skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IE is worth a lot to Microsoft because of Bing. Google pays Mozilla for Google search being on the toolbar. Chrome is Google. IE is the only browser that would have Bing be the default search engine. That's worth a good amount of money to them - I can't seem them throwing up the white flag.
Windows is priced at a premium, you just don't feel it because the cost is rolled into the cost of whatever piece of kit you just bought.

As I understand it, OEM costs for Windows are a small fraction of retail. Computers offered with no OS, FreeDOS or Linux rarely cost less than the same machine with Windows. This holds true both with major manufacturers offering a choice of OS on their products and with generic laptops sold under several brand names (compare System76, which sells laptops with Linux to Sager, which sells some of the same machines with Windows). In most cases, the cost is offset by bundling trialware, so you don't actually pay for Windows at all.
I want to say thank you for the list before I ask my stupid questions. How and where did you learn about object-orientation, etc? I find myself in a very sticky situation where I've been programming micro-controllers in C and assembly for years and using Matlab for high-level simulations with a giant chasm in my knowledge in between. Every resource that I have read so far seems to assume a student who has formally studied CS. Is there an accessible guide to object-orientation?
In this case, the author is only telling you have the story. The kindle version IS cheaper than the currently available book. The paperback isn't available until March of 2011.
US Airways Bumped Me What now?
I know I used to get nervous during interviews, so we're really nice. It's OK if somebody says 90 or 100 or 10^9 at first, but I think it's a fair expectation that you should be able to figure it out. Btw. the formula for the number of edges of a total graph is n(n-1)/2, which here in Hungary CS majors learn in school. Also, I try to help out by reminding: you have n nodes, each has a connection to n-1 others, but you count each of them twice.
One of the big differences is that iOS devices have hardware accelerated graphics. You don't really notice how weak transitions and animations are on Android until you get used to using an iPhone. It's a subtle difference, but it's real and it makes a difference.

It's weird that Android still doesn't have this. Even tired old Symbian is now using GPU acceleration for display compositing...
You can resize the text. Books offer that as well, but you have to buy an entirely new book for that. Larger type usually means larger books that aren't as easy to read comfortably for the people that need the larger type. I know this first hand, as my mother-in-law has to deal with this.
From talking with other developers, developing a good interface for Android is much more painful and costly than developing one in iPhone. I caution you that you might get poor course evaluations because it might be more of a struggle to get something implemented in Android vs iPhone.
By the time the interviewee would be desperate enough to brute force it [were they in a room by themselves], they get so embarassed they say they don't know and they'd rather move on.
Except in this case, the author presented an unfair price comparison: Between an ebook available now and a paperback book not available until March of 2011.
I find it interesting that most people who like Android like it in the future tense.

Android is always great, but in that next version, that is just around the corner. That upcoming tablet, that upcoming phone, that upcoming software.
You're not behing callous...you're being a nihilist. Do you really see no distinction between the deliberate mass murder of 3,000 innocent people, and random accidental deaths? Where are your values??
Confessions of an Agent
Praying at the feet of the Investor Gods
As an internet startup seeking funding from angel and VC firms, I have a great deal of reverence toward those that hold a piece of the puzzle to making my dream a reality. I assume they must be smart and able in ways that I am not and they can choose to bestow upon me their smarts and ability with just a simple word, 'yes', and a wave of their magic wand.

So it is with this assumption that I approach each possible funding source, stooped in a deep curtsy, presenting my humble need for their services. But I quickly found out that not every god on Mt. Olympus is deserving of the title.

I recently heard from a friend of a friend about a 'respected' member of the angel/VC community in the city where I live. Awesome! A warm lead. (not) Now this friend hadn't known this friend for long, but he assured me that his friend would love to hear about my startup. So after a cursory review of this friends investment portfolio, off goes the highly scrutinized, painstakingly crafted introduction email that is sure to grab the attention of any oxygen exchanging mammal with an interest in making huge amounts of money (wink).

For some reason, as I shook with the realization that I had just contacted 'the' one, I decided to do a little more research on this angel and his business. Come to find out, he has been tried, convicted and sentenced in 11 counts of SEC fraud earning him 22 months in the clink. Not someone I would be interested in funding my project.

I am not saying that all angel/VC's are bad. Far from it. It is human nature that allows me to see the world, and the people in it, as good. But there is a part of me that knows its not ALL good. (I think that part resides right next to the part of me that refuses to believe that the "meat" in a BigMac is really meat). I have learned that those that can provide me with something that I "need" are not necessarily any better than I am, they are just different. They are abundant in something I lack. Sometimes it's funding, sometimes its sh*t.
Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798548 or
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-business-of-the-social-netw... on "The Business of The Social Network"

Edgelings blog http://pajamasmedia.com/edgelings/

Also note this recent "Ask HN: Best movie about work/business?" item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776345
I can share my experience from developing with Silverlight and c# for a few years (Though for the past year I've developed exclusively in java).

First of all the language. c#, especially in the latest iterations has become incredible. Featuring the goodness of both statically and dynamically typed languages. It has become very elegant and powerful.

Sadly, I can't say anything similar on Java. Is has been very slow to advance, very conservative when advancing, and the tools are still so slow (At least eclipse).

Regarding GUI development on Silverlight. Microsoft has done many things right with it. It has the best separation of UI and logic that I have seen built right into it. They have xml files to represent the UI (In the same way web has HTML), and the framework is as flexibly as could be (e.g. it wouldn't take you more than a minute to create a scrollbar that looks like a clock for example (If you have the graphics ready).

And the most important of all - they have a UI editor built for DESIGNERS. It encourages you to worry about the UI look and feel, and not on the logic behind it. It has tools in it from the designers world, and encapsulate a lot of headaches (E.g. setting a gradient direction is done by dragging a line over the area, and not by setting some numbers).

In addition, Silverlight has the advantage of being a second generation after WPF. Microsoft has learned from its mistakes with WPF, and simplified Silverlight dramatically. They could do that because Silverlight was a new technology which didn't have the requirement to be backward compatible.
I've written a very basic introduction to Django, no programming experience is required, or assumed:

http://www.instantdjango.com

It also includes a standalone Django development environment for Windows, so you don't need to waste time learning how to install and configure everyting. Give it a shot, and see if you can follow along. If you like it, there are plenty of great free Python and Django resources out there.

As an aside, I'm also writing an iPhone game programming tutorial for complete beginners:

http://coconutcollege.net

It's not done yet, but the first four courses should get you up and running with Cocos2d for iPhone. I should have the next two courses finished and posted within the next two weeks.
Great Reddit post. Poor HN post.
It's already massively outselling the iPhone. Do we even need to speculate that it's going to be an important platform for a long time?
I've noticed the Flash as well, on iPad Safari.
Mongrel2 v1.4 Out With Fun BBS Demo
Dude, just write a blog post about it, and submit your blog post. You've got 99.9% of a decent one already written here.

Writing a blog post is the answer to virtually 100% of "flagged off Hacker News" woes.
mst has been abandoned so you can have that one.
Ugh, sorry guys, I'm mortified about this.

You can spend 10 minutes on your first HN submission: is this an interesting link? should devotee be spelled with an accent aigu? is this too churn-y? ... and still embarrass yourself with a stupid mistake like leaving a typo in your hero's name.

edit: Much thanks to whoever corrected the title.
Bits are cheaper to manufacture than paper, and presumably when you buy a digital version of a book you don't own it and cannot resell it after you've read it, as would be the case with paper. A resale value of zero should justify a significantly lower price.
Ebooks may be more useful, but they are also much more ephemeral and fragile than a physical copy. They are subject to accidental deletion, file corruption and future obsolescence due to closed formats, DRM and technological innovation over time.

Those bits you paid for, they are rotting. The flash memory that stores them is leaking electrons and decaying. 5-10 years from now, your purchase may well evaporate into entropy unless you take great pains to move it from media to media. That is, if this is even allowed by your locked-down hardware.

How is something so ephemeral actually worth more than a physical artifact?
Our ad is "Database startup looking for C++ programmers". Also, here in Hungary CS majors take at least one semester of database, where they learn ACID.

Also, we're not looking for exhaustive answers, eg. in the TCP/UDP case all we want to hear is guaranteed delivery, packet reordering, stream oriented, packet oriented, UDP is good for audio, that's about it.

You should know we're a startup writing a distributed database (hence the n(n-1)/2 question), so virtually all code involves fairly low-level networking, and ACID is an everyday issue. This all of course is obvious from our website, which the interviewee presumably checks. The code is open-source, so they could actually look at the code to see what kind of questions to expect.
Best Neck Exercises for Computer Users
> still awful at CSS

I recommend you look into SASS/Compass. You have to learn the abstractions on top of CSS but from there you can leverage other people's knowledge of the tricks/hacks involved in putting together a good CSS layout.

I've recommended this to a number of people in roughly your position with good success. The biggest problem they've run into is with the SCSS syntax and once I got them converted over to sass (-x SASS) they all did fine. SASS won't teach you design and the designs have all been terrible, but generating the stylesheets ceases to be the problem.

On the other hand, I've had a terrible track record trying to do the same with designers.

> This is a good sign (I think?).

The revulsion tends to go away after you've been doing it a few years. You never stop learning, so there's usually a sigh when you see something you could have done better.
There's a bug in the tracker but it's been shut down for now. The google rep's answer was "This is something we've investigated a couple of years ago already and that we revisit regularly. Of course we thought of using the GPU, but there are non-trivial issues on many Android devices (a G1-class device for instance supports only one OpenGL
context at a time, which would prevent you from using any OpenGL based app like games or augmented reality apps.) In our past experiments we even found many cases in which using the GPU was slower than normal rendering. New devices might allow us to overcome the past limitations that made GPU support a not-so-good solution. The "choppiness" and "lagginess" you are mentioning are more often related to heavy garbage collection than drawing performance"

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
Yes, you can have that one.
You are looking at people who buy mobile devices as accessories or luxury items. I, on the other hand, want to develop tablets for medical assistance, mostly diagnosis, translation and record keeping, and deploy them in my home country of Somalia, and the refugee camps in Kenya.

Whether Apple sells X units or makes Y dollars is immaterial to me. All I care about is that every Android source file begins with a preamble that's sweeter than Aretha and Whitney to my ears: it promises me Freedom. Freedom to share, copy, clone, sell, give away. And from my experience, Dan Bornstein and the gang, bless their hacking souls, are here to assist me.

My "users" might never care what powers their doctors' tablets (they don't even know what an OS is, in fact, most of them can't read) but I do. I know I can fly back to ShenZhen and shop for boards, case, power chords, and save money. And in the end, have a Free, world-class operating system waiting for me.

To me Android is not a privilege, it's a right. It's what I will use to help my people. And there are millions like me who outnumber luxury mobile users by a huge margin.

This is where my heart is at:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726986
>That’s not all, either; Wikileaks claims that its funding has been blocked because it has been placed on watchlists for both the U.S. and Australian governments. It can no longer accept donations through Moneybookers, the site that collected the organization’s donations. PayPal suspended Wikileaks’ account earlier this year.

Maybe WePay can help him out? :)
This is something that is actually pretty tricky. The GPUs on many devices don't allow multiple OpenGL contexts to be created. So in the case of Android, the animations are done in software and the currently running application can create an OpenGL context. This generally makes for slow animations (and unfortunately worse battery life).

What can be done is that the system can create an OpenGL context, and then proxy all other calls (from other apps) through that context with a minor performance hit. This is something that the original iPhone had actually done. However, I think this might be somewhat challenging when working with different mobile GPUs and their quirks.

So while on the surface it's a very simple problem, in practice it can be very hard.
Okay, fair enough. I probably wouldn't apply for a job like that, but if I were I'd make sure to learn a bit about DBs first, if not networking.
I know of no Android tablet available in the $199 price range. Someone please point one out if one exists.

The argument that Windows won because Macintosh was priced at a premium is a dubious argument.

Apple is able to purchase flash memory, processors, and touch screens in bulk. They own Intrinisty and PA Semiconductor.

Apple looks like Walmart on their supply side and looks like Barney's on the retail side. There is no price pressure. They could slash their margins but they don't have to. It's still difficult to find an iPad and iPhone 4. They can't make enough of them.

Secondly, 95% market share is unnatural. It doesn't happen often. Markets look more like GM/Chrysler/Ford or XBox/PlayStation/Wii. I suspect the smartphone market will develop similarly.

And if you want to say that the iPhone will be crushed like the Macintosh was crushed by Windows then it is just as easy to say that Android will be crushed the same way Sun Microsystems and Novell were crushed when Eric Schmidt was there.
Google launches In-Page Analytics
I don't disagree with that, however, their profits have not kept pace with their valuation, and their first profitable quarter was only last year. Furthermore, they've taken a huge amount of venture capital in order to get to this point, and have had to get more at points for increased infrastructure costs.
I have made a demo app. See my blog post for code and explanation.
http://afewgoodlines.com/post/1329452279/a-backbone-js-demo-...
How many husbands have killed their wives (or vice versa) in the last 9 years? We should ban marriage and investigate the religions that promote it!!
I keep putting off doing anything on android because of java. I don't know java, and I don't really want to learn it. I suppose I will give in eventually, for android, but it will be grudgingly.
Twitter is massively overvalued because it's a fad. Can you imagine Twitter still being popular in 5 years? 10? What long-term potential does it have?
Backbone.js sample app with Sinatra Backend
I think you are right, but my mind keeps wandering to the person who can drop 6000 USD on a Kindle title. I hope they get the value out of it they need.

http://www.amazon.com/2SO4-family-K3BiCl6-KH3F4-ebook/dp/B00...
Minecraft currently, I love the cooperative exploration and creation going on on our private server. Random Flash games (Kongregate etc). New games on my Android or iPhone Touch to keep an eye on where things are at.

In the past lots of games with editors / mod capability, starting with map making for Duke3D. That was a big part of getting me into programming.
That's exactly what happened to me in my recent interviews.

Some company wanted me to write a simple string reversion and prime number finder programs on paper, I failed because I'm not used to code on paper.

Some other company wanted me to write a server client program which takes a file from client and saves it to server. I completed it on my laptop on the same day when I got home.

If the interviewer is going to make the interviewee take a written test; it must be about concepts, designs and stuff, not implementation.
Video Interview with Prolific Angel investor Paige Craig (30 deals in a year) 
... by Jason Nazar, founder/CEO of DocStoc.
Culling together various information, we're looking at approximately $100 million a year in new hardware, $20 million a year in leases. They haven't given out numbers for labor, bandwidth and energy (all huge, I'm sure), though there's plenty of articles talking about Facebook's costly infrastructure in the abstract.
Quite right. The monopolist behavior came years after their original success, and doubtless in the minds of MS's leader(s) was no different from the scrappy competitiveness they had always practiced.

MS were smart, but also lucky in their competitors. Digital Research deserves a place of honor on your list. And most things I've read about Netscape seem like they were so afraid of being killed by MS that they killed themselves instead.
For you, maybe they're not! Me, I value bits more than the artifacts that carry them. My MP3s are worth far more to me than the CDs I ripped them from; the CDs invariably got scratched or lost, and I was lugging around huge books full of them. Once iTMS came around, I virtually stopped buying them altogether.

I'm not going to argue that there aren't people who value archival formats. There clearly are.

However, it's not the job of a pricing scheme to ensure that everyone buys your product. Almost the sole job of a pricing scheme is to maximize the revenue stream commanded by the product. Literally the first step in designing a pricing scheme is to study the market, segment it by perceived value, and then price the product to attract the largest (Buyer x Price).

So, I humbly suggest: irrational attachment to physical objects as carriers of bits aside, for most people (not you, but most), the value of pure digital forms dwarfs the archival value of ink.
So if I am relatively wealthy, I should be willing to pay more for something that costs less to sell to me? You don't get rich by being loose with your money.
Free university licenses exist, though I think it needs to be set up by the institution

http://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/university/
Excellent!

Android allows you to define your UI in XML as well[1]. It's not that novel, Flex does the same thing too. But not to be too dismissive, it would nice to hear of experts in both to tell us what Android might be lacking.

Regards UI editor, yes, Android doesn't have any WYSIWYG UI editors. There is one, but it's 3rd party and not as polished as you describe MS's to be.

--

[1]http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/index.html
I suppose ... except by temperament edging into literally disabling anxiety I'm just not a blogger type (literally in that an hereditary disposition for that eventually disabled me as determined by Social Security after a quarter century in software engineering with lots of startups; I pay quite directly for most everything I post/submit to any forum).

Plus that strikes me as sufficiently dishonest it's not something I'd knowingly do. If the powers that be don't want to see material from a particular source on this forum, I'm not going to "launder" it to get around their explicit ban.
Looks like Archos has a 7 inch tablet that they sell for $199, though it doesn't have 3G access. Archos has been around for a while and are known to build fairly solid hardware, so this isn't some drive-by-night operation hawking crap on late-night informercial either.

http://www.archos.com/products/ht/index.html?country=us&...

edit: er, apparently it still runs android 1.5...
How to write a dev job post that inspires people and doesn't suck
Seriously, I look at this title and have no trouble at all imagining that it generates $6000 worth of value. Look at it, think about why you might need it, and then think about how much it would cost you to generate an alternative to it.
I am not really sure twitter is undervalued actually, compared to risk. I believe it has potential to be huge, but they haven't cracked the revenue nut. I believe a number of smart minds including Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin believe if they "get it right" they can be worth much more. I agree with the potential of twitter, but I don't believe they figured it out yet. It's their current value vs risk that they'll figure it out. Facebook on the other hand is bringing in revenue with a lot of potential to bring in a lot more.
Angry Birds take down GetJar servers
Skype’s VP Of Enterprise On Future Strategy, Products And Competitors
It's not dishonest. It's literally what the site guidelines ask you to do. This "Ask HN", on the other hand, is an invitation for us to unproductively discuss why political blog networks should or shouldn't be banned from HN. If you're going to feel guilty about something, feel guilty about that.

"If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

(PS: Sure you have commentary on the link! Specifically, you just wrote a whole bunch of words why even though this article was buried on Pajamas Media, it was interesting to Hacker News.)
That's a failure of the interviewer in my opinion. Means he managed to intimidate (not pressure) the guy/gal enough to back off.
From http://focusdesigns.com/design/

"Once the battery is completely drained the SBU continues to balance but will become stubbornly stationary and not obey your speed commands."
You can start hacking Android without a phone. The emulator is just cool :-)
Which worries me. I lived through the first dot-com bust, and I'm not interested in living through another. I'd much rather see the industry take a much more conservative approach to economics than giving way to an irrational exuberance.