skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows won because DOS was already everywhere. It wasn't the best product. I would argue OS/2 and Macintosh were pretty significantly better. It's not a coincidence that it took this long (Windows 7) for MS to produce a decent operating system - they are now having to compete on quality. But you don't even have to buy the argument that Windows was sub-par. It doesn't matter, because that's not why MS won.

Just as MS used the omnipresent Windows platform to push Office, IE, and countless other products (with varying success) they used DOS to push Windows. That is why Windows won.

There's nothing dodgy about it - the point is there is more than one way to win the market, and being the best product is pretty far down on the list.
I like this list, but:

Human-powered Pandora

Isn't that last.fm?
How about that:

Start by getting a job in "something you like". Learn maximum from it. When you will learn enough(you will feel that, believe me), just quit that company (bonus for taking some of its clients) and start you own!

Dark side, i know. But it works!
I just sent you an email (using hackernewsers email facility). My email is in my HN profile, and I am also on hackernewsers. Thanks!
I had a vague wish for XCode on my ipad.
Yes, my mind was blown for a second and then I was slightly disappointed. ("Poke" and "peek" are also commands to write to and read from a given memory address, respectively.)

It's presumably a reference to old time tables of "peeks" and "pokes" showing what each memory address controlled, or somesuch.
Quora: best languages for getting into functional programming?
You can be an entrepreneur. It ain't so hard
Didn't you post the exact same thing yesterday?
Houdini - Ruby gem to interface with Mechanical Turk
I'm a case of a still-living-at-parent's-house entrepreneur. I do this to keep down on expenses, which is the reason I can work for so long on my stuff without worrying about financing.

But it is hard. It's impossible to explain to your parents that it's not ok to ask you to "just drive your brother somewhere, it will only take 10 minutes". From their point of view, it's entirely reasonable. From your point of view, it's a waste of maybe an hour, considering switching costs and everything else.
I don't get worked up over landfills, but I do get worked up over all those bits of styrofoam that never make it into the landfills and hang out on the beach or in a park or wherever they happened to land - I'd greatly prefer those bits be replaced by something biodegradable.
"The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation."

They've cherry-picked the trough of median age at first marriage in the modern era. Looking back a little farther shows that for men first marriage only dipped into the early 20s during a few decades in the middle of the 20th century. For women first marriage has been steadily rising, however.

M F

1890 26.1 22.0
1970 23.2 20.8
2007 27.7 26.0

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005061.html#axzz0wz2a14ih shows 1890s to 2000s by decade, ultimately citing U.S. Census data.
Pretty much agree completely.

To add a few more details, it wasn't until 1.9.1 was out that "normal" people really started to look at it. There were quite a few changes that took time to be properly absorbed by the community (e.g. Internationalisation, see James Edwards Gray's blog).

Most gems also only started then to consider 1.9.1 as one of their targets, but it took some time. And anyway Rails was moving even more slowly.

Personally I've been using 1.9.1 for about a year now, but I don't make a living out of Ruby (or Rails) so it's understandable that people who need more reliable support waited a bit.
Ask HN: When was the last time you read a newspaper?
When was the last time you read a newspaper? As in one printed on broadsheet or tabloid paper.
GMail users: If you find a site that doesn't like the + character, you can also use strategically placed periods to help direct spam. myemail@gmail.com and m.y.email@gmail.com are all routed to the same account. Just create rules based on the address you give to friends and the one you give to potential spammers.
Getting Your Startup Noticed and Covered by Blogs
A fingerprint is actually worse than a password. You can't change your fingerprints and you leave them everywhere. You don't go around sticking post-its with your unchangeable password everywhere.
gmail allows you to put periods anywhere in your email address, so you can use that as a fallback. If a site's email validator pukes on youremail+mightbespam@gmail.com, you can use youremai.l@gmail.com or y.o.u.r.e.m.a.il@gmail.com or whatever combination you want to use.
It's interesting to see results from the strategy the author said "worked" in the article.

I've also noticed something similar in television ads. On a golf telecast, for instance, many ads are about golf products, but not all. They are about products that demographic might like, such as luxury sedans or investing. Does the same thing apply to online ads?
http://www.ibottleopener.com

working link
I probably should have been more clear. The concept I was thinking of is more like a premium, maybe invite-only last.fm. This is really about empowering the people who really work hard to find good music and servicing the people who really love good music.
So they fixed the encoding problems?
Leaf.ly - Achievements are Go (Powered by IActionable.com)
Too much policing at no profit in your scenario.

If a foreigner wants to send a piece of mail through the USPS, then they are more than welcome to at (atleast) $0.44 each.

If we are only using email and spam is a federal offense, then that guy can mail to his hearts content, making the government waste time and resources trying to catch him.

In the current situation, if the government wants to hunt him down, they at least have $132 million to fund the chase...
Equally pedantic comment:

Unless something has drastically changed in the last few years, flight training generally lasts for 2-3 years. 1 year of 'undergraduate' flight training, plus more specialized training on specific aircraft.

I have no idea what your friend is doing that will take a decade(?!) to complete.

source: Air Force brat, father was a flight surgeon.
It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used [...]

I understand the point you are trying to make (energy consumption is an aggregate quantity so cannot be derived from instantaneous measurement), but of course it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car, and there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.

Sadly, it is often the over-bearing extremists that cause progress to be made.
Ha. Thanks. Couldn't figure out how to do that...
There was a time in U.S. history when it wasn't uncommon for several generations to be living together under the same roof. All of this "oh, he's twenty-three, why's he still living with his parents?" non-sense would sound very, very strange to someone from yesteryear.
haha scary....
Design love, anyone?
Hi All,

I’ve been following Hacker News for a while, but never really posted in here before. I was hoping I could get some startup advice from you guys.

We are a bootstrapped startup operating out of New Delhi, India. Okay, I’ll be honest. We’re three folks under thirty who love eating ramen and spend most of their time building a web application for a global audience.

We want to change the rules of the game in the sourcing advisory market by bringing the entire process online and harnessing the power of social influence. We are ready with the concept and a prototype application, spending around three months full-time. We have so far built the core application engine (capable of requirement and evidence-based technology recommendations for say a healthcare provider operating in France with a project budget of $500k) and a CMS to handle the data.

Here’s the challenge for us though - we are fairly confident with the technology part, know our concept will ruffle a few feathers, but we can’t seem to find the right balance on UI design. We need help on getting progressive UI and graphic design, but we are in the ramen mode and don’t have enough monies to buy our way through to the design Gods. We want to be ready for TC Disrupt when it happens next (possibly Dec'10) but can’t seem to solve this problem as none of the local design firms are up to the task.

What should we do? Any suggestions or pointers in the right direction would be immensely appreciated. Would you know of any design groups or startups who may want to collaborate with overseas startups?

The Three Ramens
He also starts by saying it is a rant...

Personally I don't see why nowadays people can't give an opinion without turning it into a scientific like paper. He is very honest about what he was going to write... and maybe he wrote a comment on WebOS in particular at some other point in time.

This article wasn't about WebOS per se, but about the editorial choices of Lifehacker.
I liked this article, because rather than being a bunch of abstract advice, it just comes out and says "go to these sites, do these things," which I felt was a nice change of pace. Also, Jeff from Zferral is a great guy.
#4 exists - http://grooveshark.com
They still have an X button in the corner of the ad, and a "thumbs-up" button below it.
Dried soybeans are 36% protein by weight. Muscle beef is 32% protein by weight, although other parts of the cow are lower in protein. A steer is 4% of the soybeans it's fed, by weight. So feeding soybeans to cattle is even less defensible as a way of providing protein to people than as a way of providing calories to people: you waste 96.5% of the protein that way.

The picture is a little less egregiously bad if you look at some other foods (sweet corn is only 3.2% protein, so if you could get your cattle to grow on corn without supplementing their diet with soy or other protein, you'd only be wasting 60% of the protein). But it still isn't good.

The fundamental constraint here is that animals can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat. Animals can only produce protein from protein. In fact, most plants can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat or carbon dioxide or water, either. They need to take up nitrogen compounds from the soil to make protein. As far as we know, animals can't aminate carbohydrates using other sources of nitrogen, the way plants can. So the protein that comes from your crops is the most protein you can possibly get. Processing it through animals can only reduce the protein yield per acre of crops.

The complexity of the proteins in the cow isn't an advantage, either. You have to break those proteins down to individual amino acids before your ribosomes can use them to build proteins of your own. If foreign peptides (protein fragments) get into your bloodstream, your immune system will destroy them. From the standpoint of nutrition, the less complex the proteins are, the better.

On the other hand, animal processing can make the protein and calories considerably easier to eat. Ruminants' symbiotic bacteria can extract useful calories (and massive amounts of methane) from cellulose, even if they only pass 5% of them on to their predators; your body doesn't support these bacteria at all. And cows have these massive jaws and teeth for grinding up cellulosic material to extract the nutrients from it.

So, veganism as a diet (I'm not sure what you mean by "as a lifestyle"} isn't dependent on "huge energy subsidies". It's just dependent on crops you can stand to eat and that provide you adequate nutrition. Eating animals is a huge cost to your primary productivity; the compensating advantage is that it renders you more adaptable in your crops. Eating animal products is somewhat less of a huge cost.

As for freezing, it's fairly unusual for people to heat their homes by burning animals, and in Europe, it was unusual for people to insulate their homes with animals or animal products. Not freezing is really more a matter of thermodynamic engineering than it is a matter of acquiring adequate energy. A good thick thatch roof, a couple of meters of straw bales in the walls, and some whitewash on the inside will allow you to heat even a largish habitation with a small fire. No huge energy subsidies required. (Please don't start complaining about the embodied energy of the whitewash.)
In a more recent article from 2007, the problem still exists.

http://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2007/umsonst-im-supermarkt
> One major difference is the update pattern. Chrome OS silently and constantly updates itself so that you will always be running 100% modern software. I hear more complaints about being stuck on old versions of Android than anything else about that OS.

Over the air updates are possible on Android post 1.6?. The problem is that the carriers have their own special requirements, so no one runs a stock image, and there are way too many different phones for HTC / Motorola to just whip up and ship changes out for so quickly.
There's something pleasant about picking up a physical magazine or book and escaping all the distractions of the internet.

I find myself skipping over the longer articles on Hacker News precisely because of those distractions. The Hacker Monthly gives me a chance to catch up on the best of them.

I was debating whether or not to drop the $100 on a subscription, and your comment reminded me why I liked the Hacker Monthly. Thanks.
Random fact. All of these "Some say..." references are made in a car show called "Top Gear" [1] about their incognito test driver, "The Stig." [2]

[1] http://www.topgear.com/uk/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stig
Define 'encoding problems'. ;)
>tremendous waste in the military

Something there seems redundant.
Market dominance goes to the best-executed whole product, not the best generic product in isolation of market dynamics. Making the best product is only half the equation. Startups also need a market strategy that works.
I love grooveshark too, but #4 is really about letting people who spend lots of time on something like grooveshark selecting music earn revenue by sharing the music they've selected.
Building a strong team feels good.
This was the same conclusion that Homestead reached. They initially launched with a fremium model but after being deluged in freebie support costs switched to credit-card-required.

Although their overall signups plummeted, their paying signups went up by multiples.

It would be interesting to see if being freemium for a limited period at the very start is a profitable way to promote the company. Has anyone ever done a "get a free account now - available only for the next 30 days" experiment during launch?
I really like http://750words.com
I imagine you want to set this up as a poll, as you're going to get a lot of repetition of short (one-word) answers.

Mine: Today.
I think $10/mo is fine for domains. Actually I think it should be $20 a month.

The small time owners will have no problem paying that. Who doesn't have $20 a month for their blog? Eat one less taco bell meal and you are good to go.

And it won't do much for the small time consumers who get 5-6 domains. It's bad...but not by much. The only people such a price would hurt are the guys with 2,000 domains who'll go from paying $20,000 a year while making $180K of selling domains, to paying $480,000 a year, while still making the same $180K a year(prices will increase, but not by much...can't very well ask $500,000 for strawberries.com)

This will free up a ton of short term domains from the guys who get exact match domains hoping someone will buy one(whiteweddingdresses.com, ipadsoftware.com, askhackernews.com, goodbookstoread.com). At $10/yr it doesn't matter if someone buys...at $240 a year you can only afford to keep the really good domains.

And this can actually happen. The registars don't control domains...ICANN does. All they need to do is bump up the ICANN fee from 30 cents to 18 bucks for the .com and bam instant market correction.

And with all the money ICANN will get, they can create a free domain extension...i.e. something like .web. And the rest can be spent on improving internet infrastructure world wide...laying fiber, so anywhere in the world you can get 1gb/s.

ICANN is a non-profit...it should be doing more than just solving domain disputes.
If we had infinite energy we could make more aluminium.
(pedant alert)

The Enola Gay's pilot was 30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets

(/pedant alert)
Tesla Co-Founder: Electric Cars with 500+ Mile Range by 2020
The best way to reduce the amount of email you get is to reduce the amount you send. Works like a charm.
Some random comments:

1) I don't get the idea. Do you mean something like an automatic check-in based on your current location?

2) This is already partially covered by Twitter: just twit "Who wants to meet in 5 minutes in..."? I don't see the need of an added service. Sure, you could add all the features you can think of, like maps. But now twits can be geolocalized too.

3) I like this idea. The only problem is that a system like Aardvark could work mainly for big companies with a large customer support department. Such companies could be difficult to convince to try the new system for their support.

4) Last.fm already does that. Edit: I've seen only now your comment. Well, I prefer the Last.fm model...what is the logic behind an invite only service? If we have in common many favorite artists, it's probable that I will like also some other artists from its collection.

5) I don't own an iPad and I can't judge the usability of its keyboard...but I don't see many people programming on that thing. It's more a consumer, rather than producer type of product. However, I believe there will be hundreds of geeks ready to install it on their iPad, even if they won't use it much.

Thank you very much for your ideas! I'm currently looking for one and posts like yours are really useful for my brainstorming.
This is actually a really good question. I would think the copyright of each article is owned by the blogger or media outlet which produced it. While bloggers in general probably universally love more exposure, I can't imagine that as a group they would love the idea of someone reprinting their articles for profit... ?
Make a great product and it covers itself.
There was no good tablet before Apple's, mainly because there was no good OS. PC OSes are a bad fit for tablets, so it has to be either iOS or Android. I'm very surprised Google is going with ChromeOS on its tablet, I hope they make it easy to install Android.
Hiring Through Twitter vs. Joel on Software
Yes, so - how does this make a difference? These qualifiers are subjective and add nothing on top of the diagnosis criteria above.

"persists for 6 months" - so you don't get Ritalin for the first tree you climb. Good.

"maladaptive and immature" = the "out-of-lockstep" factor I mentioned in my comment

"The disorder impairs school, social or occupational functioning" = you keep doing these things even though teachers and parents get annoyed at you.

It's hard to be "guilty" of doing the things in the list repeatedly, without also fulfilling the qualifiers.
Hacker News Buzz
(It was a joke, I know it usually goes in /usr/bin/. That's where mine is)
It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV

At times I wonder how much of the truck/SUV critique is really driven by environmental concerns. I know a lot of people that hate SUVs because they can't see around the damn things which makes driving more hazardous. And I've raged at trucks and SUVs whose regular headlights completely blinded me because they're set two feet higher than a normal car's. That makes me wonder how many people are enraged about those vehicles but frame their critiques in environmental terms because you can't yell at someone you know because someone else who drives the same vehicle pissed you off, but you can yell at them about a more generalized harm like environmental pollution....
This is a great idea. Would it be possible to include a one or two sentence summary (very short) about each book? Otherwise we're just judging books by their covers...
Thanks for the Notifo love guys! Always great to see some interesting projects coming from the dev community.

That being said we have something very cool coming out Friday. Stay tuned. :)

In the meantime, here are some other Notifo-related projects we have come across:

http://github.com/hudson/hudson-notifo-plugin

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lgffhepmapgeepjn...

http://github.com/helloandre/Notifo-Post-Commit-Hook

http://github.com/vrillusions/notifo-imap-listener

http://chatch.es/2010/07/22/ikea-product-availability-notifi...

http://github.com/andrewwatson/Notifo-VBX-Plugin

http://nirmalpatel.com/hacks/growl_to_notifo.html
Doing a Google search -- no, not a vanity one -- and discovered my tweets are being aggregated by this site along with others from here. Odd. Did everyone else here know of this?
His name isn't relevant to the point.

Likewise, his methodology for getting to the point is not really relevant, either.

There is an angel bubble. Max is discussing one aspect of it. I disagree that many people are intentionally going out there and seducing people into the mindset, but that is a very minor point as the outcome in aggregate is the same.

More importantly, there needs to be a better way to finance the kind of companies that Max is talking about. While I get the impression that Max gets the impression that these are better, that is also not relevant to the validity of the point.
You can get an approximate answer by looking at the cost of the car. A new car costs say $30,000. Gas costs $2.75/gallon, so a new car is equivalent to about 10,000 gallons of gas.

It'll take a very very long time to recoup that.
indeed. I stopped worrying about native system ruby version since moving to rvm. it is almost the only way to keep you sane while dealing with distros and ruby versions.
I think the real issue here is that the baby boomers and later generations enjoy infantilizing their children. First they needed to protect their 10 year olds from nonexistent child predators, wifi and inorganic food. Then they needed to protect their 16 year olds from depraved newfangled sex ("rainbow parties", etc), completely unlike the sex they had during the 60's/70's. Now that their kids are grown up, they need a new reason to remain involved and treat them as infants.

Well, as long as we're shooting from the hip, I think there's a different reason behind delayed marriage and childbearing. Being constantly flooded with information allows people to form a better picture of where they fit in the world, and be generally more self aware of what they want out of life. That means that people can't live life on instinctual autopilot like they used to. Why spend some of the best years for taking a risk (not just startups, but things like taking a year off to backpack, etc.) doing the most staid and conservative thing a person can do--settle down and start a family?

I could easily be wrong, but I seriously doubt that being coddled as kids has any bearing on the current state of adulthood. That's the kind of thing people have been saying forever.
Radiolab featured Beethovens' 9th symphony slowed down to fill up 24 hours in 2007. It's the first part of the episode.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/07/15
If you get that much email you have issues larger than what you do with those thousand emails. The root problem is that you got a thousand emails. Address that.

e.g. Instead of address+foo@domain.tld - try not signing up for shady lists in the first place. Has anything of value come out of a newsletter from a dicey web site?
No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas