skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The post links to a Microsoft Document titled: "The Economics of the Cloud". The original link is .XPS (which you might not have a viewer for).

I have converted to .pdf and uploaded here:
http://thinkst.com/stuff/notmines/The-Economics-of-the-Cloud...
Congratulations on being the only person in this thread with two feet on the ground. Interesting discussion, nonetheless. But purely academic.
They have if they are allowed to define "major," which here they obviously think they are.
Steve Jobs speech at Stanford from 2005
Serfing the web: who owns your online identity?
I equate inexpensive with a cost. Am I misunderstanding something here? CentOS is a free distro.
I guess when it comes down to it, Google makes its money by search. For search on TVs to work, they need to get people typing search keywords. Hence keyboards.
As a bytecode you wouldn't use a bytecode that is targeted at handling Javascript constructs.

So now you're asking the browsers to support two different VMs; one for JS and another one. Standardizing bytecode for JS (perhaps based on the existing Nitro or JagerMonkey bytecode) would be much less work.
How To Search Using The Awk Utility
Jobs is cleverly using sample bias in Apple's favor for PR reasons here (though perhaps unintentionally). If someone emails Steve and doesn't hear back, they presumably don't write a blog post about it. Yet I suspect you're highly likely to hear about it when someone does get a reply, especially a phone call.

As a CEO you could probably make your customers think you care just by responding to .01% of emails or something like that. If all you have to do is call one guy every few weeks and tell him the same thing your underlings already told him to get this sort of coverage it's probably well worth the time.
Google's working on that: http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf

(Edit: I see that several other people already mentioned PNaCl further down in the thread. A hazard of HN's sorting, I guess.)
Commissioner Kroes: Copyright Reform Needed
I think what worries me most about the Joojoo is how Chandra puts a positive spin on everything that happens. iPad came out? Oh that's okay, we think the cloud will work (not a convincing argument). Oh so little sales? Not to worry - we have higher adoption in Europe (doesn't matter in the long run). We're shutting down Joojoo (but don't worry - we've got more VC funding, learnt from our mistakes, and are going to release a whole new stack of Android-based devices!)

While I think Chandra is a nice guy, I'm beginning to question his ability to see things as it is. He's done two startups now, both with near zero traction.

A constant positive spin on everything, an inability to see or create unique value propositions (they are one product cycle behind their competitors - two if you're talking about the iPad) and you've got one hell of a sticky situation.

I support the Singaporean startup scene, I do. But I'm beginning to worry at what this says about us.
As per the first comment at the site, an actual article: http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/top-stories/506872/twitter-bom...
My favorite of his short stories on the subject, Printcrime: http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...
Except that Search _is_ the answer to what we need on a TV right now. Whenever I fire mine up right now, I either want to go to a specific channel, find if a particular program is playing right now, browse a category of programs, or access my existing digital library. Existing remotes, including Apple's minimalistic design, are worthless for doing this. It might look sleek and thin, but it's probably the worst user experience for getting to what I want right now. I don't want to have to press arrow keys a hundred times over through menu after menu after menu to get to the show that I want to watch.

GoogleTV's remotes let me do that. A few button presses and I'm instantly where I want to be. While Apple's product design strategy is elegance over any and all costs, with Google I can get shit done. And that's all I care about at the end of the day, not how pretty my remote looks when I'm using it.
Ryan Singer (37signals) on How to Design from Scratch
> canopy support structs popped

Do you program often?
No, it wouldn't help at all: let me point to the overwhelming success of standards (XML, HTML, Javascript, CSS, Postscript) that are character-based.

Think of Javascript as a (human-readable) virtual machine layer itself, below which the implementation is free to do as it pleases as long as it meets the JS standard semantics.
The WSJ headline underscores the opportunity and the article perfectly explains it - Facebook is completely non-agressive in how they're monetizing their ad inventory.

The fact that they are printing money with tiled CPC ads is crazy, the day that they switch to agressive pursuit of that inventory, start leveraging user data, etc . . . wow, I can't even compute.

Do not believe people who tell you that social media inventory isn't worth as much as other types of display - I know more than a handful of people that are seeing 3 - 4x returns on Facebook's platform which suggests that FB is UNDER charging for inventory, and that's with an essentially weak platform.

It reminds me of the good old days of Overture, early Google AdWords, etc.

Facebook is spot-on to be doing what they're doing: keep build market share over all else - I actually believe Zuck is trying to keep their ad-platform "non evil", but oncethey go public it's going to be a different game.
Self and V8 are connected through Lars Bak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer)
WWAMD? Or What Would A Millennial Do?
Many things have been written about the millennial generation. They have been labeled everything from entitled slackers to tech savvy, new media socialites. They are highly creative but easily distracted, media savvy yet brand receptive. No other demographic is primed for the web like the millennial generation, and no other generation has influenced it more. Oh, and they like to share.
With a cofounder. He is in charge of business, I do the coding.
Apple's iAd system seeks to mitigate some of these things. The ad content is downloaded separately by the device so there's no network loading time, and hitting the home button takes you back to the exact same place in the app you had been in rather than back to the home screen like every other instance of hitting the home button (much to the consternation of some who highly value consistency). And, they only have ads that are highly interactive and "interesting", going so far as to do the production themselves on all of them to date, afaik. So at least if you see an ad for something you're interested in and it says "iAd" on the side, you'll know that by tapping on it you'll be getting something that's made for a small screen and probably has some decent content, not just a bigger version of the ad.

I certainly agree with you, though: I don't tend to click ads on my computer, I certainly am not going to tap them on my phone. But, I suppose somebody does click them on the web so... maybe those same folks tap them on their phones?
"Worse is better." (Google it.)

Javascript is a good enough (New Jersey-style) solution.

Why "fix" it?
Kinect and your kids: What works, what won't
libfreenect has been hacked on a bit to work on OS X; http://vimeo.com/16734124 for a demo + link to the code.
I really really want to buy one of these now just to write python APIs for it. Anyone else interested in that?
Apigee API Console for LinkedIn, PayPal, Foursquare, Twilio and SoundCloud APIs
so facebook / basecamp for the EE crowd?
To be clear, CentOS: Free. RHEL: +3 cents/hr.

He just worded it poorly.
Wow, that picture and video linked to the article is fantastic. I actually never heard about how the Kinect worked, but once you see that you really get it. I'm a lot more impressed now that I know about the hardware details!
Read up on IR35 as well

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/leaflets/guide_limitcomp.htm

Read through those questions and ensure you have a setup which does allow you to work through a ltd company
I find Lua depressing and Javascript exciting. So where does that leave us?

If it's all a matter of taste as to what's desirable in a "mature" language, your argument doesn't go very far.
"Let us know about your technical background and interests and why you'd like to join."

You tell me, why would I like to join? This sentence strikes my as having slightly the wrong tone. You should be selling me about how great this site is going to be and why I should keep coming back
The humble programmer...
Azul's Vega isn't really a Java processor; it's a generic RISC with a hardware-assisted read barrier.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cook_home
AppEngine claims to provide enough free bandwidth for ~5 million pageviews/month. Did you hit that limit from just this HN post?
You would think changing passwords every month is more secure, when in fact is much less secure for the reasons he explained.

People tend to get tired of remembering passwords so they write it down on a post-it and stick it on the monitor.

How is that for secure?
A bit OT, but I'm wondering about this sentence/typo:

> The caller-id, the caller saying “Ram, this is Steve” and that he was calling from Apple did suggest that it could really be Steve Jobs.

At first I interpreted this to mean that if you get a call from Steve or Apple that they have a custom caller ID display on any iPhone which would be kind of cool and would help validate to the receiver that it is indeed an official Steve/Apple call.

Now I realize this is probably just a typo, but I'm still wondering how the author knew that the call was actually from Apple as he implies.
He said

> I have a whitelist (a list of friends) that sets who has access to my wall.
> Our site includes an online toolbox, daily featured sections, community driven articles and projects, and custom engineer profiles where you can follow other engineers based on your interest tags.

Do many people in other disciplines do something like this? Serious question - where are some examples?
There might be an upper limit on the speed of the language itself, but what has a lot more room for improvement is speed of DOM operations and DOM rendering. Since you could involve all kinds of fancy graphics hardware acceleration in that, as IE9 is purported to do, there's a lot more to be done there.

Most JS developers agree now that the slowest operations are DOM operations so they are avoided as much as possible.
Breaking Breaking News
He worked on Beta / Mjølner, too. Neat!
I think Netflix solves this problem nicely. You use a computer to add things to a queue and then a remote to browse through the queue.
...and then your mind immediately rejects the whole idea. ;-)
I'm pretty excited about 'Seven Languages in Seven Weeks'. Just waiting for the Kindle edition to release.
You know that giddy feeling you get when you think you've struck it gold with a genius idea only for that excitement to settle after you've given it a bit more thought? Yeah, well, it's that same feeling people get when they tag all their friends in a bunch of photos, or post something inappropriately on someone's wall; and once it is up in the public's eye, they feel it'd look cowardly of them to retract whatever statement they might've made. So with a feature like that, you're essentially stalling the entire posting process and increasing the chance of people engaging their filters to assess whether a specific post would be appropriate for their world to see. If I know that the pictures I just uploaded won't all be up for everyone to see instantaneously, and that so-and-so will have a chance to filter through the pictures before they're posted, I'd likely not be as excited about posting stuff and I'd actually start posting less. You're basically putting a kink in the hose.

If you've noticed, after all the privacy features Facebook has implemented, not one of them involves moderating the brain -> screen process. I may be reading too much into this all, but I do have a feeling that Facebook understands social dynamics and pressures extremely well and places its users in positions where they will almost always choose the decision to benefit Facebook. For instance, you want to be 'friends' with both acquaintances and friends, and so both groups have the ability to post on your wall. You could block those who you feel may say inappropriate things, but that is a burden and they'll likely find out. So what's your next option? Not allowing anyone to post on your wall. But then you'll seem cold and unsocial. So you'll likely choose to keep your wall open for posts.

People tend to hate on Facebook, but I think they are psychological masterminds.
Nothing was easy or pretty with Netscape 4. Zarro boogs found my arse!
Exactly, I just added a screenshot of my profile page.

http://www.eeweb.com/pics/site/eeweb2.png
I'm mostly thinking about how many of the problems highlighted in "Javscript: The Good Parts" have been fixed in Lua, while Javascript can't be fixed. Not a matter of design and taste, but outright bugs.
I did as well. It sounded exactly like Steve Jobs. At the time, I didn't know what Steve Jobs sounded like so it didn't quite click until I saw one of his keynotes. He even gave me his direct line to call him back regarding one of my apps. I called him back and left him a message. I'm half tempted to dig up my cell phone records and find the number so that I can listen to his answering-message. But I would think Steve Jobs would have a secretary answering his phone? Don't you? So maybe it wasn't him.
BUT APPLE TV WON"T PLAY OGG VORBIS

:-P
Got it. Thanks Steve.
Yep, sophisticated implementations try to infer the patterns in which objects occur and then dynamically generate classes for them. However this is not without problems, because if you assign to a new slot then you need to change the object's class, it needs to gracefully degrade to when the objects are used as hash tables, etc.

LLVM IL would be excellent for speed. The problem is that it's not memory safe (i.e. it allows reading and writing to arbitrary memory locations). NativeClient at Google is trying to solve that. http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/
Looking at the datasheet for the PrimeSense reference system that Microsoft used, it does mention a "registration image" and a laser:

http://www.primesense.com/?p=514
true. I should have written "Plus, it came as a _less_ expensive option with Rackspace. :)"

Aaron Longnion
Founder of Refynr.com
Reflections on Trusting Trust
LLVM is really how NaCl should be done anyway. The idea of compiling your Web app for a physical hardware architecture is completely backwards, particularly now that there are two families in wide use among consumers.
I used to be a die-hard firefox user and I also used to write extensions for it for fun and professionally as well. I always say it's the only browser that I've read the source code for.(well, some of it at least)

The thing that bugged me with FF3 was that it never seemed to reclaim the memory that the tabs were using after being closed. I noticed that when you have say >20 tabs open. I often had to save my tabs and kill FF so that it doesn't bog down my system.

Now I'm using chrome which still is not perfect especially when you have say gmail and gmaps open and several other tabs. But killing the tabs does seem to make the app snappier again.
Isn't it fairly well known that Steve used to code, but hasn't since like the 80s? He dabbled with it, but decided that it wasn't his strong point?

Or am I just making that up entirely? Sounds like something buried in folklore.org somewhere...
Yes! I agree completely with this. I was just trying to do an image search on google earlier today and it drove me nuts having to hover over each image to see the size and then get shunted off to some weird ajax light box display after finally picking one.

It was bad enough that I abandoned the google search and went to baidu, which was actually the more minimalist option for once.
The infographic they post in the article with the layered area chart is slightly misleading...it makes it look like Google's share is the smallest if you take a quick glance and don't stop to think about it. It took me a minute to realize that Yahoo's share wasn't actually larger than Google's, according to that graph. They should have used a stacked chart instead, which would have underscored the tiny share Facebook has, relative to the big guys.
I'm in an intro-to-python course right and we're working through Think Python. (It's free online: http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/ )

I've found the exercises really fun and easy to get motivated about. I can't speak about a whole progression path, but this book would be a good stepping stone in anyone's progression path.
I understand that money is ultimately the answer to my question... however...

Why haven't Microsoft or Sony, or better yet some video game maker we've never heard of, realized that building a platform to encourage "hacking" would make a lot of money. If Apple's App store has thought us anything it's that people want to be engaged on a deep level with devices such as video game consoles.

I must be missing something.
Good point. This invite page was originally setup to screen our beta testers. We wanted to make sure we courted the right type of person.
I love reading Cutts and I love my Kinect and would love to see exactly what he is asking for, however if a well known MS engineer conducted a contest on discovering/emulating the software* behind Google's search appliance, do you think it would be met with embrace or venom by the HN community?
This is why it's a good idea to at least skim the article rather than just reading the HN headline before commenting.
There are quite a few instances blogged about online where Steve actually replied to someone's email or called them back about an issue.
Six months old and only three hundred users, what's wrong?
I opened up shop a little over six months ago and as of today we sit around 300 users. I'm a single founder of a web site called TheMovieTracker.com and although we've had steady increase in usage (very gradual but not downward) it hasn't really taken hold. I'm also aware that it's in a very competitive segment, but that doesn't keep a lot of site from doing much better that I've been doing. Any thoughts, words of encouragement, criticisms, trolling or otherwise for me to keep my spirits up?
> Wired represents the tech community in a sense, so I feel it reflects on me a bit what they do.

Nope. Wired is an attempt to attract eyeballs to advertisements.

If you think that Wired represents you, great. If not, that's great too. Either way, that's your decision, not wired's.
This is an amazing solution, but the original question asked for the "optimal" solution. How can we be sure that this solution is the optimal solution? Is there a way to prove that no better solution can exist?

Edit: apparently there is a proof of optimality, mentioned here: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/31499/100-prisoners-100-bo...
Exactly. Not to mention 'enthusiests' in the very first sentence, and links to content that aren't actually links.

Why would I want to type not only my contact info, but my life story into a site that looks like a sign-up form for a spam list?
Bit of a conflict of interest coming from MSN.com, don't you think?
hunchentoot_stop ()
{
echo -n "Stopping Lisp Hunchentoot Server process..."
echo ""

# 6200 is the port to signal end of lisp process
(telnet 127.0.0.1 6200 &) > /dev/null
(sleep 7)
}

Surely, there must be a better alternative for shutting down the process. Telnet? Really?
Fucking bay area man. It never even thunders here. I've been here two years and already I'm a wuss like everybody else. I'm sick of complaining how hot it is when it hits 80 and how cold it is when it hits 65, and how it's raining when there's just a thick mist in the air.
Spaceballs reference? Ludicrous speed!

Colonel Sandurz: We can't stop, it's too dangerous! We have to slow down first! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/quotes

Google and the Spaceballs seem to have a lot in common.
This is kind of ridiculous. I do want to be searching on my TV. That's why I have a computer hooked up to it with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Just because Apple designed a product that fits your needs doesn't mean that it fits everyone's.

Statements like "Apple thought about the entire experience, and realized people don't want to search on their TV and left it out" are offensively condescending and give Apple too much credit. Building any product requires making assumptions. So far Apple has happened to be right with many of theirs, and for that they deserve a ton of credit. But the fact of the matter is that the Apple TV obviously doesn't meet very many people's needs, otherwise it would have sold better.

I think Google deserves some credit for trying a different approach, based on different assumptions. Proclaiming it DOA because the remotes look complicated is more than a little short-sighted.

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." This can go the other way too you know, and might turn out to be just as ridiculous: "No hulu.com. Clunky remote. Lame."
It's not as easy as it sounds - if you're admin for a Facebook page, you probably need somebody to be a secondary admin to regain your admin later:

"You're the only person managing the group below. When you deactivate your account, any groups with the "open" privacy setting will no longer be editable. We recommend changing the group privacy to "closed" to allow any group member to become an admin. To choose your own admin replacements, click edit next to each group's name."

Facebook will also prompt you about your apps:

"Note: You are listed as the only developer for the following Platform applications. You must either delete or transfer ownership of them before deactivating. Also, even though at least one of the applications listed below were created on behalf of a Facebook Page, this will only delete the application, not the Facebook Page."
Okay, but how do you _write_ with the Apple remote?

The article doesn't compare like-for-like. It's not a fair comparison.
Agree with the many other people commenting here that the article was full of nonsense. And the idea that these changes spell "Google's inevitable ruin" is pretty hilarious.

That said, I do hate the changes. I found the old image search far nicer to use. The most important negative change is that when looking for an image, I like to open up multiple options in new tabs, sort of making a shortlist from which to chose from later. To do this I, while scanning the images, click on ones of interest with my middle mouse button. With the new version of Google images, the images don't become actual hyperlinks until you have hovered over them for about a second, so there's a considerable delay when trying to open multiple images in new tabs quickly.

I also dislike the live results stuff, I'm not sure if there's any specific reason or just because I'm used to the traditional method - I haven't actually used it nearly enough to know if I'd get used to it, given the chance. I use https://encrypted.google.com, which hasn't rolled out that feature, thankfully. (Possibly my issue is this: I'm a very fast typer, so I can complete my exact search query without it taking noticeably longer than completing half of my query, and it's therefore more efficient to wait until I get the most accurate results, rather than hoping that a less accurate search will have found what I'm looking for.)
Just when I was going to sell my Google stock, Dvorak goes and pays it his highest complement. Guess I'll wait a few more months...
13.2% of boys now diagnosed with ADHD, up 21.8% in 4 years