skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I've found is that potential customers can visualize hypothetical products nicely, and can be quite responsive, especially if you are solving a pain point for them. So, for example, you're already underway with your project, but I'd scale that mental impression back in any sales pitch. Call producers/product advertisers and describe what your potential product (now nothing more than an ambitious idea) could be like and ask their advice for further tailoring it to them. This allows them to see their benefit, and past your real world start up difficulties. Next, ask if you may contact them once you've got something solid going. Do this with both sides. Build up a list of contacts over a month or so, then tell everyone how many people you've got interested and that you're opening the initial sign-up page now! :)

Edit: Also, your homepage looks great, but I'd take off any solicitation for ads for yourself. I know that's what you get out of it, but you don't want to do anything which might scare away those first crucial users. One step at a time. :)
My grandparents are also close to 90, and they do feel very lonely, I can see it in them whenever I visit.

My grandfather in particular was an agricultural scientist, he loves plants and outdoors and working with tools, and used to be very energetic.

Now he has to sit on a wheelchair, and grows bored of watching TV and reading (it doesn't help that his eyesight is very bad).

Their current enjoyment are their grandchildren, and we've grown old. I just hope they can get to see their grand-grandchildren (my girlfriend and I expect to have children in 2 to 3 years' time), that might get them some enjoyment again.
Three Steps to Improve Your Data Security
While reading online books, I generally have another browser open to look up those difficult words. The tabs tend to expand quite quickly after hours of reading. If the interface were dead simple, then I would find this very useful. I've been looking for ways to expand my vocabulary. Being able to access a listing of these words that I lookup would be quite interesting and may actually help me out quite a bit.
Keeping it universal is a great idea. Whenever I find myself with downtime, I'm generally looking on my phone for something to read. It would be great to access this listing on the go. I'm excited to try this out!
Football is America's premier sport, and the Super Bowl is America's most prestigious sporting event. People will collide just as hard without helmets as they do with in order to win a Lombardi trophy regardless of the cost to themselves.

Isn't it that when you hit your head without a helmet, it's going to hurt much more and thus you avoid getting hit (at least that's the argument used here)? As far as I understood, the problem with the helmets is the hits you don't feel as painfully with the helmet as you would feel without, but which are very dangerous if they occur very frequently.

I don't know if you can compare that to MMA or boxing the way you do, but I'm not a professional football player either.
"A compiler is not exactly a competitive advantage for a company as big as Apple."

Apple might not make money directly with its compiler, but for its 3rd party developers to be stuck with a mediocre compiler is definitely a disadvantage for Apple.

Hypothetical:
The hardware under the hood is identical to that of a Dell.
Compare an application written for both, but the one running on the Dell uses Intel's highly optimized compiler while Apple uses one that's not tuned for any particular platform, and therefore performs somewhat poorly on x86.

Result: Apple has a 20% performance deficit.

Now say that application is Photorealistic RenderMan or Cinema4D or Modo.

That 20% performance deficit, that has nothing to do with the hardware, just created a significant cost disadvantage for a mac user -- to implement a renderfarm, the mac adds either 20% in rendering time, or 20% in extra hardware costs to offset the rendering time (which ends up costing more still in logistics).

Result? Apple would lose a potentially non-trivial sale.

Having an optimized in-house compiler would probably also help to improve OpenGL performance on the mac -- because odds are the entire OS is compiled with the same compiler...

Though it may not be a significant direct revenue generator, having a good compiler would probably still be very beneficial for Apple AND its customers, not to mention developers.
Apple paid for Java; they're not going to get sued.
I would hope most entrepreneurs don't have the attitude of "it's not fair." Maybe it isn't fair. But as we all know life isn't fair. Meta-discussion aside, any entrepreneur worth his salt won't be thinking like this.
Thank you! Ordered the "Designing w/Web Standards" book first.
Steve Jobs is Wrong
Not true. Windows XP included Flash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player
"Two years later it shipped with all releases of Windows XP."

https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms06-020...
"Vulnerable versions of Macromedia Flash Player from Adobe are included with Windows XP"
Personally, I think that if infrastructure (rather than wealth redistribution) were really the main business of government then I wouldn't have any objection to paying taxes.

I'm sure that GOOG pays enough taxes in one way or another to pay for its fair share of the world's roads. This is more than I can say for the bum sitting on the street corner.
Cancellation and C++ Exceptions
The difference between individual incentives and corporate loop holes is that the incentives were put there to encourage certain type of relatively beneficial behavior.

The loopholes were placed there often at the behest of the corporations they benefit. Corporations have far more ability to influence governments than individuals due simply because they have far more money. Money is power. More power, more responsibility. Google has pledged to be responsible. Taking advantage of the irresponsibility of its peers is not responsible.
I'll have to agree with the D comment. As someone who actually writes in D (for fun), I felt that it was more like a checklist for D than a wish list for Go. Though yes, I will concede that Go + those changes != D.

Unfortunately, the Cheez Whiz ponies aren't implemented yet, but if D ever hits 3.0 maybe it can be pushed into the spec.
How about C# in the form of Mono?
And is good at fudging details.

Make $100,000/month = Make $100/month.

Buying a $420,000 house = Live in mom's house

Buy a brand new BMW = Buy a 1982 Volvo.

Write a post saying how you made tons of money and blew it = Please buy my book - this Volvo isn't getting any newer
There are a few possibilities

1. Consider exchanging services with a designer. Costs some development time, but might be worth it for good design work.

2. Ask a designer friend for a favor. You don't want to impose too much, but you might be able to get a discount off the normal design rate.

3. Depending on the type of project, you may be able to find prebuilt templates/themes that you could adapt. Themeforest is a good place to look.

4. Consider using a grid-based CSS framework like Blueprint. It already has all the basic building blocks in place. It won't be beautiful, but should be at least reasonably usable.
This would put you ahead of literally half of software engineers at or below my level of seniority at least one Japanese megacorp. While I have very little experience with working in the United States, anecdotally, many programmers can't program there, either.
Hopefully Apple does include MacRuby pre-installed.

I just wrapped up a MacRuby app. MacRuby is a very cool system. However, if you are distributing the app, you either have to include all of MacRuby, or go through a complicated and error-prone process of excluding portions of the stdlib. This is a black art at the moment.

Even without most of the stdlib, the bundled app is much larger than the equivalent Cocoa app.

The larger app size could become a concern on machines like the Air with smaller SSDs. It also seems tasteless to have multiple apps each with their own MacRuby distro bundled up with the app. A pre-installed MacRuby would solve both of these problems. Then again, it would also make creating Mac apps almost too easy... how will I compete?
Am I one of the few who doesn't see a problem with this? If our tax structure is so f'd up that it allows for this, we need to change it. In the meantime, why wouldn't Google minimize its tax liability?

If you're an entrepreneur and are against this, I hope you voluntarily don't take the tax breaks afforded to you, or else you're a hypocrite. Lunch with business partners? Better not write that off. Your internet or cell-phone? Don't write that off either. Part of your apartment where you code for 5 hours a day? Don't write that off either.
Using tax havens is certainly not one of these cases.
Edit: Fixed, sorry had a bad copy and paste.

You sit at home and come up with a great new piece of software that’s worth 250 million and sell it IBM. Why should you pay more taxes than the bum sitting at home next door? After all you did not use land or resources protected by your countries military and police forces. You did not use public infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams) or government backed institutions (banks, phone lines), or even workers or customers educated by the public school system.

Ask yourself why would IBM pay for such a thing? Well they have customers that use land and an educated workforce. And what about your bank? How do they keep from being robbed? Heck, what’s to stop your bank or IBM from simply shooting you vs. letting you keep the money?

Face it, without a government service there is no way to generate extract and keep 250 million in value. Because even Drug Lords depend on governments banning their drugs.

PS: If you disagree you can always leave and renounce citizenship.
MacRuby packages itself inside the .app, so you have a self contained package (can distribute the app without requiring MacRuby on client machine)

[Edit: as noted by rdouble, package size is an issue]
Probably not in a hot new startup, but there might be some obscure company somewhere that would need some code monkeys...
There are some amazing images of fractals on the web.

One site that was pointed out here in particular was the Mandelbub, which looks amazing:

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html
Thanks.

Sorry for my ignorance, can you or someone tell me what you mean by 'whitelabel'
He mentions BitC. Any comments about this language as I have never heard about it before?
yeah - but he put a monkey in his picture
One of the slides says that good designers should know how to code.

On the one hand, I have enjoyed doing front-end code for my projects. But on the other hand, during my time at a large agency, designers NEVER coded because of the division of labor. I don't think the fact that we didn't code made us worse designers than those that did. It just focused us on the mantra of "do one thing really well."
This will probably improve security. If they shipped Flash on the device, there is a very good chance that it would be out of date (and insecure) by the time someone buys it.
Let me put it this way: Apple doesn’t seem to believe that Blu-ray will be a standard storage medium for computer users in the next decade or so like DVDs and CDs were before. That might be the reason why they are not exactly eager to ship their computers with a Blu-ray drive. That assessment rings true to me. I might buy a Blu-ray player for my TV but I don’t think I really need it for my laptop. (I might want to watch something on a Blu-ray disc but I’m actually kind of tired of all that physical media. I bought my last CD 18 months ago and my last DVD something like two years ago. I don’t really know how true that is for the rest of the world, though.)
Yup, there was a big fuss and all the headlines were sure to focus on "security vulnerability" and "Apple". Color me unsurprised at this move...
Will the Mac remain an open platform?
Programmers don't hate Microsoft.

Many hackers do. (No, not that kind of hacker. Those guys love Microsoft: plenty of vulnerabilities to exploit!)

But programmers, in general? They love Microsoft. Microsoft keeps food on their tables by providing Visual Basic, C#, and other tools that they can use to shovel out PoS or ERP code or whatever.

Most of the fun and innovation is in the realm of the hacker elite, though, to whom a Microsoft monoculture is both stifling and suffering from a chronic case of doing-it-wrong.
Java has never been cross platform. Back in the dot.bomb days running java on anything other than Windows and Solaris was a huge pain in the ass when not outright impossible, and there was Sun's infamous internal memo about how much Java on Solaris sucked!
The characterization of "evil" is too strong. The focus should not be on Google, but on the world's corporate tax system because it doesn't accomplish what it was set out to do. In terms of the level of fairness and for the purposes of generating domestic revenue, it is broken. A specific tax revenue distribution was intended, and that is why the particular tax levels were set, but instead the levels change dramatically for the most sophisticated participants.

Maybe the answer is to make these tax management/arbitrage services more accessible to everyone and every business to allow the democratic/political/capital system put pressure on the issue. I imagine the overhead is great, but there should be a way consolidate or ease it, I am sure some innovative minds out there will find a way.
Steve Jobs claimed that vertical touch screens just don't work, so I'm not sure we'll be seeing a touch screen on a Mac anytime soon.
this is one reason youtube is banned from Turkey, the minister claims it is because they make revenue in turkey and don't pay tax. It might be a valid reason.

The second reason though (going off topic) is because they don't have anyone to talk to in turkey for censoring stuff, which is very evil of them.
Umm... Just don't use it. No one is forcing you to. Some of us are happy to have it, even if it does have some quirks.
Could you go into more detail?
I know of people who enter med school in their late 30s/early 40s.

So no, you are not nuts. Life isn't a race.
I can't speak to support then, but now they'd handle a problem like that for free and have a hot fix available to you in no time. Microsoft product support services is really top notch.
Rands in Repose: How nerds and geeks parse the world
Got it: Thanks to wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product
> Unfortunately, the Cheez Whiz ponies aren't implemented yet, but if D ever hits 3.0 maybe it can be pushed into the spec.

I'd wait first for the any of the existing D2 compiler(s) to at least implement the features that are in D2 'spec', as it currently stands there are no implementations of D2, and that is without going into all the bugs in the most used compilers.
My reply was not meant to assert that redditors are actually anti-semitic in a nazi sense, but to show that it's not really "equal-opportunity". In short, jokes about jews and blacks are clearly acceptable and even popular but gay jokes are not.

Maybe one could claim that gay jokes aren't there because they aren't considered "most offensive" to start with but I really doubt it. I think it's just a code for "let's make racist jokes".
Google pays plenty in taxes... in the form of payroll taxes and employing thousands of people. Their "effective" tax rate is significantly higher than 2%+ quoted here. People forget that corporate income tax is the last resort of taxes after all the other shit-ton of money spent operating the business and paying and hiring employees (who themselves pay plenty in taxes) so to say their tax rate is this low is incredibly mis-leading.

It is not evil to setup legal structures that deal with tax minimization and tax efficiency. It's no different than Google starting Adwords as a perfect market to maximize their profits by using an auction-based system.
The sound samples were horrible. I couldn't understand the "singing" voice at all. I think this would be more distracting due to the uncanny valley ("Was that directions or road noise or the actual song?").
Photo: The evolution of Square's credit card reader
I agree. But I guess it depends on the succes of the OS X app store. If becomes popular quickly, it does not make sense to use a non-exclusive technology, while it could attract a lot of developers otherwise.

Though, I think it will require inclusion of MacRuby, or an exception in the OS X App store terms. It's not that likely that they will accept a bundle-wrapped MacRuby given that they also do not accept programs that use deprecated technologies (Java, Rosetta).
We're on the same wavelength - this is the exact flow I have in mind! Now to get back to work.
Anecdotes on converting Rails apps from MySQL to PostgreSQL
>None of those products/services would be possible but for the government spending taxpayer money...

This is sloppy reasoning. Just because A contributed in some measure to B does not imply B could only have come about because of the contributions of A, nor does it imply that more of A will yield more Bs.

Further, absent a parallel world in which such different choices were made, one could just as easily argue on economic grounds that the resources confiscated would have been otherwise put to more effective, productive use in satisfying the wants of the common man.
So what? If you want developer tools, they're a free download on microsoft.com http://www.microsoft.com/express/

Microsoft can't win here, if they shipped all that with the base OS there'd be haters hatin' on them for "bloat".
First off, I don't care who you are or what you do. No single individual creates that much value. A CEO makes big decisions, sure. But he receives advice from countless people on those decisions, and countless more people make those decisions a reality. Companies create value through the actions of hundreds if not thousands of people. The decisions of its well paid leaders are more valuable than the actions of the average worker on the factory floor, but not that much more valuable.

No CEO could possibly make decisions more important, more weighty or more valuable than the leaders of nations. And the leaders of nations make an order of magnitude less than the average big company CEO.

So no, I wouldn't produce value far in excess of $250 million. I would be getting paid way too much.

Second how long did you take advantage of government services before you became a productive citizen? What did you get from it?

Let's assume England. Just off the top of my head - for the first 14-21 years of your life you got: health care, a primary and secondary education, protection of the military, a higher education, use of the roads, clean water, clean air, sewage, trash removal and the BBC.

How much do you think you owe the government for 14 years of the use of those services? How much interest do you think you're paying on that debt? How about for the continuing use of those services?

Income tax is not the government claiming ownership over a man's labor, it is simply the minimum payment on a debt and the fee for continuing use of services.
...And when some country is offering ZERO, any X% >0 will not encourage companies to shift their tax structures back to the US.
> None of those products/services would be possible but for the government spending taxpayer money to develop the infrastructure behind those services (the internet, roads, GPS, etc).

I'd argue that the infrastructure would have been built regardless.
A lot of things are being pushed into GA that aren't entirely appropriate for it, but I'm glad people are still curious in trying these things out.
This book can not be recommended strongly enough. It was my "a-ha!" moment with JavaScript. Especially for people with programming experience in other languages, it's a gem. It's thin and easy to overlook, but every page is a, "so that's why JS behaves like that!" revelation.
Not really, the latest C# is closer to Scala than it is to Java...
>Linux comes with Apache, Python, C/C++, Perl, AWK, sed, vi, emacs, and more.

>Windows comes with Minesweeper.

Erm... you can download for free compilers from Microsoft or the Visual Studio Express editions. Or you could get all of those above things for Windows. You get IIS with Windows.

Why should MS bundle those into Windows and waste disk space for 99.5% of people who will never use it? BTW Ubuntu does not come with GCC. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=120421

>It's always seemed to me that Microsoft almost actively prevented me from using my own machine. I couldn't get into it without buying more.

Uhh what? We are not talking about iOS here where you need to pay $99/year for the privilege of developing. Can you elaborate?
I wish they'd let me resize windows from any corner.

Wait for OSX Thundercat
Well, corporations are by their nature sociopathic entities that seek to maximize profit regardless of anything else. That's fine, and I don't think anyone can blame them for taking advantage of loopholes.

The question is, why do the loopholes still exist? Why aren't more people angry about them?

EDIT: Downmodded? Seriously, guys, noncontroversial statement. Go talk to an economist. Or a lawyer. Corporations are legally obligated to be sociopathic and maximize profit above all else. It's a feature, not a bug, invisible hand and all that.
To argue that having an Apple supported JVM was good, or that it doesn't matter because you'll just have a 3rd-party JVM instead, misses the fact that it's the change itself that will be cause the of problems. As crap as Apple's Java support has been, it was a known quantity: as a developer, you know what your Mac users have (currently it's "most have Java 6, but there are plenty of people still stuck with Java 5"). The same is true for Windows; even though the JVM comes from Sun, everyone gets that same JVM, and pretty much everyone has Java 6.

It will take some time before a new one true JVM for Mac emerges. Furthermore, Apple's wishiwashiness on the support ("may not be included") will probably inhibit development on a true replacement.
I'm not sure how old your television was, but I haven't seen a physical power switch on a TV since the 1980's. Newer models have an electronic power button so that you can turn it on manually or with the remote. If there were a physical power switch on a modern TV, switching it off would render the remote useless until you walked over to the TV to turn it on.
Customers of a feather, flock together
Google Analytics Analysed
By all of our jobs you mean individual people. Google is a company so yes, I'd agree the people that work for Google are individually responsible for managing and fixing their systems of government but "Google" itself is just a virtual entity.

While Google is not primarily an educator, I'd say Google offers a lot of educational content that, presumably, does educate people. As for roads and health care systems, well they haven't ventured there yet. ;)
If after timing your page you want to get some external confirmation I use this site frequently:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

It gives some pretty useful results when you're tuning your page because it breaks it down in to components.
Government should focus on trimming expenses instead of raising taxes.

Google's shareholders deserve part of Google's profit much more than US government.

Shifting money from government to shareholders increases likelihood of further innovations.
You're talking as if the US should receive the revenues for this foreign sourced income (notice this is out side of the USA income, not internal US income). As if google is only mountain view, CA. And as if these corporations don't contribute hugely to their headquarter country in employing tens of thousands of people who pay generously harvested income, payroll, property and other taxes and spend the majority of their money in the local economy not to mention made thousands of new local millionaires who develop their home economies even further.
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