skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for your response. If HTC, Palm, Sony, Nokia, or anybody else releases a great Google Android or Microsoft Windows Mobile phone for business use that comes with a great keyboard and is equivalent in functionality to a Blackberry, with easy-to-use developer-focused SDK's that Google and Microsoft have, while Blackberry sticks with their (from what I hear) poor platform and continues to charge a big extra monthly fee for their data plans, I can imagine RIM will be stuck in an unfortunate situation two years from now, as Palm is today.

In my opinion of how quickly things can turn around, Palm used to be the darling of the Apple world, having roots in Apple's Newton project, and the PalmOS operating system supported Macs while Windows devices did not. As soon as the iPhone came out, Mac users of Palm Treos were probably the first in line to buy the real thing (an Apple phone). Also, Palm themselves put Windows on their phones even before the announcement of the iPhone (turned out to be a good decision for them, since they weren't doing much with the PalmOS, because they couldn't really modify it after all--they chose to have backwards compatibility in order to state that they have over 60,000 applications.)

There's also the issue that RIM, a Canadian company, is the only company that forces every message to go their country before it reaches its destination, which means state and federal government officials, and the military, will have an easy choice to use one of the other platforms, as many departments have done already in the United States. The governments in France and India have also voiced such concerns to ban the Blackberry.

Note that I am not referring to stock prices here, but the general status of the platforms at that time.
I wish I could gift you all of my karma for that one. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.
It seems the crux of this post is that "while I don’t know the exact donation totals, I bet the site has raised a thousand dollars in a couple days." Or to summarize slightly: something almost positively probably happened, and by god I'll use this event that may or may not have happened as linkbait.

I really think we should refrain from posting our own content unless it is of particularly high quality (a fairly long--and edited--essay, a project we have been working on for several months, a redesign of our company's app). If I had to summarize this concept into one rule it would be "Don't post things that might appear to a reasonable individual to take longer to read than to write."
Can someone kill this, please?
They should spend all $150 million to buy a new UI for the Blackberry. Seriously.

I think if they (very quickly) build a non-crap UI for the Blackberry, they'd have a shot... Given that Jobs is adamant about his ridiculous on-screen keyboard.
I will start myself having programmed both for Google Android and Windows Mobile.

In the grand scheme of things, the two platforms are comparable in the amount of joy and pain they cause and it takes roughly the same amount of effort to get things done.

Windows Mobile:

+ C# (popular, easy to learn language)

+ IDE with debugging

- IDE costs money

+ Decent compatibility, debug once - run anywhere

- Compatibility is not perfect - there are two distinct flavors (touchscreen and non-touchscreen) and while its possible to write compatible code it still takes effort

+ Native Emulators for different form factors

- Network connectivity in emulator is a pain to configure

+ Once you configure it you can simulate network conditions very well

-- Windows Forms UI is quite primitive and does not have even basic layout. Huge pain in the neck. I hate it.

- The View and Controller of Model-View-Controller are merged into one (class Form), as a result you can't easily separate View from business logic. Thus it is harder to test.

+ Allocation profiler and unit tests

- No regular profiler, no code coverage

- Stagnant - very little has changed in recent times

+ Large install base (10 mil)

Android:

+ Java - popular, easy to learn language

+ Single UI model for all devices (touchscreen)

+ Free IDE with debugging (Eclipse)

+ Working network connectivity in debugger

- Not as rich connectivity options

- Debugging is half-assed - it hangs all the time (search for "19% bug") and you can't eval random expressions, only local variables. But then again it gets the job done.

+ The Intent / Activity / View model is nice - View and business logic are separated. It's also quite cool that application consists of late-bound activities - basically you can expand existing application by developing a newer implementation of existing activity. In other words, it's hackable that way. The whole way how Google rethought the idea of "application" is very fresh and I like it - it seems to make sense to me.

+ Regular Profiler (don't remember about unit tests and allocation profiler)

+ Rapidly evolving

- zero install base
"If HTC, Palm, Sony, Nokia, or anybody else releases a great Google Android or Microsoft Windows Mobile phone for business use that comes with a great keyboard and is equivalent in functionality to a Blackberry,"

Well, they kind of did. There are many phones that run Windows Mobile and do all the email/calendar quite well.
This is my phone for example: http://tinyurl.com/64jtkq T-Mobile dash. It has keyboard, does all the push-email with Exchange thingy and runs the software that I write for it.

My biggest problem with it is outdated UI programming model (Windows Forms), but judging by posts here it is a nice problem to have compared to what RIM offers.
so when i search google for a red widget i never see ebay listings? are you f kidding? MS was before the net, as was apple, so count them out as they are manufactures not websites, google came up with the best search (given my argument is that the net is all about search) algo and thus gained success, so they dont count. Myspace made its way through the fog with SPAM, youtube got big because they tapped into myspace offering the best music video service, and lost 1 million a month in the process (im still not even sure if they have actually made any profit and I seriously doubt it), social networks have poor quality traffic, albeit alot of it, which costs them a fortune in data centers and makes no cash, Can I safely say the only social network to be in profit is linkedin.

"but not worth early focus for a lot of others"
Total crap.
320480 - Download useful iPhone PSD File
What's so mysterious about puts "hello, world"? I think you have a mistaken impression of Ruby.
In general, this is probably the best time for companies that are talking to MSFT re: search about being bought out, due to the fact that:

1. MSFT has cash in the bank and the Yahoo acquisition didn't go thorough

2. They are even more desperate now to bolster anything & everything to do with search & monetization

3. The perceived value of search companies (Powerset, Cuill) is higher since there are very few search companies that can allegedly make a difference to begin with, and even fewer buyers

Powerset is valued at 42 million (see venture beat article), if they are bought for 3x-5x that amount by msft and they can retain their independence they should probably go for it. If Powerset needs the same kind of computing resources, msft would be a better bet in supplying that.

Msft did something similar with TellMe in terms of retaining their independence apparently (no idea how far that is true).
Just came across http://disqus.com/ so I'll add it here for future reference.
Apart from the difference in usage commented above you do not worry about cannibalizing a market where you have less than 10% market share.

If you as an example could cannibalise the Laptop market by 100 units and you had 10% share of same you would only loose 10 unit sales in the first market and gain 100 units in the other market. In this case smart phones. Assume a 3 to 1 price ratio you would gain $2 for every 1$ you lost.
The one reason I switched to google was because on the search engine I was using the search results and images took a really long time to load on a 56k modem, while google's results page loaded instantaneously.
Why does a language have to have a culture of testing? If you are a good engineer, you will find a way to test your code, even if it means really going out of your way to test your code. For example, there really isn't an easy way to test kernel code written in C, so some people embed a Tcl interpreter in their C code, write some tcl command handlers, and use the tcltest package to test.

Just because your cute little framework created some test file placeholders for you doesn't mean you're going to write good code, or good tests.
How Web 3.0 Will Work
great article, but php bashing is akin to a class war, and yea sure - the upper classes are more secure (trustworthy) than the lowers ha?
How is it different than posting a long block of text instead of a link?
So does Caltech
One can only express so much in a short sentence, but McCarthy's reply does sum up one version of a traditional cognitivist understanding of perception. That is the idea that knowledge is raw data, and that thought is processing. It seems to me that much of traditional AI is unfairly dismissed, just as behaviorism was largely unfairly dismissed by the AI people, such is the peril of science being ruled by trends in the absence of strong findings (real science as in physics for example, the paradigm of real science).

But I also think there are some very important ideas from the more recent work that began with connectionism and led to embodied/ enactivist approaches. That has led to a definition something along the lines of knowing being an organism's ability to interact effectively with its environment (which would involve being able to predict correctly the results of actions performed on the object). So that would imply that both the organism and the environment are involved in the knowledge.

The camera has no knowledge of the table because it has not had the experience of lifting the table and feeling its weight, being aware of its ability to throw it (and how far), to set it down (and how its weight will affect how quickly it will hit the floor), its surface as a stable place for setting other objects, etc. All of these interactions lead to the perceptual skills necessary to know and understand the table, which is to say to have a trained neural network controlling, planning behavior, categorizing experience with these trained expectations.

(That seems to imply some guiding principles for implementing AI: 1. basic locomotion and physical interaction with the world is an important and non-trivial problem 2. there needs to be a linking theory to extend basic-level knowledge to novel, abstract categories of knowledge grounded in the earlier type. For 1. lots of neuroscience work is relevant including constructivist/ modeling approaches, including the behavior-based AI paradigm and for 2. one such major linking paradigm is the one that started with Rosch/ Lakoff /Faconnier/ Gibbs etc currently under the headings of conceptual metaphor and blending theory, cognitive linguistics, embodied cognitive science)
Heh - well I saw enough proof of her identity. Besides the personal correspondence, I saw a photo she took combining her student ID, a photo of her and Tracy, and a coin someone had requested. I don't deny that the whole thing could have been elaborately faked, but its past the threshold where it would be worth it. The author of the reason.com article also confirmed her identity.

Nonetheless, you're right that an unscrupulous person could probably gather some non-trivial amount of money by basically copying what I did.
> A Laptop and Cell Phone (even the iPhone) are complementary.

Not for much longer. Have you noticed that the most capable phones are getting larger and the least capable laptops are getting smaller. And both are available with Windows, Linux and MacOS X. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186508 a possible future mix.
All I know is that facebooks ad's are obnoxious enough that it was the catalyst for me finally installing adblocker plus on firefox.

I don't want to see ads for meeting attractive libidous neighborhood women on the sidebar of the website I use to keep in touch with friends and organize social gatherings with those same folks.
It makes me feel like I'm using myspace or some porn site whose ads are specialized to the geographic region indicated by your connection....
This article basically attempts to discredit the maxim that 'The three most “personal” choices a developer makes are language, tool, and OS.'

The author posits that these shouldn't be 'personal' choices, rather a programmer should just choose the right tool for the job.

However, I think he fails to take into consideration that some choices are 'sticky' (in the economic sense) because of external efficiency boosts.

For example, Eclipse may be a better Java IDE than Emacs, ceteris paribus. However, all things are not equal. By using Emacs with JDEE I get free svn integration, my keybindings, my customizations, and so on. All those things would take considerable time to set up/learn on Eclipse.

Similarly, I can imagine certain tasks for which OCaml may be better suited than CL or Perl (my two strongest languages). But, I may have enough additional expertise in Lisp or Perl to offset the 'natural' advantage OCaml would offer. (This isn't to suggest that we shouldn't push our comfort zones and expand our skills, though).

It's a basic principle that specialization often leads to efficiency increases. And, since the decision of what to specialize in (Emacs v Vim, Ruby v Python, etc.) is effectively arbitrary, it boils down to a personal choice.

I should learn the basics of both A and B (windows and linux, cl and scheme, etc), but at some point I should choose one to specialize in. And that choice is pretty personal.
Speaking of FB Chat, I used it for the first time yesterday when somebody messaged me, and it freaked me out. I don't know how many people enjoy having to chat with a browser window open. Sure, it's portable, but it's unappealing in many cases; and you're practically guaranteed that they're analyzing your chat logs.
You can't compare yourself to Google for years without releasing something that actually compares to Google and then expect people to refrain from pointing it out.
Debt financing isn't just about avoiding a "down round." It's also about maximizing the upside value for current stockholders.

There is some maximum possible business value of Facebook, no matter how much capital they take in. The founders hope to reach that value. If they issue more stock, even if they take in the same valuation for that stock, that final maximum value is being divided among more shares. Each shareholder's upside is limited as a result.

The lesson: -- equity is dilutive for growth companies, even if it's priced appropriately --
How to make a music video
I tried to find a free PDF version of that paper, but no such luck. However, I found an earlier one by Michael Spivey and Rick Dale, ON THE CONTINUITY OF MIND: TOWARD A
DYNAMICAL ACCOUNT OF COGNITION (59 pages, <http://www.cogstud.cornell.edu/spiveylab/PLM.pdf>;).
From the software engineer's point of view, there can be no question that Symbian is by far the nicest platform to work on. It's got the same two decades of heritage as pretty much every other popular operating system that exists today, but it shows what can be achieved if the people who designed the OS in the 80s were thinking clearly about the future.

It's so refreshing to work on an Operating System where character sets aren't anything you have to worry about, that has Unicode designed in to every component from the file server on up. To use processes rather than DLLs as the basic unit of code reuse is just great, and with platsec to have a decent mechanism for policing access to those processes... Well, I could go on and on, but I better not.

It also helps to have a quarter of a billion phone installed base, and almost 1 in every 10 phones shipped being a Symbian phone. Not just Smartphones, mind, all types of phone.
The hidden value of processing.js
"I use a variety of languages, tools, and OSes, and my choice of which to use are all geared around a single end goal: not to promote my own social or political agenda, but to make my customer happy."

My customer probably won't be happy if I programmed his thing with a language, tools and OS that frustrate me to no end. That frustration will no doubt find its way in the product, just as sheer joy finds it way into the product when I love the way I work.

My agenda? Having fun making software that's fun to use.
Android: it's open source. It might not be an initial advantage against something like iPhone, but in the end, I think it's very compelling.
More unix kung-fu:

screen (http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/)

recs (http://code.google.com/p/recordstream/)
Debt gets paid before equity. Meaning if they don't sell out or aren't able to pay off all their debt. The shareholders get screwed. That's it.
Amazon EC2 Elastic IP Addresses
There's nothing wrong in promoting a social or political agenda either. We are software specialists and we should educate other citizens, including our clients, about the virtues of good software and the right tools to build it. This is no different from any other field. I though the post made Ted look like a pushover.
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Extending Your Wireless Network With Better Antennas
I guess it's the white belt...
I recently saw one of those being used in a store at a POS box of some sort. They had removed the trackpoint cap!
I like this variant:
http://www.cherry.de/english/products/keyboards_g83-6188_lin...
"If you're building a web product, and you're in a tech hub like the Valley, Boston, NYC, Austin, etc... I wouldn't bother with a business plan. If you're not in a tech center, I'd bet you're going to have a hard time raising funding with or without a business plan, but YMMV."

What sucks is I'm not in a hub or really anywhere near one. I'm hoping to find something/someone locally who is willing to fund me (and my co-founder) enough to get to one. Until then... I keep hacking.
I am interpreting this question to mean "How is posting this link different then posting a new topic on HN with the same text?" (Please stop me if I have simply misinterpreted a snarky remark about the value of my comment. ;)

I wasn't intending to address that distinction in my comment, but the distinction is important because additional traffic to your website has the potential to benefit you far more than posting "a long block of text" on HN does. This is why most low quality submissions come in the form of links instead of text submissions: because the submitter wants readers to visit their website for nefarious sundries.

The point I was trying to make, which applies equally to submitted links and printed text, is that they should be of higher quality than this submission. To me this submission feels like its raison d'etre is to serve the submitter, and does very little in way of sparking interesting or meaningful discussion for the HC community.

To be more specific, it fits into the mold of the variety of submissions that I find to consistently be of the lowest quality: short (and often unedited) posts submitted by their own authors. When I joined the HN, posts of this kind were virtually unheard of, but recently they have become rather common. A simple test for these kinds of submissions is "If someone else found this entry, would they submit it to Hacker News?"

I have to apologize though, my comments here are really directed at an undesirable trend, of which your submission is only one example, and not an egregious one at that. So, I hope you don't put too much weight into my critique.
Shareaza Stands Up To Scammers: “We’re fighting back!”
If you want a book, the best one I've read (and over time, I've read more than my fair share) is "Business Plans that Win $$$": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060913916/

It looks old and outdated and cheesy. But while it is from 1987, the differentiating principles are the same ones that you hear echoed by pg, 37signals, Sequoia, etc. Sound business principles (the kind that an investor who has not drunk of the kool-aid, yet, should possess and be looking for) have not changed in those years. The book pushes you to answer the same hard questions that a good investor will, and position your plan in the best possible light.
So how many servers does $100 million buy exactly? A bespoke built data center full of them I would have thought!
I've used the PwC format for a class that I've taken in entrepreneurship. As people have mentioned, the usefulness of a business plan varies depending on what you're doing. However, if you can write a good one, it really forces you to think things out well.

http://www.pwcv2rform.com/cgi-local/hcregister.cgi?link=pdf/...
Having a good culture is important for various things, in my opinion. It doesn't guarantee code is good, of course, but by creating expectations that things should be done a certain way, I think that on average, it does make a language more attractive.

Case in point: Tcl and Tk made it vastly easier to create GUI's, but there was little to no culture of getting design right, no guidance about how to make a good UI, and that came back to bite Tk because people came to associate it with ugly GUIs.
I considered this possibility but a casino which is too open to bots could become marginalised. Real players would be scalped too easily and bot writers would be playing a zero-sum game. Both factors would reduce casino turnover and profit.

So, it is in a casino's interest to leave the whole issue unresolved and with a level of tolerance which is in-step with competitors.
Unveiling the iPhone 2.0?
Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool
The 25 Year Old BSD Bug
I've been using Yahoo lately and haven't been disappointed.

In the past I have used Gandi, which worked well until Visa's extra security screen (which doesn't work in Safari or Firefox) came along.

Earlier this year I registered 3 .com.au domains with Enetica totalling to ~$200 and they charged my account 3 times. I wondered why I had been charged over $600, rang them up and got refunded within a week or so.
So, Are You Fed Up With Facebook?
From the article:

Besides limits on the screens and hard drives, to be eligible, the systems can have no more than 1G byte of RAM and a single-core processor running at no more than 1GHz.
Actually, I was talking about both. It's all good and great that they'll host my comments, but how do they make their money?

I need to know this in order to migrate.
Any determined talk of how Web 3.0 will work is, at this point, as premature as talk of web 2.0 back in 1998.

We simply don't know.

Daniel
Huh, interesting (well, for me), that guy's business is about 500 meters from my parents' house in Eugene.
There are many, many books on the subject. They're all fairly standard. Go to your bookstore and get the one you prefer.

Daniel
Acunote is what I use to plan out my sprints. It does all the stuff of creating charts (which clients always like) and predicting how much work you'll be able to get done with each new sprint.
The coolest thing from JavaOne 2008
What about OpenMoko? It will soon become available to the masses, it's fully open, cheap, extendable etc.