skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oops I meant Jessie. I base it on a few things.

1. She didn't see this coming. Apparently she has no instinct for due diligence.

2. The way she handled one of her best customers, Lucinda. This woman does not seem to understand the most basic principles of successfully running a small business.

I've seen Jessie make essentially 2 business decisions and both have been horrendously embarrassingly bad.
I want to say, "Thank you." Lately, I've been working to print Office documents and Outlook emails to PDFs for a product in the legal industry, and Microsoft's documentation, their CodePlex projects and their interoperability teams have made this process surprisingly painless.

It's a pity that IronRuby was largely cancelled, however—I would love to have more high-quality dynamic languages under .NET. Microsoft has a variety of excellent static languages, but dynamic languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript are all very popular, and Microsoft hasn't had a popular tool in this space since Visual Basic became a static language.
Programming for a living is like playing Sudoku with a time limit.
1. Fire your browser team - the entire division. IE is the dead, stinking remains of 90s technology. Save yourself a ton of grief and money and standardize on Gecko or Webkit. Then make it a mandatory upgrade. Do what Apple did - change or get left behind. It may hurt in the short run, but it's paid off in the long run.

2. You know that buzz that Apple and Google have? When was the last time you heard anyone who doesn't work there say the same thing about Microsoft? Your mindshare is a dead stinking corpse in the middle the street that no one cares about.

3. Get smaller and get faster. Mozilla updates every couple of months and its like a party. Safari updates whenever Apple feels like it (which is still faster than you guys). Chrome updates whenever they take their ritalin. They all update faster than you guys. You've got 40 million programmers up there and this is the best you can do?

4. Other platforms exist. At a minimum, your browser should be on them (see point 1 first, though). Us Mac users thank you and curse you (well, I do, anyway) for allowing to have Office. Now go do the same for Linux.
I'm surprised ESRI doesn't show up more often. Their tools are de factor standards in many many markets.
1) Change the name of Microsoft Security Essentials so people will have an easier time finding it and knowing what it does. Market it better, while keeping it free.

2) Have more free options available for small businesses and teams running the .NET stack. BizSpark is a step in the right direction, but for cash-strapped startups who want to test ideas out in a production setting, it still doesn't compete with the free open-source alternatives.

3) Focus more on getting program installations done right. For example, SQL Server 2008 has taken a step backwards in terms of installation. Errors happen quite frequently during the install/upgrade process--it shouldn't take several hours of fighting one installer to get it working properly.

4) For popular third-party programs that work correctly with Windows, it would be nice if Microsoft had an online database of checksums that Windows can transparently check the program against. If everything looks good, don't present the user with "Confirm/Deny" choices, just install it. Otherwise users become jaded and used to clicking on "Confirm" even for popups that require more thorough inspection.
It probably means that you haven't achieved a high enough level of job-hate to get yourself moving. The friction required to start something new is always high, even more so for something like quitting a job or starting a company.

I would suggest taking the smallest step forward in the direction you want to go in. Then when that is done take the next smallest step. This will help get the momentum going.
Also, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I can imagine Posie's will get a lot of support from their new customers by complaining to the press. And these customers will buy meals, be model customers, offer their condolences....and tip nicely.
Recording an instructional video right now ;-)
For all these years I kept on installing windows on my laptops and desktops not because I'm a MS fan, but all the cool games run on windows and I'm a frequent gamer. MS probably will have a good advantage if they released a handheld gaming platform.

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/210279/rumor-microsoft-d...

MS will probably have a good comeback with that, I hope it wouldn't be a closed environment like XBOX or Sony PSP. I would love to play flash/html canvas games using a handheld gaming platform. If they could add touchscreen functionality along with web browsing and installable games from MS Games/Steam etc. then it will be game over for other handheld platforms.
1) More competitions for develops like 10kapartevent.

2) Robotics - Try to create a cheap programmable android. I know not core competence but partner with someone.
The desktop is NOT DEAD. All those other devices are primarily for consuming media -- which is great. But I'm still using a desktop with a keyboard if I want to do any, y'know, work. I spend ~8-12 hours a day on a desktop and everyone else I know with any kind of office-job does too. And that's a lot of people. Tablets/console-games aren't going to change this any time soon.
One more: press alt+cmd+up arrow on the keyboard.
MS, please stop trying to sell 8 different SKUs for each new version of your OS. Just sell one. Thank you.
BRK and NOP? Odd choice. 0x20 and 0x60 are still burned in my brain. (I couldn't afford the exotic "floppy disc drive" required to run the assembler, but the ROMs would disassemble what you entered so hand translating to machine code wasn't too bad.)
Interesting post. I think you made a bunch of mistakes.

1. Underestimate the importance of good content to attract people.

2. Overestimate the importance of real names.

3. Design. Either make it ugly (which would have been fine), or really good looking. Both your design and the designers' design where in-between meh. You should have kept it ugly and focused on the content :)

4. Pulling in feeds makes the content worse, not better. Automated content doesn't create community.
That's not released yet. But we just released Evernote integration - so that is a path from any mobile client.
GREAT point. On a fresh Win7 install it takes like 5 clicks to get to 'My Documents', with all the favorites and libraries etc. Do I really need to click past "My Music" folder every time I want to open a file? SIMPLIFY.

In case you missed it: SIMPLIFY.
virtually everyone purchases their Android devices through their carrier, locked to whatever software that carrier has approved.

Virtually everyone _in the US_.
Just out of curiosity: what do you think the actual usage rate is for these groupon/coupons?

I'm sure it's way way higher than a coupon printed in a paper or offered online, but there has to be a certain % that don't get (or forget) to use the coupon before the expiration date and the business benefits outright.
I'm the author. We actually bought Locately.com. We looked at both new domains and ones that were being sold for less than $5k (tip: the listing price is always way above what the owner is actually willing to sell it for).

Of all of the names we came up with, we liked Locately.com the best and so we worked out a deal with the owner. Having a good name is important and definitely worth the small amount of money we paid for it.
There are lost of great ones. I especially liked this practical comment:

From the SO answer:

This seems to stop morons from messing my code...

// Autogenerated, do not edit. All changes will be undone.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...
Chrome OS was not designed to be a tablet OS. It can be used on a tablet, but if you read the launch blog post it's very clear they are targeting netbooks, not tablets. Since that day they have of course expanded to include tablets, but suggesting that was the original idea is misleading at best.

Also, Chrome OS hasn't been released to the public yet and so it's absurd to call it "dead". The planned release date is in October.

Imagine walking in to Best Buy or Futureshop and seeing a line of laptops, some labelled "Microsoft" and some labelled "Google". People are less afraid to move away from MS if they're moving to a company they know and trust, like Google.

Calling Chrome OS dead, at least right now, is a very very silly mistake to make.
loop
...
...
// sleep 10
sleep 7 // Changed from "sleep 10" on 11-19-05
// by jvj because Bruce in Buffalo bitched
// that it ran too long. Now he's happy.
// The next time he bitches, change it to
// "sleep 5". That oughta buy us another
// year before we have to rewrite it.
...
...
until done do repeat
Product manager Greg Sullivan told CNET that trade-offs had to be made in order to meet the schedule and GSM was prioritized since it's used worldwide

Good luck with that...I have a feeling that WP7 is not going to be that competitive in a worldwide market where Nokia still dominates, and Apple is creeping in. In the US, how many WP7 phones will they sell on AT&T when they have to compete with iPhone? In the meantime, Verizon and Sprint customers whose contracts are expiring between now and the "first half of 2011" are going to re-up with shiny new Android phones that are bound to be out by the holidays and they'll be off the market until 2013.
I thought the merchant was able to set a limit, if they choose to. Or am I wrong?
Totally agree. Many have criticized Google's culture of "try lots of things", but it has clearly worked well for them. Microsoft should be encouraging their young, hungry tech talent to be creating tomorrow's killer apps today. Bureaucracy and top-down direction will kill this type of innovation every time.
That was my understanding - that Linux instance is really a special purpose guest running "alongside" the other guests on top of the hypervisor.
He used to run a "Dark Tips" segment on The Screen Savers.
Actually it's not so absurd to want to build in proprietary features. Let's say Yahoo! wants to create their own seed for their users, but they want to tie the user accounts to their internal, confidential authentication systems. It is both completely disadvantageous for Yahoo and has absolutely no benefit for the OSS community for Yahoo to adopt Diaspora in that scenario. And I'm sure there are a lot of companies and developers out there who have unique features to add to their seeds that have absolutely no relevance to the main codebase or other developers.
"The reason is that almost everywhere I turn, I hear clients and employers complaining about how they can’t find enough good developers."

There are good developers for every kind of job. A good developer for a small bakery around the corner is very different from a good developer for the core search team at google.

The issue then is not why aren't there more good developers, but why can't employers find developers that fit their needs.

This is something that's been covered widely, most notably for hn by pg. If people that are starting tech companies have trouble hiring good programmers, imagine how difficult it would be if you aren't a tech start up company looking to hire programmers.

A small step toward the solution is to write on your blog a distilled checklist of how all of the companies you've worked for were able to describe what their needs were.

Once you are able to describe a problem, it is much easier to find a solution.
Facebook is what a social site looks like when you don't have anonymity - and I don't like it.

People end up self-censoring about 3/4 of the things they want to say on Facebook so they don't offend anyone. It's an intellectually barren wasteland of harmless platitudes and abandoned thoughts.

I appreciate where you were coming from with this idea, but I like a little anonymity to my Internet. It's the truth spice.
Drupal Solr Next Gen - the refactoring
Does anyone know if this includes any the Unix source or copyrights that Novell had as well?
I've always liked the birthday problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
How about using the email address instead (and offer a username as a display alias only, if people don't want to have their email address displayed).
> What use case does ChromeOS solve that Android doesn't solve?

Printing. Browsing the web and writing long emails like a normal user, rather than like a tablet user: no weird issues with mouseover, fully-functional built-in Flash, etc, etc. There are lots of differences between the web experience offered by Android and the web experience offered by Chrome OS.

Also, normal people won't have to make a decision in a store about picking "Android" vs "Chrome OS". It's more and more likely that people will pick from the limited few options in the store, and maybe try it out before buying it. If a store sells laptops and some run Windows, some Mac OS X and some Chrome OS, then Chrome OS will be a serious competitor at least in the netbook form-factor.

Tablets are often sold in different parts of a store, or at least together in a different display. You'll see people picking between iPads and Andriod tablets. I doubt that normal stores would display Chrome OS tablets in the same area (but I could be wrong).
The two metrics that the article is based on are the number of visitors to the services homepage. On Tumblr you login to the website to post content, Posterous on the other hand uses email and so doesn't get its members visiting all the time to post new content. I think this article is flawed.
Dog food their own software and systems more, and where it's unpleasant to use - improve them.

Far too much of my Microsoft using experience is of a solid technology which is idiotically annoying, and a new version which ups both desirable features and irritation at the same time.

I mean the remote desktop client which has a ton of user experience flaws which hasn't improved for years, then developed another security warning to pass through every new connection.

I mean the mess of software licensing which got no better, then worse with KMS/MLK keys.

I mean the web browser which is now a web browser with a first time startup wizard full of pestering questions.

I mean the event log viewer which was basic and fiddly, and is now massively complex looking and still fiddly.

I mean the scheduled task list which is now a scheduled task maze.

I mean the Control Panel which is now a Control Panel Advent Calendar.

I mean the Exchange Management Console which morphed into a Half-a-management-console-half-a-scripting-language.

I mean the Windows Explorer which locked up a Pentium 4 when accessing an optical drive or network still locks up a Core i7 920 when accessing an optical drive or network only now it tries to hide the optical drive first.

I mean the IIS6 tree which became an IIS7 "lets arrange everything inspired by our favourite abstract artist!" mess.

On and on and on, they sell me on industry leading desirable features like Branch Cache and Outlook Anywhere and yet my everyday experience is Microsoft the Bully.

"Come here, jodrellblank, we have a brand new system for you to try with $newfeature!"

"Wow! run run run"

Security warning tripwire, Are you sure checkbox, Did you notice the information bar? Would you like to move or copy files from this location? Error 0x28003210D ha ha! F1 for help? Sorry, we removed that help system in this version. Online search? Ours is awful, you'll never find that error. Helpful utility? You no longer have rights to run it, "admin".

Want $feature? Why don't you just come and get it then? It's right here... FOREVER OUT OF YOUR REACH.

cries in a corner
A properly standards-compliant browser. I know IE9 has partial support for CSS2, but I want them to go the whole hog (css3, acid3, svg, etc).
<nit>
Sign-up page username field. When I tab out of the field, I get the message of "This username is still available", ok, good to know, but I think it would be better if you only chimed in in case of an error. My first reaction before I squinted at my monitor to read the small text, was, uh-oh an error message.
</nit>

look forward to playing with this. I have a lot of workflow oriented around bookmarking.
Why one need all this shitload when there is kvm?

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm-amd.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 86K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm-intel.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 478K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm.ko

qemu-kvm and libvirt based stuff with a community support?
iTV, Ping, and Game Center - Apple's Holy Trinity
What? What kind of freelance do you do? I've been doing this for just over three years and it's gotten easier every year. I can't imagine going back to a job, though I get offers every week (literally). Just curious why my experience is polar opposite yours :-/
If you like your name then I wouldn't switch. Techniche is not that common a search term and as you start to get more traffic and mentions, you should be able to overcome it quickly.

In our case, "cardio" is a very common search term. Also, we didn't like our name for the other reasons given (hard to pronounce, doesn't say what we do, not memorable).
Ask HN: How can a new author get a book on Amazon Kindle Store?
How can a new author get a book published on Amazon Kindle Store? I'm thinking of writing a book, and I would imagine that this would be the best way. Does the Amazon Kindle Store accept finished books directly from authors? Please share your experiences.
From your comment "it's not good enough for me" tells me that there most be some way of refining the idea so that it does become good enough for you.

As a first step, talk to people who use your competitor's product and see if it is "not good enough" for them as well. Then ask them if your refining idea would make it good enough for them. After you've talked to enough people you will have a more clear understanding of what needs/problems/frustrations your competitor is addressing and what needs/problems/frustrations your competitor is not addressing.

Then you can start implementing the solution for those needs.
Ask HN: Your project/folder structure for /home/*username*
What is your folder structure for your files?

There isn't much info on this, but it is a pretty central component of using a computer.
sounds interesting, i'm gonna try it
job opportunities come up that you could apply for, you don't because you're holding out for something better

Your next job just has to be better than your current one to make the jump worthwhile. If you hate your current job as much as you say, it shouldn't be that difficult to find one at least incrementally better.

I think the problem isn't that you hate your current job so much, I think you just hate the idea of working for someone else. You're probably also used to the security that working for the man brings, compared to the uncertainty and possibility of failure that founding a startup brings.
Rentacoder and elance are the absolute worst places a decent freelancer should look for work. Even craigslist is head and shoulders above them. I've found lots of $75 - 100 / hr gigs on Craigslist, but they'd laugh me out of Rentacoder for those rates.
Oh! Last time I checked it showed 219. This looks like a better number, from what I know :)
Everybody is going to click on this:)
People define "good developers" as those who are extremely passionate about their work. They come home code more or read/blog about code. It's not entirely surprising that the people of this mold are a minority in the field.
watched your video to see if this was something i'd want to use, still have no clue! show a useage case in the video please, not just a bunch of pretty words about the service.
For some reason HN seems to frown on the occasional 'thank you' post. I can see how if all there was was thank yous that it would get boring quickly but I don't think we're quite there yet.

I think the people that would downvote a 'thank you' that is more than just two words are scared of something that is not a problem.
Talking about penetration numbers on 3.0+, data on WPF and Silverlight adoption would be useful.

MS should also consider making Silverlight and WPF more compatible.

And if WPF adoption is lagging expectations (as I suspect it is), figure out how to simplify it and flatten the learning curve.
you're joking, right? what part of it is implausible?
I believe Groupon is the worst marketing for a small business. Read my 11-part review that starts with a similar story of a toy store at http://www.retaildoc.com/blog/groupon-worst-marketing-busine.... Businesses exist to make a profit, the more of them that go out because they are looking for a magic bullet in Groupon, the worse for your neighborhood.
It's not news, but Patrick is probably the most prolific high quality contributor to HN and it is helpful to have the stuff that he thinks is good in one place.

Think of it as a cheatsheet.
your sign-up email has a confirm link. It doesn't show up as a link in my email. I had to do a copy/paste.
I've got to admit to taking a certain guilty pleasure in these numbers after Posterous' last campaign to get switchers. They were pompous, arrogent, and unnecessarily slagged on their competition. I'm pleased to see that such nasty tactics (apparently) paid little dividends.
YANIS (Yet Another Instant Site) - Amazon Instant
I'm currently working on a the 3'rd floor of a household brand and as I look around there is not a single desktop, everyone is using a laptop - some with a docking station some without. Everyone has a large 24inch monitor to plug their laptop into. My last company issued an IT direction that we would not buy anymore desktops - only Sunrays for virtual desktops. So as far as the future of desktops in offices, I am not convinced.
Don't forget what the 6502 was in. The NES used it, the Apple II used it, and the C64, and a few early arcade games, and the early Ataris. The SNES used the 16 bit variant of it called the 65C816, as did the Apple IIGS.

Interesting side note: The Apple IIGS could run normal Apple II 8bit software and GS-only 16bit software... Nintendo had planned the same for the SNES, but bailed on the idea early on, afraid of the backwards compatibility cannibalizing SNES game sales.

Sony, who was an important part of designing the SNES, produced the SPC700 sound DSP (which had a 6502-like instruction set, its own RAM, and a normal DSP companion core to do mixing, panning, volume, and filtering).

Incidentally, Sony had a working prototype for a add-on CD drive for the SNES (it used the expansion port on the bottom most people didn't know existed, and the SNES would sit on the drive). The drive also included a secondary independent 65C816, sorta like SA-1 chip used in Super Mario RPG (which ran 3x faster, had its own RAM, could MMIO and DMA to hardware in the SNES and interrupt the main CPU to do so).

By the time Sony was ready to ship the device with Nintendo, the SegaCD add-on for the Genesis had already crashed and burned, and Nintendo decided to back out because they thought CDs had no future for gaming.

Sony decided to make their own console, replacing the Super Nintendo "component" of their CD add-on, and produced the Playstation. The Playstation sound chip was similar to the SPC700 (but vastly enhanced for CD quality audio), but the rest of the Playstation was decidedly not like a SNES.

Sony, during the development of the Playstation 2, decided to add backwards compatibility as a feature when Nintendo didn't.
Seriously, that was an awesome take on freelance. I read a lot of these "how freelance is like," type of articles, and they're mostly focused on the freelancer not the work.

But I think he's just writing for that audience. The question isn't how can I be a successful freelancer, but how will my life be different if I choose to freelance. That's probably what most of his readers are looking for.
Multics--The first seven years
Indeed. I can't even read Gruber anymore because it feels like Steve Jobs is pacing back and forth behind him sipping green tea and telling him what to type.