skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's actually a very difficult space to compete in. Having worked on major desktop-related infrastructure for a major linux distro, I've got real experience on this one. It's a decidedly non-trivial task.

Back when linux was "cool" (when was this? Late 90's?) only geeks tried it. Some stuck with it, others went to OSX, like yourself. Most people, during this time, managed to hear the word linux, but didn't really know what it was. Consequently, they didn't try it. This mythical time when everyone and their grandmother was trying Linux just didn't happen. But just because Free Software didn't work for you back then doesn't mean it failed.

Mac OS, by my standards, failed miserably. Totally. Utterly. So I went to Linux. This was pre-OSX, when Apple was a company that had totally lost its way and was getting demolished by Microsoft. Pretty much everyone said that the Macintosh and Apple had failed and their days were numbered. Now things are different because Apple didn't stop. They never really failed you see, they just kept going. The Free Software community is doing much the same, and I'd be surprised if we're in the same place in another ten years.

Just because something is not meeting your specific needs right now doesn't mean it's failed. Given the enormous progress I've seen over the past ten or so years I think it's fair to say quite the opposite. You actually have a choice to run Linux today where that wasn't really an option a decade ago. If that's failure, then you have a strange definition of failure.
Savor this day, my friend. You will never get another opportunity to be as succinctly clever. I am jealous.
No PG comment. Too busy already?!
I'm pretty sure that the government will not let this become mainstream. There's always a way to combat a site.
I use Rhapsody + FairUse4WM.
In Microsoftland, F# is pretty nice.
I don't think the record labels as we know them now will survive even with copyright protection. As I said in an earlier post, funding will be provided by LiveNation and other live event promoters, who will use them as advertisements for the live shows.
It's a blog sir.
Ada never caught on as a general purpose programming language, but a subset of it lives on in PL/SQL, the embedded language in Oracle. It's not the most flexible or elegant language, but it's easy enough to learn and extremely reliable. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job. Sure you can run C in-process with your database, but unless you really, really have to it's a bit pointless to risk i.
Sorry for the thread hijack, but I'm curious about people's use of monitors as tv replacements. I don't have a tv - instead my second monitor has hdmi input, and I use that for my very infrequent tv watching. I think that the quality of the image isn't all that it should or could be, and wondering if other people have found ways to get better quality HD on a computer monitor.
Getting money for digital content distribution is an excellent value proposition for music makers. You need to show up at each, err, show. You only need to upload files into a distribution engine once, then every person on the planet can buy them.
Matt didn't get the viacom / youtube thing right. The DMCA provides a certain copyright-related safe harbor to online service providers, not just ISPs as he states. It is far from clear that youtube violated copyrights (that is the point of the litigation after all).

see: http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/03/viacom_v_youtube.html
I developed Eureka Science News (http//esciencenews.com) completely under Windows (using WAMP). Be sure to backup everything often though, catching a nasty machine-disabling adware on your dev box a week prior launch can be stressful (been there, alas)
I can see how to do it via a custom-crafted URL, but not in the interface...
Free content is often free because people understand the the increased eyes and ears on content will make up for it being free. Only a fraction of your audience will pay, but your audience is probably orders of magnitude larger if free vs. gated by a pay wall.
Historically the indexing factor is tied to the amount and authority of a domains inbound links. Not all sites will get the results yielded on this domain.
I can't speak to Perl, but PHP and MySQL are bone dead easy on Windows.
You should follow the Pirate Bay. They've been very good at avoiding arrest.

Making a sea-steading country is also a good solution. If your servers live there, and can connect to everyone else, it will work.
I've read in a number of places (and this may be incorrect) that YouTube loses safe harbor by converting the videos from one format to another. Mark Cuban said that for one, and he has paid entertainment lawyers on staff.
Why I won't learn Perl (voluntarily)
You mean like Pearl Jam's distribution and sale of their concert recordings? It's a great idea. I wish Radiohead would do the same thing. I'm actually surprised they haven't, since they definitely like extra opportunities to make money. Probably they haven't thought about it.
Yet you deny that anyone can be as masterful at managing and making computer systems work together as a professional violinist, and then claim that 'these people' have bias against everyone else. You also falsely state anyone can become a sysadmin in 6 months, ignoring the fact that the best sysadmins are ones that started in their teens and have mastered their field, just like classical musicians! Are you sure you aren't the one with a bias?

You are implying that art is somehow better than science and engineering! People can be good at something no matter what it is they are doing! They can hone a skill or perfect a craft or master a field of anything! At least realize your bias!
The Google IPO event of the nonprofit world
Of course, it just remains to be seen if this can be accomplished. Studies have clearly shown in many occasions that humans will generally not pay for something they can get for free. In fact, we'll incur a ridiculous amount of cost just to get something for "free".

A few weeks ago, Papa Johns locations in north east Ohio gave away free pizzas worth about $5. People stood outside in the 45 degree weather, with rain, for 2 hours to get that pizza.
Provocative article. But I don't think the fact that book publishers price ebooks and paper books the same is about protecting printing plants. It's actually about protecting a distribution advantage, which is a core part of the publishing business.

The Amazon kindle is a grab at the book distribution business. Amazon's goal seems to be making the Kindle like iTunes+iPod for books. With iTunes, music publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on a single store for a major chunk of their sales. It's plausible that one day soon, iTunes will have serious leverage in promoting songs and shaping the tastes of music consumers. Needless to say, this would be extremely painful for the studios.

Similarly, if Amazon can help you find the books you want, and sell them to you, and deliver them to you, what value do publishers add at all? Publishers deliver value by selecting, developing, and promoting books. If the captive Kindle audience gets big enough, what is left to publishers? Copy edit a book and wholesale it to Amazon? That may be a business but it's not publishing as we know it today; the margins are vastly smaller.

Owning the distribution channel would be tremendously lucrative, which is why Amazon is happy taking a loss on each Kindle book they sell. The publishers are justified in fearing it, but they'd be better served by developing a Kindle alternative that makes both them and their end users happy than sitting on their hands and pretending nothing's changing.
Try it. What have you got to lose?

A good rule of thumb is that if you want your company to have revenue, you should require regular payment (make money while you gain traction, then sell or continue). If you want to have as many users as possible, you should make your application free (gain traction, investment, then sell or start charging). And if you want to optimize towards the fewest users, least revenue, and exude the least confidence to users, investors, and the media, and guarantee you'll be an employee of your existing company for another couple of years, have a donation system.

Soon you will find that as many people pay $2-$5 as those who would be willing to pay $30, if $30 was a standard price. If your goal is to minimize the amount of revenue your startup makes while making your users feel guilty while using your app, this is a great way to do it.

But give it a try. By the way, the reason Wikipedia has a donation system instead of a subscription system is because a subscription system would not make any sense to its mission and the licensing of the data, as well as tick every contributor off. In other words, it's a last resort for a company that already has traction but needs to remain free and cannot place third party ads on their product.
rents go up from year to year.
And we expanded in the existing space.
Revenues increased about 17x in five years.
:tabnew
is mine.
For the last 8 years, I've been developing LAMP projects on Windows and deploying on Linux. I don't have any trouble with PHP extensions nor do I have to change any code to deploy on Linux.
It's much different for established bands. But yeah, that is awesome. Pearl Jam has been very innovative ever since they took on Ticketmaster in the 90's.
because helping kids in the third world is suddenly not important if it's not gonna help promoting your relgion

Now you're just being retarded and resorting to name-calling (see what I did there?). I write both Open Source and proprietary software, and I have no religion.

You've already shown yourself to have a deep misunderstanding of Open Source, and its community. You've also shown a willingness to erect straw men and hold up single individuals as representative of an extremely diverse group of people. And, you've shown a profound lack of comprehension of how far Open Source has worked its way into every aspect of human technical activity, and how it continues to grow.

Your article may have been interesting and mildly believable ten years ago (and I remember reading lots of similar arguments back then, and they were a little worrisome to those of us in the Open Source community), but today it just exhibits an extremely limited view of the technology industry and where Open Source fits within it (where==just about everywhere).

In short, you're not a credible witness, and you become aggressive when someone calls you on your weak arguments.
I knew that there are many datacenters, but I expected them to be more or less in sync. However, the results have been totally different for many hours today, and are still only half the same.
I've only ever used monitors driven by a PC playing video, not from some other video source, but for those scenarios I've not had any trouble.

The problem with other video sources is that the HDTV timings aren't what a monitor will usually get from a PC. This is particularly problematic in PAL-land, as 50Hz are unheard of on PC monitors, although I wouldn't be surprised if the NTSC "not-quite-60-Hz" caused havoc in the monitor circuitry. Of course, the reverse situation is just as bad. TVs expect TV timings on their HDMI inputs, they'll do overscan trimming, etc.
New Entrepreneurial Forum launched - get connected in Orange County
Ha, sea-steading still seems a little out there. They still have to connect to everyone else through an actual country.

I don't know how TPB has lasted as long as they have. It is impressive.
But it's not OOP's fault, and to the degree that Microsoft had to release something early (in order to support their Win32 framework) and keep supporting it -- it's not their fault either.

You can go with a lightweight (?!?!) framework around your API, a la MFC, or more of a true framework, like OWL. But in either case, comparing a what? 12-year old framework system with something more recent isn't exactly apples and apples.

I'm not trying to make excuses but heck, the whole reason we grow new frameworks is because old ones get too bloated and brittle.

Rock on with Boost, but don't compare apples and oranges. Maybe it's me, but professionals are supposed to know the hard-to-use crap and should be able to swim around in that stuff like a fish in water.

Hey -- just my two cents. No matter how you cut it, C++ is a killer language when it comes to complexity -- and that's without the freaking frameworks!
In my experience, TVs are terrible for displaying anything but video. Driving a TV from a computer can be problematic for a variety of reasons: signal timings, available resolutions, overscan, etc.

You'd think that with HDMI being essentially the same as DVI (leaving aside audio and such) we'd be rid of this issue, but no, it's been dragged into the HD era too.

Personally, I've had the best results with the VGA (analog! gasp!) inputs on TVs that have them. Basically nothing apart from computers provide VGA signals, so the TV knows what to expect. This avoids overscan, running at the native panel resolution, etc. I realise that for something as high as 1920x1080 this might not give decent results, but I would check in the specs if your TV's panel REALLY has that resolution. I've seen all sorts of weird resolutions in TVs.
The EEEPC (and other linux-based low-cost PCs) success is a positive indicator that Linux can make it. Sure, some "geeks" will install XP on EEEPC, but for the most part, people are using Linux on it.

I bet you haven't used any Linux in years. It's changed... alot.
In the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter... nice recursion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

is also relevant.

Pricing information services is hard, however since you are usually able to segregate your market into people who will pay little and use little and people who will use lots and pay lots; you can usually find some feature set that casual users will want but not be willing to pay for.
I have a 42" plasma TV hooked up to a Windows computer and Mac Mini. I use it for playing games and watching movies.

At 'couch distance' (~10 feet), normal size (10-12 pt) text is pretty much too small to read. I have 20-20 vision. 16-18 is readable, but my eyes get tired of it after a few hours of following chat on WoW.

I had no problems with crispness of image or anything of that nature.

Granted, I'm talking 10 feet and you're asking about 4, so... grain of salt.

Also, in my not so honest opinion, things you stare at all day are not things you want to go cheap on. Buy a decent TV if you buy one. If you have the time, find a model you like then set up alerts on FatWallet.com to tell you when one's on sale. I did that for my TV and got it (new) for $1000 (it's $1700 normally).

If you want an actual data point at 4 feet away from a 42" TV, I can pull a chair up to 4' away tonight and use the TV instead of my laptop. Just ask.
Yeah, people like free too much, irrationally so. Chipotle in Cambridge gave away free burritos (worth $6), and the line was over an hour long.

That said, I don't think this spells doom for micropayments. A successful "donations" model is Ben & Jerry's Free Cone day - a not-insignificant fraction of people donate to help various causes. I'd be interested to see statistics on this.
Oh, neat. I didn't know you'd implemented RSS feeds.
My girlfriend bought a 46" Sharp Aquos LCD 1080p TV a few weeks ago, and I built her an HTPC to drive it. It's a tolerable monitor, but only for games (for which it rules) and movies (also awesome). Since it's the only Windows machine in the house, I use it for testing our UI with IE, and even briefly using it for development it is apparent that this is not the ideal workstation monitor.

And on the Costco front, we checked out their stock, and they didn't have any of the models we liked. We were mainly shopping for the high end Sharp models, as most of the rest of the LCDs we looked at were a bit blocky in high movement scenes. The Sharp also had a better contrast ratio, 10000:1, than almost all of the other LCDs, which leads to clearly deeper blacks. We found a great deal on the model we wanted at BeachAudio.com (we'd intended to buy the 42", but the 46" was gonna be about the same price). Even shipped, it was about $250 cheaper than buying locally.
That's what the "less" implies, though, isn't it? "n times less" always means 1/n times as much (i.e., smaller by a factor of n).
They still have to connect to everyone else through an actual country.

I'm not sure if you were meaning "connect" physically, but of course there's always satellites, and other non-physical ways to connect.
"My position is that it’s bad to criminalize natural behavior."

Violence is natural. It must be wrong to criminalize it.
If The Pirate Bay can just get three or four satellites up there, we'll all be set, at least until the US shoots them down.

Realistically though, satellite internet is just too expensive bandwidth wise for it to work for the Pirate Bay.
Regardless of what the law says, this doesn't make sense.

An automated process blindly converts video from one format into another, and the company hosting the video suddenly has a duty to examine each and every video to look for potential infringements? I don't see how that follows at all.

Of course much of this law is untested, so any lawyer who makes claims about this is most likely just telling you what he thinks he can make a court believe.
How Good is Avast Anti-Virus? | Tech Jaws
Exactly. Linux is about flexibility. However, for the end user (and unless I read this article completely wrong, the article discusses software aimed at these people) to get something set up exactly how they want it, Linux doesn't make this an easy task to do quite yet. Like you said yourself, there's distro's aimed at different tasks.

Ideally (to me), some distro could have website that could autodetect hardware and have a bunch of {check, drop down, radial} boxes for software to put on it. (Want Fusion? OpenOffice? Gnome or KDE or XFCE or so on? How much information to see? Everything/Quick blurb/Errors only/Whatever else? Hell, if its for the end user, let them upload their own desktop background to use right away. Little things are important too) The site would then customize the distro and create the iso as needed for the individual.

That would in itself go a long way to creating a usable customizable OS that does what people want instead of trying to guess what they want and create yet another variation within the sea of distros. But, such a thing hasn't happened yet for a variety of reasons.

Just because I can customize a {Gentoo, Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, etc} install to be exactly how I need it, doesn't mean my neighbor who "heard about this lunix thing" can do the same.

"Different target market."
Which one are you discussing? And is it the same one as I am? I'm talking about end users.
IT vs HipHop who's really "Got Money"?
Microsoft makes software for Macs too, you know. In fact, Microsoft has a Mac business unit.
No one disputes that humans can live and work in slummy conditions, but that doesn't mean we should. We could also raise families in one-room homes with seven ft. ceilings. That would suck though.

A desire to shape our environment to be aesthetically pleasing is not a human defect that needs to be transcended: it's a natural desire that fulfilled improves our lives. (Example: it's been shown that higher ceilings increase creative problem solving: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/519146)

You speak as if you've taken the better side in the case of form vs. function. But just like we're wary of people obsessed with form over function I think we should be wary of praising function and degrading the importance form.
This doesn't scare me. What scares me are tools like PPI. I don't want tools touching my source code. I want a language that makes those tools unnecessary. (Lisp and Perl6 qualify. I don't need my editor to type code for me; I can write language constructs that eliminate that need. Actually, I can do this rather effectively in Perl 5, too.)
Faster Markdown with Ruby (59x faster than BlueCloth)
Ryan Tomayko has released some nice replacements for the aging (and slow) BlueCloth.
You quoted that-- sorry if this is a dumb question, but where did you find that information?

Thanks in advance.
Auto-blogging software… AKA “Splogs” are a bad idea
I think Charles Oliver Nutter did an excellent job parsing Maglev's numbers:

http://headius.blogspot.com/2008/06/maglev.html
I've seen some blog posts indexed within 2 minutes. A lot of people have reported sub-5-minute indexing. 20-40min is good and the most common time frame in my experience and from what I understand from other people.

Ultra-fast indexing depends on posting just before the crawler hits the index page. A lot of luck is involved to catch the crawler like that.
Funny, but painful to watch.
At home I use my old Mac workstation as a media/internet server and have it plugged straight into my HDTV as the monitor. I use Teleport for controlling mouse / keyboard on the workstation from my laptop instead of running cables.

I don't think I'd want to run my HDTV as often or as long as I have my laptop open (which is 18-24 hrs/day). I still prefer a dedicated 2nd monitor (which I have at the studio).
New Hire Checklist
Going Medieval: Time-Warner Begins Metered Bandwidth Testing
Very few people suggest that you should never take on technical debt. But you should consciously choose to do it and there should be a reason, just like there has to be a reason for financial debt.
I can't remember if this has come up before, but what is the best resource for learning how to hire people?
Agreed. And I recommend Notepad++ for text editor
The historical evidence contradicts Matt Maroon's assertion, conventionally held by corporate intellectual monopolists, that copyrights "incent" [sic] creativity. See Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly for a detailed discussion.
Sweet, now we have a direct feed from the trading floor right into the caffein-encrusted twitchy fingers of the nervous financial bloggers. How can we work Twitter in here someplace so that the breathless realtime apocalypse will be complete?
Video Interview: PG on YC and New England VCs
Companion piece to Scott Kirsner's column
I couldn't resist checking:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22How+long+will+it+take+fo...

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%22How+long+will+it+ta...

http://www.alexa.com/search?q=%22How%20long%20will%20it%20ta...

All duds for now.
If I imbeded the search result in a third webpage and then googled that page...woo, makes my head hurt.
Google is impressive, that's for sure.
Wrong story perhaps?
The Case Against Micropayments
A tribute to (jl + pg)
Common carrier regulations do not apply to ISPs; in fact they buy whatever regulations they want.
I had vague thoughts of using XMPP for grid computing--but I suppose this is obvious.
Why sic? It's in dictionaries.
If you like TextMate, TextMate compatible editor http://www.e-texteditor.com/
I would argue that when it comes to certain specific structures and sectors, micropayments can and are useful, specifically in regards to capturing impulse buyers who are engaging in entertainment-type activities. Above a certain cost threshold, many consumers will think harder about a buy and thus decide against an impulse purchase, but if the cost is low enough, they will just buy it, particularly if they are engaging in entertainment already.

itunes is one great example, as well as Xbox Live and Second Life. Limiting the context to leisure activities and creating a situation where the micropayment right then and there is the most convenient form of acquiring the product makes these successful.
I think the full equation is XX + XY = YC/2

... or maybe I just took this a bit too far.
Sounds interesting. It's gonna be a challenge and a half to get this to work though, can't imagine the number of challenges that this approach will create