skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually I think the first 2 sentences here nail this for me.

If your aim is to own a category, and you have a chance at designing an awesome product.

If your aim is to dethrone the current market leader in a category - well your odds are a lot lower as your focus is off.
Fair enough, if you define a "systems programming language" as one in which it's appropriate to write a real-time operating system kernel, Go is very likely not the language for you given its built-in garbage collection. Its suitability as a language for OS kernels has been discussed in this thread, with comments from the Go authors: http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr...

However, if you define a systems programming language more broadly to include statically typed languages that compile to machine code with good support for a theoretically and practically sound concurrency model based on CSP, Go might very well be something worth investigating.

And I wouldn't say that C++ achieved popularity "quickly" inasmuch as according to Stroupstrup he started working on it in 1979 (http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#invention) but it wasn't in widespread use until the early/mid-1990's and wasn't standardized until 1998. By that timetable I'd say that Go has a few years yet before it can fairly be judged a success or a failure.
Why not? Using an easy language on a hard problem means you can hire someone who knows a lot about the problem instead of having to worry about the langauge. At least until the language starts getting in your way (and, in my limited experience, between Javascript and Node's Buffers, you won't find yourself too limited on protocol implementations).
Xmarks closing
btw -
http://www.foresight.org/Updates/Update26/Update26.1.html

From 1996 part of the claim about making centimeter lenths of carbon nanotubes within the year and a mention about spooling them. Smalley claimed that the spooling was just around the corner as well. Carbon nanotubes have a billion dollars or more per year industry for some time and have had over a billion spent on R&D. We are now at about 1000 tons per year for total world production and the common lengths are usually a millimeter or less. Centimeter lengths are still rare. Nanocomp technologies is one of the main companies working with longer than millimeter or centimeter lengths and making a few tons per year of those lengths.
They actually have pretty broken security practices from what I've heard. Their security review before pushing live features is definitely as not as strong as Microsoft (I can't really say for Google, I don't know what their security review is like). Check out the Facebook Chat for an example.
"Odd, your entire economic model seems to suggest otherwise."
As others have noted, the point was not that university graduates are, by definition, smart or morally virtuous - merely that university courses require you to submit papers, do written exams, etc where it's made very clear that copying someone else's work is not acceptable.
Tile5, HTML5+JS lib for building maps, tiles, googlemaps style widgets
"Hackers" in the MSM = "Anyone who uses a computer for nefarious purposes".
Louis Vuitton 2010 New Bags purple
The other issue that for angel investing is that you really ought to be doing 10+ investments a year to actually even out the risks so that you can get a return. That's a fairly high watermark.

I've done approx 45 investments. One has returned (a small amount) of money in five years, so far.
Q&A: Why Microsoft surrendered 7 million blogs to WordPress.com
I think it is significant that both Unix itself and Linux were category killers. Unix succeeded because people kept going "Wow, there's nothing like this!" and writing in to get it, copying it passing it on to other people. When Linux took off, there was no Free-ly available Unix-like OS (at that time). Linux quickly gathered a critical mass of users who saw it as something like the answer to their prayers. I guess the strengths of Plan9 were not such as to create a new category for itself, and its flaws made it an unsuccessful competitor against existing Unix-like systems.
Probably not a bad thing. I don't have an android phone, but I could definitely see Amazon doing a better job of running a store than google, after all its their core competency
It wasn't a break-in that released the data. They shut down the website in the face of the DDoS. When they brought it back up, their backup copy allowed unfettered access to their server. No exploits were required. They essentially posted all of this information online of their own accord.
Was the war to prevent that or was that a result of the war ?

The UK left Hong Kong without a fight and handed it over to another undemocratic communist state - the result doesn't seem to have been quite as bad
The AOL you knew before November 24th, 2009 is dead.

Don't make the mistake of underestimating the new AOL. It's a profitable media empire that is growing rapidly and knows what it wants. It made $500mm in revenue last quarter.

Here's AOL's 10-Q filing last quarter: http://ir.aol.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=147895&p=irol-SECText&...

It's hard to parse because last quarter ended the first three month stretch AOL has had as an independent company from Time Warner. It contains a ton of information about the IPO and spinoff leading up to November 2009, but if you read carefully, you'll see that AOL made $557mm in revenue last quarter, had $495mm in normal expenses, and made a net profit before tax of $62mm. Sort of. These numbers are dubious because there was a $1.4 billion charge for "unusual expenses," including a write-off from the IPO for disintegration costs and a total write-down for Bebo.com.

The real balance sheet in the 10-Q from last quarter is further obfuscated by a $182mm stock purchase of AOL by Digital Sky Technology, the Russian investment firm that bought a chunk of Facebook a while ago. A few hundred pages are devoted to that and some calculations are skewed.

Together, the things above make it look like AOL as a business is unprofitable, but I don't think that's true.

We won't know how much the company really makes until its next 10-Q filing, but I am inclined to believe the backwards projections suggesting that AOL made profits during the four quarters prior to its IPO of $34.7mm, $1.4mm, $74mm, and $90.7mm.
That sucks. How do I synchronize my passwords with Chrome now?
I'm not sure what the GOF book is, and while its been years since I was a c++ programmer, I'm pretty sure that design patterns are generally independent of language.

also, "inferior languages"? really? can you elaborate? I would also like to transcend beyond the petty squabbles of mere mortals and my .net/python existence.
First the President wants to be able to wiretap any digital communication (encrypted or not) and now Congress wants us to censor without due process. When did freedom start being such a bad thing?
This is Sparta.

class SpartanList(list):
def foot(self):
return self[0]

assert l.foot()
return l.foot()
And there is a free version of the login widget StackOverflow uses. (Not quite the same code base, but more or less identical.) At http://code.google.com/p/openid-selector/

When I deployed a version of that on my sites, I got lots more causual users posting comments, etc. Most of them just click on google.
>By that timetable I'd say that Go has a few years yet before it can fairly be judged a success or a failure.

I don't care, that's not what I'm talking about.

I was talking about the use-case uncanny valley it sits in.

If you have a point unrelated to anything I said, use your blog. I've had enough grief from hackerne.ws over the past week that I have zero patience for someone using me as some kind of pontification aid.

I know what's involved in making a kernel, and what's typical for systems programming and embedded development today. I don't give a good goddamn what the devs of Go have to say about it.

Use case inappropriate. That's the last time I'm repeating myself.
Interesting. Got any details?
RIM needs to fix the Storm and Torch before they even try to attack the tablet market. Those two products don't give me much confidence in this new one, although the Playbook is based on a different OS: QNX instead of BB.

As for the Playbook, too much fake pre-rendered animations, not enough actual video of the tablet.
I don't find this surprising at all. Even with no case at all, the only worry I would have would be scratches to the screen. I suspect only a "perfect" hit would crack the screen, and I doubt there's many parts inside that could be broken from such a drop.
There's also focus. Apple has always focused on the consumer. At best, the "prosumer," which is a nice way to say a consumer with a bigger budget. They've never made the needs of larger businesses their priority -- even when they're doing the necessary work: for example, when they introduced things like Apple Remote Desktop, they talked about it in terms of school computer labs.

RIM is primarily focused on the business side. The tablet, in this form factor, can fit into a purse or (har har) folio pretty easily. It talks to the blackberry their customers will already have. It's a way to extend the platform with a bigger screen, for Word documents, spreadsheets, etc, without losing the point of their brand.

Apple -- and bless them for it -- pushes the bar up across the board for user interfaces, usable power (as far as I can remember, other smartphones as powerful as the iPhone had terrible battery life), stability (remember windows mobile, and garnett), and pure capability (HDR photos). But, they've chosen to focus their energies on an intentionally-narrow set of products. There's plenty of space in the market for them, Android, and RIM. Apple's got the core consumer experience down pat. Android's got the variety and hardware development pace. RIM's got messaging.

Maybe Meego too, but that's probably just my silly wishing ;-) Why don't more Linux-based smartphone platforms come with an X server? :-(
Yeah, it's amazing that anyone pays attention to TechCrunch :|
It's hard to make any judgement of a language that's barely a year old, especially about performance and libraries. All industry standard languages are at least a decade old.

> C++ and Java are the gold-standard for library-centric concurrency methodologies.

It's a standard, but it is not by any means the gold standard. Just about anything would be a better concurrency model. Also see "Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library": http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.html
I think he's suggesting using your mouse to select a result.
Django's ORM, the only Python one I've experience with, provides get() for those cases.
Robotic Javascript
You should probably put "Please login with your Facebook or Gmail account below" on your front page instead.

Modify the services named based on expected clients. Choose one or more from the following: AOL, BBC, Facebook, Google, IBM, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign, LiveJournal, Yandex, Ustream and Yahoo!. *

On the sign-up page, put in smaller text "You can sign up/log in with any compatible OpenID service" for the technically savvy users, if you expect any at all.

Don't straw man.

* list copied from Wikipedia.
The link to Om Malik's post: http://gigaom.com/2010/09/27/aol-close-to-buying-techcrunch/
>It's hard to make any judgement of a language that's barely a year old, especially about performance and libraries. All industry standard languages are at least a decade old.

It's a product of their design decisions and has nothing at all to do with implementation or time.

Look at Rust if you want to see a realistic up-and-coming systems programming language.

>It's a standard, but it is not by any means the gold standard. Just about anything would be a better concurrency model.

Right, well get back to me when you write that multi-threaded web server in Python.
As much as like to see deals happen in the Valley, I'm saddened by this news. Not that I find the content of TC that compelling anymore, but I doubt that this will do anything to improve the quality of content.

You can hate all day long on MA, but there is no denying that he has done a lot for the startup community.

I think this signals MA's eventual departure from TC and that, to me, signals the end of TC's dominance in startup news.
I highly recommend the MelissaData.com web services for address verification:
http://www.melissadata.com/dqt/websmart-global.htm

One single web service that can validate addresses for just about every industrialized country.

Also, if you are interested in seeing example "correct" addresses for many countries, see Address Doctor.
http://www.addressdoctor.com/en/countries_data/countries5.as...

Both of these companies are leaders in their field.
I think you're the only one to get my point so far.

A lot of the best libraries and concurrency approaches I've implemented in Clojure so far have been imports from Java. (NIO2 being one example)
I hacked up one of the first address validation services on the Internet: http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/adserv.html , back in 1998(?).

I've since moved on, and the backend database hasn't been updated in nearly a decade. But it works fairly well, and can take free-form addresses as input.

I'm surprised there aren't more such free services out there.
Wow, xmarks is dead because they couldn't "find a scalable business model" with two million users.

http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/25734453850
He already sold Apple (IPO). And NeXT. And Pixar.
The real problem with java in linux distros
Personally, I'm willing to restrict this to just lists to keep things simple. I rarely ever need a way to extract one value from a list, set, and iterable.
Excellent service. I have been using xmarks for a while.
I realize you're being clever by substituting the original poster's argument, but RIM did indeed create a new category.

When the Blackberry shipped, it wasn't a smartphone. It wasn't a phone at all. It was a dedicated email device. And it was pretty much alone in that category.

It became popular in businesses that had previously been using pagers (specifically 2-way pagers), and eventually they added a phone component (which was actually terrible for the first few iterations).
Thank you but no !!

Let me get this straight : you want to force your views and fads upon my lifestyle and make it a formal policy, all the while increasing my working hours because now I have to take a nap during working hours and I still have to put in my 8 hours? And I get no compensation for the increased hours. No Thanks !!1
Their long, slow decline in subscribers is really long and slow, and has given them years of cushion to retool--- their legacy subscription revenues last year were about $1.5 billion.
They're using the Zynga strategy:
"If you can't beat them, copy them, and steal marketshare"

I don't think RIM is aiming to out-do Apple at all. Neither is Samsung, HP, Dell or any of the other manufacturers.

But collectively they are going to try to "PC-ize" the tablet market and normalize Apple's current advantage.
So do you just always get up after 30 minutes, even if you don't fall asleep for 10 or 15? I find the idea of timing the wakeup difficult otherwise. I guess WakeMate or a similar device might help.
True. But getting to the first 85K users is quite an accomplishment too.
Apple didn't create the MP3 player market, but made out OK. Same for smartphones. You don't have to be first to be successful.
That I can handle. It's the afternoon tryst with my secretary that leaves me incapacitated.
I never used them because there are plenty of intranet related bookmarks that I wouldn't want appearing on a search engine. This service could have lead to some nasty data breaches. It's probably better for the internet in general if they fade away.

Having said that, it sucks that they ran a popular service that they couldn't monetize.
If your app only provides Facebook for authentication, do some Jakob Nielsen-style usability testing and you might be surprised how common this complaint is. That's been my experience on the most recent app I've worked on.

Startups love Facebook authentication more than users do.
You know, early adopters tend to think about technology, and make choices such as not using facebook. You're likely setting yourself up for negative publicty from some person with a blog and a large following. Is it really worth risking that to shove onto users your choice of being technologically locked in to someone else's company?
Check out https://lastpass.com/
We're a YC startup going through the visa process right now.

Once you raise enough to pay yourself market salary, the situation transitions from "impossible" to "annoying and long".

So focus on the product, then on funding and/or revenue: the rest will follow.
I wouldn't be surprised; that's certainly the pattern that befell (early-ish) linux users that moved away from the platform.
CloudFlare - CDN For The Masses
It's cool to see the results pop up, but even on my new macbook pro and google chrome there is a bit of GUI lag that happens when it's refreshing, which makes my computer feel slow.
(swap! clojure inc) is acceptable and a more literal translation, although refactoring your code to use (inc clojure) is usually more idiomatic.

See also, ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.
Five essential steps to prepare for your next programming interview
I'm the same. These guys say 20 minutes is the best, but in that case I think we need to choose a better term than "nap", because I won't be asleep for almost any of that 20 minutes. Rest, perhaps.
Namesake Is The Match.com For Professional Opportunities
Are there any other sync services that work across both Firefox and Chrome?
If the startup either hasn't decided what to work on

Approximately what percentage of startups do you accept that apply with no particular idea?
Problem is that they've got a CPU that is (reportedly) twice as quick as what's in the iPad, more RAM... and 0.5 lbs less weight.

As we've seen from the iPad teardowns, the vast majority of the iPad's mass is the massive battery. 0.5 lbs seems like it's a lot to rob from a battery while increasing the power consumption of the device.
Same. I can't on purpose. Occasionally on a bus or train I have, but I can't seem to induce that state intentionally.
Sorry to comment spam, but, Yahoo has a "PlaceFinder" API that does geocoding (and address cleanup): http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/
while it's a terribly designed language, I've longed stopped hating it. I know all of it's quirks, and I know all of it's work arounds, and the density of support it has can't be beat.

Stockholm Syndrome?
Chrome killed my use of Xmarks. With a consistent, cross-platform browser that has syncing out-of-the-box I no longer need Xmarks. I mainly use other browsers for testing now.
What Are Entrepreneurs' Biggest Obstacles to Getting Funded?
Huh. I was actually looking for a Chrome bookmark sync for my iPhone two or three weeks ago and I came across Xmarks. I didn't choose it because I was really hoping for a standalone app that would interface with Chrome's built-in bookmark sync. While it's sad to see any popular software company shutter its doors, since it is going away (in a comparatively short 90 days, no less) I'm personally glad I didn't start using it.
Ask HN: Music while coding?
What kind of music do you listen to while coding?
I know this is different, but I still think of Reddit and Condé Nast while reading this.
with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free

After taking so many knocks, it's easy to be disheartened. But why not at least give this a go? It doesn't involve a large engineering investment - just charge for what you already offer! When the alternative is shutting down, where existing users need to move on anyway, you might as well. Those users might appreciate the value of what they have now that it is about to disappear...
Sad to see them go, but this might be a good lesson for several people out there who go into startups with the "make product now, worry about revenue model later" mentality. While that can be successful in many cases, there is a downside as well where many businesses don't survive.

Either way, I'll miss xmarks since I use it on all my computers and my phone :( Thanks for the great product for the last several years.
IMHO design patterns have been a great success because they have caused people to think about designs and suggested a vocabulary for discussing them.

Whether or not any specific world changing patterns have come out of the movement doesn't really matter to me. What matters is that the average blub programmer is just a little closer to understanding that classes are not just for modelling real world 'things'.

(I'm mostly an OOP programmer, assume something intelligent about functional programmers etc for me...)
It sounds like Time Warner moved a lot of write-offs to AOL right before the spin-off to hide their own losses. Then AOL was forced to "take a bath", where you toss out all the huge one time write-offs(i.e. Bebo) in one earnings season and return to good numbers in the next earnings season.
Plants set stage for evolutionary drama
They are failing because they can't even ask people to pay for their service. They skipped that and went directly to we are shutting down our servers in 90 days.

DHH needs to give them some scream therapy about business models. The one he does about asking your customers to pay for your service.
Here's an "uneducated/contrarian/meta-contrarian divide" triad, about Facebook:

what's facebook? / facebook is great! / facebook is beneath me, and I rarely use it (Marco Arment: http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/5-questions-with-tumbl... )

So, tech hipsters, you too can join in on the fun.
Biosphere, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Piana, Kobol
/ Facebook is beneath me and I can't stop refreshing.
Facebook uses openid to eg, allow users to sign in with a google openid when signing up for facebook. But as far as I know, Facebook is not an openid endpoint, you can't auth against a facebook account using openid.

Happily, google is an openid endpoint, and basically everyone has a google account for gmail or something.
You'd be surprised. I've been aiming for 20 minutes assisted by the iPod's Timer app, and I've hit 11-minute sessions that should qualify as 'naps'.

I've noticed that if it accidentally turns into a longer session, a sweet snack and a glass of water helps with the irritability a little.
That XKCD made me go back through a whole lot of my "low security" sites and change the password away from the same old thing I'd used for ages. Still funny though :)
Unfortunately that is even tougher for users to remember as there is even less context.
A Badge That Tells Consumers, "Trust This App"
As a child programmer I've always been slightly scared of the static keyword. It still feels odd 20 years later

Black magic I tell you!
I think he was referring to a break in the chain of custody.
Probably used the law enforcement interface. Build a backdoor for cops and the hackers will target it.
Sure, but look at the clusterfuck above where people are arguing about something called Quora -- they can't even agree on how you log into the site, because some people only saw it when you had to use Facebook.

Users will only give you one chance, if they see a reason not to come back then they won't come back, regardless of later changes you make.
Sure they do.

The implication in the article, as I read it, was 'Ruby is a wizbangy new language that sprouted into being only recently' whereas the truth is that it and PHP are just about the same age.
Swoopo: Profitable Until Deemed Illegal
Same here. I don't think I would of started my Hacker Newsletter if Mailchimp didn't have their free account, but will be happy to pay as it continues to grow.
Drug used in lethal injections in short supply
Watch The Latest African Movies Online Free
BlackBerry PlayBook vs Apple iPad