliens might not want to show themselves to us. That is, if we are an experiment that their interference would mess up. Perhaps they are just studying some sociology and evolution theory with earth. We already are the result of the "von Neumann probe".

We are not seeing any other aliens because our creators (not god, but some aliens) are so powerful that they destroyed them or kept them away.

Well, just a random thought I had after reading the article.
No offense.

This is probably a new site record for the unconvincing use of that phrase.
I've thought about this issue in the past and have a similar view to the author's, forgive me if it's a little bit childish:

I believe that in order to develop space technology a species(let's call it that) has to be technologically advanced but in order to be technologically advanced the specieshas to be innovative and competitive.

But competition is the trait that can cause conflict and wars so any species that has the capability to colonize foreign worlds also has the ability to annihilate itself.

Thus I have this idea that every species that has been able to get this technology has killed itself off. It's a morbid view but just an idea that I have.

What I like to think is that we are getting more and more in line with nature and less and less pugnacious so at one point maybe we'll get along with the world - hopefully these advanced aliens have reached that point.
If your goal is to make enough so that you can concentrate on something else, creating a mundane income-producing company is the wrong plan, because it will rapidly stop producing income if you stop paying attention to it.
I'd be more surprised if they didn't do this. (I was going to make a snarky comment about the programming.reddit auto-submit-to-YCNews bot, but...)
Head First AJAX by O'Reilly.
There are "smart" content management systems like Movable Type that let you type into a text area using "bold" and "italic" buttons like Word. When you submit, it automatically converts it to HTML.

The NYTimes designers, apparently, type everything out by hand and inject the HTML directly.
You know wxPython has a widget that can render html. It's not full featured, but I was pretty amazed by it. There's definitely a lot of potential there...
Ask HN: Test driven web development
Hello,

I'm gradually becoming more interested in test driven development, and I decided to use it on one of my projects.

I am also thinking about using this approach on another project - a web application which I'm writing in django. I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around writing unit tests for something which will ultimately be quite highly coupled with a framework.

Can anyone here recommend of a good way for going about this? How have you done it? Does it simply not work?

P.S.
General good information about TDD would also be appreciated, since I'm new to the whole concept.
I've thought about that too. What if there is a civilization out there that are millions of years ahead of us. What can't they do?

We think in human terms, but they might not have the need to spread to every planet. But they may want to stop other civilizations, because they can become threats to them. Perhaps they just monitor the galaxy and stops other civilizations from spreading too far?

That could also explain why UFO observations have increased so much after WWII. When they noticed that we could make nuclear bombs, we were put on the "no fly list" :-)
Half A Million Microsoft-Powered Sites Hit With SQL Injection
Speaking from experience, it's the ability Steve Jobs has to merge benevolence with good design. It's a mission and within the DNA of Apple to bring to the world good designs, intuition, and stuff that just works.

At the end of the day it's just computers but when imbued with the idea that through computers peoples' lives are easier, more efficient, and more fun, you just attract people willing to work harder and longer and wanting to change the world.

Sappy, yes, but it works.
It looks nice, but I haven't found anything I like more than Consolas on Windows.
The article is the basics of presentations, to bad all it is presenting is the opportunity to buy a book through amazon
Upon Steve Job's return one of the many decisions he did was to axe the Research group within Apple. His explanation was simply: no one does R in the valley anymore. The sole survivor of that group was QuickTime while over the years what Apple has always excelled at has been development and an eye for seeing innovation and bring that home.

iPod: contracted.

iTunes: bought.

Most of the pro tools: bought.

Computers: integration of OEM parts.

Displays: rebadged.

And they've been able to gain marketshare like crazy and release products that people lust for. On the consumer front what has Microsoft presented to the world even with their massive research division? Talking Barney dolls? A house full of quirky tech they keep showing off every chance they get? Surface? Zune? Xbox?