skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When Apple has moved on to a new technology, support for the legacy technology has generally lasted about 5 years. If they wanted the more demanding apps off of it, it made sense to close the door to 64 bit. Apple has put considerable effort into optimizing the OS. It didn't make sense to do that for legacy support. Apple certainly does care about pro apps, and has done many things that can/do enhance apps developed for current technology.

Photoshop showcased the Mac as a performance platform for some time Previous to OS X. I think they played hardball with Apple, trying to bully them into using costly Display Postscript licensing for OS X, and lost.

At one point Adobe engineers would interviewed by MacWeek magazine and talked about development. Sometimes managers forced them to do Windows code first because they hated it so much. They described it as working in a sewer. The Mac was far more advanced below the surface of the OS. Color matching support evolved far earlier. Simple things like anti-aliasing an image when scaling it had to be reinvented in every Windows app, but it was an included service of the Mac OS. Clearly the engineers loved Apple even pre OS X. It's too bad that Adobe trying to strong-arm control of a key technology in OS X placed some distance between the companies. The Mac market and In retrospect Apple did the right thing avoiding the proprietary lock. Going with more open standards, and sharing some things they develop has been good for most of us. (except those wanting proprietary lock in)
Those look much better than the colored statues in the original article. Any idea if the difference is due to the lighting, the quality of the job, or historical accuracy?
I think most of these excessive-choice problems can be solved by first keeping the things simple and then building in a "plug-in" feature. It could be as simple as an "advanced" tab in case of configurations, to plug-in (hardware/software) modules (accessories?) in case of programs/devices, to apps in a mobile OS context. However, a prerequisite to creating things this way is good design, which is more of an art than science.
We wrote this in response to the HN discussion "Ask HN: Best Startup City - Outside the USA?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375

The blog post is a profile of the Los Angeles startup scene, who you should meet, and what you should do there if you are thinking of moving or visiting the city.
"Don't be evil" must be one of the biggest PR regrets of Google. Everything they do today is measured up to that
It requires rooting/jailbreaking your phone and unlocking the bootloader, if you consider that an option. Otherwise, American carriers (except for T-Mobile) will freak out if you even mention running something other than what they put on the phone.
Man, how many times is this story going to be submitted?
Sony unveils 'Single Wire Interface Technology'
Agencies are some of my best customers, and they seem to love it because it helps them with the workload of their existing clients, so they can bring in more business.

Looking forward to hearing what you think.
I think there's an argument that DNA is more likely to lead to life (not intelligence) than an arbitrary coding scheme; that is, that with DNA it's easier to create life than you'd expect for a vanilla encoding scheme.

This assumes that during the billions of years on earth before DNA, lots of different chemicals came together, but if any self-replicating one came together, it would grow and still be around. Exceptions are if it wasn't very good at it and died out, or that DNA-based life attacked it or grew faster, crowding it and starving it (or bad luck wiped it out - but it could arise again.)

The fact that DNA did survive shows that DNA is indeed specially suited to encoding life. One might even try to estimate how specialized it is, by estimating how improbably it is, based on how long it took for a planet of experiments to arrive at it.

The details of how it's special could be in terms of protein folding, eg. that you can specify some really cool and useful folds, crucial for life, in surprisingly short DNA sequences. It's as if the search space of encoding schemes was scoured for schemes that in effect included a handy collection of library functions.

But this lovely (I think) argument doesn't apply to intelligence at all; nor even to mammals, or indeed animals - just for basic life. Once life existed, all the extra features were just hacked on.
There was an article a while ago about the Coca-Cola company putting pressure on one of these "independent" companies to change it's labeling. They wanted to say "zero high fructose corn syrup" or some such which Coca-Cola management thought was a bad idea. If they had been truly independent then the conversation over packaging would have not come up.

Anyway, the value of independent organizations is bad ideas are less likely to propagate between them.
A lot of projects where I would have used python twisted (http://twistedmatrix.com) in the past, I now use node.js.

It's all projects where I need to connect different protocols together. Like amqp & websockets for example.
I'll be honest and admit that a few months ago I would have given you the cold shoulder too. I just found an amazing co-founder who is the king of schmooze & I've come to appreciate the power of a good old rolodex.
I think maybe you work in a completely different field of programming to me. Most lines of code I have written in my career have ended up in the final product. The same is true of most the developers I know.
Doesn't work in Firefox 3.0.x
A simpler, more important question you should probably answer first:

If you are completely and utterly unable to raise enough external funding for your current product concept to become viable, how will you modify your go-to-market plan or your product to make your business viable?

Put differently:

In the likely event that you fail to raise, how will you bootstrap?

Two reasons:

First, towards the end of this list, the author mentions "what's your BATNA". Your BATNA is crucial; it's probably 100% of your negotiating leverage. For a first-time entrepreneur, getting funded without any significant leverage is like winning the lottery: it does happen... but.

So, you'll have better luck raising if you have a real plan B. You'll be harder to jerk around (VC in particular will absolutely jerk you around). You'll be better able to allocate your efforts between real opportunities and product/market development.

Second, you are probably going to fail at raising external money. Nothing personal. Most first-timers are probably going to fail at raising external money.
Thanks. A few things caught my attention which haven't been discussed yet in this thread:

that was some of the nicest work I ever did -- it's interesting how destructive processes can also produce great work. (This is not to say that the results are worth the destruction.)

Take the feedback you receive and use it to improve the product but unless something is really trivial it is better to sell what you have than to make some promise you can not keep -- another general lesson I would take away is, "be very wary when the salesperson is allowed to write the spec". I bet this is true across all business domains.

Fred never did hire a replacement, and hoped that I would stay on because I would not let my buddies down. -- I think this dynamic is built into the business models of some companies, especially consultancies. You feel guilty if you go home to sleep while your friends are coding 'til their eyes bleed, even when the overwork is brought about by extrinsic factors (see above).
Do you use a Pogoplug?
Are local economies somehow more worthwhile than distant economies? I don't quite understand that argument.
Looks good so far, I signed up for a beta invite. One thing I noticed, you have radio buttons for what I'm using for analytics, I would suggest you make them checkboxes, so I could've selected Google and Clicky.

Just my $0.02 :)
Overall I really like the idea, for anybody that's done serious SEO, it's very nice to have this kind of service. My major issue is that the pricing system makes me extremely nervous. We're one of those sites that has a "gazillion" keywords and when I see the price jumping from $50-$1000/month with just an increase of a few thousand keywords it makes me think that a few hundred thousand keywords will cost substantially more than my entire monthly revenue.

I think you created the pricing schedule based on your costs. The more keywords being tracked the more "crawlers" necessary, meaning the more servers you need and thus more cost. However, I think you need to establish a pricing schedule based on the customer's math. i.e. something that's directly related to revenue (most likely traffic, or maybe number of pages) so that the ROI calculation is easier.

Right now maybe I have a few hundred thousand keywords, is that going to cost me $100K/month? Even though 95% of them generate a small amount of traffic? So now I'm doing a blind ROI calculation. Essentially I have to use your system (and pay for it) before I know how much I'm going to be spending.

If you make your pricing based on something I know (# pages, monthly uniques, pageviews, etc) I have an actual idea on how much I'm going to be paying and I can make an intelligent decision accordingly.

I guess I could use the "personal" free service to see just how many keywords your system will find and be able to do a better calculation, but that seems a little obtuse.

So I think the goal is to come up with a pricing structure that is easier to calculate, and on your end not have people crush your system with too many keywords. This can be done pretty easily I think: bucket keywords in priority (refreshed daily, once a week, once a month, etc).

Priority is based off of a few factors: traffic and historical volatility.

In this way you can intelligently and efficiently monitor hundreds of thousands, even millions of keywords with 1 cheap server (maybe $100/month) and charge out 500-1000/month. In that way you're still seeing fantastic margins, I'm getting great use out of the system, and everybody's happy.
I personally don't use a serverside framework, with the Javascript toolkits there is really no need. I use Dojo for heavy duty apps and jQuery for lighter apps. I use a JSON library on the server side (for Java JAX-RS) that acts as the data and business logic layer.

I like this because it separates the concerns of UI and business logic. It is faster to develop the UI because you are working in HTML, CSS and Javascript (make a change refresh look at firebug). It also allows me to stub the server side by writing json files. By the time I am done with the UI prototype, I have a very good definition of the services that I will need on the server side.

The nice part about the loose coupled nature of building a web app this way is that you are not heavily invested in a server infrastructure, if you decide you no longer like your server language then you just start implementing new services in the language du jour.
It's really rare to see a 1 founder startup do so well, but if you ever meet Ray in person, you'll know he's completely capable!

Ray's helped Fanvibe's SEO out so far, we're loving his tools! Try out Ginzametrics, it's really slick.
The engineer thinks of the problem as a technical problem with a technical solution: wrong browser, switch browsers. Simple!

Out of curiosity, how would someone with good customer skills handle this situation?
They are if you want to build a life in your local community.

But that aside: a small, high-quality farm in Nebraska is just as worthy of support as a small, high-quality farm in Wisconsin.

The problem is, a small, high-quality farm anywhere is more worthy of support than Cargill.

Patronizing local farms instead of supermarkets means less of your money goes to Cargill. That's a good thing.
Smart tech firms are willing to hire experienced developers who can learn new stuff in a reasonable amount of time. There tend to be or should be limits, e.g. back in the '90s it really didn't tend to work to hire a non-OO programmer to work on an OO language project, because they had to learn a new paradigm as well as the more minor details of a new language (which if we're talking C to C++ isn't that big to begin with), unless you were willing to wait something more than a month for them to be productive.

It would be interesting to look at the hiring of companies that do functional programming. A new employee how didn't at least take SICP or one of its functional derivatives would take a while to learn the new paradigm.

And there are many tech companies that simply can't do anything other than train new employees because they're just not going to find anyone who's up on their technology. Before the mainframe alternatives to IBM all but died and UNIX took over the midrange companies doing anything other than IBM mainframe work generally would have to train their new employees, e.g. Honeywell didn't expect new Multicians to be productive until at least a month had passed.

Today's greater standardization allows what you're talking about ... which many people think is also commonly a sign of poor management, specifically the manager who doesn't believe he has the ability to mentor those under him or even be able to judge their progress in coming up to speed. Heck, how many companies even ask prospects to prove they can program (e.g. FizzBuzz), let alone program in the language/framework in question?

In general the state of the art in US IT industry management is dreadful and you can't particularly afford that in a field that's so difficult and unforgiving ("Can't fool Mother Nature" sort of unforgiving).
Anyone else get the feeling that Ginza just emailed that article to TC, who reposted it under "Leena Rao"'s name?
Should you be able to copyright a shirt?
I think the problem is that "Don't be evil" was mis-interpreted as a credo for Google when it was really a command and warning to its users.
Point taken on NIPS. I agree its focus has shifted in recent years. Venues like GECCO/WCCI/CEC tend to be better if you're looking for nature-inspired algorithms.

The theoretical foundation debate is ancient and probably not worth getting into. However, there are many benchmarks for each class of algorithms. For instance, the double pole balancing task for neural network controllers is considered a standard metric. More general benchmarks, like keepaway soccer, are also available.

Also, in fairness, the whole AI field is balkanized. Look at statistical relational learning algorithms for example. The closer you look, the more fractures you'll find in any community.
Try using your iPad as a skateboard. The lack of wheels really comes in handy then!
You can buy the good (although that's a lot more expensive than buying a call); you can buy shares in a mining or refining operation whose profits will rise if the commodity prices do; you can buy shares in equipment suppliers who sell to the above; you can do any of the above for commodities that substitute for the commodity in question (e.g. rice and corn, if you expect wheat supplies to be short); or you can bet against commodities that complement the commodity in question, either in production or consumption (e.g. mining more indium will probably push zinc and gallium prices down, since the three tend to occur together; cheap energy would probably depress the price of aluminum somewhat; and similarly, cheap energy would probably elevate the price of bauxite.)

Disclaimer: I'm broke at the moment; following my financial advice would be a bad idea.
There's a gorgeous villa that Nero owned at Oplontis. It was dug up under 50 years ago, so the air hasn't degraded the fresco quality at all. It looks, to the untrained eye, like a Donatella Versace set for Saturday Night Live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oplontis

http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotos-g187786-d622819-Op...
Short answer (in this order):
2. PHP
1. Ruby
3. Uh.. isn't this "almost" ruby?
4. WTF?

Long answer:

For the record, I am biased. I prefer functional, readable code that is not subject to some mystical "coolness" quotient dictated by some "gurus" in Silicon Valley. I can program in almost any language, and yet I still find Ruby almost completely unreadable.

I will not hire a developer who "can write that in 10 lines of Ruby", because none of those 10 lines is documented, readable, or debugged. Not that there's anything wrong with Ruby per se, but my experience is that it's an attempt at RAD which is a process that usually isn't preceded by an architectural design stage.. Again, my experience, not necessarily common.

For single-threaded web functionality, I prefer Object Oriented PHP 5.3 + jQuery + PHPLiveX (for object oriented Ajax) + Postgresql (database).

For server process (single or multi-threaded) code, I prefer C# (mono-project.com) over Java. Perl is still a contender, but its dwindling number of monks available, and its waning interest level among new developers makes it a distant second.

For mobile App development, PhoneGap, Corona and MonoTouch are good for quick development, but Objective C still owns the house for native development until someone comes up with a contender (I hear that there's a mono project under way to compile C# (Mono) to Objective C... which would be cool. C# is much easier to manage than Objective C.

R
You can, but it's not easy and it's definitely not something a normal consumer would do.

Although I imagine the people buying the Nexus Ones from the developer site aren't normal consumers.
Back in Roman times, and even today, it's common to have cheap durable plain wallpaint up to a yard above the floor, and then fancier decoration above.
There is some truth in the article. Coding is easy. It's all the other aspects of software development that are difficult. I know that the biggest hurdle for any programming project I've ever been involved in is deciding what will be the different parts of the system and then how those parts will interact. Once I start writing code, I can program very quickly because I don't have to make hard decisions.

Even so, a few thousand lines of a code a day is a bit much for anything non-trivial. To write that much code in a single day means that person must have done little else besides coding. Unless there was a period of about a week of design before that kind of coding, I'd expect the code to be rather kludgy because everything would be decided immediately. A few thousand lines of code, though, is definitely not something I'd consider average.

A /small/ project that added a new feature to an existing system took about 30 hours for the initial version over a two week time period and about 800 lines of code. Granted, I don't know exactly where my programming abilities lie skill-wise, but I can't imagine someone being 30x or 40x more productive than that as you suggest.

And maybe I'm just new around here, but if was going to argue for the Dunning-Kruger effect, I'd begin by arguing that I am clearly not suffering from the effect myself.
Funny, the situation is actually better than I imagined. I had always assumed that Pepsi and Coke owned everything; depending on my mood I would think that one or the other owned Dr. Pepper, too.
frequent automated offsite backups are your friend
Thanks for being willing to admit that. Was it the culture of the company, or just the way it was for you? Here, people seem to act pretty slammed with work, then take a 10 min smoke break once an hour or so. And I don't see anyone else screwing off.
No, it's not. GS take big risk, they run large exposures as a bank. They'll have their down days.
A hydrogen-oxygen mixture in a flexible container like a balloon is unlikely to amplify a deflagration into a detonation. However, either way, the fireball radiates mostly in the ultraviolet. You might want to mix some methane or acetylene or something in there to help it radiate in the less-dangerous visible spectrum.
Sure, but they also gained a lot from it.
We autoscale very, very quickly to serve all the jobs in our system. The only limitations we place are on test jobs, where they execute sequentially per account and only 100 can be processing or waiting.
http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

"Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it."
Startup Professionals Musings: Eight Questions Every Startup Hopes You Won’t Ask
Gruber misinterprets what Schmidt said. He was making a prediction, not a prescription, regarding future social behavior -- young people changing their name as they come of age.

Ten years ago, would anyone have predicted that today we would be able to have online friendships with 1000 people whom we have never met (Facebook), know what they had for lunch (Twitter), see photos from their vacation (Flickr), know their exact location at this moment (Gowalla), what items they have just bought (Blippy), etc. None of this has anything to do with Google or how "creepy" Schmidt is. It seems to me a prescient forecast.
I don't know about the EVO, but Sense on my Incredible is pretty slick and I haven't had any battery problems (although I just got it Tuesday).
> [...] It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain [...]

This is false. Genotype-phenotype is not general purpose compression algorithm so there is no limit. You could theoretically compress all information about the universe in single bit. Algorithm for that would be: If you see one then you should return full information about universe and if zero then you should throw exception: "Error in input data."

Not every phenotype can be compressed to genotype. There is no DNA for animal on 17 wheels or for a cheese-cake.

It is more similar to fractal compression or procedural generation where huge (even infinite) amount of data can be "compressed" into simple rule.

If simple math can do something like that then complex machine of physical interactions can do much more.
I've tried (very) hard not to let my feelings (in so far as there are still smoldering embers about this) either current or remembered shine through and to depict things as objectively as possible.

Part of that is giving credit where credit is due. The vision was his, the implementation, and dealing with the fall-out of all the bad decisions in every way except monetary (he never missed a payment of the agreed upon monthly amount) was mine. All of us, also those that were brought in later worked quite hard.

There would not be much point in writing this in any other way, the only thing you'd get out of that is that I am either vindictive or that I still haven't come to terms with all this, 20 years after the fact.

I think I have come to terms with it, I see it as a very expensive but ultimately very useful lesson that I apparently needed to learn in order to do better.
I am not saying they where never used, just the fact that much of a project is scraped at one point or another. EX: Bingo card creator started as a java app, and now it's a pure webapp. He still let's people download the app, but it's on the way out.

It may be a semantic argument, but basically if the same people / team are working on the same problem then a complete rewrite does not make a new project. As far as I know zero of Windows 3.1’s codebase made it into Windows 7. However, when you look at API’s it’s hard to call the Windows 3.1 to ME family a separate project from the Windows NT to Windows 7.
It still is. I have a slightly more advanced, but still elderly, Nokia 6230i and I use it any time I'm doing something that might wreck my phone but where I do need a communication device.
In my opinion, this piece ignores the larger issue with ranking employees. Ranking of any sort implies competition. Your employees should not be competing against one another any more than the cells of your body should.