skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course I'm not going to fight the windmills, and sure Google is aware what's happening.

What Google's policy is, as I understand it, to index information that's openly available to every host with an IP address. Google wants to see the same content as any other host on the Net can see and that's, you know, pretty much in the spirit of the Internet.

Going against these principles means going against the Web and breaking it. Good or bad, designed perfectly or not, and no matter whether the world will become a better place to live thanks to iTunes and Apple, but this is anti-Web.
I wouldn't bet on it. The majority of the 70 million Nintendo DSs out there are likely owned by persons who cannot afford an iPhone (although the situation may be different for the PSP).
Lol. There aren't short term gains for dominating Office. There are billions of dollars per year for decades. Creating a competitive market would be the worst thing he could have done for himself and his shareholders (though probably a good thing for the world).
it would be nicer if it was only app though, but I'm guessing there would be no way then to pay for each book separately. AppStore doesn't allow you to charge for add-ons to an application, right?
apple should have no problem with an ssh app. i'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone (maybe http://www.rovemobile.com/products/networkadministration/ssh...) gets around to releasing one (likely won't be free).
Do you agree that an order of magnitude fewer people would be using PCs? (I'm assuming that all proprietary OS monopolies are equal, since if MS were never born its possible Mac or IBM would have achieved what Microsoft has.) I don't see how 10% of the developers we have now, even in an all open-source world, could have created anything like what currently exists.
It does strike me as a little silly that there isn't a better way to get e-books to people. What if there was a band that released their new album as 14 separate iPhone applications, each with their own audio player?
Code to detect this: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-my...
The News is NowPublic.com
Photoshop, and GIMP has been around for a very long time.
news.YC: May contain capitalism.

(p.s. You're totally right)
The Circular Bike, a.k.a. "Vicious Cycle"
Twitter saga ends in jailed translator going free
Who is Evan Weaver? How does he know what Twitter's problem is?
AFAIK, India is the only country where newspaper subscription is/has been increasing over the past few years. I have even seen new papers launched in the past couple of years.
Linden Lab CEO responds to Lively, says Second Life UI will be simplified
Desktop Picture Day | My Philly Network
MS is all about separating search into verticals, as opposed to Google's one-box-fits-all-queries approach. Live Search is desperate for anything that will attract more queries, so I really doubt they'd kill BOSS.
Are you sure it isn't a rails mindset problem?
IPhone Application Overview And Demo Videos
Yes, but if you release on opening day, your app is likely to get bought up in the 'buy everything' frenzy created by the new store/phone.
Wikipedia says Photoshop has its origin in code from University of Michigan written around 1987 wheras GIMP was started as a student project at UCB around 1994. That gives it a 7 year head start.
I think the FISA bill is relevant to a technical site, as evidenced by coverage on very many technical sites. But I usually don't upmod these stories - and I like that mechanism much more than 'killing'.

That's actually the sad part about killing a story - it wouldn't need to be killed if the community was diligent about sticking to a theme.
And they predicted the demise of the motion picture...

And they predicted the demise of radio...
I don't think he's trying to dump old media stocks - he's trying to promote new media. The natural way to do that is to attack the "dinosaurs" that are being replaced.
I have found the "Motion" advice to be very impactful, and easy to do. Not only do I do it with charts, but if I present an architecture diagram, I use the technique over several slides to show transitioning from the "old" architecture to the "new" architecture in steps.

It really drives the point home and makes it easy to understand.
I'd rather an empty space than either possibility
Evan Weaver is a Ruby programmer who Twitter hired awhile back to help fix their scaling problems.
"You have freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, to be secure in your letters, etc.. Notice that implicit in some of these is that you cannot deny others these rights."

Finally a voice of reason.
Pansy.
I agree, based on the article it seems to be the stress of the job rather than the hours worked that he died of.
Your argument is fine and it could be absolutely true... provided the numbers back it up. What numbers do we need?

- The number of users who post iTunes links.

- The clickthrough rate.

- The number of users who click through on an iTunes link who don't have iTunes already.

- The percentage breakdown of the number of users who will react to the forbidding "you need iTunes" dialog by a) downloading iTunes; b) going away frustrated; c) going away frustrated and writing an angry blog post.

- The difference between the previous data and the data on the number of users who, presented with a nice informative page with a discreet "you can get this at iTunes" link, will a) download iTunes; b) go away happy; c) go away and buy the music from a competitor.

- The approximate value, in dollars gained or lost, of every scenario I just outlined.

- The cost of building and maintaining an additional web app (which, once built, can never be taken down) both in dollars and in loss of focus. Remember that this is Apple: Their general philosophy is to maintain focus by eschewing profitable but low-margin businesses and focusing on a select few high-margin businesses.

- The extent to which the existence of two separate Apple music information sites -- the music store and the Web Thingy -- confuses users and decreases the probability of sales across the entire Apple customer base. This is a hard one to measure, but a good usability lab would enjoy tackling it.

As it happens, I don't know any of these numbers. Apple, however, knows them all to some approximation, provided they have an analytics person on staff. So, when Apple decides to let AllMusic and Amazon have the free-music-information business to themselves, I'm not equipped to second-guess them.
Please, go back to reddit.
I don't really agree that you can go from "Hey, I've got this great idea!" to a spec in 7 minute and 30 seconds for most features; for many of our user stories we debated for hours. This, of course, might just be a sign that we chose vague user stories.

Even so, importance of project management cannot be overstated. Even if planning takes up most of the effort per iteration -- presuming that it's good planning -- there's SO MUCH of value that will come out in the planning process that you can't get if you just sit down and hack it out. Maintainability is just one thing that good PM will get you.
Hah! I've been thinking the same thing for a while.

I think that you win more points in the SDOHN game the more tenuous the connection is: "This Obama article is really about hacker news because ... ... facebook ... ... futures trading ... ... venture capital ... hackers!"
In short - they are trying to re-invent IPsec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec).
I tend to think record labels aren't entirely worthless, though the barrier to entry is getting quite small. They serve to promote bands and act almost like vc's by taking a risk and funding the bands that can't afford to get a good sounding record made. This isnt just a software problem. It involves using good equipment, having rooms that don't destroy the sound of the instruments, etc. It costs money.

Do you think the price-it-yourself model Radiohead used could work for other bands? Radiohead was already huge, thanks to the labels promoting their previous work.

I don't mean to undermine the efforts of last.fm. I just wantto point out how sensational the post's title is.
Excellent overview. (But just an overview, there's a lot more meat on these bones.) These are the things that go without saying, but no one talks about because they aren't cool.

A spec is well written when QA can figure out how to test a feature based on the spec.

A great test of your specs. Building test plans and development should be able to proceed simultaneously and separately.

On gathering data, go out and talk to people getting more data points about the problem you are solving until you start hearing the same things and can’t learn more from talking. Then go work on it, knowing all this data.

Don't forget to talk to them in groups. Their disagreements (and there will be disagreements) will provide some of your best data points.

Niel doesn’t recommend a developer also taking on the role of PM, as there needs to be a tension between who represents the user and who implements the product.

What he calls tension, I call checks and balances. We hackers are all too familiar what could happen when you develop in a vacuum.

The PM should be the most empowered employee in your company… Yes, even more than the CEO

This cannot be lip service. The first time the CEO overrules the PM, your "project management" will lose all credibility and be worthless.
Loopt launches its iPhone app with a surprise partner: Yelp
photoshop is better than GIMP. paint.net is a great free alternative but windows only. in relation cheap is better than expensive, and any alternative that challenges a monopoly or overpriced incumbent can be a very good business to start and a product/service that many people will happily try out.
Creating a conference about Failures in Software
Thank you; that wasn't immediately evident by looking at his bio on his blog.
Tolling the Bell for the Gatekeepers (TechCrunch,TechMeme,etc)
You laugh, but traditionally you get to see the merchandise before you decide buy it.
Truemors.com redirects to nowpublic.com and crashes firefox

(winXP, firefox 3)
Just to add to the above - FreeS/WAN project was too heavy on an ideology and it had a major impact on their technical decisions. They refused to support DES, because it was weak, nor did they want to include X.509 (PKI) support, because it was a hierarchy "controlled by selected ones". This limited practical usefulness of the project and it was one of the primary causes of its demise. Others were the fact that it was hard to install (required patching and rebuilding the kernel from the source) and tricky to configure.

It was officially shut down in April 2004 - http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html

There is a fork called strongSwan, which is still being developed even though it's Linux-specific and there is a native IPsec implementation in Linux 2.6.
Actually I am interested in an iPhone, and my decision to buy it depends also on the selection of applications available.

Obviously Apple is doing fine without me as a customer, so what can I say...
Gah! No Anti-Web links!!!

(just kidding)
An ebook reader might be a good app, but selling public domain books as individual apps feels like blog spam (actually even worse since there is money involved).
Top 10 turnoffs for women
Well to tell a secret, I also have an iPod. This discussion for me was more about the iPhone applications, really.

Also, Apple made sure that iPhone apps can ONLY be bought via iTunes. For the iPod you can get your MP3s anywhere.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. - Albert Einstein

Whatever those weapons are, they'll probably need good hackers.
I'm releasing one at some point. If I can ever get the MLS data. Yikes what a mess. http://codemorphic.com/products
Fine, let them not chase me, but then don't ask me to be happy with their service.
The iPhone 1.0 critics -- where are they now?
since you know ruby, i'd suggest ramaze, sinatra, merb or rails (in order of my preference)
Let Our Congress Tweet
The Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander
I tried this myself, and it works. I have an app store icon on my iPhone, right this very second.

I tried downloading the free AIM app, but it didn't work for me. Trying some other apps ...
So how exactly does it work - does Apple reserve the right to refuse you into their shop. So it can happen that you invest a lot of money and poof, Apple says no and that's it? Or do they promise to host any kind of app, in which case they can't prevent ebooks from appearing?

This closed store thing really isn'T very beneficial for developers...
Yes, indeed -- if by "rails mindset" you mean "build the minimum amount that will work - YAGNI; launch early to gauge interest and get feedback; use established, standard tools, methods, architectures and libraries when possible; premature optimization is the root of all evil; when you do hit a scaling problem, it will almost certainly be architectural in nature."

Of course, once your app explodes in popularity and you realize that it's more of a messaging service than a CRUD app, you've got a problem -- the Rails Mindset problem. But this is the problem that the Rails user wants to have. The problem the Rails user doesn't want to have is the one where you spend months learning how to engineer a scalable messaging app, launch it, and find that nobody cares and that it can't be marketed.

(And that was the obvious risk for Twitter at its inception. Everyone thought Twitter was a waste of time at first. I certainly wouldn't have wasted more than a few weeks building it, and I would have never imagined that I'd wind up struggling to move millions of messages a day.)

If you want a world where you don't have any problems at all... I don't know what to do, but don't found a startup. ;)

(Sorry you got downmodded, BTW... my advice is "be less terse". I tried the Zen Koan method of posting a few times when I started out here; it's unreliable.)
Thanks for the book recommendation :)
One of my friends also asked me to look at "Real time rendering" second edition by Moller/Haines. Any thoughts?
Nonsensical. Perl has most of the lispish features of lisp. There is no re-implementation.

Here's a better rule: "Any sufficiently useful Lisp program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of standard perl and the best CPAN modules."
If you hadn't said "just kidding", I would have voted you up. This submission is worthless to me, since I can't even see what it is.
Photoshop is hacker related.
10 Great Tech Books
This is how Guy has described Truemors to me:

"Truemors has evolved a lot. It was wide open, and we found that only a handful of people sent in quality stuff. Now anyone can post, but we hold for approval those from people we don’t know. There is a group of people who have accounts who can post directly. We actually pay those people."

Guy's new site, http://alltop.com/ has a similar concept to Popurls: hand-selected feeds shown in boxes, with mousovers for headline descriptions but the site having multiple subdomains for each of the topics it features. Its's described as "an online magazine rack of popular topics such as politics, science, fashion, celebrities, Macintosh, etc."

Guy's obviously seen the power of Popurls in helping Truemors. One thing he's done with Alltop is emailed the bloggers whose feeds he places on the site, who then to promote Alltop to their readers.

Other sites similar to Alltop.com, and therefore Popurls are:

http://smashingfeeds.com/

http://www.eufeeds.eu/

Basically, Alltop appears like a set of Netvibes universes, but customized for the mass-market and promoted more heavily.

http://eco.netvibes.com/universes
Someone whose site didn't get bought for a lot of money.
"I just want to go on record saying that none of Twitter's problems have ever been Rails problems."

The way that the phrase is wrriten, demonstrates that there was lack of organization.
Boy, that sounds a lot like the US, and any other country which is going through the same set of problems.
I think you're exactly right.
Yeah, I realized after I'd posted that I'd misread the comments in question. Anyway, pumping up new media by attacking old media seems like a pretty risky strategy - investors are just as likely to go to energy or defense or finance or other hot/undervalued sectors than to new media. I think it's more likely Andreesen believes that old media is doomed anyway, and that's why he's interested in replacing it.
"They" also predicted the demise of the steam locomotive, the horse and cart, the vacuum tube, the oil lantern and the whaling industry.

Predictions are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, we all know this. Do you have anything to suggest that the newspaper is more analogous to the motion picture than to the telegraph?
Single Page link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6354

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance - Henry Petroski (Knopf, 1989)

Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean - David Gelernter (Oxford University Press, 1991)

A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, 2002)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979)

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham (O'Reilly, 2004)

The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman (Basic Books, 1988; paperback reprint, 2002)

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder (Little, Brown, 1981)

The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing - David Kahn (Macmillan, 1967; revised edition, Scribner, 1996)

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time - Dava Sobel (Walker, 1995)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1986)
Oh .. Thanks for the feedback

I am not sure why you are not able to play. Do you have flash > 8.0 ... Please do ping me at prateek AT muziboo.com and I would try my best to help you out
IPhone App Store (Best and Worst)
Good idea: Electric scooters used as taxis in Paris
Humorously he updated the post to highlight a comment that's
"right on". A comment about a popular Rails site (insiderpages.com) that apparently handles high traffic with is. Except that it's unavailable at the moment. Right on indeed!
Maybe. But in this case, you can clearly see a pattern on the plumes (the 2nd from the left matches the next, smaller, one to the right)
Except in this particular case, the "someone" is Iran itself.

(Or, I should say, the Iranian government. Referring to a nation's government by the name of that nation is a habit we need to get out of, especially in cases like this where the government and the people's interests seem to be largely unaligned.)
I just manually installed the 2.0 update on my 1.0 iPhone. It rocks, I have to say. Feels like Christmas. The AIM app, as well as the Exchange/push integration (which I've tested out and works fine) is making the HTC's of the world seem insignificant. This update makes the iPhone 1.0 folks out here feel like grownups now.
Onion routing solves a different problem: anonymizing traffic. This "project" doesn't aim to provide anonymity, just resistance against sniffing and some MITMs. Onion routing provides encryption as a side effect of anonymity, but it's massively inefficient compared to just encryption.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=242484
Mark Cuban:  Here's How YouTube Can Make Money (And Lose Market Share)
Google Lively Review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
Its hard to know when to drink the Koolaid and when not to... that being said, when Jobs first presented the iPhone, even a hardened skeptic like myself thought it would gain a strong following.
Edit: But Iran never said it wants to attack anyone, or made any threads besides retaliation in case they are attacked.

I really don't want to get into a political argument, but you really need to know that this isn't true. Three ways:

a) The Iranian government has been making threats against Israel for a long time, and this has increased since Ahmadinejad took power. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel)

b) The Iranian government has been funding, training, and giving weapons to groups making attacks inside Iraq. At a guess, they've killed thousands of people so far.

c) The Iranian government funds Hezbollah, a terrorist group which attacks Israel.
Linus' original post about Linux
The Revenge of RPC: Google Protocol Buffers and Facebook Thrift
Ojay 0.2: easy keyboarding, a validation DSL, and two new UI widgets
Hmm, except that picture came from a video feed, whereas the other picture came from a still camera. Not enough evidence to decide either way at the moment.

Do we have that actual picture from multiple different news agencies? That should tell us whether the editing was done by the Iranian government or by the news agency.
There's nothing to kid about. Linking to the iTunes store is just stupid. It's the kind of thing that makes me think submissions should also be down-moddable.
Isn't this his first successful startup?
As the project manager on my start-up, I certainly agree that project management is essential.

However, there are many ways to manage a project. The document-heavy method he proposes is one that I used again and again back in my consulting days.

Unfortunately, this kind of project management is extremely ill suited to an early stage start-up. Those documents all help reduce communications issues, and they do so extremely well, granted. But if you're having enough communications issues to warrant this in a 3-5 people start-up team, you are completely and thoroughly fucked, and no amount of documentation will ever save your ass.

With a small team and rapid development tool, I think most agile project management practices are far better suited to deliver the application and be able to react to market changes quickly.

Also, as others have pointed out, 30-second requirements? Yeah right. In your dreams.
Oh, it's common enough, though it's usually easier to get them with something like 127.4.132.17.

Well, or warez.<domain> - there's a long tradition of A-ing that to 127.0.0.1, I use warez.trout.me.uk as a cloak on IRC and there've been a couple times idiots have tried to flood me off the net with predictable results ...
I interpreted the "I have the graphs to prove it" as humor. Obviously the graphs prove nothing, but I found they helped explain the arguments.
Yeah, they can refuse you. But they said they wouldn't unless it violated their general rules. So you're right, one day everything could go poof, and a lot of people are nervous/annoying that Apple isn't very clear on what exactly you need to do to prevent that. Basically, until Apple publicly comments on why they allow certain apps and why they didn't allow certain apps,and gives some clear cut decisions, developers are going to be in limbo
Neal Stephenson: Programmer as a writer. Do it right the first time
What about the timeline for your other apps?
That wasn't the point. I like the GNU userland. I just get tired of hearing RMS bitch about the fact that everyone calls Linux kernel+userland distributions "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux". That ship has sailed; it's time to let it go.
It's an old adage that you learn more from your failures than your successes. It's sort of left unsaid that learning from others failures is quite a bit easier.
It also doesn't say anything. It'd be nice if he explained a little more of his position. A common thing I hear is that Rails simply puts the problem of scale into the database. The problem may not be a Rails problem, but the design of Rails doesn't solve the problem either. It just puts it somewhere else.

I have not worked with Rails, though. This is just what I've read. I'd prefer if an insider like Evan Weaver would elaborate a little more on what problems they had and how they solved them. All I know is that some people say Rails is a problem and they have evidence for that and this guy says it's not and suggests nothing more.
The Fear of Common Knowledge