skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not necessarily agree. There are a _lot_ of good _businesses_, which basically _fill the gap_ in other product.

xMarks is not like an cut-n-paste iPhone app
(http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html), which becomes _useless_ after the vendor decides to implement the feature, rather a decent service (Chrome/Mozilla sync does not solve the syncing problem across browsers/iPhone/iPads etc.) which could not its business model.
I've used Dreamhost's $10/mo. shared hosting (one of the few shared hosting providers with shell access) for the past four years, and I can confirm that when it works, it works -- but there have been at least two outages during my time with them that have lasted upwards of 24 hours.

Obviously, that's unacceptable for most businesses, but if you think your business won't get sunk by that type of outage ... then I'd say Dreamhost might work well for you. For me, it's handled occasional heavy bursts of traffic without crashing, and I bet its resources are enough to handle most startups' demands. Once you hit the point at which it can't keep up with your demands, you should probably be able to afford something better -- assuming you have a viable business model.
I recently purchased my first Mac in 15 years of programming. While browsing around the reseller I was struck by just how sexy everything looked. I always try to hide PC's under desks in my home, I'm happy to have the Mac on display.
> OpenOffice is something that I can explain to my mother when I install it for her instead of MS Office, Mom, it's just like Office but it is open source.

In what way is open source easy to explain? Are you going to tell your mom that software is made up of source code that needs to be compiled and OpenOffice gives access to that source? It's much simpler to say Libre as in Freedom because you can do whatever you want with the software, modify, redistribute, resell etc
You can to take into consideration of those who do not primarily live in Vancouver but purchase property there, including but not limited to, Hong Kong riches.
I disagree, it hasn't stopped being a force for good.

Where is the evidence that his leaks have directly got people killed?

When I see something like this, my first reaction is, who benefits? Who is better off with Wikileaks discredited?

There's another way to lose credibility you didn't mention, have someone big and powerful with vested interests attack you relentlessly. The Pentagon's primary (and I think leaked) tactic was to turn people against Wikileaks by equating them with the direct loss of life. Sadly, it seems to be working.
The beauty in Android is that it doesn't have to be the best ... it just has to be good enough + shipped on cheaper phones ... just like Windows did.

Also, I've got an iPhone 3GS, and I see lots of area for improvement ... the biggest annoyance for me being that all these apps I have (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, yahoo messenger) ... are not using the iPhone's contacts list for storing people profiles ... so even Apple screws things up in the details department.
I'm pretty skeptical about Bloom Energy, but it's not fair to compare the efficiency of a 375 MW gas turbine against a 100 kW fuel cell (assuming that customers care about local generation and aren't just looking for the cheapest power). Maybe you should compare against a microturbine.
It's true that mere searches for Google instant might not directly be a measure of it's success. But most certainly, it is a measure of the level of interest sustained.

a)Even if the phrase "Google instant" were to be done using Google Instant, wouldn't Google have done something to incorporate it in the trends? (User clicks on links, right?)

b)Google Instant was not released to the general public all at one go.It was done in phases. So if it really did have a viral effect, and sustained interest, the graph would not be a spike and a fall-off.

Take the case of Google wave-
Here 's the Google trend of October 2009, (It was released on Sep 30)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+wave&ctab=0&ge...

Compare the news reference volume of this and Google instant.
Google instant seems to have a sharper fall in news reference volume than even Google wave!
This has to be linked in some way to the number of people using/ enjoying Google instant!
My hunch is that, there haven't been as many takers for Instant, as Google might have wanted-- at least,not yet.
I'm sure they've been working on it for the past half decade. Maybe now it'll even get resolved.
Everything is turning into a screen, from edge to edge. Once it’s all about glass, it’s all about software.

This is assuming that once it's all about glass there isn't anywhere to go. Apple has become a leader in UI design and glass happens to be the current popular choice for devices. 10 years before the iPhone few people would have predicted a phone with no buttons and a glass screen would become popular, and a few years after its release everyone in the industry is imitating...same goes for the iPod in relation to CD's or even cassette tapes. I would venture a guess that few people now know types of devices that will become commonplace in a few years.

As long as Apple is able to stay ahead of the curve and continue to stay a leader in making new things that people want to use I don't think will have a problem staying relevant. So to answer the question is that once it's all glass Apple will probably be on to new and better things.
Perhaps he's just had enough. In the Inc interview [1] he gave the impression that he lived for TechCrunch. After four years of that, he must be exhausted.

[1] http://www.inc.com/magazine/20101001/the-way-i-work-michael-...
Also look into Instapaper.

I've known about it for some time but never really used it until I bought a Kindle 3. Instapaper supports periodically automatically pushing content to your Kindle (using the Kindle email address, so it costs $0.15). However, if you use the Kindle web browser you can load Instapaper and download a Kindle version of your articles for free. For now, this is what I'm doing (mostly because it is more "on demand" than having content pushed at some interval).
Researchers Engineer Adult Stem Cells That Do Not Age
It's sad that the rate of Perl evolution has slowed to the rate of Java evolution, if not slower.
I can't believe this getting upvoted. I wonder how much software you use every single day thats created and maintained by "self-important teenagers and manchildren".
UK ISP's admit they would give priority to paid services
> What is the problem with Chrome bookmark sync?

Well... http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid...
I put this into a category of "I knew this before, but seeing it re-enforces that knowledge."
always remember master yoda's wise words: "Do or do not; there is no try."
Ask HN: What is it that enables a small company to become a behemoth?
Almost all the big companies of the world were at one time very small, or one can even say teeny relative to their current sizes.

Yet, not all small companies grow into those big companies.

What is it that enables a small company to become a behemoth?

Any opinions?

Thanks.
Where Good Ideas Come From (Animated)
No, I'm not saying that at all! I am not a Debian developer. I have made packages so I understand what goes into them, but that statement was driven by me as a Debian user--when things are consistent it makes life so much easier.
Can anyone give a quick overview of how viewing time on a page is estimated?
Did AOL acquire the rights to the CrunchPad as well? It was never clear whether it was completely spun off as a separate entity.
Instead of aliasing common commands, I make heavy use of Ctrl-r at the command prompt to search the history.

So if I have a complex command I want to run several times, I'll type it out in full the first time. After that, I'll hit Ctrl-r and start typing part of the command until it shows the one I mean, then hit enter to run it.
As people here are fond of pointing out: correlation does not imply causation. One can easily make a plausible case that the reason people from wealthy backgrounds score higher on measures of intelligence is because, to the extent intelligence really is inherited, attempts to quantify it are still sensitive to things like quality of education and intellectual stimulation throughout life, both of which strongly correlate with wealth.
That might be true, but the news reference volume should show an increasing trend- or at least, some 'bounces' - which is not the case yet!

Also look at the magnitude of drop- from search index volume 25 to just above 0! That's a pretty drastic fall.
In today's media environment you probably need a singular spokesperson as a front for interviews etc. You won't get the same amount of attention by just being an anonymous "hivemind".

Also, it's very interesting how the media has turned on wikileaks in the recent past. It's not about how many Pakistanis or Afghans the CIA drones are killing per day, it's about whether wikileaks endangers any sources.
Digital paintings still shy away from #000000 black in paintings. It still often looks wrong. It'll flatten out just about anything you put it on. The relationships between colours stay the same in RGB as in pigment. It's just that colours mix differently. Adding true black to your real life paintings has this huge possibility of totally blowing up any colours near it if it mixes in by mistake. Digital well... that's up to the artist's self imposed limitations.

That said, all the rules about black disappear once you talk about greyscale images.

As some sister comments point out, while the relationship between colours remain the same in RGB as pigment, the role the relationships and colours play are different from on a website, to print, to a painting.

I also suspect that sub pixel rendering could screw around with off black fonts.
Except the reality check : swedes do better by about every metric you want.
On #1, income is correlated with intelligence, but from the studies I can find, wealth is much more poorly correlated, if at all: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2007.02.003

From that paper's conclusion:

The results confirm other researchers' findings that IQ test scores and income are related. Depending on the method of analysis used and specific factors held constant, each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year. This means the average income difference between a person with an IQ score in the normal range (100) and someone in the top 2% of society (130) is currently between $6000 and $18,500 per year. While income and IQ test scores are related, results do not suggest a link between IQ scores and wealth. Regression results range from a negative to a small positive relationship depending on the specific analysis done. Moreover, since most of the statistical results are not distinguishable from zero, this suggests IQ test scores and net worth are not connected.

What exactly does cause the concentration of wealth is an interesting question, but it appears to be more complex than simply making more income, and unlike income doesn't appear to be as strongly associated with intelligence (if associated at all).
She could just pay someone to hack on the code for her, not something she could do with MS Office.
I am not sure it works like this.
You can only listen on communication if you are the first node (you will know the contents, where traffic comes from and the destination) or the last node (you will know the contents and the destination but not the source).
And onion routing should mean that encryption layers are peeled off as communication travels through the nodes.

https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...
It was just a rumor, but enough to bring APPL down by 6%, luckly:

"Entire Stock Market Recovers As Apple COO Tim Cook Says He's Not Leaving For HP"

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-coo-tim-cook-says-hes-n...
"The United States may possess a shrinking middle class, but the number of its citizens who consider themselves middle class (because they can't face that they're rich) may actually be growing. "

When you live in a place like Chicago, with a city sales tax alone of 11%, $250,000/year (among other taxes) might not be considered wealthy. Wealth is relative. A job in the midwest for $100,000/year will go much further than a Job in the Bay area for the same.

Nearly half of all people in the US don't pay federal income tax:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-a...

Before we start taxing the rich even more than they are already paying, we should figure out how to get tax revenue from the people that aren't paying. This will never happen because the democrats don't want to lose votes (taxing the rich always seems to be the only answer to getting more revenue).

Everyone should also get taxed the same percentage. This way, everyone knows what it feels like.
My ex-girlfriend bought an iMac and proudly displayed it to her friends. She showed them travel pictures, watched movies, etc. The computer had, for her, transitioned from a computer to an attractive designer object that provided utility. It didn't really feel like a computer so much as just a part of the environment of our apartment.

That always struck me as Apple's greatest success. There are way fewer hackers and hardware connoisseurs than there are normal people in the world. Apple has been able to appeal to people who used to merely tolerate technology.
LibreOffice - OpenOffice.org Community Adopts New Brand Name
Check me on this, but isn't encryption basically a solved problem? In which case, isn't it a little late for this? We have the encryption, there is no backdoor, and legislation won't make it so.
Healthcare is an excellent example of how absolute leaps in wealth are much more significant than relative ones. Access to good healthcare is pretty binary, and doesn't put a very significant dent in inequality - but it lifts a huge concern from those too poor to buy for themselves.
Black is very commonly used in art

http://www.google.com/search?q=brush+painting

Impressionists had they fancy rationalizations for why they didn't use black, but in my opinion, because of their painting technique and style, black looks dirty and smudgy.
It is simply not true that "the best DRM the industry has come up with was broken before it was released". Examples of DRM schemes that remain unbroken, and continue to support their owners business objectives:

* The content protection scheme that binds DirecTV cards to paying accounts.

* The VM-based BD+ scheme that protects each wave of Blu-Ray releases, requiring disks to be cracked individually.

* The current incarnation of the iTunes video rental protection scheme.
Twitter User Streams goes Production
I'm of the opinion that people who say something is a good problem to have are people who have never had that problem.
Adobe's burning bio-methane from a landfill, not fossil fuels.
I'm aware of people assuming that it must "become fun" after reaching certain milestones because surely their friends wouldn't all be playing it if it didn't...
> the biggest annoyance for me being that all these apps I have (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, yahoo messenger) ... are not using the iPhone's contacts list for storing people profiles ... so even Apple screws things up in the details department.

I'm not sure that's a screw-up so much as a philosophical view of the contact list as being for actual contacts and not random twitter user names with no associated addresses, phone-numbers, etc. I'd be pretty irritated if yahoo messenger were able to clutter up my contact list, personally.

On another note entirely, overuse...of ellipses...is a terrible...habit.
I don't want to try this since I fear to use up my win-a-lot-of-money-in-the-lottery-once chance.
Well it freezes my Chrome (Mac OS X) and I have to forcequit.

On Windows, I've had issues like overwritten or deleted bookmarks among other things ..

Frankly, it's a big PITA and this isn't limited to just 1 version of chrome
I wonder if he takes the same approach with women - when he wants to have sex with one, he just goes ahead and does it, rather than 'trying'.
Sure, but he's (provably) often been wrong, many times.
This recession is a cleansing for our economic culture. The old guard of white male management and business bloat is the demographic that is getting squeezed the hardest. They've treated the makers as "resources" and skimmed off the productive for decades. They better get government jobs quick, because there is no room left in business. However, I have a feeling the very thought of that might offend their self-righteous stance on government "dependence." Suck it up, Larry, those bills aren't going to pay themselves.
Nope, he's wrong about this too. On the scale of half a billion people lifted from absolute poverty by making the US "rich". Note, by the way, the rapidly increasing flow of western consumer goods into countries like China and India.

They didn't revolt when they were poor, why should they start now?

Also, I didn't exclude anyone - the article is very explicitly about wealth distribution in the US.
Truthy @ Indiana
Being poor today means worrying about an entirely different, and much more comfortable, set of issues.

I'm not sure you have a full appreciation of the extent of poverty in contemporary U.S... The official US Government definition of poverty is (according to Wikipedia):

The "absolute poverty line" is the threshold below which families or individuals are considered to be lacking the resources to meet the basic needs for healthy living; having insufficient income to provide the food, shelter and clothing needed to preserve health.

Wikipedia claims that in 2008, 40 million people (13%) met that definition.
Turns out I'm pretty good at lottery. I get about a 20% return on investment, which appears to be much better than average.

For a small fee, I can teach you how to lose money more slowly.
That number just so happens to be around what Calacanis' Weblogs got when he sold ($25M)
DropZap is free for a limited time + info on upcoming DropZap sequel.
If you are a fan of Tetris, Drop7, Bejeweled 2, etc., check out DropZap for the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dropzap/id338490375?mt=8

The sequel, DropZap 2, will have two shapes. Circles will behave as the squares do in DropZap. But it will also have squares, which also fire lasers and shrink, but they do not allow lasers to go through them. For example, when fired upon from the right, a square will not allow the laser to continue beyond it to its left.
Increase-Twitter-Followers with Twixplode [eCourse]
Why and how-to Increase Twitter Followers?
Valid point. I would venture to say that the majority of power users do not, but look around at an office meeting or in a classroom setting. Most generic users don't resize their browser after it opens. And if they do resize it, it's to make it fill the full screen.
I did not get the tatoo reference, haha. As far as I understand, though, there is TCO in Clojure, right? You just have to be explicit and use (recur).
It's Down to Five.  Help Us Decide.
I'm a big boy on the internet, I don't mind a flame at all, especially in response to a provocative post.

If you spend years, and millions of dollars, and don't make _any_ attempt to bring _any_ money in the door, I think you are making a mockery of the entire startup culture.

It's a business. What part of that do they not get?

Maybe maybe maybe, maybe they could try being a business and not seriously expect that some magical revenue stream is going to come knocking at their door with sacks full of cash.

Who funded these people? How can you seem to be so technically competent and marketing savvy, and not have a shred of business sense?

Are they going to go "focus on the next thing"?

Do they really deserve to be given funding for anything?

I think if you take someone else's money under the pretense of creating a business, you have some responsibility to the entire system to actually _try_ to create a business. And they haven't!
"both stable and squeaky clean"

where by 'squeaky clean' you mean 'has not been accused of any crime by anyone? is that a state of being outside of the control of the person being accused?
A product is not just about features. It's about experience.
You don't have to have anarchy to have competition in government. When people recognize individual sovereignty, its not necessary to fight over who will protect a piece of land and its people from thieves and invaders. Its just a matter of contract.

People can peacefully collaborate on their mutual security without coercing each other.
IIRC, TechCrunch didn't even acquire the rights to the CrunchPad.
It's nice that Big Names are supporting it, but for it to survive, it needs actual developers who know the codebase. I believe the actual developers are what sandGordon was referring to.
Edited the select box values to run 100k times and I still only won $10508. (Browser couldn't handle returning 1 million results)
I would venture to say that those same people who are notorious for texting while driving are also just as likely to be putting on makeup, fiddling with the radio, trying to eat a sandwich, or yelling at their kids. Thus, the net amount of bad driving due to cell phones may not be as large as previously expected.
Write a Sinatra-based Twitter clone in 200 lines of Ruby code
Why Schmidt should tone down tech utopia talk
I wonder if there are any psychoactive substances that induce megalomania ...
I use Arch too, but I really don't get what this has to with GoboLinux...
I'm wondering, does this play into why I see so many men under 40 who want to marry, but can't find a woman who will marry them?
It's interesting insight, but look at it like this...

Apple's dominance isn't from hardware alone. But they are exceptionally talented at it. It isn't in software alone, but again, they know what they're doing. They've got a lot of mature, battle tested code and an outstanding developer community who knows how to wield it. It's not in digital distribution alone, but yet again, they got there very early, have a lot of practice and many deep relationships with the rogue states (thanks, PG) who bully would-be media companies.

Marketing isn't their top achievement, but they love the things they make and the authenticity of their marketing works very well for them.

I could go on and on, but you probably get my point.

Apple's core strength isn't any one thing first, then something else second. Their strength is their ability to see the whole board and make every single thing they do complement everything else in a very meaningful, very equal way. It's an absurd game they play, a combo of three dimensional chess and hacky sack, but their focus makes it work.

No one can compete with Apple by trying to crib any one of their strengths. To be successful, you need to be able to attack several of them at once, and that's very challenging.

They've created an absurdly defensible position. The vision needed to get there makes my brain hurt. No matter how you feel about Apple, you can't argue that their organizational synergy is an incredible force.
WikiLeaks worked better before Assange became WikiLeaks.
Chris is here from time to time.
Regardless of their relevance to golfing, hunter-gatherers do use spears and projectile rocks extensively for hunting. They're ubiquitous among modern hunter-gatherers, and archaeologists have uncovered wooden spears from over 400K years ago. For scale, agriculture didn't become important until 10K years ago. This is much more than enough time for humans to develop complex functional adaptations specifically related to projectile weapons.
Bill Signed today doubles tax deduction for startup expenditures to $10k
> The difference in build quality, materials, and tolerances between a MacBook Pro and a Lenovo are still obvious

Yes, ThinkPads are still some of the most sturdy laptops around while MacBooks tend to need more support/repairs. Of course Apple's (repair) service is very good, and MacBooks do look nice(r), but "build quality" means something else to me.