skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Add stuff into vs2010 to make small, portable executables for Windows with minimal dependancies. Get rid of b.s. like silverlight and wpf and adopt html 5 big time. Rip off cocoa & iphone sdk and make a windows-alike version.
Vmware is one of the few software I have ever bought, I am pretty hardcore open source otherwise.

Vmware works very well, has top notch clone/backup/rollback feature, can automatically install tons of different OS. That's a real time saver.

I use kvm at work where we don't have vmware licenses, and while it does work nicely, there is still no working rollback that I know of, and the network configuration is a PITA in general. Vmware frees me from all that hassle that I frankly don't want to deal with.
We Are More Popular Than Human
There are plenty of great developers.
Chiantenq
Also,
get rid of Ballmer and put someone technical in charge. A hard hitter like Gates or Jobs. MS is embarassing at the minute.
Smartness and even hard work are not enough. Connections and a luck are required.

You cannot prepare a good dish with only two ingredients. ^_^
and articles from daringfireball.net have zero insight
while being biased to extremes.
Why do people read it? Probably because most people search
for approval, maybe?

Perfect example of the comment upvoted by people searching for approval. Articles from daringfireball.net have zero insight? Biased to extremes? Really? Did you even bother to read any of the articles?

if you want to use the Android trademark and have access to its marketplace,
you have to play by Google's rules

That's exactly the point of the article: Google acts this way but claims otherwise.
I just really disagree with this: "Web programming, while allowing generally crummier applications"

With HTML5 and AJAX technologies a web application these days can do everything a rich client application can with the added benefit of accessibility everywhere from any endpoint.

"The biggest thing Microsoft should do is make the desktop king again" .... keep flogging that dead horse with your buggy whip
DMCA is only relevant for about 5% of the world's population. Don't be so sad, things are better than they seem.
We'll see how ChromeOS does! It seems to me that you won't see any netbooks labeled Google - you'll see them marketed as "Acer", "Asus", or "Dell".

Focusing on the web experience and printing (to combine your reply to my other comment) seems like a very narrow niche to me. It seems like ChromeOS is trying to position itself between Android and something like Windows 7.

Surfing the web and wanting to print is a common use case - but in that example, why would I want a device that does that, but not get a full fledged computer? I can't even install my own apps! Why would I need the capability to print - yet buy a device that pretty much requires me to be online all the time?

It just seems very risky to me. Why not add a printing function to Android? Wouldn't it be cool if you could hook up your phone and connect it to a printer and print? Wouldn't Android devices have "proper" flash if they had more powerful processors? (which is a function of mobile processors getting more powerful)?
whats about things like firewall etc. ?
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> fully-functional built-in Flash

But, but, but Adobe said that full Flash was coming to mobile platforms everywhere. Are you saying they lied?!

Seriously, that's meant to be something Android does.
Geez, it was a light-hearted glimpse into the difficulties of freelancing. Not a tutorial, a how-to or documentary, just a slice of what daily life is like as a freelancer. Dry spells, unpaid 'vacation', no clocking out.

I for one enjoyed it.
It sure has nothing to do with the open source. It's about what Google says and what Google does. Go read the article.
Spend the same money on startups that Microsoft spent to destroy startups in the 80s & 90s.
I would tell Microsoft to go back to their 90s mindset. Less focussed on big corporations, and more on getting (Windows) Microsoft software everywhere. Back then Microsoft was maybe an evil empire, but at least they did some exciting things from a developers viewpoint.

@Balmer:
Get rid of .NET. There are people who use it, and some of them actually like it, but it will never become the huge success you thought it would become. This also means Silverlight has to go. The JIT compiler, with an open sourced assembly language, could get a 2nd life in the browser.

For a next OS, have a good long look at Windows 2000. Start from there, and instead of adding millions lines of code, start rewriting to make it smaller and faster. That way you end up with a valid OS to use on mobile devices.

Put more effort into your webbrowser. Make it so that it can be used for any type of application. Don't wait for W3C, if it's up to them we will have to wait till 2019 for a complete HTML5 specification. The other browser developers will either follow, and if not, developers will decide if they make a windows only application.
Make the browser the default UI layer of Windows. This time to prevent nasty lawsuits, make it easy for others to add their own navigational toolbar.

So in short, instead of trying to protect business with windows locked in technology, be more open, and out develop the other companies. Become the company again, where it pays off to develop on your platform.
A video demo of "hey look, click here and something happens over there!" is all well and good for impressing your mother, but not entirely useful looking forward. They've mentioned concerns with horizontal scaling and yet they don't consider the obvious option - Erlang.

In their presentation for Pivotal's Tech Talks series, they dismissed XMPP on the basis of not wanting to learn about it(!). Their dismissal of onesocialweb seems inappropriate on technical grounds. Also, HTTP is not the be-all and end-all. Not everything has to be shoehorned onto HTTP...
What are some ways to get 20/day of passive income?
I recently got a windows 7 machine. Some things that bug me as a programmer using it, and make me wish I just paid up and got a mac:

1) WPF - I am trying to use this in my work life. It scares me when I hear your ex-product manager twittering that it's dead. I now feel like I should've done my app's front-end in qt or swing.

2) Will microsoft create in-built, tested, virtual desktop support already? More people use laptops that need it even more. I use virtuawin, but things just don't work elegantly. Mac OS X supports virtual desktops natively, and it works without a hitch.

3) The one thing I actually do like that comes out of microsoft are your office products. I think as people actually go paperless now, it's a good time to double down on investing in OneNote as a platform used across tablets, phones, and PC's. Also allow for one to sync it to say, their windows home server, and let one define tags to be whatever they want -- and you may have something that will make me committed to the platform.

4) It's 2010 and I still use cygwin or a virtual instance of linux just to have a console with the commands I want. Windows PowerShell came wayy too late for me to want to bother spending time learning it. Mac users don't have this problem.

5) Start defining some rules for say "windows experience" PC's. This can be an upper-tier for laptop makers to try and not be cheap. This comes from my frustration last april when trying to buy a new laptop. Go into any b&m store, look at the windows machines - feeling like cheap plastic, glossy screens, and meh build quality - then walk over to apple's corner. It's a night and day difference. There's high-quality PC laptops made (ex: lenovo T series, HP envy), but they're hard to find in stores, and are typically only found online. Microsoft needs to define some rules on what a great PC has, similar to what they're trying to do with windows phone 7.
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The short story for me is saved enough to give me a full year's runway and quit my job.

For you, since you are still employed at your job, I would suggest that you start chatting to people in your area that have started / are starting companies. Figure out how they did it. You'll learn much more over a beer than anything we can probably tell you here.

Then figure out what frustrations you want to solve for people. Think about whether they are going to have those frustrations five years from now and then go talk to them.

As for carrying skills over to a new career, given your technical background you'll have good project management skills and incredible knowledge into mining. What sorts of problems / frustrations can you solve for mining companies / employees? That's an easier way to start than how do I become the next google.
>and a big part of the reason for posting here was for someone to say "hey, here's a wheel you can buy off the shelf!" not "hur hur, you're stupid because you're assembling a web stack, fail!".

I don't think assembling a web stack is automatic fail, but I think not buying a wheel you don't need is even better than buying one off the shelf. ;)

>Already had decided, if you'll notice the followups below, to replace redis with memcached, though I don't see how it would be a single point of failure if was just using it as a cache

If you're just using it as a cache then the SPOF doesn't matter, you're right, but if you're just using it as a cache then I'd say it's the wrong tool. It's great at doing fancy stuff with data structures in memory, but memory on a single node is all you get. (Dumping memory to disk improves durability, but does nothing for capacity.) If you want more cache than that, then you'll have to add your own clustering. Memcached itself is not any better, actually. At the very least you'll need to add libketama to consistent-hash across several memcached instances. Even better would be to use something like Kumofs or Voldemort which provide roughly the same semantics - Kumofs even uses the same protocol - while also handling server-set changes and such transparently.

That brings me to the point about whether to implement a separate caching layer at all. Why? Is there some known or inevitable performance need that wouldn't be solved by having enough cache on the nodes serving the authoritative data? If not, then implementing interfaces to two different layers - with all of the consistency problems and impedance mismatches involved - will just be a waste. My general advice is to never add a tier unless you're absolutely and empirically sure that the pain your gaining won't outweigh the pain you're avoiding.

>I also figured I'd need to write some scripts to have nodes join and leave the clusters, mostly calling the Apis built into the components of the stack

Writing those scripts can be a significant part of implementing your own cluster infrastructure. I'm sure we could have an interesting discussion about whether writing those scripts would be easy or hard, but IMO the more pressing question is whether they need to be written at all. If your storage layer (e.g. BigCouch) already does its own clustering, then you need to do practically nothing at that level. If you then keep your front-end servers as stateless as possible (i.e. not storing any persistent/shared data other than in the primary data store) then adding/removing those servers should be a complete no-brainer. Just give them some addresses and credentials, and boom - no cluster magic necessary.

It's not components I'm recommending so much as a pattern that avoids the need for so many components, but I hope it's still useful. Good luck.
Now that is dedication!
If you're pointed at data which suggests that laptop sales are declining significantly in parallel with the increase in tablet sales, I think you need to provide an argument a little more substantial than bluster.

There would seem to be some evidence that some of the people who have to choose now are migrating to tablets but the real test will be when they come to replace them having experienced both. Do they stay tablet or return to a laptop?
> On a fresh Win7 install it takes like 5 clicks to get to 'My Documents', with all the favorites and libraries etc

Hmm. Interesting. On my first install it was just there and I could get to it with one click.
Have you ever seen a crashed ESX Server with no community support, tons of home-brew utilities with wired command line arguments which throw a bizarre error messages to you that even google know nothing about? I did. ^_^

The idea is about reducing complexity and reusing community-tested solutions, not creating a new layer of complexity with a coded in a rush, badly tested poorly documented closed-source layer.

btw, if I use native lvm I can get a lot of flexibility.

edit: some BS removed.

btw, there is still no x86_64 xen-host for a modern kernels.
These two services have similarities, but someone could just have well written an article that says "Wordpress leaves Tumblr and Posterous in the dust."

I like the idea of a YC company taking on an existing one head on once in awhile, rather than looking for an overtly specific niche. Posterous still has a ton of users, and I think at one point and time the digg vs reddit chart looked pretty similar. Look at it today and you will see a different story.
Sorry if I came across as the comic book guy from the Simpsons
This shouldn't have reached the frontpage.
Nothing interesting or new here - Python's memory allocation scheme and garbage collector aren't state of the art.
LazyMiracleDB, because you're never alone on a network
Could you tell me which e-mail client are you using? We are sending an HTML e-mail. Thanks
Let's say you have manager A, minion B and ad agency C. If A and C know one another, A can simply say to C, here's some money, get on with it. If they don't, A uses B as a proxy in case it all goes hatstand, B can take the fall.

There's no reason B can't be complicit in this and take the day off to play golf instead...
Well. That is more like the downvoter's right :)
Wow! Just imagine a 200 MHz Apple II!
At the same time, organizational psychologists seem to recognize that subcultures actually play a vital part of corporations and that they should, generally, not be killed off. They are the watchdogs that keep the dominant culture reality-checked, and they are generally a source of important, but unexpected, new ideas.

A cultish hive-mind where everyone is a clone of the founder is no good either.

It's not an easy balance to strike.
When it comes to Internet related technologies, Microsoft should stop trying to innovate in a Microsoft centric view of the Internet. Of couse this view does not help Microsoft promote their operating systems and tools but it does open them up to be more about standards everyone cares about and not just the Microsoft circle. There is so much innovation in web development in an ongoing basis, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft to always be playing catch-up or keeping their developer base only in their sandbox.

A good example of a Microsoft centric view of the web is when I was lobbied by Microsoft to add IE8 specific code for enhanced IE8 specific functionality to my site. "Other browsers will just ignore the tags" was the reply to my question about cross-browser compatibility. This is a wrong-headed view of the Internet. Make open standards that are valuable enough for everyone to adopt and lead in that area. IE8 only functionality doesn't help anyone but people who will only ever service IE8 users.

Their adoption of jQuery for use in their tools and participation in the community is a good example of where they are doing what I am advocating. Silverlight, on the other hand is an example of a Microsoft only view of the web.

I find my very smart, very talented Microsoft focused web developer friends are often late to the latest trends in web development because they're so focused on what Microsoft is doing and not where the Internet in general is going. I'm sure this is not representative of everyone who is a Microsoft focused developer, but it does seem to be a case with a majority of people I speak with in that area.
Welcome!

The Classic ESX has Service Console is is customized RHEL

ESX 3.5 was built on top of RHEL, but vSphere 4 was completely redone. Ask anyone at VMware my friend.
Just cmd+up is fine
An html5 based extension system similar to chrome or safari so that extensions are easily portable between the browsers.
Agree about Office. While it's expensive it's still, for me at least, best of breed (except PowerPoint). If I were Microsoft I'd be looking to leverage Office more than Windows.
I was referring to the Management Console.
From the blog - "Our particular struggle is with our marketplace, in the whole it doesn’t know that it needs our product."

Do you have a well defined repeatable way to reach your end customers? If not, I would suggest stopping everything you are doing and focus on that.

Some thoughts that came to mind -
1.) Can you apply this to local tennis tournaments?
2.) Can you apply this to local <insert sport> clubs?
I couldn't even get the import from tumblr feature to work on posterous...
Diaspora is asking users to do the exact same thing: give up their Facebook accounts and start over on Diaspora. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a serious incentive for users to move over.

"It's open source" is not going to cut it for anyone but a subset of techies. Data portability probably won't be a big incentive for most people either, considering you can't even get them to back up their hard drives. Although I think it is a pretty cool idea (and I would like to have one), I have serious doubts that "you can pay us for a thing that you plug into your wall and your profile lives on it" will be much of a sales point for most people either.
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No one in his right mind, outside the HN hivemind, things posterous is a serious challenge to tumblr.
However, there is a price to all this: Hacker News will never be commercially viable. I know it's never supposed to be; its purpose is high quality conversation and links. Still, it's a good idea to note something like that if you're pointing to HN as an example for developers. HN is very successful at what it's supposed to be, but profitable is one thing it is not.
Dating Reviews
First let me say that I'm a big user of MS technology, I actually one of the few that calls myself an MS fanboy. Xbox owner since 2001, Xbox Live subscriber since 2002, coding in .NET with VS since 2005, Windows machines, etc etc. However I own an iPhone and an iPad. They are the best in class for what they offer.

Here's a very very practical idea that MS can implement very soon:
Xbox Live App Store. MS already has 40+ million 360's connected to people's televisions. You have the Indie Game section, and there are some non-games there, but the quality is pretty poor. First off, broaden the scope officially to "Apps" and make them a first class citizen in the dashboard. Market the area, support the area. Just look at what Apple is doing with the iTunes app store and iteratively improve upon that. Also, give indy developers access to Kinect libraries ASAP. Essentially with Kinect, you can do to the TV what Apple did to the Phone - made the advanced "smart" capabilities accessible to everyone. And open it up to developers in a big way because you don't have the resources to make everything yourself. I really can't stress how cool this would be, and how game changing it would be for the "set top box" experience.

Here are a few "big" ideas that I'd like from MS that are more out there:
1) an all you can eat digital media subscription. I would pay up to $100/month to be able to watch any movie (in HD), play any game (PC or 360), read any book I want to, or listen to any music anytime that I want on any device I want. I don't care to own anything or build up any collections. I just want to be able to consume the media that I want to in a ridiculously convenient way that is actually reasonably affordable.

2) Where my physical person is my representation in meatspace, my facebook profile is my representation in cyberspace, my phone should be my representation in digital space. When I walk into a room with my phone every device around me should be aware of my phone and extend my phone's functionality. Let me put it this way: my phone contains a display, speakers, camera, etc. If there is a better display in the room then let me use that display instead of my phone's. If there are better speakers in the space then let me use those speakers instead of the phone's. etc. Essentially "explode" the phone's physical device into the surrounding better devices so you effectively have a "super phone" wherever you are. And subsequently you "collapse" the phone when no such compatible devices are around.

3) somehow get rid of bandwidth caps. Fast ubiquitous wireless with no bandwidth caps would be amazing
3b) somehow make the above reasonably priced no matter if you're "roaming" in another country or whatever

Now for minor complaints:
1) Windows sucks for battery life. OSX is awesome for battery life. This is one of the major reasons why Apple can make decently powerful laptops in a nice form factor.
2) WHY do I have to reboot my computer for every damn little update? It severely impacts my enjoyment of my Windows computers.
yes and no i would think to "the best customer acquisition strategy is building a compelling user experience".

yes - if you already have customers looking at your product offering.

no - if you are starting fresh out. If people aren't coming (build it, they will come) then nobody is going to use or talk about your compelling user experience.
> "What use case does ChromeOS solve that Android doesn't solve?"

Android is designed for native application based devices, Chrome is designed from the ground up for Web applications. Web applications especially with HTML5 caching technologies, LTE and Wimax, use of whitespace to increase Wifi range is the future and make a lot more sense on tablets than mobile phones.

Even Eric Schmitt says Android is not designed for Tablets:http://www.mobileshop.com/blog/mobile-phone-news/android-2-2...
I feel sorry for your experience, it just does not match mine. Note that we are not talking about the same products - I mainly use vmware workstation/player/fusion (I deal a lot with cross platform issues in some medium-size open source projects).

Concerning things coded in a rush, I cannot say about vmware, but libvirt and the associated tools certainly are far from mature in my experience, at least for an end user.
It's so simple that we actually focus more on the content than anything else

Let's also not forget the fact that the content is aimed at a fairly narrow niche. If HN were aiming for mainstream popularity, I don't think it would work so well.

Now, presumably this focus may also be the case in some sub-reddits-- but then you fall into the opposite problem; the permitted topics can be too narrow.

Put another way: there's a complex set of mutually reinforcing relationships between the community, the content, and the system. I don't think you can reduce the cultural differences between Digg, Reddit and HN to any of the three.
Having an assembler built in to the basic interpreter was pretty damn cool as well, even if you had to manage the passes and origin your self
Google's Chief on Social, Mobile and Conflict