skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think Microsoft is worse than any other big company in their position, in fact I think they're probably much better given the charity Bill Gates is now engaging in.

Most big companies of Microsoft's size engage in unethical or illegal practices, and most of them don't have CEO's that become philanthropists. Gates is doing good, relatively speaking.

But I also think that praising Bill Gates as a "Hero" for his philanthropy without looking at how his wealth was generated, or how inefficient that process is misses the big picture.

Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have flowed through Microsoft over the years didn't go to Gates, and a lot of it was spent on unethical behavior which has held the industry hostage for years. For instance we've only relatively recently begun to see large transitions away from Windows, IE and Office, which might have happened much sooner in a more open market.

So who are my heroes?

My heroes people working in government trying to rain in monopolies and fostering healthy competition. My heroes are people that write software supporting open protocols that make it easy for everyone in the market to compete on equal ground.

My heroes are people in Africa and elsewhere using these technologies to bootstrap their local economies, so in the long term they can buy their own vaccines instead of getting them from Bill Gates.

None of these people will become billionaires, and you'll never know their names. But combined they'll do more economic good for humanity than Bill Gates ever could.
By self-segmenting, I mean that his customers are voluntarily sorting themselves into market segments according to what they are willing to pay, and then paying that amount.

Extracting the most value from your customers is a challenge. Ideally since software has no real unit costs to the developer, you'd like to be able to sell the same software for every value from $500 down to $0 with each person paying the max they are willing. The problem is that you can't divine the amount each person would pay and have no way to manage this. I am saying he has his customers sorting themselves based on what they will pay on his behalf, and in theory he could get closer to the theoretical ideal that way.

It is true, there's no rational incentive (although maybe a desire to ensure the developer keeps working on a game you love almost qualifies) but it doesn't matter if using the guilt lever works on irrationality so long as it works, which if his numbers are real, it did to the extent that he sold two at 5.99 for every one at 2.99.
The natural ones allowed me to cut my pain medication ;-)

Not that I wrote that, I also noticed I no longer use any Microsoft software. That can also explain the pain medication...
I think the app is in need of a better icon. I assumed it was a game.
Women 2.0 Startup Competition
The competition is open to early-stage web, consumer, mobile, cleantech, and biotech ventures around the world! Applying companies must have at least one female on the founding team, be in beta stage and have not received significant funding. The perk: All entries will receive written feedback from the judging panel of investors and executives.<p>Finalists will be invited to PITCH Night on November 4 in San Francisco to present their startups onstage. Winners receive meetings with iconic investor Esther Dyson (Principal, EDventure Holdings), Matt Murphy (Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Mike Maples (Managing Partner, FLOODGATE), and Naval Ravikant (Partner, AngelList). Winning teams also receive a host of startup-friendly services (valued at $18k) to help jumpstart their startups. For more info and to apply, visit http://www.women2.org/pitch-competition-2010/
Certainly porting happened, but the market was very fragmented. That was why Office was born in the first place.

My bet for what would have happened: one of two things.

1. Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did and you'd be complaining about them instead. Except maybe you wouldn't be complaining because nobody would have written this article because whoever benefited from it would have hoarded their money as most billionaires do rather than becoming the greatest philanthropist of all time.

2. Hacker News wouldn't exist for you to comment on, because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it.

I don't think any other result is possible (and I don't think the 2nd is practical). Users simply aren't savvy enough to deal with fragmentation. You wouldn't have the web we know today without cheap home PCs anymore than you'd have man without the apes.
They could shorten their release cycle but it wouldn't change the behavior of their largest customers.

Consider a large organization that finally installed IE7. [Welcome to 2006!]

I'm sure we'll have to deal with this for years to come (unfortunately), and neglecting corporate customers leaves a lot of money on the table.
I'm still trying to decide how I want to install it. Being able to test all versions of IE on a single machine is getting impossible.

I have a Windows 7 virtual machine for testing IE8, a Vista vm for IE7, and an Windows XP for testing IE6. And I only have one license of each system, and I don't really want to drop my ability to test IE7 or IE8.

Fuck you Microsoft!!
That's good - many people seem to fault the employer in my experience.

Question though - the wood analogy was yours. You were expecting me to foresee that and list the difference between people and wood? I am also disappointed that your response did not address the differences between companies and....let’s say…Antarctica penguin colonies. ;-)
I provided the command that I used to test the Micro instance on DocumentCloud's server. The only requirement would be to install Docsplit

sudo gem install docsplit

Then just `time` the runtime and compare.
you don't need an account to post. Pick one of those and write it up!
Science vs Reason
Peer review is no substitute for critical reading. Even to the limited extent that peer review works, it really only works at all in academic contexts.
. . . or a Windows badge on Linux.
larry ellison is a true silicon valley hero and success story.
The impact of overwhelmingly talented competitors on the rest of the field
In my experience, we were encouraged to be more ambitious with our ideas than we had been before starting YC, while working to launch the first version as quickly as possible.
Does anyone know how culturally broad this is? The examples tend to be USian or highly western companies.
I know the feeling, but they're stuck too--they want XP to go away and can't get rid of that either.
For anyone interested, I have created a Java library wrapping the JSON APIs exposed by Ronnie.

http://github.com/anoopengineer/jhackernews

Currently supports only fetching of News pages - top pages, new pages and ask HN pages. Support for comments and voting to be added soon.

Licensed under Apache 2.0 license.
i don't get it at all. but about monetizing this... i occasionally see people on the subway with a "fantasy football" magazine.
You realize that value is a subjective term while on your way to the bank to cash the check.
Well done, probably the best implementation of a simple site builder I've seen.

Only issue I found was the template picker has body content "This is where your content will be.". Granted its quite an easy change but a repeated sentence like that doesn't quite show off what the template would look like with actual paragraph text (not all equally sized and spaced).

Lorem ipsum does a fair bit better job at this, but since the text will be user facing I'd suggest writing up some decent sample text, perhaps a story about orbs.com?
The biggest problem with mobile app distribution is that if it doesn't work, he's just done. Updates don't boost you up the app store, and all of the downloads from word of mouth and blog reviews don't add up to a hill of beans.

Unlike on the web, or Facebook, where you could simply improve the product, he's screwed if it doesn't take off quickly.
> Everyone's starting point is relative. No one ever gave me the gifts that Bill Gates got. But then again, I've had gifts that 99% of everyone who ever lived couldn't imagine.

I don't have too much more to add, just wanted to say we fairly similar to you, and think you're an awesome contributor on HN, and wanted to let you know that. Absolutely no disrespect intended and it'd be good to break bread sometime if we're ever in the same place, I've learned a lot from your comments.

I very slightly disagree that with gifts comes responsibility, because I think only an individual can assign responsibility to themselves outside of the basics of not intruding on other people. But I'm probably strange, most people don't think that way. With that said, I assign high responsibility levels to myself (service, charity, helping people, good citizenship, protecting the weak, serving the strong and virtuous, and those who wish to be strong and virtuous). Anyways, that's somewhat a minor point - I wanted to comment more to show some respect. You're one of the best commentors in HN history and I've learned a lot from you.
I think you're overestimating this one blogger's reach vs. 500/X's Facebook likes, checkins or comments (X being a vague social non-participation factor which is shrinking quickly). Consider the size of all those people's social graphs, how many impressions are made. The event would still have to be excellently run and inventive (like the Patron event in the article) to maximize impact, but I don't see a reason for such small groups like this unless money is literally no object.
Seems quite promising...
Slicehost, Node.js & WebSockets
The three hours wasted was actually just 20 minutes of 10 people's time. Forcing people to sit and wait for 10 minutes is totally passive aggressive.

Also, not every employee can accomplish that much in 10 minutes. A support or business person could fire off an e-mail or two, but an engineer suffers when time is broken into small chunks. Engineers are also paid pretty well, so when you're talking about 3 hours of "engineer-time" wasted, the cost to the company adds up.
So you're saying you would purposely invite fewer people to an event (even if that means a much higher cost per participant) in order to minimize negative reviews? That doesn't make very much sense to me.
But the point is that you can do that. With Rackspace, you get X amount of storage, and that's the end of it. If you're getting full, your only option is to get a server with twice the RAM and disk at twice the price.

With EC2, I can have a server half the price of Rackspace's cheapest instance, but with theoretically unlimited storage space. I could use that e.g. for backing up server data, or as an NFS share.

The one major limitation of Rackspace's service is disk space. It's severely limited, and there's not much you can do about it.
Use the torrent for faster downloads... http://www.erlang.org/download/torrents/otp_src_R14B.tar.gz....
which is linked prominently from erlang.org's downloads page.

Actually, what I find most interesting is that looking at their tracker stats:
http://www.erlang.org/stats/torrent.html
reveals surprisingly small download counts. It isn't clear when the download counts were last reset (or if this is accurate at all?), but so far, only 13 people have completed a download of this latest build via the torrent, and at most a few hundred of earlier versions. Interesting way to estimate the size of the "active" Erlang community?
For the most part webapps will work under any OS with a browser, you can't really say the same thing about Windows/Linux software.
/me points to Linux.

Granted, it's not quite 20 years.
Why are you implying that wanting to keep your wealth is wrong?
> That was why Office was born in the first place.

Office was never "born". Not even designed as a suite. It was cobbled together. Word and Excel were independent products developed originally for the Mac. PowerPoint was acquired and Access developed internally.

> Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did

Striking a deal with IBM, retaining the rights to the OS and cooperating with OEMs so they could clone their client's hardware? It takes a devious mind to come up with a plan like this.

> because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it

I don't know about you, but I had a lot of fun with my Apple II. Bill Gates had nothing to do with the popularization of the home computer. In fact, he may something to do with the demise of the home computer of the 80's and its replacement by bulky, noisy, beige boxes with 12-inch CGA monitors running MS-DOS (a most home-unfriendly OS). My Apple II+ had 2 screens, one 14" white monochrome soft-switching between the motherboard video and the 80-column card and a 17" color TV directly connected to the motherboard composite output. Sadly, the IIe could not do the same trick (I used to have text on one screen and graphics on the second)
Airplay is meant to work the other way around - from your iOS device to another device - e.g. an AppleTV, a fancy receiver, a networked TV, etc.
I'm a system administrator at a startup now going on 3-4 years. Having complete access and control over every piece of data in the company is a great responsibility. You are given a level of trust above and beyond anyone else. Misuse of your position and power is wrong and says a lot about the type of person you are.
10 years ago, when I visited Australia, their currency was similar in value to the US (I think an aussie dollar was worth roughly 65 cents US), and they had no pennies OR nickles. It started at 10 cents.

They also had 1 and 2 dollar coins.

The best part was that the change in your pocket was worth enough to actually allow you to buy things with it. Not like we have now, where people only use it to avoid getting more change back.
Last I read Larry makes 1.6 BILLION US DOLLARS a year. I don't think you can ever spend that much money.
How timely. I just started writing a library to scrape data from Hacker News because I wanted to put the posts I'd upvoted in the sidebar of my blog.

Link: http://blog.edparcell.com/how-i-added-my-hacker-news-saved-s...

Your API has advantages and disadvantages against this approach: On the upside, it provides a uniform way for all languages to access content from HN, which is really cool.

On the downside, all requests through your API have to flow through your server - this makes me uneasy for two reasons: First that you could switch off your servers, esp. if take-up is high and you are not being compensated sufficiently for running them. And second, because I'm uncomfortable authenticating to an intermediary.
If there would be only one thing that you would really have to know it would be divide and conquer, everything else follows from there. It allows you to tackle any size project and to solve problems that are too complicated at first glance.

It allows you to debug really tough bugs and keep moving.

The guy that taught me that trick was a long time COBOL programmer, he took pity on me after not being able to crack a certain problem and it was like someone handed me an electric drill after puttering about for years with a pocket knife.
The Hierarchy of Internet Needs
Another nice advantage to Micros is the ability to scale up in more incremental chunks. The linked benchmark works well if you use the full capacity of the medium at all times -- but if you need a little less than that, running a cluster of Micros gives you eight smaller stepping stones to find the sweet spot.
So why isn't he campaigning for lower taxes for her instead of higher taxes for others?
The news is, that pitch was paid for
Yeah, I wondered what a coordinator's work would look like concretely and imagined a kind of freelance product manager. Do you think that's way off?
Ask HN: Further reduce energy consumption?
I live in NYC and don't own a car, I bike to work whenever the whether permits.

All the appliances I own are energy star.
All my light bulbs are the energy saving type.

What else can I do? I don't want to buy energy credits, I want to reduce my own energy consumption.
OpenFeint now available for Android
Just to offer a counter-opinion, I went to the site searching for a video to explain it to me and left when I couldn't find it. I did click to start creating a site, but since I didn't have any site I actually wanted to create I felt intimidated by this approach and gave up immediately.

Looks like a slick product though, I will definitely give it a try when I have something I actually want to make! :)
Apple to announce subscription plan for newspapers
The difference here is probably the degree to which this affects each gender. While no man wants to limit his options in women, being in a relationship probably doesn't define his sense of self-worth the way it does with women. Of course, not all women are this way, but women often sacrifice bits of themselves in the name of love. We are more likely to:

1. Give up time with our friends/hobbies to be completely there for a boyfriend, all the time.

2. Move to a new city to be with a guy (who sometimes isn't even planning to marry us), giving up any career progress made to date.

And that's even before adding a layer of geekiness that I've found acts as man repellent to most "mainstream" male populations. I cannot just go to a party and start talking about how happy I am that Mass Effect 2 is coming to PS3 now that I sold my 360, nor can I go any deeper than "I like computers" with most guys. It's just not all that hot. But the chick who has a fantasy football team (and doesn't know it's filled with D-list players) gets the welcome mat (eta: because sports is accepted in the mainstream).
And the Burger King quarter-tonner is particularly tasty.
webkit has a fatal flaw: they didn't write it!
I wrote this comment (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/1785/what-sho...).

I have a lot more advice for systems developers (which can basically be summarized as "you're never as smart as you think you are -- plan for it") but I don't think they generalize as much to "all programmers."
Privacy, geo-location and over-sharing
I just read Atul Gawande's Better where there is a good discussion of Semmelweis, Apparently, Semmelweis was an extremely obnoxious nutjob, which is why he was ignored. When Lister started a lower profile, less obnoxious, program to do basically the same thing a few years later, he was much more successful.
For most of history, reason was the only known or accepted way to arrive at truths about the world.

I disagree. Most knowledge has always come from "science". You know it's raining outside because you looked and it was. You know there's a snake under that rock because you looked under that rock and there was a snake there. Moreover, all human skills and crafts from fire-making to cathedral-building must have progressed through a process of trial and error, which is just a non-formalized experiment.

This wasn't as prestigious as knowledge acquired through reason, though, since it doesn't take a genius to figure things out just by looking at 'em. Only when science became formalised and difficult to understand did it start to gain prestige.
This may be true, and you probably choose your place of employment to reflect the fact that you are not a morning person. However, this article isn't about you personally, and it isn't about a specific time either.
I'd be nice to have a little demo video.
Is it ironic that a site called "Beauty of the Web" is not itself beautiful? The blue & purple scheme looks like my monitor's having hue issues rather than some subtle color epiphany.

The animations are nice but, for example, the "download IE9" popup at the top right looks amateurish, as does the orange button compelling us to Download Now.

Compare this to the beautiful design of even Firefox's update pages and be disappointed.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6.9/whatsnew/
This doesn't hold account of people installing it through packages or compiling from the github repositories or downloading the flat file without a torrent.
I can't believe this is getting upvotes. Destroyed lives? Please. Get some perspective. And check your history. The guy bootstrapped Microsoft using nothing but sweat equity -- no investment, no inheritance -- working for years in very meager circumstances in New Mexico before getting some traction and moving to Washington. In short he lived the dream that many of us aspire to, and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. The article was spot-on.

It's sad that myopic, hysterical, anti-Microsoft rants citing dead bodies and destroyed lives get upvotes on Hacker News.
Speak for yourself, fella.
What would be an example of a successful application of this approach?
I'm not surprised that giving criticism is harder, since women are socialized to give feedback indirectly, through body language and other social signs, and even when speaking about a problem not to do so plainly. Simply saying what you think is treated as a "masculine" trait. I imagine the ways of communicating that are treated as appropriately "feminine" are much less effective in a technical context.

Do you consciously model ways to give criticism that your female coworkers will feel comfortable with? Does it help them open up and criticize each other? What works? (This is a subject I have an interest in in a personal context as well, since I sometimes get baffled and frustrated by indirect communication and would like to be better at coaxing women to be more direct, which is hard if the relationship isn't already close.)

Also, I'm surprised that women have a hard time taking criticism. I didn't expect that at all. Can you say more?
Halo: Reach makes you a better employee, a better person
Thank you! I have played with it and it's really awesome...I have been planning to use weebly for a couple wiki but it's so hard to use for fast changes. Orbs fits the bill perfectly.

Some things I would love to see:
1. colors in text
2. security (can I store a bank account number or passowrd in a private orb)
3. renaming the home paeg
4. image linking to a web url instead of just allowed to upload
5. embedding stuff (photo slideshows, youtube videos etc..)
I disagree. Quantifying the energy balance of the planet is easier than quantifying the aggregate behavior of individual, semi-rational actors in the marketplace. What happens within the climate system of the Earth is chaotic, but the energy balance itself is measurable.

If you'd like to see a chart summarizing the various climate forcings, then look at page 4 of this link: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm...

I'm not going to track down all the literature behind those numbers here, but there are published, falsifiable arguments supporting them. Climate models aren't similar to Wall Street voodoo.
At Schiphol Airport, a Library for Layover Passengers
After they yanked the previous 64-bit player beta for Linux, I'm a little gun-shy now; I'm treating anything they release as "beta" as something they reserve the right to yank out from under me at a moment's notice now.

I'm actually hoping to see Lightspark develop into a reasonable alternative:

http://allievi.sssup.it/techblog/
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/lightspark
https://launchpad.net/lightspark/
But US ISPs are not expanding in rural areas.
Ted Nelson said the world of computing would be different if AT&T hadn't charged $50,000 for a Unix license (yes, that's per machine!).
My mistake. It's here: http://www.beautyoftheweb.com