skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One by one:

> Staff members will despise it,

This isn't a point on its own.

> poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly

What is a "poorly formatted document"?

> training costs go up

Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office.

> it's a mess.

How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
Yahoo Said to Work With Goldman to Fend Off Takeover Approaches
I used to only be able to program in large blocks of time also.

Then one day I thought about the 66 minutes I 'waste' each day on the train to university; 33 minutes per trip. I started to take out my laptop as soon as I get on the train and try to work on programming. Initially I had very little done, by the time I really start programming it was time to get off.

But now, 3 or 4 months into it, I seem to manage to get something done every time; I'd say now the 33 minutes is worth at least 20 minutes of productivity if I had been spending it in a 4 hour block.
I think that should be Excel is king - I suspect you could probably replace Word and PowerPoint for most users and they wouldn't notice that much.
This is the dumbest shit I seen. I been reading HN for 1.5 years and this is the first time I felt the need to create an account and post a comment.

I realize my comment is rude and I will probably be flamed. But it's just too hard to resist after reading the first couple ideas like selling ties online because the author believes people will pay to collect ties (first time I heard of this) and virtual girls to train. Regardless, I apologize for my rude comment.
Better get that field full of rakes ready.
Chilean Miner Mistress
I've always had lots of side projects, so I understand that line of thinking, believe me. And I didn't intend to be snarky, it's just that it's easy to go down a bad road where you convince yourself you're doing better financially on a project than you are because you fail to take your time into account. Imagine you were selling the site to someone else: they'd have to hire someone to do the work you've been doing, and that costs money.
Keep in mind that this is a ~35k user sample size of people downloading the TweetDeck beta application -- this is not "my mom" with an Android phone so I would recommend you don't look at this as a valid sample for the overall Android market.

The way to ensure the diversity remains compatible is by building a strong ecosystem around it that requires that compatibility -- the x86 ecosystem is a perfect example. By building applications that work with the Android mainline you create gravity forcing others to follow that path as well.
What Nature didn't say
You are misinformed. Mercurial is still very much written in Python with a small part in C.
Hmmm. I don't think the comparison with GNU/Linux is 100% clear cut.

At that time Linux was making huge inroads into the server market and anyone not recognising that was going to be laughed at. Microsoft doing so was probably not the biggest driving force in subsequent growth.

The modern equivalent would be not recognising how much of a "threat" Google Chrome is to the other browsers with its brand and growth.

Now, Open Office. I am not convinced that it is a viable threat to Microsofts corporate sales. I know personally of very few (big) corps who could reliably switch to OO - for all manner of reasons.

It is a competitor, sure, and certainly making inroads into the home market. But a serious corporate threat? Not yet.
> AOL and the hedge funds would only need to put up $500M-$1B

That's an interesting use of the word 'only' :)

I agree it is a possibility though, but such mergers usually don't work out well in the long run because of conflicting priorities.

It's amazing how much staying power these 'old giants' have, it would not surprise me at all if it did happen but I'm more skeptical about the aftermath of such a merger.

One thing is for sure, lots of people will lose their jobs. That seems to be the one constant when big companies merge.
Sculley seems to be saying the following about Jobs:

- Straddles the line of micromanagement vs. personal communication with workers. (Interested in every detail of the process.)

- Acknowledged all workers (memorized first names of Mac team).

- Directly communicated with all workers. Example was telling developer that their code isn't good enough.

- Is a perfectionist.

- Kept teams small (Mac team limited to 100) and fired people if needed new talent on the team to keep team to that size (enforced accountability).

- Hired well.

- Focused on simplification.

- Got rid of the bad.
They've been lasting for a very long time already, what makes you say that?
Their pitch video is great in explaining the product with all the alternative use cases. I'm inspired.
Hmm.. I may have drank too much tonight.. but.. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?!?!
Oct. 14, 1985: C++ Adds to Programming
Yet being federalized is where the advantages lie.

Culteral differences of government, language, style, currency (localized versions of the Euro), entertainment remain. How do you think culture interferes with the EU operating smoothly?
The thing that stands out to me is that the Chilean president was there in person for every single rescue. I have no idea what kind of man he is, but that to me, sets a great example of how national leaders should respond in a disaster.
Rome ignored gunpower, horse collars, innovations in shipbuilding out of arrogance. Not a good example of innovation.
EDIT 2:

Hey there, it's early in the morning, and it's pretty clear that 3,000 * 30,000 != 100,000... But go ahead, downvote me some more.

I think I need another few cups of tea.
India's richest man Mukesh Ambani moves into £630m home
I agree, but at least having implementations in the wild should bring more attention to an idea and scrutiny of that code than none?
I also cannot reproduce in chrome for Win7, Opera 10.63, nor Safari for Win7,

I am getting what looks like a few CSS errors in FF, but no JS ones.
"Warning: Error in parsing value for 'width'. Declaration dropped."

Site look super ugly in IE9, which is supposed to be standards compliment, yet it looks like crap.

Could it have been the syntax highlighter[1] that broke?
[1][http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/]
If only it weren't so extraordinarily ugly.
Can you please expand on this? I don't get it: do you think something like newtwitter is badly designed because it uses faux-routes? If you don't have faux-routes then how can you easily insert links which will "go to page X" ?
Your feedback is appreciated.

As for the ties, I do not just believe that people will pay for them, people do:

http://www.zazzle.com/collector+ties

So if even my - according to you - idiotic ideas have found traction in the meantime maybe there is something there ;)

The score with 'ideas' is about the same as with start-ups, most of them tank. The problem is that if you wouldn't have the bad ones you wouldn't have the good ones either.

And if you could muster the energy to read on for a bit you might find some that are not like that, or maybe you would think they're all junk.
Health Implications Unknown for Rescued Chilean Miners
I use OO on Mint Linux here at work where everyone else uses Word '07 + Win 7. So here is my experience:

> What is a "poorly formatted document"?

Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables, OO has serious trouble displaying full page tables properly.

There are lots of other subtle things, but I can't reliably produce documents in OO and send them to, say, a client as a word document without checking them directly in Word.

> Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office.

This is a non-trivial issue. And the same reason Linux is struggling to reach the corporate desktop. Re-training is, for an organisation, a quite complex business. Because of pay, contracts, organisation, finding the expertise, ticking all the legal/legislative boxes.

Another way to consider this is that a lot of people now are doing computer literacy certificates (I think some are even internationally recognised qualifications now). Employers can accept these as saying "this person can use Word fine" which saves them the cost of training and support etc. If they switch to OO this goes away (at least for a while).

>> it's a mess.
>How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc

This was some MS brilliance at work; because while the Ribbon bar was initially hated you will generally find that within a corporate environment employees find it quite productive and usable (at least in my experience). The look is so radically difference OO feels awkward (or so I am told by someone who tried it).

Generally speaking, looks, GUI and layout are the things that "turn users on" the most. a) they are familiar with the Word way of doing things and b) it has a really fancy looking GUI. This stacks up against OO.

>> Staff members will despise it,
>This isn't a point on its own.

And yet, it is probably the main reason most organisations won't bother. Even if it takes just a few months for your staff to stop grumbling it probably doesn't feel worth it. And don't forget that the people signing off on such a swap (management) are "staff members" in this context - they will irrationally dislike it too.

I like using OO, and find it a competitive piece of software. I even convinced my parents to use, and like, it!

But I don't think it will break the corporate barrier for a while yet :)
Storylines: Visualizing the Interactions during Software Development
Sir, I applaud you for your skills at diplomacy. It sadden me every day when I hear of perfectly good engineers executing on half-baked ideas. Wouldn't a list of 3 great ideas be better than a grab bag of random thoughts? Think about the potential engineering hours wasted.

We should start a campaign: "Save those Engineering Hours, Stop half baked ideas".
> What is a "poorly formatted document"?

I just wanted to touch on this from another angle. I use OO here at work on my Linux machine. My main issue with OO is it's styles support is incomplete, to the point where it's impossible for me to keep my documents style appropriately. It seems like a small thing, but I'd much rather handle styling via style sheets then have to manually edit the items.

Here's the basic thing I discovered: OO gives you 80% of what you need from Office, but you still need that final 20%, and that's what Office gives you.
Apple took advantage of this in its lawsuit against Apple II cloner Franklin Computer. Franklin claimed it had independently developed its ROM and OS code. On examining Franklin's code, Apple found some no-op string variables containing, e.g., the name of an Apple developer and "Appleworks." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankli....
Those actually are valid points, but he could have clarified it a bit. If people despise it and either A) start publicly berating the IT organization or escalating to the C-suite or B) stop being productive because they can't stand the software, it's a problem.

Formatting is a problem, especially when collaborating on complex Word or PowerPoint documents. Excel & Calc are the most interoperable. Also interestingly, OO.o (I'm basing this post on the OO.o v3.3 beta) is more compatible with MS Office 2007 than MS Office 2003 is, so your mileage may vary depending on the status quo.

Training is a problem, period. A lot of the menus -- and menu icons -- in OO.o are not logical, and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research. Not that MS Office is perfect, but since most people have been using it for a decade or more the incremental changes across versions make it much easier for them to familiarize themselves with subsequent updates. In a lot of ways, I'd compare the UX of the two like this: OO.o:MS Office::GIMP:Photoshop. The GIMP works great but is missing some functionality that a small subset of users find critical, and the multi-window UI is confusing.

I could go on....
I did the exact same thing at reusableimages.com a few years back, but gave up due to lack of traffic and a growing sense of being out of my league. The site just uses Yahoo image search now.
$25 per person? [I think Diaspora did it with much less people] I will be looking at you from now on with suspicious eyes.
EDIT: Feel free to delete it
The OpenOffice site has a list of major deployments [1], and considering how long it's been available as an MS Office alternative, the list isn't that impressive.

Several years ago the local school district switched to OpenOffice. I happened to notice it during a teacher conference, so I asked the teacher how she liked it. I was pretty surprised by how much she hated it (I mean, she really hated it.). Of course, that's just an anecdote, but what's more telling is that the school district is back to using MS Office.

[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...
I'd have said the negative aspects of Imperial rule weren't communicated precisely because there was a broad consensus that colonisation should never be returned to, despite the "failed state" status of much of the decolonised world.

The problems with the British Empire (and other imperial Empires) resulted from an approach more or less the polar opposite of the fanatical evil cult of the Third Reich: it was essentially government determined mainly by influential individuals' profit motives. Food exports and protectionism whilst part of the population starves happen frequently with home-grown regimes; the problem is one of distribution of wealth and influence and not of remoteness or ethnic differences. And you'd be hard pressed to show me a country that _didn't_ use brutal tactics, including against civilians, during warfare; the chief novelty of the British concentration camps was that they kept records of casualties and fiercely debated the appropriateness of the tactics they used
Even most good ideas start as half baked ones though.

The thing that's been keeping me alive for the last 15 years started as a bet for a bar of chocolate, several pivots later it was a top 300 website, sometimes it doesn't take much.
There's a reply button below each comment so you can disagree in context.
Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
IME, the most useful tip is "maintaining the context outside your head". The article recomends a "running comment". I use a notebook, but anyway I find it efective.
Manchester police reporting all incidents on Twitter today.
The Old World
Campaign builds to construct Babbage Analytical Engine
And you would figure that out in the interview. If it matters enough to you, you can figure it out in the first five minutes of the phone screen before going further.

It seems to me that the literary criticism in this thread is getting kind of thick. The job posting is like a resume in reverse, and a resume is not designed to be a window into someone's immortal soul. It's a teaser.

A job posting is a telegraphic commercial that's designed to describe the job in the broadest possible terms, so that the obviously unsuitable might be discouraged while the potentially suitable might be prompted to waste a few minutes on an email cover letter. That is why they use the same jargon, that is why they deal in cliches and fashionable labels ("Lean Startup", "Fortune 500 company", "lifestyle company" -- these terms may not be highly specific but they tell you important basic things about the company's outlook, just as the words "SWF, thirtysomething, seeks SM with LTR potential" tells you boring but crucial basic facts about your potential first date.

Don't expect Tolstoy. If you want to learn what a company is really like you're going to have to pick up the phone or start an email discussion.
the designer gets 5%
we need the rest to cover the costs of the above mentioned + profit
> Self-rule is good, but it's been taken too far. So let's conquer "dysfunctional" places and install foreign rule. Oh, but let's call it representative democracy. Wait, what?

It's actually not that complicated. Yes, having representatives from a place in the government is a good thing. The lack of this representation is why the American colonies fell out with Britain, for instance.

Self-rule has good things, but has been taken too far - yes, Zimbabwe's much worse now than it ever was when it was British Rhodesia. A functional local government might be superior to a functional foreign government. But a functional foreign government is far superior to local rule-by-madman. I don't see how anyone could prefer Mugabe to Cecil Rhodes.

And yeah, dysfunctional. No need to put it in scare quotes - I think anyone sane can agree places like North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Burma have dysfunctional governments.
Cult Creation: team building for startup founders
I would go with a T or X series ThinkPad with Intel graphics and Ubuntu.

I've seen a team of Python web developers with MacBook Pros. They all used Ubuntu virtual machines for the actual development.
thanks for that feedback

you nailed it down :)
I don't imagine there are too many Ubuntu installations in environments where this kind of SSH security is desirable. I could be wrong though, and you'd be right that this doesn't excuse them from shipping broken software. Yet broken software doesn't legitimize these frivolous measures. It only delegitimizes distributions like Ubuntu for settings like these.
I'd rather publicly admit I made a mistake than just make it disappear. I rarely think deleting posts is appropriate.
The idea is to remove the part of loading friends from the page loading. By delay the friends JS to run only after the page is loaded, the page loads faster, and can be loaded from cache. The cached page doesn't know your friends. You then have the JS load a page with friends as a separate request. This shifts the request from the loading of the page to after the page is loaded, meaning the page gets loaded faster, but missing the small feature of displaying friends.
This is not specifically about Backbone. How do you provide content for web crawlers/searchbots with a client framework?
Startmate applications now open
If there was a 64-bit version of ARM. I would believe it, but I am guessing not.
I have heard from the V8 developers that Mozilla do some optimizations just to score better on benchmarks - i.e. they score really good on things that are specifically benchmarked. I have not verified their claim, but generally for me as an user Chrome and Safari feel a lot faster than Firefox.
Yeah I should have started marketing two years ago, or at least show my idea to other people. I started that only after the first year, with a survey to find out if my idea is right (and it was). The thing about marketing, or anything that involves people from outside, is that you can easily motivate yourself by dropping details no one wants (saving time ftw) or add new ones if you see there's someone who's interested in this or that little extra.
(Maybe a bit off topic.)

I tried to install Ubuntu10.10 yesterday. Burned the image on a CD, and tried to put it on my unix test box. At the end the install quits on me with some cryptic cannot mount foobar drive. Browsing the web for help it turns out either I should have burned a DvD instead of a CD, or I have not enough RAM for the installation.
This machine was running XP for Christ's sake. :)

My point is, I'm still waiting for a Linux distro that "just works/installs". Ubuntu has some momentum at the moment, so I thought maybe this is it. But again I ended up in a 15-open-tabs browser-session on a "PC" to crawl through message boards to see what is going wrong.

I'll give it another try someday, but not anytime soon. For now, I'll stick to my freeBSD box.
"Now most non-religious women would be unable to work there."

Not true. Most non-religious women have no problem with head scarves.

"This asymmetry is a discrimination against non-religious citizens."

Asymmetry != discrimination. The asymmetry of the law is due to the asymmetry of religious discrimination. Namely, it is easy to target religion for discrimination with "neutral" laws, while it is hard to target non-religion for discrimination with "neutral" laws.

This is due to the fact that the non-religious are free to do or not do these things (head scarves, dreadlocks, etc.), while the religious have no choice if they are to be faithful to their beliefs.
That's wacky. When I was first getting into OSS, one of the most confusing things about code was typedefs. I knew the basics of C, and looking back on it a lot of what confused me was actually pretty straightforward code that I probably would have been able to piece together, but the use of arbitrary type names (which I didn't even know was possible) stopped me from even trying on more than one occasion.

That's a point in favor of Ruby's "the most readable solution is the most elegant" philosophy over, say, Perl's inverse: It's cool to feel like a member of the club, but if writing that extra line means a beginner (or even a child) can more easily figure out what it does, and she gets interested in programming because of it, that's a lot better for the hacking community as a whole.
agree 100%, it is the only way for customers to "trust" your pricing scheme. Otherwise, it's carte blanche to raise at any time...
Honda Twister 110cc: Price @ 42000 Rs with Great Mileage
Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Pvt. Ltd. (HMSI), the 100% owned 2-wheeler subsidiary of the Honda Motor Company, Japan - the world's largest manufacturer of 2-wheelers, today marked its foray into the mass segment through the launch of its first 110 cc bike Honda CB Twister in the presence of senior Honda officials.
Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right.

If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky.

Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your product will be a joke and people will lose interest.
> Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables

Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.
> I'm trying to get out of the contracting game.

Consider Matt Gemmell's answer on his 5/10/20 yr plan below. For those who don't know, Matt Gemmell does bespoke high-quality UI.

In fact, the whole Q&A thread is fascinating.

> What do you see yourself doing in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

In 5 years, hopefully earning a full-time living from software products rather than contracting. Beyond that, it's a stab in the dark, but I'll have a go: in 10 years, focusing on writing, speaking, mentoring and such (still within this field). In 20, ideally back in academia doing research and teaching.

> The common factor is probably that you should only pursue things you really, really care about (whether it's romantic partners or your actual job). Life's too short for anything less, and finding something/someone great is a lot easier than you think.

http://www.formspring.me/mattgemmell
How did you decide on "somewhere around 7" concepts in thought at once? What counts as a "concept"? If you are referring to the 1956 George Miller paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", then that really has little to do with "concepts".

See Tufte: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

"That essay reviews psychological experiments that discovered people had a hard time remembering more than about 7 unrelated pieces of really dull data all at once."
Chile didnt save the miners, capitalism did.