skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, merely doubling profits doesn't mean much. It's his performance against the average CEO's that yields a comparison that makes sense. Has the number of personal computers active in the world only doubled since he took the helm? If so, I suppose that doubling MS's profits is acceptable. But I'd be surprised if engagement with computing devices has only doubled, so it's possible he's underperforming expectations.
It made me feel like you're being sarcastic :P
Or they think Android will be the easier of the two to kill. Or the less interesting of the two. Or the less profitable. Or the less symbolic. Or it's their second milestone. Or . . . well, you get the picture.
I meant "If you look at American manufacturing as percentage of American consumption of manufactured goods ..."

Edited in original.
"Win Phone sex? The killer app?"

I LOL'ed
Automatic text translation  - Stackoverflow
>Whoever headed up the XBox should immediately be promoted into Ballmer's postion

I think those guys have already left MS in the past few months - Bach, Allard, Vrignaud...
Maybe you should wait for the real thing before you start judging with videos ;-)

Disclaimer: I have an iphone (but that doesn't stop me from being excited)
Whoever headed up the XBox should immediately be promoted into Ballmer's postion, his effigy should be burnt and then maybe they'll be ready to move on and be a real tech company again.

Bad news: they fired J Allard back in May.
Jesus you can't make a buck in this market, the country's goin' to hell faster than when that son of a bitch Roosevelt was in charge. Too much cheap money sloshing around the world. The worst mistake we ever made was letting Nixon get off the gold standard.
"Android's smartphone market share has now passed that of Apple—17.2% to 14.2% at the end of the second quarter, Gartner estimates"

Will this also be enough pressure for Apple to cut its exclusive ties with AT&T? I just bought an Android device today. I couldn't stand AT&T's network anymore.

Competition's good. Keep it coming.
It was fair. He was making his peers look bad before the shareholders.
The grade is curved, though, and Ballmer's a hell of a long way from the top.
In the last 10 years would you like to estimate how much the computer industry sector has grown? Double or would I hazard a guess at significantly more?

So, put it into context and doubling the profits is pretty pathetic.
Yes. That's what I meant with attribution.
Symbian is dead - or will be as soon as dumbphones die. That leaves iOS and Android and, perhaps, RIM. For WinMo 7 to be measurable, Microsoft will have to pull one heck of a miracle.
I've seen it (read: I've actually used it).

It's solid - I'm not sure what everyone is going on about saying it's the world's most terrible UI. I didn't require any instruction at all figuring it out - it's mostly pretty intuitive. Some weird corners and quirks, but that's MS for ya. There are some cool tricks with the software keyboard that even the iPhone doesn't have.

That being said, an iPhone killer it is not. It's more responsive than most Android devices, but the fit and finish isn't quite there to really go toe to toe with the iPhone. It's also missing some pretty key functionality that is now common in the market (read: multitasking).

Also, its chief advantage here seems to be responsiveness. It's bloody fast, and that's a good thing... but it seems that a lot of the speed comes from first party apps being written in native code. Third party apps will be 100% .NET, and it remains to be seen if the same speedy user experience can be maintained in the third party realm.

[edit] The unified contacts thing in WP7 is really cool, and something I wish Apple would copy (but they probably won't). Having the phone be able to unify my friend's twitter, facebook, and address book entries is pretty slick.

I know, webOS had it first ;) It was cool then, it's still cool now, and I wonder why Android and iPhone haven't gone in this direction at all.
Get better at estimating, and please don't ever use the words "creative and unpredictable forces of software development" in front of a client. You may be able to avoid project rates in your market, but in mine, clients (a) want to pay for an outcome, and (b) want to know what they're going to end up paying.

There is a middle ground here; bill in person/weeks instead of by the hour (which, by the way, is probably an amateur signal), and structure your projects in terms of milestones that have economic value to your client.
I'd offer $9 for just the domain name.
First off, amazing stuff.

I came to this thread to find this explanation. Thanks for writing it out. In case you're wondering, the first place I looked for the description was on the legend in the lower right, I expected something to be clickable that would tell me what a "deal" meant. You might want to place the explanation down there. Even a "title" attribute would be a quick win.
Getting 70 or so high caliber founders and pooling their respective strengths is a huge advantage. Usually the press talks about the valuable advice and connections offered by the YC partners - this is just as big though. Everyone gets advice from the best sys admins, designers, etc, from across the batch.

The biggest successes online always seem to have some sort of marketplace for a business model - Google, Ebay, Paypal, etc. Not surprisingly, as YC seems on track to becoming a big hit, they have managed to find such a model. They are becoming a market place for top founders to network and exchange ideas. This would be very hard to recreate in an unstructured environment (like a co-op), because trust is essential.
Use my tool: http://viewtext.org/?url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...
Finally some insight into google caffeine. Its remarkable what they can do with indexing in real time. MapReduce is great for number crunching when you have time to wait for the data but in google's case thats just not feasible. Could they have added further capacity to speed up the process? Yes but would that have been more efficient than what they've now produced? Unlikely. I cant wait to see the paper thats produced. Some of the smartest minds have worked on this. Working on huge data sets like this has got to be fun.
They have held their PC market share in tact so regardless how much the market has grown they have gone with it. Pretty hard to push past 80+ % share.
Kudos to Feross! An inspiring story.
I can appreciate that it's the platform team having some fun for shipping... but this is gonna be pretty embarrassing if WinPhone 7 tanks.
I think 3rd party app performance is going to be less about the runtime and more about how well it is coded. The raw perf difference between native and silverlight for something like UI is negligible.
Too right. And not only that, but some of the goods and services we enjoy today didn't even exist not all that long ago.
Another thing to be careful with, if you leave the company pre-IPO or purchase, you need to exercise those options, but the money you are spending is still very much a pie-in-the-sky bet. Until the shares become publicly traded, you can't do anything with those shares, sell them, trade them, etc. You can only hang on to them in the hopes they become worth something someday.
Some will get used for spam - but what's the use of knowing the address came from site X?

A couple of years ago, I used TaxACT's website to file taxes. After I began receiving several spam messages a day using the unique email address I signed up with (I have read on third party websites that someone stole their email distribution lists), I realized I needed to find someone new to use to file taxes online, since it was clear that I could not trust TaxACT to protect my personal information.
I fear there is. Street prostitutes aren't doing very well.
What an excellent app, great job!

Have you thought about adding a social angle, i.e. allowing users to make comments on or recommend specific seats? Perhaps another heatmap layer to display desirability?

Personal beef - Rogers Arena in Vancouver is "Seating Chart Pending" with no ETA... coming soon?
Certainly for UI or high-level logic it's not going to make a big difference... but my impression is that there won't be any native code allowed, which is a stark contrast to both iPhone and Android.

If I need to write some performance-intensive bits of code, I won't be able to on WP7. Lots of the more novel/intensive applications (e.g., real time image analysis from your camera) will not be possible, or at least will suffer a significant usability hit compared to their speedier Apple/Google counterparts.
That is a great story!
exactly. And the broader network effects are huge too (which I'll write about next). There are hundreds of companies that never did YC that are another degree of separation away.
I agree! That is great API programming. Not everyone develops the APIs, some develop for the APIs. Made my day!
Get ready for IPO...
At least Windows Mobile is no longer using IE6. Gasp!
More like foolishly fired by Ballmer, which was too bad, losing Bach and Allard in particular really hurts them.
Android is Linux. From what I've seen of Microsoft's marketing against competitors, there strategy is to pretend that Linux does not exist.
The fact that you have to even ask this question (I've been in same boat) is evidence that traditional resumes and hiring mindsets are broken and archaic. The "X years of experience in Y" concept being probably the poster boy. Because what does X mean? Is X years by Bob equivalent to X years by Steve? What if X years in Y yields greater mastery than A years in B, because the former occurred later in their career, or because B was more difficult?

For example, I wrote a lot of C code in the 90's, but never "professionally" and so I periodically encounter recruiters whose brain just implodes at that concept. How could I possibly know C if I never did it for a paycheck? Is he lying? Talk about an insane world view.
Economics quote gone way way wrong...     [via: likelicorice.com]
wow, so we put how much 'stock' into what these people say?
Bonjour-Vietnam Le specialiste du voyage au Vietnam 
1er site d'informations du voyage au Vietnam
Maybe WinMo 6.5? I guess even Microsoft employees can't quite stomach that.
A mentor of mine did this, with $300,000.00 for four years. He bought a plot of land in Wyoming, built and underground cabin, and bought a Backhoe to help himself build it. He lived there for four years before moving on with his life...
someone from youtube recently reached out to me about some stuff and as an aside commented that i'd also probably make a good google employee. but my college GPA (2.8 or so) pretty much rules out that possibility. too bad.
That's what we have done. Paypal horror stories freak me out, so I regularly withdraw to my bank account and then transfer to another account so paypal can't go after the withdraw. Paranoid, yes, but better than nothing.

Now that we have $1.5k a month in donations, we are using Braintree. Wasn't worth setting up before proving financial viability, but definitely worth the peace of mind with a proven business. Great piece of advice.
Back when WM was just a baby a fired Nokia engineer started a site claiming that WM would overtake Symbian any day now..

Its several years later and good many MobileMonday members have laughed at that time and time again..

My prediction WM8 will be MS buying RIM..in 18 months or less
The Medal of Honor has been given to quite a few living members of the service. I don't know why the author thought this was the first time.
What? Is this a "Watchmen" quote?
does no one like activecollab? It has some great features.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) and Cross-site request forgeries (CSRF) | ICA
Using Twitter @Anywhere Bridge Codes
H.P.'s Board Blunders - again
Keep in mind that you will have to earn $40k after taxes, so you will have to actually earn about $60k.
Similar deal here. Went for two years, got a full time job and I couldn't get student loans big enough to cover the other two. Were the classes and connections worth the price even without a degree? Absolutely. Considering todays economy, a body of work, salary and two additional years of work experience is more valuable than a BFA from a pricy art school.
"For his valor during that October 2007 mission, the White House announced Friday that the 25-year-old sergeant, of Hiawatha, Iowa, would become the first living service member to receive the Medal of Honor, the military’s most prestigious award, for action during any war since Vietnam."
The article doesn't explain how, or what mistake was made. Not much content, really.
well, women do like lawyers, doctors, VPs, CEOs, etc much more than say plumbers or programmers.
Out of curiosity, how do you define a solid scope ahead of time? What kind of details do you go into? What if the client asks you to tweak a feature that's within the scope, but ends up taking up significant amount time?
It seems like he should use a higher level language to do this stuff:

http://docs.python.org/dev/library/ssl.html

Very well documented and does most of what he wants.
Godaddy always struck me as the Ryanair of domain names. A company that you didn't need to love as long as they did what they said on the tin.
Which means that the YouTube CEO is scouring Hacker News.
License Evolution and Hosting Projects on Code.Google.Com
Is it irony that we have a guy whose degree is in history writing about the rest of us not going into technical fields?
All those who venture in caves: return to the world, or go mad from loneliness. Some may seem interesting, but there is a thin line between insane and interesting.
If you are willing to live on rice it's about $200 a year for 2000 kcal per day. This is at supermarket prices, if you were willing to buy by the tonne I'm sure it's much less, just buy a futures contract and bring your truck to the delivery point.
Ask HN: How does Google back up personal data?
I'm wondering how Google backs up personal account data stored on their servers (ie, all Gmail messages and attachments, Gdocs files, etc). How do they insure that your data stored on their servers is safe and backed up? What's the likelihood of losing all the data from your Google account?
Perception is a funny thing.

I'm a 30 year old male with a scruffy not-really-a-beard and mostly t-shirts in my wardrobe. When I go out alone, I can't so much as stand in the same grocery aisle as a child without getting suspicious looks from parents and store employees. It's much worse at the swimming pool or beach.

When I have my baby with me, it's the opposite. Kids crowd around me; parents strike up conversations. Mothers are happy to read a book while their daughters talk to me or swim around me at the pool. It suddenly makes sense to people why I haven't shaved in 3 days and wear t-shirts.

They go from thinking Chris Hansen should tell me to "have a seat right over there" to thinking I'm just like Mr. Rogers. I'm still the same person, but the perceived threat level is completely different based on whether or not my kid is with me.
Funny you should say that, because we bought a set of Wusthof-Trident for my in-laws.

I bought mine in Germany and carted them back through China. Gives you a special appreciation of them when you've carried heavy knives and a wood block on your back for a couple of months to get them home!
However in households with lower socioeconomic status the problem isn't lack of attention from the parents. The parents TRY to help.

This is the opposite of the educators in my family, my own experience as an educator, my book learning on pedagogy, and my experience as a student. It also runs screamingly against the difficulty that, in the United States, children with lower socioeconomic status are disproportionately unlikely to have parents.
My core group of friends are artists and teachers. They go to church and they live traditional lives. They keep me grounded and stable. I often turn to them more so than my tech friends for help and guidance. But the reason is because I don't see my tech friends being as mature given the same age. It's a time thing. Eventually everyone will be old enough and mature enough.

No one wants to talk shop all the time. That makes you as boring as a kooky professor.
Surprising to read between 800-900M 2009 revenue and a price tag of 1B.
I don't have any friends who are into the tech space either. You're not alone in that. There is definitely something cool about being able to step out of it for a while. None of my friends read HN, reddit, or most of the news and blogs I read online, so in some ways real life and online life are completely separate. I see it similarly to you, sometimes a boon, sometimes a bane.

That said, I've been trying to network a bit to get more face to face acquaintances in tech, and I'm thinking that will be really helpful in the future.
"quantitative finance" is a technical specialty. What you describe is a typical situation of tech people, quants in this case, trapped by unfavorable turn of economic conditions in their, over saturated during boom-times, corner . That is exactly the kind of trap the brightest minds are avoiding by not going into tech.
The 9th is by far the largest circuit, so its rates of being successfully appealed and overturned are proportionately greater.

Conventional wisdom says that the 9th gets overturned when its decisions skew too liberal. The Roberts court is far less likely to overturn a decision perceived as skewing "business-friendly". Nothing's more business-friendly than enforcing contracts, right? Personal responsibility and all that.
"Which do you think seems more fraudulent?"

Any corporate destination for personal purchases looks more fraudulent than any home address. Home addresses -- most notably the one correlated with the account -- have easy traceability. A package being delivered into the bowels of a place with thousands of employees, not so much.

I'm quite glad that any paypal purchases made on my account can only be delivered to my home address. Seems pretty logical to me.

"Oddly, Amazon has no problem with this"

Amazon is the seller. They take the risks because they have a large-margin product that they are selling you. PayPal is a very small margin payment facilitator. Your comparison is not at all valid, and borders on ridiculous.

"maybe because they're indemnified against fraud losses by the CC company"

This is absolutely wrong.

The CC company bears absolutely no burden for fraud beyond the administrative hassle, and it is wholly on the merchant's backs. Merchants have to follow the prescribed rules (e.g. taking a CCV number) or they lose their merchant account, or they fall into a tiered bin where they pay much higher rates.
Ask HN: Equity Advice, First Employee/Director-of-Eng/Series-A valley startup.
Please advice. Regular HNer (posting from a temp account).
Pilom is right. Your life would become revolved around food.

You should check out the following three things:

Emergency by Neil Strauss in which Neil detail his experiences in trying to become more self sufficient and gaining the abilities to escape from the system

Island to Oneself by Tom Neale for a first hand account of trying to survive on a deserted island for 16 years.

And Survivalistboards.com, which is full of conspiracy nuts but has lots of information about becoming more self sufficient.
The Tooth’s Rogues, Villains and Bastards of 2010
Shame on you for not knowing classic :) It is a "Wall Street", the first one. Should be taught to 6-graders together with Special Relativity.
>>As Android's smartphone market share has now passed that of Apple-17.2% to 14.2% at the end of the second quarter, Gartner estimates - Apple's strict app rules could have ended up hurting it. Some developers might have chosen to go with Android instead.

imo this analysis is wrong. The tech press and a lot of HNers care about Apple's "strict app rules", but very few consumers care about them and a very tiny fraction of iPhone developers have abandoned the platform because of "rules on how developers can build applications for the iPhone"

Apple's market share is hurt because of many reasons - in the US, they are tied down to AT&T while Android is available on all four major carriers, the iPhone 4 received a lot of bad publicity etc.I'm surprised that the WSJ writer chose to focus on Apple's "strict app rules" as the reason.
Well, revenue is not profits. It would be interesting to see what their actual profits are. For one, they spend a lot of money on advertising.
Certain proc intensive stuff could be hampered but this is all guessing until about 3 months from now.
His amusingly written and insightful take on redundancy versus dependencies is one of my favorites, a good take imo on a fairly key issue in programming: http://www.yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-...

"But you already got it - I don’t want your code, because I’m an antisocial asshole that has no team spirit whatsoever. I’m going to parse arguments using 5 lines of C code. Worse, I’ll make a function out of those five lines, prefix its name with the module name, and replicate it in all my modules."

"I don’t want to depend on anything without an owner. [...] not only do I want to depend on stuff with an owner, but I require a happy owner at that. Contrary to a common managerial assumption (one of those which rarely hold but do keep managers sane), I don’t believe in forcibly assigning ownership. If the owner doesn’t like the module, expect some pretty lousy gardening job."
Respect if you do it because you're harmful to society, childish if its because society is harmful to you.
Very cool. Didn't think it be such as big deal, since others have already played around with the official Youtube player and API. For example: http://www.yvoschaap.com/youtube/, http://www.flatvid.com.
Hey lzw... hit me up next week and we can talk Joyent without the marketing speak. dcrawford @ joyent.com
Wasn't England starting to industrialize around that time? They kicked off the biggest change in human life ever. (Or perhaps the second biggest. Agriculture was pretty big, too.
Free household furniture for HN member new to bay area
My employer is selling off their company guest house furniture. Most of the items are in decent condition. I will try and get it for free for any HN member (preferably someone with karma points :) who's just moved to the bay area and is in need of it - again, no promises here, but I'm definitely going to try hard to get it free.

Here's the list of items -
- Wooden center/coffee table
- Dining table 4 chairs
- 1 Table lamp with shade
- Single-seater couch
- 19" TV
- Vacuum cleaner
- Wooden TV stand
- 2 twin beds (1 with mattress & 1 without)
- Couple of other household items.

The items are in a public storage in Sunnyvale, CA. You will have to arrange for pick-up.

Ping me if you're interested - rachna dot emails at gmail dot com .
They can still cut hair. Or teach. Or spend time with children. Or do comedy.
Assuming its applicable, it may also help to tell us the expected target market (or the market you're somehow restricted too): global, country specific?
Can Yahoo still be saved?
In general, don't expect Google to answer any questions about how they do things.

I suspect that they don't back up per se but instead replicate data across multiple data centers.
Though perhaps `lost' to the Germans. They sell lots of capital goods.
Looks like a newer submission is taking off - for crossreference purposes, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1680185
Well aware of that, but it can be a bit of a pain if you're tunneling more than a couple protocol or if your tunneling to more than a couple of hosts. Also, VPN let's you use the same configurations as you would if you were local to the machines, you don't have to use localhost, etc.

And of course, there's also well known performance problems tunneling over SSH because you incur a double hit from the TCP backoff algorithm. Not to mention that you can't (easily) tunnel udp over SSH....

Come to think of it, there's no real comparison. SSH is a great remote shell protocol, but a shitty VPN protocol (not surprising since it's not * intended* to be a VPN protocol).