skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The problem with this statement is that PowerPC is a RISC architecture, and it clearly was insufficient."

PowerPC's shortcomings had nothing to do with being a RISC processor. After all, you said it yourself: x86 is really RISC at its core anyway.

The "economies of scale" argument has nothing to do with the technical merits of the chip design, it has everything to do with the fact that every PC save PPC Macs has used an x86 chip for decades.

Architecturally, x86 does have disadvantages. It's been designed over the years to maintain backwards compatibility -- meaning it's still living with mistakes that were made decades ago. There are a lot of reasons why its unlikely that Apple will start manufacturing custom chips to run OS X, but none of them are because x86 is a great chip design, or that it would be impossible to design a custom chip that would run OS X well.
Sure, if you throw yourself in the deep end, you may sink to the bottom. However, those who make it out will be better swimmers than those who stay in the kiddie pool, that's all.

> but I think most of those billionaires would have been as successful or even more so if they'd have spent the time to finish school.

Dropping out can be a necessary condition due to timing reasons alone. Gates dropped out of Harvard because he was worried about missing his chance to make it big in the computer industry. There's also the non-trivial issue of losing your most energetic years as a young adult (18-22) by spending them on something other than your life ambition. Not to mention, if you aren't interested in college and force yourself to do it, that may well have such a spirit-crushing/soul-numbing effect that you kill off your own motivation to the point where you lose your drive to DO your own company. It depends on your personality.

I think for the most part, ambition to take over the world as an entrepreneur is incompatible with jumping through anyone else's hoops, including sitting in class and doing what someone else tells you.

So it's not that dropping out makes you a world-changer, but staying in is frustrating to the ambitions of world-changers.

If you look at the Forbes 2007 list of richest Americans who didn't inherit their wealth, you get 1. Gates (college dropout), 3. Adelson (college dropout), 4. Ellison (college dropout), 5 and 6. Brin and Page (grad school dropouts), 7. Kerkorian (8th grade dropout!), 8. Dell (college dropout), 9. Allen (college dropout). Only Warren Buffet at #2 didn't drop out of school at some level, but he was already established in business before he went to college, and only went because his father pressured him into it. He hated it. (I left out the Koches because they inherited Koch Industries.)

The causal effect is that the same thing that drives them to be successful also drove them to drop out.
Why it's time to dump the Web 2.0 sobriquet once and for all
I moved by the sea to create my venture, I'm not shooting to get rich quick, I want a better life. For me getting a better life meant going surfing as much as possible.

I can't imagine throwing everything for my startup, I already left behind my friend, familly and my ex-girlfriend, I won't kill my way of living standard too. I suppose it is legitimate for other people to seek a place on other criteria like where I find VCs or other people like me or mountain, or night clubs etc. and do their venture for a living.
Kim Kommando get's published in the Lansing State Journal (MI, USA and I forget where she is that they pull it from) But from what I have read of her... she gives, poor, or ignorant advice more often than good advice.
Right. I never said anything about games. I'm getting all the open source people pissed. Ohh well it won't cost me a job.

I wonder if people not working on open source games has anything to do with it costing money to eat. (For you open source folks, money is a closed source system the mean government forces us to use so they can lock the entire population into one way of doing things. People with healthy self esteem feel comfortable charging a fair bit of it for their skills. Heard of it?)

But since you brought it up. I played quake what, 8, ten years ago.
The shape and the size of the keys is more important that what is displayed on them.
What am I supposed to criticize? Your post reminds me of a time a guy asked me to do a code review of his java hello world program. I couldn't tell if he was f'ing with me, or if he was really seriously that much of a n00b.
Tumblr, Instapaper, YCN, Google Reader Subscribe, Share on Facebook, Bugmenot
Although maybe he's wrong about Photoshop vs Gimp, I still think he is correct in saying that some programs just can't be done in an open source manner. A better example might be something like Second Life - there is no way that could have evolved the way most open source software evolves now.

Some things just require immense dedication and concentration from a large amount of people from the very start - and in an open source project, you can't get that until you have a sizable project already done.
Rackspace files an IPO, setting price by auction
Rackspace, the large managed hosting company, has filed an IPO eight years after their original (and retracted) IPO in 2000. Like Google, they are setting their price by auction.
The thinking about start-ups has shifted over the last few years so there is more awareness, and in certain places -- esp. Silicon Valley -- it can actually be a plus even if it folded. In other places, nobody wants to touch you if you've had a failed venture.

Ironically, without a diploma, your best options for getting a job at someone else's company happen to be in the same locations that are best for starting your own company regardless of diploma. Google probably won't hire you but another startup will, because they don't have diplomas, either! They just care if you are smart, and get things done.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/04/26...
Triathlete gets killed by great white in San Diego
So as a break from schoolwork I go surfing a lot. This dude got munched in Solana beach which is between the 2 places I usually go surfing. He was out training with some other folks. The odds of getting attacked are so low - The Black Swan rears its ugly head.

I'm still gonna go surfing again soon, just not this weekend.
The problem is, if you have standards this high, you'll never find someone.

The good programmers you talk about are extremely rare.
The Future of Space Sports
South African Computer Olympiad Hosts Online Contest
Where do anti-depressants come in?
The full title of the book in question is this,

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

...and Ben Stein's political concerns are quite appropriate. It is astonishing to listen to ordinary people discuss evolution, and to observe the context in which the subject is raised. The one context is...

Christianity.

You see? There has arisen an odd dichotomy [1] between Christianity and Evolution. And people understand religion to the extent that it is false, and understand evolution to the extent that it is the proof of that falsehood. Lesson over. Ordinary people can only understand things in an oversimplified way. Part of the job of the elite is to determine how things are simplified.

In fact, the implications of evolution, and especially its offshoots like sociobiology are in extreme contradistinction with an entire class of laws and shibboleths and received wisdom----shortly, anything that champions egalitarianism or sings "We shall overcome" when that overcoming means a quashing of the superior by the inferior through unnatural means. I posit that "unnatural" means are inherently temporary, and so require constant maintenance--which is what Stein is doing.

[1] http://www.northernsun.com/images/thumb/2214.jpg
They probably felt they were respected like crap by the vendor. When one party has a disagreement with another, and there's a clear and obvious disparity in some kind of standing (be it social, financial, racial, age), the party getting screwed over may feel they need to take action against this or have no trouble gaining confidence to stand up against a perceived injustice, since they're fighting two battles for the price of one. It doesn't matter if the second cause has nothing to do with anything, such as if the difference is only perceived or didn't matter in the situation.

Whereas in actuality, the other company in question is likely simply trying to rip off everybody equally (equally, in other words, meaning as much as possible.)
Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything, I guess TV has to play a role as well.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac-do...

Maybe we need more gin carts.
The economies of scale comment was simply that back before the Pentium Pro, most people thought that RISC was going to take over since it is such a better system, but because Intel is able to sell so many chips it can afford to throw extra engineers at the problem and add things like out of order execution to the x86. Or rather there are much more important things than the ISA's technical merit when considering what is the best chip to use. Plus I don't think that Apple has a chance, or they will have anything to gain by making its own chips for desktops and laptops.

The absurdity of "running OS X well is that OS X is not that special. If he means "running everything better" than it makes sense, because these are general purpose processors, and there is just a small set of instructions that are basically the same for all architectures.

x86 is not the best ISA, but the Core 2 Duo is an excellent chip, and it's hard to make a better chip no matter what ISA you are using.
So I'm looking around Rackspace's webpage (a little pokey, btw) to check out the prices. I don't see any. Now, as a rational person, I have two thoughts:

1. Well, there are a 1000 other hosting companies that aren't a pain-in-the-ass starting at step #1 (looking for prices), and

2. They are obviously ashamed of their prices anyway.

...which means that I'm going to look elsewhere.

But a quick google search shows that their dedicated servers are $500/month and up. Pure insanity. But, you know, they have "Fanatical support". What is that, anyway? What I want from my hosting company is, you know, a minimum of hardware failures. I'm not sure what support you could have besides that. Backups? Backups are pure monkey work. I value it at minimum wage.
FYI, a person from Argentina is called an Argentine.
Try this one:
http://www.ee.bilkent.edu.tr/~signal/defevent/papers/cr1062....
My least favourite phrase in the English language has to be "they must have too much time on their hands" in response to something creative but niche (re-creating Star Wars in animated ASCII art, for example). My usual response these days is "at least they weren't just watching TV".
Canada is a great place for a startup except VCs - if u r planning to get VC involved then u might have a tough time ... u may certainly get the meeting appointment but not the funds. Also angel funding is minimum. I don't know what kind of corporation u need to form (compared to Delaware C/S corp) but it may not be as advantageous as Delaware corp. Legal and tax laws are very straight forward. Proximity to USA will certainly help but dont know whether VCs from US would be interested in canadian firm ... if u r planning to hire hackers then u can find best brains here.
also visit http://www.startupnorth.ca/
http://www.daskeyboard.com/
Rediscovering Standard ML
SkEdit v4.1: Text Editor for the Web
Massage chair company Zubio gets funding to help stressed techies relax
I go fix my car and watch Cary Grant movies to relax. What do you guys do?
In fact, the implications of evolution, and especially its offshoots like sociobiology are in extreme contradistinction with an entire class of laws and shibboleths and received wisdom

This, then, is the basis for societal construction? The apeish mandate of kill or be killed is the last word, simply by virtue of it being the only word for most of history?
I don't get that title... It suggests that Twitter somehow helped him get out of jail, but... it didn't.

He just had his phone on him and Twittered from time to time.
Is it me, or does this guy speak like Paul Graham writes?
(Future == Cloud computing) ? True
> I never said anything about games.

You use your Wii for spreadsheets?

> I wonder if people not working on open source games has anything to do with it costing money to eat.

No. Not everything is done for money. Do you watch TV? Do you play games? Do you post to Hacker News? Probably... but you're not getting paid. The point is you enjoy doing those things, so you don't need money.

Games are very tedious. They involve lots of artwork and testing things 1000000 times on a tight deadline. That's the perfect thing to pay people for, because the end result is profitable and people won't do those things for enjoyment.

You may think this means open source has failed, but it's just one specific instance of people not being interested in working on things for free.

Finally, most open source work is not done by volunteers for free, it's done by people being paid to solve some other problem. About half my work is contributing to open source projects. Initially writing stuff is good for our business, of course, but when we release it and other people add features, our apps are instantly more reliable, with no effort required by us. We put in some work, the community puts in some work, and the end result is we get twice the library (or whatever) for half the "cost". Of course we contribute to other peoples' projects too, it's just the right thing to do.

It's not a zero sum game. Everyone can win when everyone helps each other out. (I imagine the gaming industry isn't like this, though. Helping your competitor is probably Evil That Must Not Be Spoken Of. But other areas aren't like that.)

Anyway, are you done trolling yet?
Does She Look Like a Music Pirate?
hand tracking, eye tracking and speech recognition are coming on strong with all the power todays computers have.

I don't think the keyboard will ever go away, but a lot of things will be way faster just with hand signals, and subvocalization dictation.
I've done some literate Haskell programming on stuff of my own. I never used it while working with other people, though. I understand that darcs (http://darcs.net) uses a fair amount of literate programming, perhaps you'd like to check it out.
What, you mean like The Future of Ideas(http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/)?
I'm guessing their (retarded) rationale for not showing prices is that then you'll be "forced" to contact their sales department to know more and then you'll "have" to rent a server so that you didn't "waste" their time...

Also, their configurations are "managed"... My totally uninformed guess is that you basically can't do squat without contacting them so that's why you need Fanatical Support (tm), and if you want to do something "non-standard" it will be hard and costly because it won't fit well into their architecture.

I hope someone can come shed some light on how totally off the track everything I just said is.

PS: The guy on their main page is fucking scary!
Well, if they're gunning for an IPO, you know they have quality hosting. They've been around for a while, survived the 2001 bubble, and they host 37signals and a ton of other websites.

I won't be a walking ad for them, but they reportedly have some kind of management structure that lets them handle support well. shrug
I've got to assume that something like this is at the level of a 1980's handheld cell phone with regards to price at the moment (and maybe tech?).

And just like the 80's cell phone, the only people I've heard online (as a group) considering these keyboards have been doctors (specifically radiologists and radiation oncologists). Basically they are people with a) lots of cash and b) a great need for complicated software and c) little time and patience to learn useful things like keyboard shortcuts, they way programmers,etc would.

Now I just wonder if we'll see drug dealers picking these up...
The high price of coming to America
I think there's an exception that says that OS libraries don't count, since that would mean that you could not write open-source software on any commercial OS.

I had a difficult time figuring this out when I released a plugin for the closed-source software LCDC under the GPL. While it's clear that you can't link a GPL library into a non-GPL executable, the reverse case seems to be more muddy. I finally settled to my satisfaction that the spirit of the GPL should not prevent me from open-sourcing a library even if that library only is meaningful when used with a closed-source executable, given that I as the copyright holder can state the intent that the library be linked with proprietary software. It's sort of like the proprietary software is my "OS" and I'm linking to it.
Stopfinder helps you find TTC stops and parking in Toronto
A previous employer recently migrated their infrastructure off of Rackspace. I'm not quite sure of the price but it was in the ridiculous range and we kept having odd issues with the infrastructure (the network was setup oddly so that we got something like 10Mbps between the application servers and the DB server). We kept having really odd problems and poor performance.

It seems they have plenty of satisfied customers but I would personally never do business with them.
I have a thin mac keyboard. If you want to stare at your keyboard all day, it's mind-blowing awesome. For typing and coding, not so much.
I look at it like this. If you are the author of both parts, why bother making the application open source? If you aren't going to make the whole thing open source, there isn't much to be gained by you or your users. Nobody wants to contribute to an application that's half-open, especially when they're debugging something and they step into the closed library.

If the library is an OS library, then you should have no problems.
Personally I take it as an insult when someone says that in response to something creative I've built. You go months work-school-sleep-work-school, waiting for the occasional free hour or two to work on something because you're passionate about it, sacrifice sleep or social life, and when you get done someone looks at it and says, "I don't understand the work that went into this and I'm not going to expend the cognitive effort to gain any understanding, but, damn, it must be nice to have loads of time on my hands like you obviously do."
Thanks for the feedback. The 200 limit is ours, we could (and should) increase it. We don't have all the results from day one (we'd have to ask Twitter for the full archive), but we could easily display up to 1000 results without a significant performance hit.
These are the kinds of articles and thoughts that really make me cherish Hacker News.
Apple iPhone SDK Beta 4 (allowing background apps?)
What format do they use? It looks like neither SOAP nor XML-RPC. It looks more like some home-brew XML-dialect.

Are they reinventing the wheel, and if so, why?
Once again, an opinion piece that claims to be research.

If you don't like something, say "I don't like ...", not "people in general don't like ...". You don't know what people in general don't like unless you have done some research. Talking out of your ass is not research.

Anyway, thinking back to the Amazon checkout... the author does have a point. It's weird that the UI just disappears during checkout. But on the other hand, when I go to the checkout, I want to checkout and be done. If I just wanted to see my items, I would go to the shopping cart, after all.
I don't understand why Shirky used the phrase cognitive surplus as opposed to time surplus. After all, free time could be spent productively doing cognitive work, but it could also be spent productively performing routinized labor. Most of the top wikipedia editors rack up their massive edit counts from correcting spelling mistakes and wikifying content, not writing original articles.
They're PHP programmers. It's a well kept secret, but PHP actually stands for "reinvent the wheel thousands of times because I don't know any better".

But hey, at least they don't have to install CPAN modules! That's hard! </sarcasm>
I love mine. I just wish I could have a cut of the purchases from my referrals.
>Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything

I of course have only read the mainstream summary of the study, but I think the study must say that anti-depressants usually don't cure depression. But I can assure you that messing with serotonin reuptake makes people happier.
Accept no substitutes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_Keyboard
Pick up Dan's book, you won't be disappointed:
Predictably Irrational

I'm about halfway through and loving it.
Python Dataflow Programming
This is so true. A very quick story - last year when I was coming up to leave University I decided to make leaving presents for my housemates as we were all about to part ways. So using my fairly basic Photoshop skills I created some digital photo collages, very simple but very effective, then went out and got some cheap frames and printed them out. When I gave them out later that evening they absolutely adored them, they were very cool. They also said I must have had far too much time on my hands to have done these, to which I replied 'I did it while you all watched Happy Gilmore'.

This notion that contributing or creating something is seen as a waste of time really gets to me. Personally, I get far greater satisfaction spending my time this way than watching the mind-rotting junk that finds its way onto the television, yet this is seen as the normal way for us to spend our time. The worst part was I felt I had to watch it just so I could spend time with my friends. I really hope there is a shift in thought upon us.

(I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)
See -- there are good reasons to take all that money from venture capitalists! ;-)
> Let's be frank: The world does not need another social news aggregator or online scheduling assistant.

Let's be frank: The world does not need another person telling us what the world does not need.
Free time is not just a recent thing. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, many of us had tons of free time. Even as agriculturalists, it was common for people to have to devote zero time to work for months on end. At times like this, young people could sing, dance, and play music for over 12 hours a day. There were places in Ireland that were like this in living memory.
Mobile Social Networks Expect $28 Billion in Revenue by 2012
Judea Pearl: The Art and Science of Cause and Effect
Agreed, did you talk to him at Speed Q&A at Web2Open?

http://www.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?speed_q_a

That was my favorite part of the conference.

Thanks again to Tony for putting it together, being able to talk to these people in an intimate setting was amazing.

-Andreas
Well, true but how offensive is it really if you say that you would rather not say how old you are?

I mean, women do it all the time.
That's the most expensive investment.
You should also probably post your social security number in case you don't post your schedules and we really need to find you to tell you that missing startup school is not ok.
Wow. I am surprised he was able to get out of jail. I am sure if I put something similar on twitter, my 6 followers would eventually read it and then reply 'oh, bummer.'
Facebook’s Insatiable Hunger for Hardware (they're running around 10,000 servers)
Louisgray.com: What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
It's only 50 bucks. GO BIG HOMIE.
If they are "one program", a distinction which seems clear but ends up being a judgement call, then no, you can not do this. If they are separate programs, then yes, you can do this. Plugins seem to be okay as well, but are a gray area. But your app's core functionality must be GPL'd or GPL-able or else you could be in trouble when you distribute it.