skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, why would Apple have gone with Intel in the first place? The Apple/Intel relation is far more deeper then it looks or one understands. http://bigtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/06/13/apple-and-in...

And the fact is that AMD is quite large (especially considering the acquisition of ATI) and even that it's market share dropped significantly it's still a hard buy to digest. I personally don't thing that Apple would make such a risky buy knowing what the ATI acquisition made to AMD itself.

And also a fact is that AMD did very well on the server market. A buy would mean for IBM a win/win situation. What could possibly stand in IBM's way of reentering the mainstream market? One lesson I've come to learn is that as bigger is one's portfolio of good products as better is for one's income. Don't you agree?
Perhaps because it's a delight to use and look at?

Occasionally, when something is designed better than any other comparable device, you have to pay to use it. In this case, you pay by following a few of their rules.
I'll really try to take that whole rant with a grain of salt.

Yes, I realize I'm locked into "apple's DRM" - if I buy from the iTunes store. I buy from Amazon MP3, or I rip CDs (those are the 3 ways to get music on my iPhone, right? ;)) to MP3. No DRM lockin there... Yes, it doesn't happen to play FLAC/OGG but I can easily transcode FLAC to Apple Lossless if I want - and back again - and I have yet to hear anyone explain to me what OGG gives me that mp3 doesn't.
Surprisingly, just because it doesn't have GNU/ tacked on the front of it, a product can be innovative and interesting despite it not being Open Source. I know this comes as a surprise to RMS and his FSF hippies.

Also, the single most annoying part of the iPhone 2.0 is the fact that ANY TIME the location services are activated (including by Apple's apps like Camera and Google Maps) it asks you permission to locate you.

Not to mention that, as another commenter mentioned most phones have GPS these days - and my recollection is that the Enhanced 911 features mean that that GPS can be automatically sent to authorities in the case of an emergency. So, pretty much any phone is going to have that 'risk' - if the OpenMoko devices have GPS they may need to comply w/ E911 as well.
I think ATI will be bought off by someone .. maybe even Intel given that Intel is now developing its own GPUs. On the x86 front, the only possible acquirer for AMD CPU divison seems to be IBM.

Sun also bought a x86 startup a few months back but Sun has its own problems. Samsung was considered as another contender but Samsung wont actually get the x86 license (the license can only be transferred to US based companies I believe).

Or maybe AMD will survive. They need to find a new management and probably need to deeply collaborate with IBM on fabs and tech.

Despite Nvidia's sabre rattling, it cannot compete with Intel on the CPU front though Intel certainly has the resources to give Nvidia a fight.
Good, make an example of them. They aren't the only ones doing this, but as far as I can tell they are the worst. I just switched to slower DSL because I couldn't GET to the internet during peak hours because of their filtering. I never had issues getting to comcast.net, but google, facebook and whatnot always seemed to be 'down' from 4-9pm.
Sure, if you're making something for a specific country or region, it would probably be good idea to be there. This is just another instance of the principle that you want to be where the expertise you need is.
Live iPhone 3G Unboxing and Review
The government won't allow them to go under. It would lead to a housing depression, and during an election year, is not good for the incumbent.

Also, it would set up a string of revaluations on credit default swaps, which there are about 4 trillion dollars worth floating around in an unregulated market. So the two companies will probably get nationalized, along with a government bailout of Lehman brothers.

It's funny to see everyone fight against the free market when it goes against them. Freddie and Fannie are shit. They have been shit. When they raised the loan limits to 750,000 a couple months ago, it just allowed them to pile on more shit. The bad loans coming out of California could be repackaged and sent to these companies at the taxpayer's expense.

These companies are overleveraged, poorly managed, unhedged, and are running out of cash. The only reason they're solvent is that they value their asset classes way above what they can get on the market right now.

Unfortunately, we have to bail them out. If we didn't, it would take down our financial system. But the actions of the Fed and the Treasury create a behavioral incentive for companies to take undue risk, because they know they have the government as a safety net. It's not fair to the taxpayers.

When we get over this mess, we need to find solutions to prevent this from happening again. Examples such as creating a regulated market for credit default swaps, and limiting the amount of leverage and directional risk a firm can take.
It's even more fun to watch it when you've been short the stock for the past six months.
This is fantastically cool. Kudos!

The one question I had, and I haven't had a chance to look at the code yet, is if there is a way to query multiple dbs at once, at least for simple queries. Ideally in parallel.
Jerry Yang’s Pledge: Not on My Watch
FCC to Punish Comcast in Internet Probe | Tech Jaws
Ever since "Donald Duck in Mathmagicland", I've been intrigued by geometrical relationships inside music

Interesting articles by the writer's collaborator:
http://www.sju.edu/~rhall/research.htm
Who shot General Motors?  (Labor unions, in 1950.)
Would Apple sell AMD chips to other Manufacturers or would you only be able to get them in Apple hardware? I don't think Apple is interested to start selling chips. And I wouldn't want Intel to basically be the only chip manufacturer for non-Apple hardware. As a consumer I care about competition and I think IBM would be more likely to be able compete with Intel than Apple.

Furthermore, it doesn't seem to make sense for Apple to buy AMD since they ([Apple]; correct me if I'm wrong) seem to put more emphasis on mobile processors, and there Intel is ahead of AMD now and probably for the foreseeable future.
High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom
Remembering Ashton’s Law
I should note that this isn't quite what I was asking for in that thread. This requires me to touch each of my controllers to make changes and (more dangerous) requires each web server to know about all of the DBs in question.

That's a far cry from "make it the database's problem".
It's basically like Argentina or Chile without the revolutionary rumblings.
Fred Brooks actually made a similar point in "The mythical man-month". "Plan to throw one away", ie. build it, throw it away, and rebuild with the knowledge gained from building it the first time.

Update: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_man-month#The_Pilot_Sy...
A simple, non-computer example.

You are checking people in at a conference registration booth. You have people with last names A-M in line one and N-Z in line two. You have just sharded the registration forms by last name.

The Pro is that it's a lot faster to get people registered. The person at the desk has to seek between roughly half the records. The Con is that the person at the desk can't easily/elegantly get a record not in their grouping. For example, a couple comes up where they have different last names (John Jones and Jane Smith). You can't check them both in without bothering the person next to you and making the process slightly cludgy.

How does this apply to databases? Well, if you have a users table that is sharded, some users are in DB1 and others are in DB2. You can't simply join across the different servers. That's the big con to sharding. You lose the ability to join. There are things you can do, but they're cludgy.

The good thing to take away from this is that, unlike the conference check-in, databases are really good and fast. You don't need to shard as quickly as you do with humans. When you start getting a high level of concurrent activity, you can add replication. Once you've exhausted that, only then should you think about sharding. Without sharding, you can create large sites, but you'll get to a point where you need to start thinking about it - you're not at that point (not that I am). Twitter is at that point and handling it poorly. Really, if you get that big, you'll have the money to hire someone who knows what they're doing.
'iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can't be on everyone's phones.'

I dislike the fact that Apple has considerable (compltete?) control over the distribution of an iPhone app and even charges the developer for doing so.Frigging unbelivable!
Ruby and Macros: An Experiment
EPA's value of a human life is $6.9 million, down $1 million from 5 years ago
> a product can be innovative and interesting despite it not being Open Source.

I don't wanna be an ass, but I need to point out that you may be slightly uninformed about the FSF and GNU with your choice to use "open source."
Hmm, excellent points in the article... I have to take those arguments into account, as my company sells software. It's not about avoiding open source, it's about removing all doubt as to the origin and ownership of the software.
I thought the kindle has one, and I am pretty sure the iRex has a touchscreen.
How does that make sense? Maybe I'm ignorant, but it seems Apple has a good thing going with Intel these days. Why would they want to spend a ton of money to acquire AMD only to have to compete against a current partner who has a superior product?
If you're just starting (which you will be in 4 years), the best way is to put together some money; I'd save 5k or so and retain a lawyer who specializes in corporate law. Tell him what your needs are, and he can figure out what's important and what's not.

You can get the gist of things by reading here; there are a lot of people who read and comment here who have startup experience as well as standard corporate management experience.

The biggest piece of advice I can give you is to remember that as a hacker, you are an expert in your field, and you have to remember that there are experts for the other aspects of your company as well. Use them.
Men with a bounce
Have you see some people bounce as they walk? No I am not joking, I am serious they walk as if they have springs in their feet or in their shoes. When I speak of springs in the shoes, I remember coming across recently a company that markets men’s shoes with springs
This is the main reason Apple can ensure quality. They limit the scope of their hardware so there are no unexpected use cases. Visual voicemail "just works", the app store "just works". The problem is that the iphone appeals to geeks, and many geeks are privacy/FSF/EFF purists.
Seth's Blog: Bar graphs vs. Pie charts
So your company does load testing. I didn't claim every big company tests adequately, or even has a process in place, so lets put straw men away.

Consider apps like major hosted tax apps on tax day (Quicken, H&R block, etc.). Consider the load they are under--a substantial portion of the US files their taxes in a 12 hour period. It makes twitter look wimpy. And they release what is essentially a rewrite every year.

How do they make something so critical work under a massive load their app has yet to undergo, in advance, while twitter fails? Load that grows 100x in a year can be modeled, estimated, and simulated and the software can be tuned and hardware scaled in advance. They manage it. We have the technology.
Why are people so upset about this? They provide a great shopping experience for their customers, and a great distribution channel for your apps. This is a service worth paying for.
Is it true that the iPhone can't play .ogg? Couldn't you write an app for the iPhone that plays ogg, or would that be impossible because the audio files can't be accessed from applications?

I've started using ogg again because I couldn't be bothered to make my Linux system encode MP3s...
And when the speech was over, McCarthy spoke up from the auditorium's front row. "I'm a little puzzled," he said. "What does this have to do with AI?"

I love you, John!
What can we learn about the iPhone app ecosystem from the Facebook app ecosystem?
Upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the 90s
Actual paper is at: http://www.ciul.ul.pt/~pacheco/cs.htm
A snake oil salesman not satisfied with his business of pushing proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology into your home, Jobs has set his sights on getting DRM and proprietary software into your pocket as well.

Is it just me, or does the rhetoric from FSF often times border on spiteful? Snake oil salesman? Come on, guys. You're not going to win over sensible people with this kind of attack.
... Not so great.
Gina Bianchini - http://about.ning.com/
Overcoming the genetic fallacy: reverse stupidity is not intelligence
Sweet favicon reminds me of... http://bricabox.com/
Right.

And unless my main reason for buying a mobile phone is "for hacking," I don't see why I should pay $400 for the alternative (i.e. the Neo FreeRunner) when the iPhone "just works"--and nicely at that. How sure are we that the Neo FreeRunner would even be stable enough for use as a main phone?

When the day comes that I want to hack my phone, I'll get the FreeRunner. (Hopefully by then it'll be cheaper.) For now, I just want to use my phone.
Well lets consider this for a moment.

1. Apple's main bread-earner right now is the Macbook, MBP and iMac. All of them are premium models and significantly, all of them use mobile processors. Only the Mac Pro uses desktop processors. AMD's mobile line cannot compete with Core 2 Duo currently and is only found in cheaper laptops.
I cannot see what apple gain by acquiring AMD. And what exactly will they do after acquiring AMD? Not buy Intel processors anymore and instead compete with Penryn and (future) Nehalem? And once again lose out to generic Windows boxes in the performance game?

2. Apple has no chip expertise in the desktop/laptop area. They have a small inhouse chip divison but its dedicated to mobiles and handhelds. Their recent acquisition was also in this space and was fairly small (less than $50mn if i remember).

3. Apple does not have the resources to compete with Intel. OTOH they have a very good working relationship with Intel and I dont see why they would want to disrupt that and instead focus on non-core areas.
Waiting for approval to join the ranks of iPhone application developers is made even more frustrating when you see the App Store spammed with 99 cent "ebooks"
Iran...has photoshop.
If I'm not mistaken, it is actually in Palo Alto, CA: http://about.ning.com/tos.php

I have reached that conclusion based on the fact that there is no mention of Massachusetts law in their terms of service and their Postal address is in Palo Alto.
Some of us just want a really nice phone with great applications. Go iPhone! It's as simple as that.
Vengeance Is Ours; by Jared Diamond
Poorly titled and misrepresented
Anyone else think the FreeRunner looks like crap? Aside from the hardware, the UI looks like Windows Mobile on the top, and iphone on the bottom..
I hate to be nitpicky, but is Ning one of the "valley's 150 biggest corporations"?
Apple to ship 1 million iPhones this weekend, says RBC
I've had a yahoo mail account since before the internet. It's my spam and bacon account. And my habit is to go through yahoo.com to get to mail. So I see all the stories and I've never clicked on a celebrity gossip story. Once in a blue moon there will be a science story and I've clicked on a few of those. So what do I keep seeing over 99% of time?

Celebrity gossip.

Thanks AI!
Can any iPhone developers chime in on the location tracking?

Is it not so that ONLY one application can track your location at a time? Additionally, when using a downloaded iPhone application you should assume that it will access some form of your personal data, in most cases that is the utility of the application.
The problem is that this channel is THE ONLY ONE.
I put zero effort into making code compile right the first time. The compiler (gcc) is much faster at finding errors than I am. Where I do put effort is into making sure the algorithm is correct, something the compiler is not so good at.
5 Reasons to Avoid iPhone 3G
According to Crunch Base it's in Palo Alto, CA

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ning

Maybe it's not yet "big" enough to be considered? Maybe they just missed it...
Fascinating stuff... But I wonder how these higher-dimensional geometric structures map to the reality of hearing: patterns tickling a hairy cone.
Err... the stuff in ()'s is your own editorialized point of view. But this isn't really what I'd call hacker news in any case.
I don't believe there is an accurate way to compile a list like that unless private co's like Ning(or Xobni or Loopt) disclose revenues or employee numbers or users or whatever your differentiating factor is to be considered one of the 'valley's 150 biggest corporations'.

In this case, siliconvalley.com [http://www.siliconvalley.com/sv150/ci_8893849] acknowledges the biggest 150 companies as Public companies which would mean Ning does not fall into that category.

Although I do consider Ning to be a "top tech firm" in the valley.
ivan, thanks. question: what programming languages is tipjoy built on?
"into your home... into your pocket as well."

Lock your doors! ...Sew up your pockets! This has to stop, before Jobs has DRM technology dating our women.
Exactly -- Nick, you've already won the karma game, no need to linkbait.
You can install other Linux mobile os(maybe even non Linux im not sure about that) if you don't like the default. Im currently saving for a notebook, so im not going to have the money for a new phone, but the freeruner should be usable by the time i have money to buy it.
Is it just me or is the recent wave of Social Personal Active Marketing for f5 having the opposite of the intended effect?

Whereas before I had a good opinion of f5 (I'm stuck with gear made by a canadian phone company); I am now motivated to seek out alternatives.

Also paying someone's annual salary for a box of commodity parts and commodity software is mildly irritating.
I'm not so sure it makes sense for IBM to buy AMD either. If they are already sharing technology what incentive does IBM have to acquire AMD? Why buy the cow if you can have the milk for free?

I guess they could get into the desktop chip market, but I'm thinking if they were interested in that they would have put more effort into making Apple happy a few years ago. Would an acquisition buy them anything that would improve their position in the server market?

It seems like a struggling chip maker that's years away from having a top product again is more a liability than an asset. I don't think anyone is going to touch them with a ten foot pole. Besides, the companies out there with the money and the know-how to take over a chip manufacturer will most likely be able to get what they want- technology deals, engineers looking to jump off a sinking ship, etc.- for a far smaller price than that of an acquisition.
I am not linkbaiting. If you check the article's title, you will see that it is unchanged. The title comes from this part:

"Agarwal calls it Coke for short, and his fellow researchers are affectionately known as Cokeheads."

Also, I don't like editorializing and injecting my opinion and pg doesn't as well (I'm guessing he's the one who reverts headlines to their original state when they're editorialized). I've changed few headlines in the past but only when they were grossly misrepresentative of the article or just plain crappy and didn't convey the content of the article.

So, if you have a problem with the headline, complain to The Register please :).
"New research shows that when people need help getting a job done, they’ll choose a congenial colleague over a more capable one. That has big implications for every organization—and not all of them are negative."

If by "new research" they mean my entire working experience and probably that of millions of others, or the design that led to LinkedIn's success, sure.

I've seen far too many people work themselves right out of a job because they were just impossible to deal with.
i really like this post because you not only give specific advice (micro-apps), but you focus on the bigger picture of personal development. it reminded me of a blog post by marc andreessen where he suggested putting yourself in really tough, uncomfortable positions because as an entrepreneur, thats what you'll be facing on a day to day basis.
"But none of G.M.’s management miscues was so damaging to its long-term fate as the rich pensions and health care that robbed General Motors of its financial flexibility and, ultimately, of its cash.

General Motors established its pension in the “treaty of Detroit,” the five-year contract that it signed with the United Automobile Workers in 1950..."
Out of curiosity -- are you guys aware of startups out there that have a female co-founder? I'm aware of TipJoy (http://www.tipjoy.com), but no others.

Also, anybody around here have a female co-founder on their team? If you ARE the female co-founder, I'm not asking you to reveal your gender, I'm just curious about whether there are other teams floating around with women in them.

We have a female co-founder -- in fact, she is actually the one that hatched our initial idea. But our product's demographic seems to be more women than men, as well.
P300 LAN/VPN file sharing tool version 709 released
I think this is a pretty misleading OpEd. It would be crazy to think that management broke fiduciary duty here (as the article implies, with the references to legislatures/taxpayers).

It was twenty years before GM saw competition from the Japanese (in the wake of the oil crisis), and it's hard for us to see six months out in our own companies. Any rational shareholder, were they so smart, could have dumped GM in 1973. And, really, 1950 to now is two whole generations (generally defined as 30 years). Fiduciary duty means a "reasonable person" standard. While, yes, it would have been better now if they had the government take on these obligations then, it's clearly not unreasonable for GM to have decided otherwise.

Second, and more interestingly to me, is that it was in GM's interest to bear health care costs. GM needed to attract and retain skilled labor (which is why they compensated them so well in the Treaty of Detroit). Bearing healthcare costs, as a flush company with two full decades of prosperity ahead of it, provided a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining labor versus other fields that these workers could have gone into, such as plumbing, construction, or the like.

I'll leave the historical nature of the Big Three's political biases to others.
As a libertarian immigrant, I don't care for unions. Please no Ayn Rand jokes, I can't stand her.

So while the unions are certainly a big part of the problem, the responsibility is ultimately with management. It is ALWAYS management's fault.

It doesn't matter if it is GM or a start up, it's management. If you are considering going to work for a startup, the management should be the most important factor in your decision.

GM's management could have changed the company culture to be as efficient and productive as Toyota's. It's not like Toyota made a secret of how it works.

GM could have seen the decline of proven and easy to access oil reserves, and the rise of the middle class in the BRIC countries and done the math. They are in the car business, so they ought to have seen what's coming.

But no, crap giant gas guzzlers. The unions didn't do that, it was management.
Can you have too much software quality?
Company saves $2mm+ switching from Outlook to Gmail