skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft must be in the "Other Investors" group listed as collectively owning 9.7%. I guess Accel is in there too.
Interesting app, I like the idea a lot.

I wish there were a service where by the results of a filter could be sent to a printer. Preferably one that formats emails better and turns entire correspondence threads into books. I'd like to archive some of the more meaningful relationships that are captured in all their twists and turns over the years in gmail. Sadly I have never found any such tool.
Ask HN: Feedback on my iPhone app to send reminders by phone call
Not everyone is 'long' in stocks (betting they go up). So it really doesn't matter if a year is the 'best' (for those 'long'); it matters the specific positions held.
You can even find the propaganda bloggers on HN, at least it appears: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jojogogo

Luckily, the astroturfing is...not so good in most cases from what I've seen of the Chinese bloggers. There's a few times where I've noticed oddly pro-Chinese opinions that were well formed and articulated, but I think some of those are indeed genuine.
I'll check with the team at Rackspace working on CloudFiles + CDN with Akamai to see if gzip compression will be supported. (You also can request it here: http://feedback.rackspacecloud.com where it can be voted upon by others). I do see Akamai itself supports "Content-Encoding: gzip" if used with the "Vary: Accept-Encoding" header. I'll post what I learn here, or you can email me directly at robot AT rackspace DOT com to follow up.

More details on the relationship between Rackspace and Akamai will be posted at this link: http://www.rackspace.com/akamai . The partnership is just beginning; your feedback and requests are and will be appreciated!
Employees are assets.

A business organization might be a saleable asset even with a failed product. A solo founder with a failed product is just broke.

While probably not the best strategy, building an attractive organization may reduce risk by making the worst case scenario a talent acquisition instead of a liquidation. Personally, I'm a bit of a misanthrope so I lean towards Weinberg's position.
Apple Granted Solar-power Patent
It seems that the F# team is always careful not to step on C#'s toes in interviews & marketing.
TSA Worker Gets 2 Years for Planting Logic Bomb in Screening System
That quote has always bugged me. It's dimensionally wrong: a station wagon doesn't have bandwidth.

Bandwidth (in the sense intended here) is measured in bits/second: how do you measure that from a station wagon [full of mag tapes]?

Now a freeway full of station wagons ... that has bandwidth.
OpenJDK Sees Mac OS X Port Come To Life
Google Serves Places On The iPhone With A Side Of Hotpot
I think this is a good thing. "App Store" is too generic a term to trademark IMHO.
How many employees does Facebook have? If they have around 5000 employees, then on an average, if they go public for the valuation claimed, every employee gets around $3M!
Creating a "Brain Gain" for U.S. Employers: The Role of Immigration
So... not quite unlimited after all?

I have to echo omh and steveklabnik, I frequently use over 500MB (though usually under 1GB) without doing anything "funny" (e.g., tethering, torrenting, or just generally being a dick to the pipe). Most of my usage is streaming videos and music - a "fair" enough use of an "unlimited" data plan I would say!

It's good to hear that these new terms won't impact you materially, but realize that a great many legitimate users are impacted by these new restrictions. Furthermore, as smartphones become more powerful and we are able to do more and more with it, bandwidth needs will only increase, and plans need to scale with that. This is a huge step backwards in wireless data connectivity.

T-Mobile: unlimited mobile internet!*

*unlimited mobile internet includes only circa 2004 features like email and mobile web.
That's just the Office suite, see also:

http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualPrope...
Facebook: tools are top priority
1. A rising tide floats all boats.

2. Unions don't have to fit the rigid model you have in your head of the UAW. They can still allow for inequality of pay negotiated on an individual level, but after an initial negotiation on a collective level. Basically you can design the union to still pay higher performers what they are worth and pay low performers a lot less - but with everyone's salaries being increased relative to management.
With all due respect to web standards: a standard is something that everyone uses.

It depends upon your priorities. Others would say that a standard is something that is completely & unambiguously specified so that interoperable implementations can be made. The terms under which such implementations are created is yet another concern. We probably need 3 orthogonal axes to plot various standards: ubiquity, specification, licensing terms. A "defacto standard" would score high in ubiquity but might have no specification (let alone one of quality) and might have bad or undefined licensing terms. Other things may have excellent specifications but niche existance. Something like H.264 has a specification, high penetration, but licensing terms that require certain participants to pay. Something like WebM is shooting for very liberal licensing terms, they are currently a niche but are angling for penetration — although I'm not sure if they have/intend-to-have a specification upon which interoperable implementations can be based.

Edit: there are also those who seems to put the greatest importance upon who controls the specification. They wouldn't accept PostScript as a standard, for example, because it isn't controlled by a standards bureaucracy —despite the clarity of its specification. I personally believe that unless we can openly acknowledge all of these components of the concept of "standardization" we'll have a lot of heat & no light when we're discussing it.

My personal leanings: I value a complete & ambiguous spec above all else, and loathe de facto standards that thrive in absence of one. I don't feel standards bodies are a must-have, but acknowledge that they can be nice. I also acknowledge that standards bodies can give the illusion of community control when in fact they provide no such guarantee. I'd rather not have to pay to implement a spec, but in some problem domains (such as codecs) I can understand why some would want to be rewarded for their work.
Does moderation work?
Contractors can work out well, as long as they are treated like contractors. I've seen (and personally experienced) too many situations where employers are simply looking to hire an employee (while calling them a "contractor"), without having to provide benefits or have them eligible for unemployment, etc. So they'll bring in a contractor, ask them to be on-site, try to give them set hours, try to supervise them, and so on. That's shady, and at least in Canada, won't fly (or, it isn't supposed to).
I was surprised to see Mathematician as #2. That contradicts everything I've read about math careers on HN.
I've used this library in the past, but it is really too bad it hasn't been updated since 2006. I've since moved on to PHP's DOMDocument::loadHTML function.
> why wouldn't you be willing to ship H.264 and flash fallback for Chrome?

The same people with a problem with this have a problem with Flash, I imagine. I also imagine a large number of people complaining are Chrome users who think they know a thing or two about videos online.

Most of the arguments against Google doing this are smug, illogical, and stupid. Gruber asked a bunch of stupid questions, and a bunch of lemmings followed along asking about Flash. I'll go so far as to say if you're one of these people asking about Flash in Chrome, you are ignorant and wrong.
A modest proposal in keeping with the love for complexity embodied by the rules.

In lieu of sending off without replacement, allow the opponent to select any player on the field to be ejected or to defer their selection until later in the game. In other words, a team on offense could defer the selection of the player to be ejected until their opponent's best quarterback entered the field.
Systems?
Bill Draper Takes Stock Of A Venture Industry He Helped Create
This is an unbelievably awful way to look at hiring.

People aren't actually "assets".

Only under the rarest circumstances are they looked on that way by potential acquirers; a company needs a coherent place to put a whole team that both meshes what they did before and gives them enough upside to stay. You read about "talent acquisitions" far more often than you do about the companies that lay off all their employees, because the "talent acquisitions" make interesting copy.

You are not likely to profit from the "recruiting arbitrage hedge" you've come up with; all you're going to do is crater your company and screw up a bunch of people's employment. Don't do this.
I've worked at a place that did a 'tiered' scrum, where developers would meet at 9:30 and report, and then at 9:45 the tech leads would meet with business analysts, project managers, etc. and report their group's progress. It seemed to keep everybody on the same page, and it avoided the "tech to business" switch you talked about for most developers. Further, the understanding was that if you needed to talk to someone on the business side you could just do it - there was very little separation.

The problem that place was trying to solve was that the standup meetings simply got too big to handle - not everybody could give a meaningful status update in 15 minutes. It's not "pure" but it did work, and you might be able to take something from that approach.
According to http://twitter.com/#!/IPv4Countdown, we will run out of IPv4 addresses in about a month. Won't June already be a few months past when we run out?
My first computer (an ABC80, with impressive 78 x 72 pixel b/w graphics!) didn't even have cassette tapes. I'd spend a few days writing a program, and then I'd have fun with it until I shut the computer off, at which point it was gone forever. Although for the best games I created, I used to transcribe the code by hand into booklets.
Hahaha .NET /jk
Is Freemium Worth The Price?
Heaven forbid that people use their phones to do multimedia things! Who needs advances like being able to catch up on TV news while on your way to work, or using a smart DJ service like Pandora? Or even sneaking in last night's episode of [insert show here] on a particularly long commute?

Pshaw, clearly all of that is just for bored teenagers. No reasonably effective, busy adult would have use for anything but HTML and email!

Sorry for the snarky tone, but your implication that busy adults have no need for all of these data-intensive apps is somewhat insulting.
But it would look hilarious.
Well, not really. I don't use the extra bandwidth provided, nor do I want it. The only reason I pay the fee is to tether, and I gain no other advantages from that. Sure, my limit is higher and many others might enjoy the extra breathing room, but on a personal note, I only pay the extra fee in order to tether.
That's exactly how MaxCDN and SimpleCDN work, but Cloudfront and Rackspace Cloud don't pass through requests from your own server; rather, they require you to manually upload the files you want to serve via CDN in advance.
This doesn't sound like anything more than a welfare program. Welfare programs generally don't work, because it leaves most people with little incentive to go out and succeed.

It's also interesting that the only way to solve the 'inequality gap' is to take money away from one person and give it to another.
var TwoBirdsWithOneStone="Thank you, tjr!";
They list 2,000+ on their website: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet
Tools and practices for working virtually (at RedMonk)
That's very interesting because with increasingly lower limits this argumentation becomes less convincing.
I can imagine many people using up their 500MB with their smartphones in the near future, if they don't already.
It doesn't even have to be a union in the way you think of it.

It could just be an organization that exerts power on a wide scale without directly negotiating on behalf of the professional.

Look at the difference between Doctors associations, Lawyer associations, and computer science associations.

The most powerful medical authority is a collective body run by doctors, NOT run by the employers of doctors. This is because doctors as a collective have banded together and decided to take collective power.

Computer scientists on the other hand choose not to do this and so the powerful groups are run by corporate interests.

Who represents the voice of the collective programmer? No one really.

A body of software professionals similar to the AMA would raise salaries and provide many other benefits without having to directly negotiate on behalf of the employees.

One thing it could facilitate for instance would be scientific and wide-scale income information sharing which alone would raise the pay of every single software professional. It would level the playing field in negotiations and allow software professionals to capture more of their own productivity.
He wants the transfer to be compressed, which is based on the capabilities of the browser, not the content. Admittedly, the names of the headers that control all this kind of make it confusing.
I agree with you. In fact, I was stunned, in reading this piece, to find out that they were able to do it in the first place.
Mike Stonebraker on Real Column Stores
Not to be super pedantic; but they aren't suing Apple.

They've filed a motion with the USPTO to dismiss Apple's trademark filing under the grounds that it's too generic of a term to be trademarked.

I tend to agree with them, as even though I don't honestly remember anyone referring to a store selling applications as an "app store" before Apple, it feels about as trademark'able as registering "shoe store".
agreed, although i think the reason why the urgency is present in the articles is because the default reaction of a founder or small business is to take it slow and calculate. one can be too calculating, and one can be too frantic in their pivots and iterations. the idea should be -- don't be afraid to change, but don't change for no reason.
But... Google is putting in resources toward integrating Flash into Chrome. The Chrome Flash version is actually different than what is even publicly available from Adobe. My version of Flash that comes with Chrome is 10.1.103.19. The latest version available from Adobe directly is 10.1.102.64.

So Google puts its own resources toward a plugin (Flash) that, itself, can play H.264 video. I find this interesting to say the least.
Google’s Eric Schmidt on Open Source and Health IT
There is a book on software pricing: Don't just roll the dice by Neil Davidson. You can get it free on his website: http://www.neildavidson.com/dontjustrollthedice.html
The problem is the genericity of the term. For example, would you say, "Apple's Word product" Or "Google's Outlook client"? No, unless you were actually referring specifically to the MS branded versions of the product. This is actually why enforcing your trademarks is important.

Everyone uses the term "app store" to refer to "app stores". As the complaint notes, even Steve Jobs referred to "Android App Stores".

If you asked someone if Chrome had "Word" people wouldn't say, "Yeah it does." Thinking you meant a word processor in general. But if you asked if Android had an "app store" people would say yes. They wouldn't say, "No. Apple hasn't ported the App Store to Android, and likely won't".
It's detailed on this page as "6 months internet access":

https://www.t-mobile.co.uk/services/payg/boosters/

I'm generally more concerned with low latency than high bandwidth on my mobile connection. I tend to use SSH on my phone on a fairly regular basis and I've found T-Mobiles network to be very low latency in comparison to others.
Southwest Airlines pilot holds plane for murder victim’s family
Dennis Stevens gave an interesting talk on adapting agile techniques to big companies (with big projects). The slides and audio can be seen here:
http://www.screencast.com/users/SoftwareGR/folders/Software%...

A short commentary on the talk is here:
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2010/12/15/dennis-stevens-on-th...
The premise is that openness is all or nothing. But Google can support Flash and work towards openness, just as Apple can prefer open web standards in lieu of Flash while supporting proprietary systems. There's no hypocrisy or conflict.

The difference is that one company is claiming to champion open left and right whereas the other company focuses their discussion of open to very specific areas. There is hypocrisy with the former company in this case.

Maybe in the future. WebM support is new in Android, hardware decoders are really just coming to market, and there are enough existing and in-production phones that rely on H.264. The constraints placed on Google by the handful of Chrome users leveraging H.264 HTML5 video is completely unlike the realities of dealing in the handset market.

The point is that many view Chrome's move to eliminate H.264 as rushed, so why not rush Android's move? It's rhetorical. Google can't rush Android's move because it would kill Android to be unable to view 99% of online video.

It should be obvious that Google's hope is anyone using HTML5 video will eventually move to WebM exclusively.

Again, rhetorical. These companies won't move to WebM any time soon. It's interesting to me that very few of the comments here bring up the issue of encode quality. Netflix and Amazon are two companies that regularly deal with Hollywood studios, who have review policies for distributed video quality. WebM is inferior and very likely to remain inferior to H.264. One question Gruber failed to pose is: Does Google expect everyone to accept across the board lower quality of video content in the name of marginal "open"?

Content producers won't care if Chrome users end up in Flash, since the content's still available and very few non-mobile users are getting HTML5 video anyway. Flash is still the norm outside of mobile devices.

There are numerous reasons that's an unsupported blanket statement. Of course content producers will care. Why would they not care about how to support various and incompatible distribution and playback methods?

Were people ecstatic that Chrome supported H.264?

Clearly, there's a difference between caring about something that works as is generally expected and caring about something that doesn't work in opposition to expectations. People care when things break. The correct answer to that final question is: Adobe. Hurrah for them?
ProofreadingPal: Very Tactical Interview About User Acquisition
Here's five year olds (purportedly): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAHnRgPgusk&feature=relat...

The audio demonstrates why technology is not the issue.
Sure, but those can read basic english too.
It's funny that Bono and his 1.5% made it, but Microsoft and their 1.6% did not.

From the source link (reface.me, which actually got the picture from twitpic): "Not specifically included in the infographic are Microsoft’s 1.6% stake, Hong Kong billionaire Li-Ka Shing’s 0.8%, TriplePoint Capital (though as a debt provider they own nothing), and Accel Partners’ investment."
How much have you paid for using H.264? Just curious.
Potential is not a guarantee. Even if you see potential in someone, there is still a risk in investing in that potential - not all potential is realized.

Even if we assume the managers' motives were purely economical, it's still rare. Consider that they took a risk - their own jobs - based on their own belief that their team could deliver.
The risk is much smaller today than it was when the ipv6 whitelists for google, etc were originally set up. All patched modern operating systems and browsers have corrected the behavior that originally caused this (preferring automatic v6 tunnels over native v4) so that the only brokenness remaining in theory is outdated software and improperly configured manual tunnels.

See http://fud.no/ipv6/ for more information on measurements of this issue as browsers and oses fixed this problem.
This has been coming up again and again, but the question I have to ask: did anybody actually expect apple to let verizon pre-install anything?
How does a Historian have almost twice the stress of a software engineer?
The term "HotSpot" bothers me..

1) because its more descriptive to call it WiFi Router
2) calling it HotSpot means they get to tact on another fee for that feature. Maybe something like: $14 - for tethering enabled, another $20 - to enabled HotSpot.
Good catch, I'll see if I can edit and fix.
It's satire. In some ways, the reasoning that led Google to drop support for H.264, if taken to extremes, could be used to support the logic of dropping IPv4. I was merely pointing out, in a funny way, the parallel between the two situations, and the absurdity of the original H.264 decision.

For another example of related satire, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095993, which got 59 upvotes and made the front page.
This just means that Polish is a phonetic language - like Russian, my native language, which is 99% phonetic - but that doesn't mean that English speakers can easily make the required sounds.

I don't think I've ever met any American who can pronounce ы - though it's fun watching them try.
Compcert is great (it's by the same team who do OCaml). Unfortunately however it's not free software.
Actually, I did give the article a quick read. He's raising intersting points around the problems of localization and showing how to solve those problems in Perl using logic to do something that Java lets you manage somewhat easily. What's not included in my brief comment on MessageFormat, is the other part of the equation - Java also provides Locale and Property files for managing strings. My comment was intended to provide info to those Java coders out there who may not be aware of such things, since the Java API has a lot of nooks and crannies like that.
On the one hand, I think it is completely ridiculous that Microsoft, maker of Windows(TM) and Office(TM) is challenging Apple(TM), maker of the Macintosh(TM), over the potential trademarking of a generic term.

Having said that... yeah, 'App Store' is too generic and shouldn't be trademarkable so Microsoft are in the right here... it is just that there's no innocent party here to really cheer on in this.
"They have a press release, we have many millions of customer" - Ballmer in 07
Some of these msdn blogs almost feel like a non-apple folklore.org.

I like it.
I wonder how much Microsoft have changed strategy due to Google as compared to Apple.
> Moreover I have hired a talented writer via Freelancer.com to keep my niche blog updated to gain more search engine traffic (he takes $1 per article!).

$1 per acticle? I know the articles on the site (http://www.minimotherboard.com/, via a comment) are short and not really original content, but assuming he's spending even 10 minutes per post, he could be earning more working the drive-thru at McDonald's. I suppose he's agreed to it, and it's not your fault he's undervaluing his work, but that strikes me as insultingly low. I really feel for the guy if he's been forced into writing for what is essentially table scraps.
Early developers used to put NOPs into code, so they would have a place to insert hex patches later on. At a minimum they could plug in a branch instruction, bounce down to the end of the code segment, put a longer sequence of code there, then branch back. Old school stuff.
Compensating Your First Sales Leader
Required me to log in. Would it be considered good or bad practice to copy it here for HNers without Facebook accounts?
Its also really interesting that the Symbian guy basically dismisses Android as 'yet another linux platform'.
And if they add, it won't be awesome. It may be convenient or useful, but it won't be awesome. Just like adding support to use the compass won't be awesome. When they added support for VB, that wasn't awesome.