skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@metamemetics - I agree. With the Xbox - though seemingly unprofitable for years (in the beginning) - Microsoft has deployed a successful strategy (or at least the product turned successful). I decided to not venture into that area of MS business (and have left many other sides of their business undiscussed as well).
Even in the entertainment area though - casual gaming and handheld gaming (two very important businesses) have been largely left untouched by MS.
What country in Africa? There are 54 of them.
Best clothing for this is not a tux, it's a yellow workman's jacket.
Your country.
I once cracked into President of India's office. But, unfortunately I got caught on one final check and then don't ask... (super bad!)
It depends on the occasion, but yes, bonus if you appear to work there.

My favorite place to go is the women's bathroom. They always have soap, paper towels and usually something like hair gel or other amenities. Men's bathrooms have nothing, plus women are cool about it.
Good one :) - In that light, do you think the Office for the Mac division has a strategy for Office for iOS (but is just not allowed or funded to develop that product)?
When Microsoft launched Live search (pre-bing) they needed someway to inflate their search usage to tell advertisers people actually use the site. So they launch Club Live, which has a series of word games offering points and prizes for winning. Every time one types a word in a word game, it automatically searches for the word in a search frame next to the game.

So naturally I wrote a program that scripted mouse/keyboard movements with searching and changing in-memory variables used by Flash. It solved games 20-30 times faster than I could, without me even being at the computer (I ran it 24/7 on an old desktop).

Eventually other people started doing this too and the hole was plugged. But I received quite a few free copies of Vista Ultimate and Xbox360 controllers that found their way on ebay.
'Chromeless' lets devs create their own browsers using HTML, CSS, JavaScript...
DeadlineExceededError is a really stupid problem in App Engine and the simplest fix would be to just kill the instance after such an error and start a new one. Google doesn't want to do that because it wastes resources. So, the current solution is to write Python modules which, when they're imported, will work correctly even if the execution stops in the middle of the module and then is restarted from the beginning (i.e., when a new request is received).

It's possible that with the upcoming pre-warming requests this bug will disappear in practice because your whole project gets a chance to import and initialize all modules before the first request is received. If these pre-warming requests don't have a 30s timeout your instance will always have enough time to finish the initialization in a non-broken state.

Anyway, it's your own mistake if you stay with the Django helper. The bug can be worked around. It's fixed in Django-nonrel. I still see people who try to use the helper for mission-critical projects. Don't do that. The helper is buggy. It uses monkey-patches all over the place. This makes it extremely vulnerable to bugs caused by DeadlineExceededError. Just use Django-nonrel, even if you only want to use App Engine's models.
You're looking in the wrong place to discover scarcity.

Copyright law is there to prevent real scarcity. Without copyright law there would be no big budget or little budget movies, little recorded music, few books, and on and on and on.

Sure, there will be a couple of beatniks who'll work night jobs as janitors to ply their trade, but the vast majority would abandon the effort.

The scarcity, minus the "artificial" scarcity, would be very real.
Google Baraza
They wouldn't be looking at it from that angle.

Probationary statuses are generally considered a bad thing in big companies, and are often used as a first step in building a case for termination. As a cog who's hoping to make a career in one of those big companies, you're expected to want to get off that bad status and back into "good worker" mode as quickly as possible. It had never occurred to anybody that they might have an employee who didn't care about internal promotion or their "career" at the company.

So no, the only reason they pushed it was that it was looking bad for them to have employees on the "underperforming" list. The fact that the penalty for underperformance was essentially a raise was something they had never even considered.
http://ookaboo.com/

I've got an amazing image acquisition pipeline that finds thousands of images a day with little human intervention, but there's barely any user-visible categorization, the navigation sux, the full text search sux, and there's a lot of infrastructral stuff that sux too, but at least you can't see it.

Not only that, but to make the site successful I need to promote it to the sky.

I expect to chip away at some of those issues over the next year or so.
Isn't roulette a losing game? Or did you have some optimal betting strategy?
Well, bookstores around me had the $40 to $50 behemoth tech books with an installer in the back. Redhat looked the simplest, or it the cheapest.. I don't recall which.
stop looking for a non-technical co-founder, learn to sell yourself ;-)
What is it about personal effects and banks. I took over someone's desk when I started my current job. She left all her worldly possessions (and then some) in the desk. Wanting to have storage, I asked if I could throw all that crap away. "No, she still works here."

I trashed it all anyway.
So what mobile platform does MS Office Live work on then? Only on Windows Phone (or Windows Mobile)?
Are they making these things web-standard browsers incompatible on purpose? Or do they really only know/want to develop for IE browsers, ActiveX or Silverlight or .Net technology based stuff?
Is there anyone from Microsoft out there who can explain??
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823321

Can't remember, but I probably got there from here :)
I want to mention at this point http://www.opscode.com and http://eucalyptus.com/ > they are both successful with open source (of course they are not anymore early stage startups)
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>Regardless of whether human creativity is intrinsically bound to economic reward

"Reward" is the means to pursue your creativity. The ability for an author or a photographer or a painter or a musician to actually work on their trade instead of working menial jobs to try to support a hobby.

There was once a time in human history where creativity wasn't a meritocracy. It was an idle pursuit that the rich engaged in. Is that a better model?

>the fact of the matter is that you can't make the case that what we're dealing with isn't a matter of artificial scarcity

From a naive perspective, of course you can copy that floppy.

From a rational perspective, however, of course it deals with a real scarcity of creation that copyright seeks to prevent (just as patents attempt to prevent a scarcity of innovation, though the results are much more mixed).
AS HN: How much Bandwidth do you consume per day? How can I reduce mine?
Pardon my asking two questions in one.<p>Is there a way of knowing how much bandwidth you consume in a day/month?<p>Secondly, Internet access here in Nigeria is on the high side $100/month for about 7 GB of bandwidth which is far from enough considering I do not watch any videos online. I was wondering if there was a way I could reduce my consumption. Say<p>1. Preventing pages I am not presently on from loading anything.
2. preventing the one million images on TC and other sites from loading as if I do not need all of them everytime I visit.
3. Having a downgraded quality of images open.<p>

I looked to see if there is any chrome extension but cannot fine one. This is not a problem for most people but I think it is here. At least for me. Any suggestions will be really appreciated.
They might have a good chance of breaking through to handheld gaming with windows phone 7. I would wager a bet that XNA is the only thing that gives it any chance of surviving.
I am a linux fan. But I must admit that C#/.net/VS is one of the best development platforms available. Besides that they have just released F# with VS2010 which is kind of 'Language for Geeks' in MS world.
In Portland, yes, nearly every bar. Although you probably can't pull off a beer and dinner for $1 anymore most places.
Roulette can be beaten by a shoe computer. Basically you tap your foot each time the ball passes a certain number. The computer uses the time between taps to compute the velocity of the ball, which is used to predict where it will stop. Then you bet on a quadrant of the wheel by the predicted stop.

This was first done by people from MIT I believe.
nice pointer - thanks! I wondered myself, why google is not more focusing on further crowdsourcing services - with google baraza they might place another successful service on the market...
How To Annoy People By Submitting a Link to an Invite-Only Blog
If we take the mantra: "Create something that people want and want to pay for" what would be the application you would create if there were no competitors?

As far as I am concerned it would be the Office suite. People at every company want to edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and companies can pay for such software. Companies buy (hundreds of?) millions of MS Office licenses. For me Microsoft = MS Office. Microsoft will remain a huge and profitable company until no one can really compete with MS Office. Most of the things the tech media speaks about is irrelevant in this respect. People will not want to edit documents on smart phones and touch-screens. It is really not sure that people want to edit their documents using an Ajax app and want to host all of their documents remotely at Google.

I would say that other big companies seem to have bad strategies: If they wanted to kill Microsoft they would just have to compete with MS Office directly. The problem what MS Office solves is an essential one. It is incredible that Microsoft has almost monopoly at such an important market.
getting things right the first time around is much more of a practical matter than you may at first realize.
Minimalist Manifesto (part 1)
When my gym was doing some building work, men and women swapped changing rooms (all the builders were men) and I was amazed at how clean, spacious, and well-appointed theirs was. You know they even have individual shower cubicles, not just a big open space with shower heads hanging from the ceiling? Luxury!
NOKIA 6111 SILVER
Nokia introduces Nokia 6111 silver with some more features great features and stylish look. This new product has come out with including such features. Phone’s incorporated video player for download and playback or for enjoying 3GPP, H.264 video, MPEG-4, and AMR. Different features like SMS, picture messaging, SMS distribution list and many other unusual features. It also has tri crowd maintain with 2G networks GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 correlation.
Analogue Hawking radiation spotted in the lab
Rails Rumble Retrospective - DesksNear.me
Fail. One sec.
I remember Hot Bot used to have this feature. I switched to Google, though, once Hot Bot's front page stopped being the search page.
Python's lambda is not broken, it's just that the notion of a (progn) from Lisp doesn't exist in Python, so Python's lambda is a lot harder to use because for anything more complicated then 1 expression, you'd have to define a fully named function somewhere. For the most part this isn't an issue because you probably wouldn't want to have more then 2 or 3 expressions in a lambda anyway.

Granted, a lot of languages like Ruby, Lua, ML and even CoffeeScript have arguably even cleaner syntax then Python, but none has as vast a community and quality libraries that mirror Python. In choosing a language, the language itself matters, but the ecosystem equally matters IMHO.
See http://mashable.com/2010/09/17/card-2-0-dynamics/ for a demo.
Ask HN: Why is hosting on the cloud so cheap?
I am amazed by how cheap services like amazon EC2 are. Somehow, the numbers just dont add up: electricity,cooling,hardware, bandwidth. 2cents/hour just doesnt make sense.
Am i missing something?
The way I read it, they were betting with free money, so they couldn't lose.
- 64 bit issue is going to be the same for all languages. Twice the pointer size, twice the data size (unless you're using a very specific type)

- No code generators? You could complain that they're not good enough, don't support some specific extensions, don't play nice with threading, or something else, but there are many versions of python which work as compilers. Just google a bit.

- Lack of type safety is there by design. If you want type checking, why are you even looking at duck-typed scripting languages? It's a basic design decision, not something that could be changed / improved.

- Why is whitespace even an issue in patches? If anyone submits a patch, they should use exactly the same style as the rest of the file. If they don't, patch should be rejected. The same thing happens in projects where indentation doesn't really matter. Also, it's hard to "silently" screw up code covered by tests. Any big enough project should have those...
Hmm, Python had tuples, lists, dicts and classes from the very beginning (version 0.9.1). Much bloat was tacked on after the simple class model was deprecated in favor of new-style classes... class methods, static methods, metaclasses, descriptors, properties, decorators, you name it. Then there were additions like list comprehensions and generators (although those are actually useful).

IMHO, Python's indentation-based syntax is a great way to make (and keep) the language readable, but at the same time it's an impediment to language flexibility. In a more flexible language, you could have implemented most (or all) of the aforementioned features yourself. (This sounds like something a Lisper would say, but it would work in other languages as well, like Io and Ruby.)
I stopped going to (and failed) a CS class in college because it was boring, and I already had a job with a company who I'd worked with. That count?
I don't understand her claims about universal access to all files (as in rwx?). Not everyone is a sudoer in linux, for instance.
Mike Shapiro Leaves Oracle (key figure in ZFS storage appliance engineering)
How to Become a Game Programmer
Absolutely true. There are particularly murderous Al Qaeda people who were operating in Iraq (and Afghanistan), and they are in an entirely different class (actually evil) vs. the majority of nationalist insurgents or common criminals.

Despite facing them as enemies, I wouldn't even consider most of the Taliban, Sunni former regime elements, or Shia militias to be evil for trying to kill the coalition military; the only really evil things they do are attacks on civilian population, and that isn't even done by the vast majority.

In Iraq, we actually successfully reached out to a lot of the less-irreconciable elements ("Sons of Iraq") and gave them a role in the new Iraqi state. There were cases where one day they were engaging US forces, and they next day were recognized by US forces as a useful security force and given equipment (well, reflective PT belts from the PX, so we knew they were the "good" guys now) and support.
Ask HN: Why is Google turning WebSockets into SPDY?
http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol/spdy-protocol-draft2#TOC-Framing-Layer vs http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-03

On the IETF hybi wg mailing list you can actually see how Google engineers slowly turned the simple draft 76 protocol into a clone of their failed SPDY protocol.

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/hybi/current/maillist.html

Are they trying to trick other browser vendors into adopting SPDY after all?
Yes, it is amazing what they achieved with MS Office. Yet, there are plenty of companies who actually are trying an Office-free life as the licences are actually quite expensive. Compatibility between various Office programs (alternatives) has increased and for basic stuff Google Docs works actually nicely.
I found the relationship between MS Office and MS Windows the most interesting. How strong will MS Office be, without Windows. Office is the Killer app that Windows has. But a lot of people are steering away from Windows.
This is not going to happen overnight, but it might happen sooner or later.
Also - plenty of companies are still working with Office 2003 (or even 2000). The cost op upgrading is pretty significant, so companies wait longer and longer for that. That is very bad for innovation (as you keep being stuck with older software) but good for the companies wallets.

Editing of documents (albeit simple editing) is something people want on their iPads (and to some extend on other smaller devices too). Do not agree with you there.
Opera Turbo reduces the page weight by compressing images and code through their servers. Maybe it can make you reduce your bandwidth consumption.

http://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/
AdBlock will block all the adverts saving some bandwidth.

Using the mobile versions of sites saves a lot of bandwidth

Opera can do the downgrading of images

I've only had one month of over 15GB of downloads and I watch several hours of online video a week (ustream, youtube, TV Catchup, iPlayer).
http://nxtpass.com

A web app that handles two-factor authentication systems for web sites that want to add it. Let's you use an API to generate a password that gets SMS'ed or voice called to your user, then let's you validate what they typed.

I figured if Google, Facebook, and Chase banks have them, then many other sites will want them too. And they don't want (or know how) to do it themselves. Tough to market though.
Wait, MySQL stores the field names with every record? Oracle doesn't do that; Postgres doesn't do that. The documentation I can pull up with five minutes of Googling strongly suggests that InnoDB doesn't do that.

So as far as I know MRLCN's savings over MY_RIDICULOUSLY_LONG_COLUMN_NAME gets paid once, in the table header, whether the table has 1 row on 100 million.
The Goldmine of Opportunities in Gov 2.0
Thing I noticed about successful startups with friends as co-founders is that they are pretty young and both have entrepreneurial spirit. (Plus, the requisite complimentary skill-set)

Those are surprisingly uncommon combinations

What if your circle of friends are not entrepreneurial? What if your friends that /are\ entrepreneurial already have startups?

--then, of course; you'd have to find a co-founder (thats not a friend) or motivate a friend to be entrepreneurial - but, that in itself almost defeats the spirit of #5.

I do believe friends are very important, families as well.

1) They'll keep you motivated.
2) They'll give you advice/input.
3) They'll give you support; (tech expertise, business feedback and connections, etc..)

The quarter back, and the running back need not be friends to win the championships.
Yes, I agree - VS is a nice development platform. But it is mainly designed to develop for the Microsoft platform. (though even that is changing a lot bit and they are going more the "Eclipse IDE" path now.
http://www.weathermap.eu/
Weather forecast based on free data. Only rain forecast for now. I had (still have) plans to make it much better with wind, temperature etc., nicer graphics, better animation and an Android App.
I am working on too many other side project, but I hope to start working on this one soon again.
Known as the "Belgian route". Many EU citizens with foreign wives have to find a place to live for a while such as Belgium to get citizenship...
Engineer saves man by crashing into him on purpose
To get more done, work less. Really?
> Granted, a lot of languages like Ruby, Lua, ML and even CoffeeScript have arguably even cleaner syntax then Python

But Python has still the cleanest standard API. At least for me, that's what made me switch from Ruby to Python in the past.
http://bunnyland-tactics.appspot.com/

It's a two player, turn based, web strategy game. It's like Stratego, but with bunnies instead of soldiers, and fog of war instead of not being able to see what a piece is. It's my first AppEngine app, so a lot of it was just learning to use the Data Store, which is quite different from the RDBMSs that I'm used to.

Source code and screenshots are available here:
http://code.google.com/p/bunnyland-tactics/
Of course, that's what elections are for.

I'm confused - if I vote against subsidizing other people's consumption, I'm not obligated to do so?

Or perhaps you are confused and believe that 2 people (aka, a majority) threatening 1 person with violence is not force.

By that logic, 25 other laborers working the same amount might end up subsidizing the education of a student who becomes a great industrialist.

And in that case, it might be worthwhile, depending on whether the public benefits of the great industrialist outweigh the public costs. Assuming education is what enabled this person to become a great industrialist, then it probably is worthwhile.

Again, let me repeat: elbenshira questioned whether it was a waste even in cases where there is no public benefit, only a private benefit. That's what I was responding to.
We didnot play with our own money, but with the coupons on the back of the cinema tickets. But even so, we should have made slightly less than 300 a month, but we did a slightly more on average.

We did not really have an optimal betting strategy, at least nothing that can be proven scientifically, there is no such thing. But after some time we started to bet on the wheel, e.g. "Voisins du zero" or "Jeu zero" and we knew all the croupiers and some of them had an unbelievable regular way of running the ball and spinning the wheel and the ball would thus drop in a slightly more predictable area of the wheel - at least when it hit one of the bumpers and would then drop into the wheel. So we waited with our bet until our favourite croupier would throw the ball from a place, where we felt it should land close to the zero and call a zero game.

Naturally that did not always work and we'd have losing streaks of even two weeks where we went home without any money at all, but once a month or so we'd go out with over a hundredfifty euros. On average we did slightly better than expected (400 were admittedly the better months, sometimes it was a little less than three hundred), but we remained ahead even after a long time, so my guess is we were either lucky or the idea of predicting according to the croupiers regularity worked. We had the feeling it worked on two of the ten croupiers the others threw less regular.

Anyway it was definitely more fun than just whitewashing the chips. (One was not allowed to immediately exchange the "lucky" chips one would get for the coupons for money.)
The first thing is that it is virtual hosting. You don't really get a machine, you get a virtual one . And you can have a lot of virtual machines under a Physical one. SO this divides costs a lot.

Also I'm not sure but I read somewhere that in the beginning the idea for companies like Amazon or google was to reuse their infrastructure(hardware, bandwith, electricity) by selling virtual machines inside their servers. So they invest in the machines for their services but try to pay part of this inversion renting part of it.
Any application that you choose to download and run with your Linux user account has access to all the files (data) of all other apps, the only isolation is at the user level (the rwx that you mention), not at the app level.

It's not reasonable to expect non-technical people to create a user account for each app they want to download and use from the Internet.
Penthouse Relationships Lead to Business Success
I like php. I like functions too (as opposed to objects). I'm probably just old school. I also like my car, which doesn't have a motor to move the windows up and down, and doesn't have a remote to lock the doors, but it works great.
Half baked and medium rare. Delicious.