skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
oh no but at least I can cross checkout google wave in detail from my todo......
There is mention of accusations of Nestle giving away free powder for a limited time, but no specific story and Nestle denies the allegations.

Why would someone accept free formula over free breast milk? No one would be dumb enough to think that the free formula would last forever. While I don't deny that Nestle gave out free formula, I'm not convinced that new mothers switched to it en masse only to later realize (after their breast milk stopped flowing) that they'd have to pay to get more.
They blew it big time by hyping it for RPGs, which never went anywhere.

Get the RPGers on board, perhaps, and you can succeed.
I don't see why it would be a bad idea, many kids seem to fail to learn to read well if the task of teaching it is left to the school.

FWIW, I could read when I started school (at 6, in Austria [1]), as well as do simple maths; I was bored pretty much throughout my education, but at least I did well. Bored & lagging behind surely must be worse.

[1] homeschooling is permitted here but it's extremely rare as far as I know.
Really? I don't buy it. The game hosting is still peer to peer, the packets shouldn't have any need to leave the local network once the game is started.

I'd have to see actual tests of people on the same local network with high latency before I'd believe it's a problem.
I was under the impression that this was a good deal for businesses because they'd just offer the product less their normal costs for advertising/marketing, since groupon did that for them.

They spend less getting the product out (and get an almost guaranteed big order!), it costs less for the consumer, groupon takes a small cut, everyone wins (in theory).
Ask HN : Startup Building Process
Hello :

When someone has an idea and want to turn it into reality, what are the common steps involved. I found pieces of documents but I havenot found a document that says some simple high level steps. I was thinking of some kind of task list / checklist for a startup. If it is in the form of process flow like MS project it will be even more helpful. Have any of you come across such a document?
Here are some of them I think of :
1) Think of resolving a issue of daily life / have a great idea.
2) Build the code and a prototype.
3) Get some marketing.
4) Answer user questions(part of maintainance)
5) Maintain
6) Add features.
etc.

Can you please let me know such a document or add your thoughts about it? Thanks and sorry about some basic questions?
Zed, would you stop with the strawman bullshit already? Nobody serious ever claimed epoll was always faster than poll. The very graphs you linked to in your original post, the ones that you said were "flat out" wrong, themselves showed that poll was faster with smaller numbers of inactive fds on certain benchmarks.

And you don't need a benchmark to find it out, either. Just think about it. Poll doesn't scale because even when you have a ton of dead connections, you still have to iterate over every single fd that you're tracking when you're notified of an event. The array that you get back from epoll only contains active fds. As the active/total ratio goes up, you're eventually going to be doing just as much work as you would be doing with poll (iterating over every single fd), except you're also going to have taken the hit of the work to support epoll itself.

In other words, when ATR reaches a certain threshold, setting aside the possibility of a confounding (there you go, I used your word du jour) implementation detail, there's no possible way epoll can be as fast or faster than poll. It will always be slower. And if you never realized it, it's simply because you didn't stop and give it 5 seconds of thought, not because you were lured in by the malicious lies of the ignorant epollers.

The only interesting thing your original post illustrated vis-a-vis poll vs epoll was what the actual threshold was for your particular machine and benchmark.

Superpoll is an interesting idea, but there are serious issues with the approach you described. By adding the overhead of managing the epoll/poll migrations, you're inherently going to negatively impact the pure performance of both. I might have read it wrong, but it also sounded like you intended to start connections off in poll and migrate them over to epoll as their activity ratio went down. But with that approach, if you're getting spiky traffic that hits once and then just waits for the connection to time out, you're getting the absolute worst of poll, and then possibly spending the time to migrate over to epoll where it's just going to wait to die anyways.

Anyways, getting a negative response is hardly justification for posting someone's picture and ridiculing his appearance. It's that kind of behavior that makes people decide you're not worth dealing with regardless of how good your code is or how smart you are.
I feel bad for the Etherpad guys, who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015
I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over.

I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with "MY REPLY IN RED" company chain email threads from hell forever now.
Proposition 8 "fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples..."
Read Access should be allowed, but that is it. Good communication and installation docs are a must.
Kingdom of Loathing players were using it back in March, though they seem to be a more intellectual playerbase compared to most RPGs.
It's a widely accepted rule of thumb that no technology can succeed without RPGs being involved. ?:o
From what I have heard, career civil servants don't often lose their jobs.
That didn't take very long now did it? I never even got around to checking it out.

Aren't they afraid that the next product they announce in this fashion will be met with some scepticism from potential early adopters, who might think 'I'll wait for a bit to see if it stays', which in turn will lead to a cycle where it gets harder and harder for google to release new stuff and get it adopted?

edit: would be nice if they open sourced the code.
unfortunate. it was a good product, for the right market, but it was overhyped and it underdelivered.
I guess some cultures and countries regard photographs as just documentary evidence of what the subject looks like. Or what the situation is like. If everyone is dancing and singing, then there would probably be lots of laughing people in the shot. But is accidental, not because the photographer is trying to tease out a smile by saying something silly like "cheese". And then, if it is just a portrait, then it makes sense to have a neutral expression...

I encountered this clash of cultures when I came to America from Eastern Europe. Everyone looking at my family photos immediatly assumed everyone was very unhappy because the subjects don't smile. I usually got the "Oh so sad, everyone was so unhappy, it was probably because of communism...?". Nevermind that it is a picture of a large family picnic, with plenty of food, kabobs grilling in the background -- basically all the indications that everyone was having a good time (and I know they were because I was there as well). Yet, I always get the "unhappy people" sympathy comment. It always baffles me...
Based on the initial reactions to the first Google Wave demonstration by a few non-tech friends of mine I thought Google Wave might gain the necessary product adoption and momentum. I erred and so did many other folks.

I applaud Google for their willingness to stop investing precious development resources in something that looked like the next big thing but turned out to be a great product without consumer approval.
Yes, but not well. I'm using a commit-style approach to synchronize clients, so the document is never sent as a whole. I might be wrong, but I don't think couch can do that on its own. Even so, it gives me an extra layer of control, which I like. I considered making a CouchApp, but I didn't want to feel restricted.
The Dropout's Guide to Antenna Design
I don't get scribd. Why wouldn't you link to the government website hosting this PDF or to a press report conveying this information? My eyes are bleeding from all the ads...
I think most people who have a Myspace account use Slide to display pictures.
Sales force + marketing, maybe.
They blew it by making it confusing to understand what you'd use it for, making it confusing to know which of your friends had accounts (no integration with gmail!) and confusing to know when someone sent you a new "wave" (no integration with gmail!).
Jalak Jobanputra on Women Startups & Venture Capitalists
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.

Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook?

Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email.

Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really does.

----

PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could run on your own network.

PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations of the needed components.

PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private (but federated) uptake as an email replacement.
Heads next to the Ninth Circuit, which will doubtlessly uphold the ruling. Then it'll be on to the SCOTUS, which is a very different court from the '03 bench that ruled on Lawrence v. Texas.
When more people say "I tried it, haven't really used it though" than "I use it regularly" you know your product has failed.
I'm not that familiar with CouchDB-only apps but it seems to me that with node you get access to any number of other libs/technologies you may need. What if you want to aggregate a twitter feed? Connect to MongoDB for logging? Memcache? Do some image generation/processing? Websockets? Etc.
I know this isn't really hacker news, but as a gay hacker, I beg you not to flag this story :-)
I blame it on never understanding the UI, the way it did things, or its usefulness. It's like a chat you can't delete things from, and everyone sees what you type and all your mistakes? And you can post pictures?

I just don't get it.
You were the first to submit this, but the discussion seems to be at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575892
But it isn't making millions.
I still miss etherpad. I use some of the alternatives, but it's not the same :(

alternatives: http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html
Is this the same thing as Buzz?

If I want to 'connect' with friends, I have Facebook, and if I want to im work colleagues, I have Yahoo and MSN.

For document collaboration I have email for non-realtime, Google Docs for near and actual real-time.

I have a hard time seeing where my workflow needs any more collaboration tools.
that really gives hope. We are at a tipping point of selflessness. At the infinite limit Selfessness is our best self interest (I help people so that one day when I would need help other do the same)... for the moment, it is still an asymptote which requires a leap of faith.
The idea is excellent, the fail is the lack of 'product'. They should distribute Wave modules that every wordpress or phpbb user can install on their blogs and hook into their own communities... and then Wave will take off.
And what was the market, exactly?

Seems to me that not a single person I knew actually wanted to use it, or thought it filled a niche they needed filling.
Too bad you could never run it inside the firewall AFAIK.
Google docs is very similar to what etherpad used to be. All be it far less user friendly you can watch others edit and update in real time.
There is a difference between 'clean' and simple, like hacker news (which is good) and ugly / cluttered like many of the sites shown as examples in the post.
Google Docs seems to support a very Etherpad-like interface, but it's a little too bloated for what I used to use Etherpad for.
At least for tar, the info docs are licensed under GFDL with invariant covers, which is not a free license, and so text from it cannot be incorporated in free works. There's an explanation at the Debian site of some of the problems with the license: http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml
Zynga Buys Tokyo-Based Startup Unoh
That's how it starts. The scenario goes something like this: Central IT is not responding in a "timely" manner. Bosses meet, but no common ground is reached. <INSERT BAD EVENT HERE> Developers complain to Boss that they are not to blame. Boss goes to his Division Boss. Higher level boss disagreement. Division Boss gets his own admin and servers. Central IT is no longer the only IT as Divisions now have IT. < TIME PASSES > New plan to centralize all IT. < CYCLE REPEATS >
You can't make people solve problems they don't have. If Google failed with the Hype Winds at their backs, then I doubt anybody can do it.
Uh, Zed stopped being inflammatory quite a while ago now.
That was fast. I remember watching the announcement (in person) and wondering who it was really meant for. At the time it felt like a solution in search of a problem.

What I did really like was the work they'd done on change-set propagation. Don't have a link to the session on hand, but it was quite interesting.
'Higher Education' Is A Waste Of Money?
I would certainly keep Google out of the "founded in the early web" group. Google was established in 1998, well after big names like Yahoo and Altavista were the most common names in search.

Also, I wouldn't classify Google as an ugly site either.
My little group of friends is using it for a DnD RPG. It's orders of magnitude better than the IRC chatroom we were using before.

It's going to be annoying having to go back to IRC.
Ouch Etherpad guys!

Perhaps Google is coming out with WaveDocs (wave integrated google docs) soon?
Wow. I'm pro gay marriage -- my best friend was one of the couples unmarried by the CA supreme court -- but I'm not sure if this is progress or not. Honestly, I'd really like this not to end up like abortion, still fighting the misogynists 45 years later; I don't know if having this decided by the courts or by popular vote will result in less fighting. Civil rights for black people required both court decisions and laws.

Maybe it doesn't make a difference; small people will always need someone to hate.
What suprises me is the short lifespan of the product to the public before killing it. While some of us may have had Wave invites for a while, it has been only been open to the public for less then 3 months.
Ten years ago I was fluent in german and had a very limited chinese vocab, but it's all pretty much gone now.
interesting.

The discovery of the edited source is a nice, solid addition to the discussion.

Ultimately though, AFAICT you and Zed are looking at - and generally agreeing with - the same facts, ie. that epoll and poll perform better depending on the situation.

If I am understanding you correctly, where you both are disagreeing is that you are determined that no webserver will actually reflect the usage pattern that would make it worthwhile for Zed to implement this 'superpoll' feature, while Zed is thinking that it will be worthwhile.

Which makes you seem like two reasonable people agreeing on the facts and both coming to a different conclusion, unfortunate but it does happen (and always fascinates me).

I wonder if part of the reason for the differing conclusions is differing expectations for Mongrel2? you seem very focused on 'expected real-life scenarios for existing websites', but I do have the feeling that Zed is anticipating/hoping/expecting that Mongrel2 will have a broader set of uses and be used in other ways in addition to the standard webserver.
Yelp Hackathon results in an iPad-powered KegBot
Has anyone done a comparison on how well the kerning/hyphenation/etc. compare to TeX's? As I understand it, even some commercial packages that are designed for this sort of thing still fail to match TeX's. I could be wrong there, however.
IE9 Preview: Large performance improvements and 95/100 on Acid3
They launched Wave in May of 2009. It's not like they yanked it all that quickly.
Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively) early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that.

I really hope Buzz is next.
so... which version of the config file are you using?
Also, there are campaign donations to be had from the vendors of full body scanners. Less so from civil liberty groups.
Elements: Dropbox Based Text Editor for iPad and iPhone
Did you copyright that ;)
Anyway, took your word for it, so upvoted you, since I got a good laugh.
Microsoft announced, then released, spent $250M on advertising, and then killed a new phone in that time.
had no ideas they were a game company.. thought they just did picture slide shows
...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know.

They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day, but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added.

And this way works with all email, not just gmail!

There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much integration do you want, exactly?
Rather than upgrade to IE8 they should all install Google Chrome Frame.
There's no reason they couldn't provide an appliance (like the Google Search Appliance: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html) or simply make it available for a local install (like every mail server used by every company that cares about things being 'inside the firewall').
One of the reasons I come to Hacker News is to escape exactly from this kind of news. Please, let's not have this place tainted by political flame wars.
I don't think the difficult thing is figuring out that it's an easy game, but rather figuring out that it's a game at all.

The system looks like reality when it's all you know. Setting your own goals is a hard concept.
From last year...

"Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354
Given the "this is the future of communication" fanfare, I think some of us expected it to be a long term play.
I hoped you've satiated your pedantry for today, but the quote exists in several re-quoted forms. Jefferson "mis-quoted" Franklin. Everyone mis-quotes Jefferson.
Several people have mentioned that the new logo didn't fit in with the rest of the site and I have to agree. The site as it stands now just works. It's consistent. Patrick uses flashy colors to attract your attention to the important bits.

As someone mentioned before, he'd be better off tweaking bits and pieces and iterating. Making the oval in the logo a bit smaller and making the size of the bingo card the same as the text next to it.

But what I'm really wondering (and it's far less work): would changing the favicon to a bingo card or perhaps a green or blue square with a white B on it make a difference? Don't laugh, I'm willing to put some money on it ;)
It was announced in May 2009. It wasn't publicly released until three months ago (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20005394-264.html).
All the protocols were open-sourced as part of the initiative. I think they envisioned a world in which inside-the-wall installations existed in the same way the companies have Exchange servers today.
anyone with even an elementary understanding of conversion testing and optimization knows that "great" design != great conversions/sales/success
Max is awesome and I love his attitude. But I just never ever understood Slide. And why Google would buy Slide is equally difficult to understand, if not more. Are they buying technology? Or users (on Facebook!)? Or revenues (most likely not!)? Or Max and his team?
Not to mention its crazy amount of javascript usage-Wave brought most of the browsers I tried it on to a crawl on my laptop.
I really like the concept, but for many reasons never liked the execution.
The Best  Enlargement and Male Enhancement Reviews
That's an interesting perspective. I would state it somewhat differently, though. I think Wave solved too many problems simultaneously, making it overly complex in some ways and hiding its true utility in others.
While you're correct, that option was added far too late. By the time that option was added, everyone in my organization had tried Wave and then given up on it. I revived its use in the last week, successfully, with that option, only to see that it's now going to die anyway.

Really, all of Wave can be summarized by the fact that, at its launch, Wave deliberately refused to participate in any existing communications medium other than Wave. This meant that everyone you cared about had to get on Wave. Since that couldn't possibly happen, Wave was doomed from the start. Nothing about today's announcement is remotely a surprise to me.
Wave may have been an idea whose time is yet to come.

When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it.

This was mostly because I was working in a company where getting people to document was enough of a difficulty without introducing new software. If I'd worked somewhere with a bunch of early-adopters, it would have been a fantastic tool.

On the other hand, Wave seems like a tool that almost replicates all of the benefits of being in the same room as someone. I don't think there's a better way to do a distributed workplace. (Of course, I haven't tried.)
The complement of Release Early/Often is probably Kill Early/Often.

EDIT: spelling fixed, thanks!
Sorry for posting.. but I trust the HN community not to indulge in 'political flame wars', and opt instead of spirited & respectful discussion.
The guy who screened me said "I may need to touch you near a sensitive area now, just let me know if you have a problem, I'm going to use the back of my hand only" something like 5 times, so I'm pretty sure they're scripted to be "respectful".
Right now it's throwing "500: Internal Server Error"
Most of these aren't ugly, just minimalist.
In other words, a lot of time is spent attacking straw men that don't resemble what professional working designers actually do. The attitudes and beliefs attributed to designers sounds more like it comes from people who pass themselves off as designers because they have a pirated copy of Photoshop, so the only lesson here is that people who are clueless about design hire clueless designers.