skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ten years ago everyone talked about the burst of the Bubble, about how Microsoft would dominate the world, although Linux was growing, nobody saw it fighting for prominence in various areas, nobody saw the the prominence of Facebook in the network (or even the idea of social network), nobody saw the rise of Apple, only a small fraction saw virtualization as a game changer in the industry, the majority of players in the field were already there 10 years ago (Parallels and VMware) or came out of nowhere (Xen, Qumranet and Virtualbox).

Now the buzz is that Apple or Google will dominate, but real people are there, working anonymously in the next revolution, in the next previously unthought idea, time will come when Apple will not be so shiny, maybe 10 or 20 years from now, maybe even longer, this industry (consumer electronics and its sub-industries) have only a small history, yet there were cases of powerful companies going from heaven to hell in question of years, cases of previously anonymous players leading the directions of the industry, so I kindly disagree that Apple or Google will be the only companies in the new decade, maybe there are some unheard, powerful and new technology, but as Microsoft suffered to understand there are more things shaping the industry than just power and money.

But besides of that, you got an upvote from me.
How not to waste a white paper
Startup climate in Oxford/Cambridge?
Hey guys/girls,

I was wondering if any of you knew what Oxford and Cambridge (or anywhere else in the UK I guess) are like for startups? I graduated from Oxford about a year ago and have since moved away. I remember there being a supposedly decent society for entrepreneurs at the time but other than that I don't really know anything about the climate there for new companies.

Does anyone have experience looking for seed funding in either Oxford or Cambridge? I say those two as the company I'm interested in starting is in the area of software verification and both of those cities are pretty good hubs for academic research in that area and so seemed like perhaps good places to locate. I will probably self-fund (with a friend) for about a year but eventually some sort of seed funding will probably be necessary as I'd rather not invest too much time in consulting or other side tasks.

Cheers
Actually I think this just raises the bar - "Look, it only took 2 hours * 2 weeks to make something useful."

Now everyone who has been slaving away for >24 months to make their own end-to-end power monitoring solution feels slightly lame.

Look ma - power monitoring in only 1200 hours! (http://gridspy.co.nz)
Avoid PayPal then, with their screwed up antifraud data mining. Everybody else should be glad to process your money and take their commissions.
You're underestimating how much this store will help an indie developer like myself.
It seems whenever someone tries to come up with tangible benefits of Android's "openness" they invariably end up describing properties of the Palm Pilot, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry operating systems that have absolutely nothing to do with open source. Case in point:

> I've been pleasantly surprised at how much more
> configurable Android is. The fact that you can
> replace the home screen with a third-party launcher
> or even make your own app store is a clear sign
> that Google's heart is in the right place.

Or, it's a clear sign that Android isn't well designed and is no different than most of the other mobile devices that have appeared in the last 10 years. And if you purchase a locked-down Android device from your carrier then it literally is no different.
The new MBA does look fantastic, but I'm still pretty happy with my MBPro and iPad combination. I reserve the Pro for development work and intentionally keep all distracting applications and sites off of it (I block sites so I'm not tempted). I then use the iPad for travel and for most of my computing needs in the evenings or weekends such as browsing, reading, videos, games, etc. The MBA could fill the role well, but since I already have an iPad, I don't see myself switching or having both.
> The inverse is actually true..

Evidence?

> The people who espouse otherwise either haven't studied enough math, or more usually, haven't done that much programming.

Dijkstra? Hoare? Knuth?
"Without some support for bundle purchases, the Mac App Store won't be very useful for developers of software for a professional audience."

They generally don't need it. They don't need the infrastructure, they don't need the exposure, they don't want to give up 30% on each sale, they don't want to be limited to Apple's low-end app licensing approach.

Adobe, Matlab, Autodesk, Mathematica, these sorts of companies will continue selling the way they have been. No harm, no foul.

The App Store is for apps akin to what's on iOS. It's possible Adobe could throw a mini-Photoshop Elements on there, but they aren't going to put CS5 on the App Store.
Has anyone had any success advertising their iPhone apps? I'm disappointed MochiAds didn't yield a higher ROI. It seems like their ads could be more effective, considering they are blasted at the user, in the center of the content they are looking at.
No, they're both attacks. The original we thought was an attack, then we thought it wasn't, then we found out it was.
I get your point, its just I want the fastest processor. But not with the biggest storage.
eh, the thing is, most of the time, if you are selling, say, kingston ram, when you buy advertising, you are trying to exploit a disparity in information access. I buy lots of ram, right? I've used three grand worth of ram so far this month and have 1/3rd of that on order. I want to pay the lowest price I can for acceptable quality (usually defined as being made by one of several brands.) ram. I spend a fair amount of effort seeking out the lowest price on ram.

If you are trying to sell ram to me as a retailer, paying money to reach me is probably going to kill any margin you would get from my purchase... to sell me ram you need to be the lowest price of a particular set of brands that I can find. Getting yourself on google shopping would probably be cheaper, and it would be just as effective (maybe more effective... I assume that when I click thorough a paid add, I expect to pay a premium on the other end to pay for the cost of that click through.)

Now, if you are trying to sell ram to someone who, say, doesn't know that google shopping exists, then maybe you can charge more than google shopping and then pay money for an ad to reach that customer.

So, in general, less-savvy consumers who don't understand how to effectively price shop are far more valuable to advertisers. And reddit users usually don't fall into that 'less savvy' bucket.

Now, this is true for the majority of retailers... people who are trying to sell commodity products.

If, on the other hand, you are trying to build a brand, and you can get your add to somehow imply that you are supporting reddit, or you are part of the reddit community (and there is room for that... by buying advertising space, you are supporting reddit, even though you have selfish motives in doing so.) you can effectively leverage that to build your brand amongst those more savvy users (and more savvy users tend to have control of more resources, over time, simply because savvy users generally make better decisions.)

So yeah... if you are trying to sell ram to me as a retailer, ads are probably not going to help you. But if you are a ram manufacturer or a ram "brand" (like kingston) and you are trying to put yourself on my list of 'acceptable quality' ram vendors, then advertising on reddit could possibly help you.
The aspect I like most about this system is that it makes the traditionally nerve-racking process of fund-raising fun and exciting.
That's a perfect demonstration of the difference between epistemic induction (unprovable) and mathematical induction (provable).
Depends on the license. App store apps are limited in how they can be copied among machines, so depending on the license, a person submitting an open source app to the App Store might conceivably be violating the license. (This wouldn't be Apple violating it. It'd be the submitter.)
This geo-engineering reminds me of this article on Darwin's terraforming of some volcanic islands.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903

It is a really good idea. I wonder how well it would work.
Ironically, there is probably a very lucrative commercial market for this technology.

- Stock video/photo agencies

- Documentary production

- Augmented reality

- "Reality shows" or live broadcasts

The last one I find interesting. We've all seen the superimposed logos on sports broadcasts that project on predetermined surfaces (billboards, behind home plate, etc) but what about random shots of the crowd? Logos on hats, tee shirts and the like will probably be removed/replaced one day at the whim of sponsors.
I can see how a Dropbox-like P2P filesharing system could be beneficial for groups, but how would a P2P network benefit individuals trying to safely and securely archive personal documents?
"1) Will Lion change the software install policy to App Store only (like iOS)"

No, unless you think Autodesk wants to give Apple 30% of the $4000 price of AutoCAD for Mac on each sale.
Holy cow, it is hard to believe this was published as news to the psychology community.

There have been studies for ages showing that consumers are unhappy and stressed with too many choices. This is not news. However, what people that swear by the "limit choices" mantra fail to recognize is that this stress is endured for the benefit of providing better to one's self, family, and others. For example, as a U.S. consumer, I hate the cereal aisle. Way too many choices. But, if I can bring home something that is desired by my family or something new that might make my family more healthy or happy, I'm happy to bear the burden of a more stressful choice.

But, having more choices is not always better. Additional complexity is stressful as stated. So, you need a balance between choice and the freedom to choice what is "best".

Federal law permits people to take their phone numbers with them if they switch cell phone service. It's nice to have more flexibility- but is this really what we need?

Yes. Yes, it is. Although, I don't agree with the government always having to get involved.
Hey, I know, they could add a feature where you drag the menubar down to see the full screen app partially exposed running behind it. And the same for that app, etc. Wouldn't that be cool?

Oh wait.... :-)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workbench_(Amiga))
Great, c u all then.
In that case, you can get the right behavior by just swapping the variables using a temporary variable. If the compiler is decent, it'll automatically swap their uses later on.

I don't know how every compiler works, but if you use Clang (or anything LLVM-based), it converts everything to Single Static Assignment (SSA) form:

int x1 = 42, y1 = 666;
...
int tmp = x1; x2 = y1; y2 = tmp; // SWAP(x, y)
foo(x2, y2);

In SSA form, the value of a variable does not change, so it ends up creating a bunch of "imaginary" variables to hold intermediate values. From there, it does optimizations, then figures out how best to allocate registers, and what needs to be stack-allocated.
Would there be any way to have it verify that it can establish a Facetime connection? That'd serve the purpose of validation perfectly without needing to have people confirm their address or anything.
Influence Project Proves Online Influencers Have No Actual Influence
> It's been estimated that unnecessary interruptions, mainly facilitated by technology, cost U.S. businesses $650,000,000,000 year in lost employee time.

Lost me right there...the report it links to is even worse. The entire concept of linking the productivity of a "knowledge-worker" to dollars and hours is wrong-headed and incredibly prevalent in the IT field. You as an employer may be paying someone X dollars an hour but that's not what you are paying them for. The insights critical to writing great software, developing new analysis techniques, simplifying the network structure, what have you, cannot be codified in these terms. And just because your hands are at the keyboard doesn't mean you are doing anything, and sometimes being off work focused on something else brings a breakthrough.
I would hardly describe the implementation of the zoom button as a "core philosophy".

"But the repurposing of the "zoom" button as a full screen button may come as a bit of a shock to sosuperiourme mac purists."

You are overstating things. It's just a zoom button. I doubt many people even use it as it is currently implemented.

"basically a netbook, given the old processor, low memory and harddrive space, last generation graphics"

Apple don't compete on specs, they compete on experience, so this is all irrelevant. However you are right when you say they basically made a netbook. A small format laptop. The difference is, it's not rubbish like every other netbook.

It's typical Apple really; publicly denigrate a market sector, then release your own -- and hopefully superior-- product.
How Will The App Store For Mac Do?
Will it totally change the way Mac users do apps?
Will it be a total flop?
Will enough developers use it?
Do developers even want to use it?

What do you think?
This will probably create too much traffic on 'facetime server' or whatever apple has. Degradation on quality of video is what I expect if Facelette picks up popularity.
You're going to notice 1.4G. Anyone who has taken more than 1000 photos and has put them in iphoto is going to notice 1.4G, or actually tried to use garageband is going to notice 1.4G.
The conversation about selling Reddit was very interesting, but I definitely thought a more intriguing part was the discussion about how some startups fail in Y-combinator (not having the stamina to try a new idea, not sticking long enough with an idea that was good in the first place, etc.).
>This isn't about whether Android is open or not; it's about whether the way it is open is at all consistent with the way it's openness is marketed to end consumers.

I keep hearing this, but can you demonstrate where Google has represented Android as the product of some vibrant and continuous interplay between the wider open source community and their own engineering teams?

Interestingly enough, there's more of that going on than you're giving credit for. http://android.git.kernel.org/ isn't an iota of what it could be, but it's certainly more than an "occasional tarball of source".

Look, I think what Google is doing with the periodic drops is pretty lame - but the Android software is open. More than that, they've tried to spur on some pretty radical freedoms - like my Nexus One which they convinced HTC to provide fully unlockable: a simple command and a warning screen away. This was unthinkable not so very long ago, certainly in smart phones. Frustratingly enough, the market wasn't interested, but they tried. And may well try to keep pushing that bar forward. But you'll give them no quarter - they are damned for not reshaping things to your preferred standards in one fell swoop, they are responsible for both the hardware and the regressive policies of every idiot vendor whose usage of the platform they bless.

It's a bit overdone to say that "the openness is primarily for the benefit of handset makers and carriers who can use those tarballs". I'm interested in where you've acquired this insight into Google's treacherous true motivations, and I'm surprised to learn that it's so hard to take those "tarballs" and get them running on arbitrary hardware. That damned linux kernel, so notoriously hard to get running on variant hardware.

When you get down to it, your real problem seems to be that Android strikes a fairly neutral deal, allowing the carriers and manufacturers to keep their freedoms too. They're free to try to turn back the clock, release terribly gimped phones, and just generally be the dicks that we have always known them to be. We're free to reject it, and should.
Sorry, command. I still think of it as "open-apple."
I read this article this morning and thought, "Oh they're removing some feature I don't even know exists.", but didn't want to comment on it worrying that maybe I really do use it and it is useful.

Then after reading your comment, I went to every Group I am subscribed to through Google Groups and couldn't find a single one that had a significant number of pages or files. The only group that did seem to use the feature is an old users group that has a very outdated iCal calendar and a group hackfest project from 2006 in a tarfile.

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why should Google be forced to maintain and update a feature of one of their products that from my observation, no one uses? If anyone is a member of a group that does use this feature heavily, what kind of files and pages do you have tied to your group, and couldn't those be simply moved to a sites.google.com address?
But even failing the YC application would be a valuable learning experience - if YC won't invest in you, you'd do well to consider why.
I was laying in bed and for whatever reason it just smacked me in the face. Yes, there's a reason, and I was reminded of an anecdote regarding blackberries being served in the lobby to the press.

iChat is a presence and messaging framework that's completely ad hoc. The server frameworks don't do anything but presence and messaging.

Not so with Facetime. Apple just aimed a loaded gun at RIM, Avaya, and Ericsson today, and Facetime is the proof of concept. Verizon on the iPad was cocking the hammer. Apple has just shown the world that it has full enterprise communication stack integration from LDAP to device and more importantly the network in-between... and that network in between has a lot of control. Apple needs these guys a lot.

Submitting the protocol stack to the IETF is a win with consumers, but I'm sure that RIM, Ericsson, etc., are seeing this as spit on the face and more to the point it's probably why the guy at RIM completely lost his cool last week.

Apple is going at the enterprise in a remarkable manner, and probably the only way they could have.
It's not just them. YC has produced a good number of qualified investors at this point. ;)
Ask HN: What is the best WYSIWYG Website creator?
Probably not the best place to ask this, given I doubt the majority of the you do not use them, but what is the best WYSIWYG Website creator available?

Edit: The replies so far cover websites to do WYSIWYG creating, which is great, but I was more meaning software if that changes anything.
I was gonna read the whole article, but I got an alert on my iPhone that I got an email telling me that I got a Facebook wall post encouraging me to follow someone on Twitter.
I'm surprised they got Paul in pants -- must have been a cold day to get him to not wear shorts.
from your original comment:

> "The problem of distribution and monetization for desktop software is significant and largely unsolved."

This is a factually untrue statement. Folks have been distributing and monetizing software quite successfully at least as far back as the 80's. I personally bought software, and sold software, in the 80's. Shocking, right? In the pre-App Store era. It's not difficult actually. Has Apple made it a little bit easier, given certain assumptions and constraints? Of course. But only if in exchange for that you put up with a whole extra set of problems and Big Brother rules you have to deal with, and hurdles to jump through, and restrictions to deal with, and uncertainty around what they will or will not allow you to do. I've been creating and shipping iPhone software for about 2 years now. I've distributed and monetized software both without and before the App Store, and in the App Store. I know whereof I speak.

I find your comment rude and full of hyperbole. Statements like these are just as easily reversible and would still hold true:

> "The amount of work you simply do not have to do with Apple as your App Store distribution partner is incredible."

For example, could be reversed as: The amount of extra work and bullshit you have to put up with simply by distributing through the App Store is just incredible.

Here's another one:
> " (...) Instead of giving away a piece of software because it wouldn't bring in enough money to offset the trouble and cost of a licensing mechanism and merchant account, you can throw it onto the App Store for $5 and make a bit of cash in a few clicks."

PayPal makes it pretty darn easy to let people buy your software on the web. And however "easy" you think it is to just "throw something" in the App Store, I guarantee you it's easier to just throw something up on a web server. I can write a shell script, then with a few keystrokes push it up to a live site and my customers can get it, instantly, with no complex submission process, no rules, no fear of either the content or functionality being proactively or retroactively rejected, at any time.

I have an additive view of the world in that I think having more options is always a good thing. Does the App Store have good points? Sure, so it's great to have as an option. Are there bad things about it, and the iOS development model, and Apple's behavior/control in general? Of course. But to simply dismiss other ways of distributing software, and describe it as an unsolved problem, is clearly factually false and hyperbole. It looks at it through rose-tinted glasses, at a minimum, and arguably also with a great lack of awareness of both modern and past alternatives.
Is the mac app store going to be the only way to install apps on the mac? That'll really disappoint me.
See, they left google and facebook to build collaborative task and project management software.

The code is compiled into javascript, and the whole server side is actually written in javascript.

See more at http://www.quora.com/Server-Side-JavaScript/Does-Asana-use-s... and http://asana.com/blog/?p=21
"the report it links to is even worse"

It's Psychology Today. It's not exactly the Journal of Neuroscience. It's a half step up from Cosmo's "Ten Tricks That Will Drive Him Crazy!"
Thanks! I was hoping to hear from you on this thread. You're absolutely right, of course.

I would never have run this exploit on a production server, but considering that I didn't ask permission to do it at all, he has reason for concern! His main point was that I should at least let someone know so it is known that my purposes aren't nefarious.

Thanks for the input and giving me perspective on the situation.
It's more subtle than that: you need to discover what the current features are worth to people. You might be surprised to find that value is higher than what you would think, regardless of the number of features... As for the psychology of it, people are ok with paying less for something that used to cost more, but the opposite situation can create resentment.

Very, very good points, thank you again! Wow, it looks like I've got some thinking to do.

Anyway, the gist of it was: at too low a price (e.g., $1, $2) people just don't bother getting out their credit card to pay for something.

Hmm... interesting. Thanks, I'll look into this.
It's not too likely. It was a feature of the previous Airs, so I'm guessing they removed it for some reason going forward (features removed rarely return).
I don't really know why, but I always listen to some 90's music when I code. Third Eye Blind, Barenaked Ladies, Goo Goo Dolls, things like that.I just get in the zone when I have a good 90's playlist going on Pandora.
USGBC Sued Over LEED Program
Usually no music at all. I work best when it's quiet and peaceful, that's why I love getting up at 6am.

When I need a bit of noise I usually hit SomaFM. They have lots of great stations for coding, I recommend Mission Control, Drone Zone or Space Station Soma.

http://somafm.com/
Thanks for clarifying...I wasn't sure if it was 2 attacks, which makes more sense, or just a random downtime and THEN a real attack...