skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wasn't the time of my life or anything, but I was in between tech gigs and thought I'd just drive and see what happened. It was expensive (gas), but I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I get a chance. (and accidentally drummed up more work than I could handle in the process - its amazing how much you can address when you've got all the time in the world) There was a book I took with me was called "eccentric america" that had all the wacky non-mainstream places. (like the fake history museum in L.A... wild. All the seriousness of a real museum, but completely fiction.) My email's damion@entura.com if I can help. Get a moleskin and a good (portable so you'll always carry it) camera - I'm really, really not a diary dude, but reading over the entries... brings me back to my "tech guy freed from tech world" musings about the world. Its priceless to me.

Enjoy the trip.
Microsoft has a great and thriving research division, that comes up with great innovations. The trouble for MS is that they haven't been able to translate those into products well.
RWW is a nice blog but they are way too wordy. Here's the summary:

Google opened Android under very open Apache license. It is quite likely that operators/OEMs will try to lock it down or strip out features, however they are likely to leave Web Browser intact and that's the only thing google cares about - a real web browser on many phones, which is incidentally the same browser as on the IPhone.
"Microsoft has a great and thriving research division, that comes up with great innovations."

Guess which division in MS has the least number of managers with "general management experience"? ;-)
FCC's free broadband plan delayed
Crashed my firefox but that crashes at everything

Worked fine for me in 3rc2 - might be your plugins?
Do Geeks Make Good Jurors in Tech Cases? Not Always
No. I suspect that for many people their car is a sanctuary where they can actually get some peace and quiet twice a day, listen to their own music, and generally get some "me" time. That said, there are still lots of people who would, so go for it!
Egypt uncovers 'missing' pyramid of a pharaoh
Agreed. Here's another thoughtful post on the subject:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/06/the_rise_of_a...
Indeed, your product is suitable for people who work fixed hours, 9 to 5 and such.

I guess you should promote it to people in government, manufacturing or retail jobs.
Great link. Thanks for that!
Erlang's two most important features are finding their way into many languages:

- Message passing with mailboxes and pattern matching receive statements

- Supervision trees, allowing the separation of function code and error handling
"Programmers do not respect authority, only ability."

A minor mischaracterization. Programmers respect authority that is derived from ability and historic record of ability to execute/produce. Authority is something you earn and must maintain. For many people, "authority" is merely asserted by someone in a position of power, with little to back it up other than their own claims of control.
Google to get new space age home
I have one question about Fuzed. (Turned out to be a few questions, oops.)

What happens when a Master node dies? (Or, say it's EC2 instance kicks the bucket, rare but possible. Or in the case of a non-EC2 deployment the hardware just fails.)

My limited understanding of Erlang leads me to think the unhandled death of a Master node is the death of all the nodes in the cluster.

Further, I understand this does not have to be. I remember there being some way for another node to respond to the death of another node, handle that death, and let things continue along.

Is anything like this set up in Fuzed? Would this be handled by having multiple master nodes for a cluster, and they watch each other?

Would there be any difference in setting up Fuzed to handle the death of the Master node process and the disappearance of the Master node instance?
Damnit…FriendFeed Gets Even More Useful With An Interestingness Filter
asside from linux where can I find 'the cube'? no where.
I sure hope so, this is could ruin him if he handles it wrong.

I do know that a company in which he invests, probably has a good product. He's the expert on such things. Even if he takes himself out of the judging pool, the company already has his endorsement.
So the next question would be why would he even want to have them in the contest.
On one of the feeds he told a company founder to launch now rather than at TechCrunch 50 and he would cover the launch.

So is it better to launch inside or outside of the big show. The reader seemed to think at the big show, replying we are going to add more features and apply for the conference.

So based on the Crowd:
He believes it is better for him to cover the launch of a company on his site.
I think everyone else would rather have their run at the big show.
.:Based on this he should cover the launch on his site as opposed to having them join the big show.

First, He is happy because be believes he did the best for his investment.
Second, the crowd seems to think TechCrunch 50 is more important, so we wouldn't feel any undue resentment.

How he handles this will affect who seeks out TechCrunch 50 for their launch next year.
I would characterize that as 'acceding to authority out of respect.' Respect, or course, must be earned and can so easily be lost when those in authority start to demand it.
Google Earth: Explore Walt Disney World Resort in 3D
That's kind of a loaded question since a reasonable definition of an enterprise CMS is "one that isn't very good". That said, Ellington (which I worked on a few years ago) is probably expensive enough that it can be considered "enterprise" and ships with nice URLs out of the box: http://www.ellingtoncms.com/
This is a cool site, very addictive. The site seems very innovative to me.
I didn't mean they don't care about their end users, I meant they don't care about their URLs.

I think the links earlier in this thread are a perfect example of why this is useful. You can tell what you'll get when you click on the Yahoo! and Google ones, but the Microsoft one is totally opaque.
Could they not condense the article into one paragraph. I could not find the point among all the useless information, like that one:

"On my final morning in vienna, snow was tumbling like dryer sheets as I stared out the window of the IQOQI waiting to speak again with Zeilinger. Suddenly, there was a great flash of lightning and a long roll of thunder as snow continued to fall. I turned around to no one and Zeilinger's assistant appeared. He now had time to talk."

Whatever...
Why am I being downmodded? My comments come from a discussion I had with a tech lead at Google last week who complained to me he couldn't hire enough good people because of this ridiculous policy. There is no spite or malice in my original comment.
Internet Is Safer In India In Comparison to the World
Startup Email: Monitor your bounce messages
Like this:

"... NetDocs, a promising effort to offer software programs such as word processing over the Internet. The issue: Because NetDocs risked cannibalizing sales of Microsoft's cash-cow Office programs, some executives wanted NetDocs killed. ... First, NetDocs ballooned to a 400-person staff, then it got folded into the Office group in early 2001, where it died."

The earliest mention of NetDocs I found was from 2000, 6 years before Google Docs was released. I imagine the tech execs would have supported the innovation and made MS a leader, but the management execs only thought about protecting their cashcow, which leaves MS trying to catch up with Google.
Could you tell us why you recommend against pills after 70?
The PS3 has always appealed to me as a cheap number-crunching Linux box. (cheap compared to any other way of getting hold of a Cell) Unfortunately, having only 256 megs of system RAM severely limits its usefulness in my opinion.

I googled around a little, and it looks like VRAM (there's another 256MB of that) is exposed as a block device, so that could conceivably be used as lightning-fast swap space. (given a suitable priority boost over the hard disk swap) If the VRAM can be accessed directly via physical memory address mapping, then it could even be used directly, given some kernel hacking, maybe using some of the NUMA API.

Well, once I come up with an excuse for needing a Cell, I'll go through with it. ;)
What stage of release is this in? Are there any significant changes coming up?

In particular, I don't see any attempt to prevent spam. I'm not even talking about purely bot-generated spam - I mean, I just submitted that "Ghandi Christ" (email abcd@efg.hij) will not be coming to the following event:

http://mobaganda.com/rev2party

Which I found on google.

I don't really know/see how you can fix this problem. As I noted, captchas won't work.

On a completely unrelated note, I also really long for search and the ability to make an event "searchable/unsearchable".

---

THAT BEING SAID, I think this is a really wonderful idea. If you can get it to "work" without sacrificing any simplicity I will definitely be using this.

Anyway, these are some random guy's first impressions. Good luck, yo!
This is rapidly evolving into a new même. I like it!
It doesnt do sessions natively without using flup, but i heard that that will be included in webpy 0.3 but noword about its release for now. and i just wish it could incorporate open id also.
The Internet and Thought
I wondered what had happened to them. iJustine was raving about them about a year (?) ago and then I never saw them get any traction in the areas I hang around (Twitter, etc).
I agree, I don't think it would really matter who they put in charge of MS. They are simply concerned with pushing out bad products for large sums of cash.

And for all those folks out there that think Bill Gates was a 'hacker' or skilled in any way, just remember back to that article a few weeks ago when he admitted to doing a bit of bin raking for code.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/02/announcing-the-techcrun...]
The Computer Science Rapper
'The Innovator's Dilemma' -- innovation in the hard-disk industry.
I wrote up a blog post about it:

http://interfacelab.com/?p=16

In summary, I find 37signals to be full of shit.
I didn't like the article, but that HTC Touch Diamond phone looks cool.
This is what inspires me to start hacking my Ruby to PHP interpreter.
BBC One channel announces live simulcast video streaming
You and logjam should partner up on a company together. Between logjam's deep insights into how to reduce the decades-long process of building the world's largest, most successful software company down to something as easy as buying a lottery ticket, and your Midas-like knowledge of how to push out bad products for large sums of cash, this is a company that can't fail. Please let me know what the ticker symbol is when you guys go public so I can load up my 401K with your stock.
MM74HC4066 Datasheet
Accurate dimming control for even LED brightness
I wonder what Gates position would be?

Some products shrink markets. (Easy example in Encyclopedias. Books==$$$$, Encarta/WorldBook==$, Wikipedia==FREE) I think NetDocs would be one of those.

I guess the question is - from a business standpoint - why do you want go from leading your own $10 Billion industry to leading your own $100 Million industry? *Note that figures are utterly made up.

As leading shareholder, BillyG has an interest in Microsoft making money (It funds his work in Africa for one thing!)....

I guess it's an industry that Open Source and other players (eg Google) can eventually destroy on their own, but I'm not 100% sure that BillyG would have so quickly destroyed it...

I guess the issue might be one of pricing though --> and in 2000 MS could have released NetDocs at similar pricing levels to Office - and that might have changed things.. But letting Google etc come in to the market for free before they had the presence, has probably hasn't the end...

(Sorry for the rambling - Have to run..)
Yelp to create location-aware iPhone app
AppEngine for Java by morph and webtide
Google introduces 13 new features in Gmail
> definition of an enterprise CMS

Would Jonathan Schwartz's blog ( http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ ) count as an enterprise CMS? That has URLs which include the title. Does Wordpress ( http://www.wordpress.com/ ) count as an enterprise CMS? That also has URLs which include the title.
Hardware accelerated Opera
Correlation does not equal causation, but in this case I agree with the post.
Yes, I totally agree with this. I typically use Illustrator instead of Photoshop, just because I think it's easier to mock things up quickly and make edits quickly.

I will usually get to a stable design, and then bring the whole team in and put the design up on the projector. We then discuss, critique, and dissect the design. The whole time, I can rapidly make new versions and forks of the design based on suggestions. This is just something that you can't do in HTML/CSS, at least not in realtime.

There's just something about HTML/CSS that constrains you to think in a box. With Illustrator or some other design tool, it's easier to get your ideas out. For me, getting to a pixel perfect design after planning in Illustrator is trivial.

The hard part is getting the actual design down.

I think this whole thread has too many hackers that are either scared of using design tools like Photoshop, against them because they are expensive or bloated, or deem them unnecessary because HTML/CSS is "good enough". I guarantee you that I'm able to iterate on designs faster and more efficiently using design tools rather than hand coding.
You mean it has nothing to do with the fact that geeks are the most passionate, opinionated, and animated people when it comes to technology?

If you don't know what I mean: PC vs Mac, Linux vs BSD, Linux Distro X vs Linux Distro Y, RPM vs DEB, OpenOffice.Org vs Office, nVidia vs ATI, etc etc etc.
Hey Twitter, Maybe It’s Better Not To Share Absolutely Everything
Argh, yet another controversial 37signals post. What's with these? I think DHH has a narrow view on web design.

If you're handing your HTML/CSS to a "HTML monkey" and they don't get the "it" stuff right (as opposed to the "around" stuff), then they are a BAD HTML/CSS coder. Period.

The baseline HTML/CSS coder, in my mind, should be able to get pixel perfect (or very close to pixel perfect) designs implemented with cross browser compatilibity (at least IE6 and Mozilla).

HTML/CSS coding is in most cases a solved problem. If you have the man power to segment design from the actual implementation, then all the power to you. It'll probably be more efficient that way. Where I work, we don't have that luxury, and we all have to do a bit of everything.
It sounds like the same arguments that protect torrent sites will protect this company. They aren't providing taxi service, they are just telling you about other people interested in sharing a ride. No different than any discussion forum or whatever.
A humorous introduction to Haskell
I think this is an important point. We tend to view useless things(at least to ourselves) as ugly.
me too!

It looked much like flex UI at first impression
Is this a case of being plain and frank or just plain ignorance? Revealing technical issues like this just seems to tell the whole world that they (twitter) are not too technically sound and things are spinning out of control. what twitter is experiencing now is part of the normal teething problems of any startup but they should be a little more discreet in these issues to save face.
A statement like "a slight hitch, we will be right back" would have been more appropriate. It will make more sense to non technical users of twitter
http://friendfeed.com/angol
Improving on Robots Exclusion Protocol (from Google Webmaster Blog)
purpletrail.com is way way better than this. Its problem is it is based in India. Not many people know this application
How does Computer Science find its way into an introductory talk on healthcare software? If you tell us a few of the points you are trying to make, we might be able to suggest alternate phrasings.

(As an aside; I was a healthcare software developer in a previous life, and I can't recall much Computer Science coming into it, except in the most indirect ways...)
Read-Think-Write-Web just doesn't have that ring to it.
Does it convert the presentation to any other format other than pptx? ODP? or even the old ppt format?
Google Gears origin exploit
MB/MBP runs TextMate, ThinkPad does not. That's the main difference.
What's the real Federal Deficit?
Of course they have 1M+ LOC when they use Java...
I don't think that's what the article is saying at all. EF is not some supposedly innate ability, such as IQ. It's rather a skill that can be taught, and the actuall measured EF is just a way of examining how well the teaching of the skill is going. This gives teachers another tool in the toolbox, to work with those students that are difficult to teach - specifically, give them extra training to improve their EF.

Of course, my fad detectors were going off big time reading the article. I think I'd like to see some data on whether this produces longterm benefits before jumping on the bandwagon. Otherwise it might just be nothing more than showing that kids that get extra attention - such as those in a research study - do better in the short term, something that we know already.

I think perhaps the most interesting aspect of the article is that this potentially gives preschool teachers something actually useful that they can teach to their students, something that could aid the students when "big school" begins :-)
Hilarious song. Monzy was my TA for a class last year.
Study Calls for ‘Energy Revolution’
It would be better to develop the personality of the child rather than judge them by their IQ (or EF). Moulding children to become "practical" thinkers would benefit them for life.
sounds fair.
Why Microsoft Will Never Win (they blew their lead on web apps)
Email Gains Popularity As A Direct Marketing Tool 
"E-mail has become the top medium for direct marketers. 72% send e-mail to customers, a 10% increase over 2007, and 50% to prospects, a 9% hike."
"Conventional methods of business accounting aren’t applicable to software. The days of quantifiable accounting are over."

Mmmhm. Next thing you know, we'll all be talking about the New Economy....
Primed For Ripeness
Do all of arrington's rants on twitter have to be submitted here? We get it now, twitter is unstable and he is annoyed with that; nothing much they can do till it gets resolved (which takes time) so lets not sound all surprised when it does go down...
It's also amazing how few people understand the difference between deficit and debt.
I'm definitely a Googlectual.
37signals is not a "graphics" or "design" company. I wonder why they post these kinds of articles. They can basically outsource a bunch of icons and logos then start building from there.
It's not clear they are using the term "extreme programming" as we understand it. I'm disappointed the article doesn't talk more about the process they use. Maybe someone there reads this and can elaborate...
Spotting a Craig's List Scammer
Really liking this new feature. And it loads nice and quick, too. Thanks guys!
No wonder they can't control spending - no one is being honest about how excessive the spending actually is!

I hope Obama can help clean up this mess..
Design isn't about tools
Most people are found in just couple of locations at any time, and don't go beyond few miles of home
Wikimedia?
I have had the same experience, and I would definitely say there is a strong correlation but it is not a case of NDA -> Fail, but more like a Fail -> NDA.

Specifically, the type of person who thinks they ONLY have an idea, and that execution does not matter, and that there are no other problems to be solved besides coming up with the idea---that person is highly motivated to NDA.

Meanwhile, the person who thinks there are a lot of problems to be solved of which one very important part is the product... that person is less motivatd to NDA because they don't think you can copy their idea, ship it a week or two ahead of them, and beat them.
Dmitry Jemerov on IntelliJ 8, Flex, and Scala
this is so true:

working people on weekdays: home and work place

students : home and school

on saturday's (day): home and grocerry store
(in evenings) : movie/night clubs or home

sundays: home and church
home-makers: home and home & shopping and shopping & internet and internet :-)

doctors: hospital and hospital and hospitals :-)

insurance agent: home, office, home, office and home (all homes are other people's home) :-)

bloggers: home and coffee shops and library and barnes & noble :-)

taxi driver: no home; only taxi :-)
Seems like a lose-lose situation for Twitter. Before they just had errors saying "oops, try again".. but they had so much downtime that people wanted more transparency. Now they have errors that say "we lost a database" and people are saying that's too much information. (I probably would not have made that an error message, but that's just me.)

I think Twitter should stop caring what everyone (especially TechCrunch) thinks and just fix the technical issues. And please fix it soon, because users are getting tired of the same problems!
Is there really a joke to this? When someone says, "oh we lost the database" is the running gag suppose to be you better go find it? I also find it silly that everyone jumps in and claims this and that about twitter. If there's a lesson to be learned here it's that PR and spin control is equally as important as your engineers.
"But just think about how much further along that understanding curve the company would be now, instead of letting the fear of cannibalization push it away. At some point, the company will have to grab that nettle firmly, and it’s not going to get any easier — if anything, it’s only going to get harder."

I don't think Microsoft CAN catch up.
"The creationist comparison shows up other places, too."

So what point are you trying to make? Do GW people as a rule compare AGW people with creationists? And even if they would, what bearing would it have on the debate?

I have found McIntyre's blog, he seems to be a busy individual. At the moment he is discussing something about prehistoric buckets. That might be too much detail for my entry level... Also, I wonder what he would dig up if he spent the same energy on finding evidence FOR global warming.

Didn't find suitable articles at the Cramer link. Anyway, I will do my own searching.
...but the nice thing about having a web-based business is you can work anywhere (that has internet), even travel the world without having to stop working if you so want.
Too bad this will be UK-only.
...there has been much written in the blogsphere regarding solutions that can solve most of twitter's problems. They should pick one and get one with it. With ~$15M they have no excuses now.
ICall Brings Seamless Free VoIP to iPhone
A TV with better analytics..
"The application is still in development and does not have a timeline for release yet, so few concrete details are available."

Maybe we'll hear more during/after WWDC next week?
Wedding Favors - Unique Wedding Favors
Unique Weding Favors offers elegant, inexpensive and personalized wedding party favors idea. Beach favors, Candle favors, Boxes, Bags and Ribbon, Bridal Shower Favors and Wedding Accessories and gifts for Bridesmaids and Groomsmen
Cellphone-controlled hackery on University Ave in Palo Alto
Kinderarchy
Some friends of mine have been talking about building this thing for about 5 years, and the internet say they finally did it. Is there anyone in Palo Alto who can verify its existence and awesomeness?
A Case for Automated Testing
The Utopian Origins of Cubicles