skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, it's been pretty amusing watching and reading the re-structuring and re-wording of arguments on the Apple circle-jerk of blogs this past year.

It's similar to the current "browser wars." We're all over-privileged and spoiled to have 4 (soon to be 5) standards-compliant, fast, extend-able browsers to choose from on any platform we want. It's basically just nit-picking and personal preference at this point.

It's the same way with smartphones now. We have dozens of handsets that come in a bunch of different flavors (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) that are for the most part very well designed. We're just as spoiled with them as we are with browsers right now. Isn't it enough that we can all choose our favorite equally-awesome version of a smartphone without having to trash the slightly different competitor and write dissertation after dissertation over-analyzing how the other will fail or is bad (when clearly they are succeeding and a large portion of the market enjoys the product)?

Marco, Gruber, and co: you can stop. We get it, you like Apple. Good for you, not everyone else does. Isn't there something more productive you can be doing with your time?
> Would you say that someone who has been coding embedded systems for 30 years in assembly and minimalist C is a bad programmer just because they've never done OO?

If all that's been doing for 30 years, then probably, yeah. They might be good at their job, but an overall good programmer? Maybe they were great 30 years ago, but if they haven't raised their head to look around at the evolution in the industry and kept up with newer trends and developments, the level of skill atrophy would be quite large.
IBM Unveils Watson Supercomputer for Jeopardy Challenge
"But since then, very few non-geeks know about individual Android handsets. They change so frequently, and are so numerous, that there’s never much of an opportunity for a meaningful buzz to generate around any of them. Nobody’s lining up to buy them. CNN’s not covering their launches. Consumer Reports isn’t vigorously testing their antennas. The Daily Show isn’t making jokes about them. So the mass market doesn’t really respond to individual devices."

These problems are for Android the BRAND, not Android itself. For ~15 years the cellphone industry did just fine without people knowing/caring about specific models (with a few minor exceptions). You walk into the store, look at what's available and pick what you like, just like with PCs themselves. I'm not really sold on the idea that Google cares all that much about the Android brand. It is in their interest that phones become generic internet-consumption devices, just like PCs have.

I do agree that the paradox of choice thing can be a problem for purchasers, but ultimately the market seems to think that it's not enough of a problem. Every industry eventually moves to 50 varieties of spaghetti sauce, because even the most popular variety doesn't appeal to millions of potential customers.

Finally, this:
"The manufacturers and carriers have very little incentive to maintain the software on devices that are still relatively new and under contract, because they want everyone buying the newest ones instead."

What? Even if they didn't want everyone buying the newest one instead, what incentive do they have? The way the industry works now you are basically married to your phone for 2 years, like it or not.
That's why T-Mobile's now non-advertised Even More Plus plans are so nice. No contract, pay less per month, and buy your phone outright. If you sign-up in a store you can even get an 0% interest, $0 fee payment plan for your phone, really the best way to go.
Why do some people consider it "bad form" to include your link in the URL portion of the HN submission form? I've been wondering this for a while, since I am always annoyed when I have to cut-and-paste a URL.
The diversity can be bad for consumers, too. Marco makes a great point: How many 6 month old Android phones are never going to see an Android update? How many Android phones available right now will never get Honeycomb?

With an iPhone, you know you're going to get iOS updates for at least a few years, to the extent that the hardware can support various features. I've got an iPhone 3GS that's over a year and a half old and I'm running the latest and greatest iOS.

(Honest question: How many Android phones released in the summer of 2009 -- Android 1.5 days -- can now run Android 2.3?)
I follow Vuru because (I thought) they were working on some Value Investing goodness and they tend to have some good insights.

From the title of this article in particular, I thought they were actually going to rip him a new one. I kept waiting for some snarky comments or a "GOTCHA!" and was disappointed to find none.

The fact is that "fitty" convinced a group of unsophisticated Twitter followers to gamble in the market by buying a highly speculative stock that they don't understand. He shouldn't be praised for getting a 240% return for that. He's a smart guy, but this H&H thing is a terrible example of investing to inspire an article.
http://www.michaelyung.com/blog/book/2009/11/01/buying-us-ki... maybe this helps
I may be taking an "old school" approach to this, but I top post. That top post is an actual coherent written document that answers the questions with enough context to make it clear that it's answering questions. If you treat email like chat, then yes, top posting is dumb. However, email can also be an extension of the "letter writing" style of interaction where you don't just answer with one word. I'm not sure that I think it's a good idea for email to evolve into "slow chat".
Call on Obama Administration to Identify Greatest Threat in History
And now I want bourbon.

Is 1:30 too early?
And yet they will look like scientists to us unless and until someone happens to shine a light on them. Something to keep in mind.
Well, does it have to be an invisible global blacklist? Would it be possible to create personal blacklists and have one for each user? I mean, Google already customizes search results for logged in users, so this wouldn't be too far of a stretch.
Building flimsy straw men and knocking them down is an activity for children.

(See what I did there?)
Great points that you've made. One thing though, I would argue that we've seen this issue in action: "Nahhhhh... this is like saying "We have too many car manufacturers... we all need to narrow down and settle on a couple key models"

That is essentially what the reborn GM has done - it paired down a wide range of models by their brands into just a handful. If the recovery of the company is any indication, consumers responded well to a whittled down set of choices over fragmentation set.
You cannor hire great perl programmers for the same reason that you cannot hire great programmers--they are a rare breed and an endangered species. Skills with a particular programming language are not a primary differentiator between programmers. A good perl programmer is likely to be (or make) a good python programmer, C programmer, C++ programmer, LISP programmer, etc.
Bottom/Top posting is like deciding which side of the road to drive on - it's more important to do what everyone else does, rather than follow a "correct" system.

Every Silicon Valley corporation I've ever worked for has followed a top-posting model, ergo, I top post when communicating with them.

On the flip side, Open Source mailing lists like LKML bottom post, so I bottom post when communicating with those communities.

At the end of the day, after 10 years of daily use, I've never really noticed much of a difference between the two systems - as long as everyone uses the same approach consistently within the community, it's pretty straightforward to follow the thread.
Who said the legal system isn't just?
Come on, this is clearly far, FAR away from being NoSQL!

You are missing a hip, unusual name, a cool website design, clever, convincing slogans, lots of media/blog coverage and an intriguingly large downloadable binary version.
Or another for AMD64: http://code.jeffkent.net/trac/shiny_moose/browser/trunk/kern...
To be fair, the guy who recently fixed on the big car companies (either Ford or GM, I don't remember), had no experience with cars but is said to have done an amazing job.
I suppose it depends what you want to get out of it. There's certainly educational value in going as deep as you have the stomach for. But, for me at least, learning the specifics of how to get a processor on the PC architecture into a usable state gets tedious fast.
> Google dropping this codec actually helps prevent h.264's monopoly.

A baseless assertion. It’s far more likely that most sites will continue using H.264, wrapping it in Flash for desktop users, and then sending it naked to mobile devices including iOS and most other video-capable phones. Economically, what is the incentive to do otherwise, as a publisher? How in the world do you figure otherwise?

And can you please fucking stop pretending your own definition of “open” is the same as everyone else’s? Open ≠ free. Sometimes people use it that way. But there IS open source software (GPL’d, even) that is NOT free of cost (like many Wordpress themes & plugins), and there IS open source software that has been tripped up by PATENT TROLLS, and when we are talking about open SPECIFICATIONS the word “open” should be demonstrating that more than one party controls it — which IS the case with H.264 but NOT the case with VP8. So if you want to argue about openness, DEFINE your terms and ACCEPT others will not agree, but we CAN and SHOULD be dealing in terms of facts regarding who controls the spec and who can use it for free, not to mention what’s best for users (something Chrome is otherwise fantastically and fanatically obsessed with).
Very poorly designed indeed. They should have been checking for mass!
I "thank" Microsoft for the destruction of a lot of things, more than any other company (maybe there's selection bias there, I work in the same industry they service).
irb(main):001:0> x = 0; xs = [1,2,3]; xs.each { |x| puts x }; puts x
1
2
3
3
Quite correct, and it's almost axiomatic at this point that CPAN is Perl's killer app. That said, I wasn't referring to great programmers - I was referring to the language itself.

I'm not sure I understand why basically having to patch your language to get a feature that others have out of the box is not seen as a weakness of that language.

Now, we can talk about Perl + CPAN and all the jazz you find therein, but that's a different discussion. My point is, taken by itself, the language Perl does not have an especially good Object system, especially if you consider Ruby and Python the competition.

"So is DBI, Perl::Critic..."

What's your point? Database bindings and lint like code checking are not features every developer - or even a good chunk of the developers out there - are going to need, or have use for. By that logic I could point out that Perl still wins no points because Ruby and Python - and just about every other contender out there - has their own equivalents.

I'm not referring to CPAN or the the gobs of stuff in it - I'm referring to the language itself And while we're on CPAN, much of the popular and useful material in CPAN has equivalents in Ruby and Python that are every bit as mature and useful.
This article is full of assertions without actually providing evidence behind them. For example he makes the statement: "since then, very few non-geeks know about individual Android handsets". He doesn't cite any surveys of consumers that back this up. Its all very well making these assertions, but when they are so lacking in evidence its hard to trust this article, its reasoning or its conclusions.

On the other hand market share figures offer some evidence to the contrary. Consumers are clearly buying Android phones - more so than any other platform. Developers are clearly writing programs for Android phones - the market has less programs than the iphone app store but its growing incredibly fast, and its a clearly ahead of Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and Nokia's efforts.

In the tablet marketplace there has been clear demand shown for the Samsung Galaxy Tab - despite the fact that the Android software isn't even tablet ready. In other words people are buying a specific Android device for its hardware - the exact antithesis of the argument in this blog post.

I find it really hard to believe that this article is motivated by anything other than the author's liking of Apple products. Thats fine - its his prerogative to take those stances - except that I find articles promoting opinion that don't back them up with any real evidence to be incredibly unconvincing and pretty much a waste of time. Its a real shame that this got voted onto the front page of HN.
How To Date A Female Geek
Yeah, when I said "it's the only right way", that was kind of a joke. Should of had a smiley there.

I think we pretty much agree -- I tend to lean towards interleaved, but will top post when it is expected.
I for one would read at least half of these. I bet if you went to a book summary site & read them, then wrote each of those up as a blog post (or a guest post from someone -- i.e. Jason Calacanis on "How to Win Data and Influence Google" or pg on "Rich Angel, Poor Angel"), you'd have the seed of a healthy blog following.
On phpBB bulletin boards, the usual custom seems to be to quote the person you're replying to, and maybe the person they quoted, if absolutely necessary. The reply depth should never go high enough to cause problems. This works well.
This fragmentation meme doesn't even pass the laugh test. So why does it keep coming up?

My best hypothesis is that people who're invested in the iPhone are trying to rationalize their desire to stay on Apple's platform. Is there a better explanation?
"Over the past couple of years, Google has progressively added vertical search results above its regular results. When you search for the weather, businesses, stock quotes, popular videos, music, addresses, airplane flight status, and more, the search results of what you are looking for are presented immediately. The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results: They are instantly getting an answer to their question:"

Is this Google fanboy speak? Sorry, but I don't care how quickly the gamed results appear or how local they are, they still don't answer my questions.

This article is pointless.
When I tried to register, I get an error upon entering my email address - "invalid email address" - I tried closing and reopening the register window. (I'm trying on Chrome 9/Win)

Otherwise, just looking through it - like the layout and the general concept is intriguing. To answer your question of focus, I like the idea of filters or aggregating additional content. (But please let me choose whether or not to accept those new content streams.)

EDIT: When I register from the homepage, the form works. Previously I tried to click register while viewing your sample Nader page.
First point: our cards can be shared to people without the app. That being said, we have a long way to go before we're even close to Bump in terms of user adoption. I do believe the product is in essence more focused on business cards than on data transfers.

For the time being we only show one phone number on the card (we picked a size that shows up correctly on all mobile screens, not just iPhone). That doesn't mean that the info doesn't get shared though.
Why we shouldn't fear our alien overlords: Comparative Advantage
Open-source software: Untangling code
Project Kipling Alpha Test Is Now In SUSE Studio
Is the styling broken for anyone else in Chrome?
I am talking about practicality or the chances of it happening. Anyone can do what they want, but if it's incompatible with the 800lb gorilla's offering, it's basically a moot point.
Wikipleadia: The promise and perils of crowdsourcing content
I don't know what kind of fantasy world you live in where the only reason you could like H264 is because it's patented.

I like H264 because VP8 is an inferior technology.
It is apparent you did not read the article. Please go read it, or at least this quote:

> This explanation is lacking, to say the least. It appears to be a conflation of several issues: openness, royalty-freedom, and source code availability, among others. In the traditional sense, H.264 is an open standard. That is to say, it was a standard designed by a range of domain experts from across the industry, working to the remit of a standards organization. In fact, two standards organizations were involved: ISO and ITU. The specification was devised collaboratively, with its final ratification dependent on the agreement of the individuals, corporations, and national standards bodies that variously make up ISO and ITU. This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs. H.264 is unambiguously open.

> In contrast, neither WebM's VP8 nor Theora were assembled by a standards body such as ISO. VP8 was developed independently and entirely in secret by the company On2, prior to the company's purchase last year by Google. Theora was created by a group of open-source developers…
We're working on scanning features.

The Android app is currently in alpha stage. We'd love more testers though, firing an email to android@mynameise.com would make us pretty happy!
Well, he did say that his list only includes single words, not truncations (e.g. 'decaf') or compound words (e.g. 'deadbeef', 'deadc0de', etc.).
Does this differ significantly from the clojurescript which is already on clojure-contrib? https://github.com/richhickey/clojure-contrib/tree/master/cl...

You can try it out at http://clojurescript.n01se.net/repl/ which evals your code via a Java applet.

On a side-note, I'm modifying an older Javascript-based Lisp interpreter to have a more Clojure-like feel, as well as adding in Macros, etc. and running it on the v8 debug shell "d8" (built with readline enabled). The goal is to be write something like Clojure in a way one would write Node.js apps. At some point I want to have it auto-compile the lisp modules to Javascript a la Python's .pyc files.
The patents WebM is known to use are also licensed. http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/
The article acts like it's Ms Chau vs. WSJ. But, it smells to me like a PR firm is the real culprit here (possibly even with Ms Chau's involvement).
Safari also supports pluggable codecs via the QuickTime component mechanism. I don't know if anyone has made a WebM QuickTime component yet though.
> (...) it will probably serve as an additional boost to the book's sales.

I don't know; the book's only received negative attention by my perception.
It's not a scenario that I'd considered as a possibility before, but it does seem quite plausible that a hijacker masquerading as police or an airport security guard could get onto an aircraft without going through even so much as a metal detector. All they would need would be something which looks convincingly like a uniform, some fake badge and a gun.
I've come to the conclusion that this debate boils down to your personal writing style. If you are an accomplished writer who can boil down all the points in an email, express your responses as a coherent, single body of prose while maintaining enough context to keep your reader fully in the loop, then yes, top posting makes sense.

Chances are, you're not.
The fee would be about $5 million a year. Arguably, both could afford it (it would be about 5-10% of revenue, but doable).

The reason Mozilla is not wanting to include H.264 is that:

1) It can't do that in the open source version, and doesn't want to have separate open-source and closed-source releases.
2) It feels H.264 would be bad for the web, since it requires paying to create content in H.264.

Reason #2 is somewhat more important than reason #1, since #1 could be worked around by using system media frameworks, etc.
Interesting stuff. One of our managing editors at Forbes spoke with the IBM guy leading the project: http://blogs.forbes.com/bruceupbin/2010/12/14/ibm-to-ken-jen...
Sorry, you have truly no idea how NoSQL databases work and miss important points like parallel mappers and multi-dimension keys.

Google the TeraSort project to get an idea how map-reduce works and why it wins over all SQL-based solutions.
"corrective capitalism" - awesome term.
As do most nutritional supplement vendors.
Excellent points, and thank you for sharing them. The physical memorability of paper cards are one of the most difficult borders to cross for us. We have some great ideas that we'll be implementing throughout the year.

Customization of cards and playing nicely with old-fashioned paper cards are an absolute requirement for us to succeed: we're very aware of this - and building towards a great solution.
This looks fine and all. But allow me to ask:

Is it web scale?
Can you talk at all about what happened with the dongle? I've been following mynameisE for a while and was excited at the prospect and would love to hear a post-mortem regarding the product.
First prize of 50gb for life is nice. A really great incentive.
Erm... Am I still reading Hacker News?
I agree about the original title. I disagree that your replacement title is an accurate representation of the article. The article does cover the inaccuracy of the original Wall Street journal, but that didn't seem to be the main thrust of the article. The article is more about what Amy Chua's book is really about, rather than being about how the WSJ wrote a misleading article about it. I think a better title would have reflected that.

That said, I think even a title like, say, "Wall Street Journal article about Amy Chua's book was misleading" (basically "lied" ==> "misleading") would be better. Saying they "lied" is a much stronger statement than saying they "mislead", and the former seems to imply something more extreme, like that they were pushing an agenda. If the article had addressed the WSJ's motives and asserted that they were, in fact, pushing an agenda, the stronger title would have been justified, but, again, the article wasn't really about that.

All that said, I think it was a good article and I upvoted it. I also think it would be interesting to hear some thinking about why the WSJ spun the article in the direction they did and as hard as they did. It seems like the WSJ is unlikely to have a specific agenda relating to the parenting styles of Chinese immigrants, but what do I know.
True, but I would offer the difference between "Too many models" and "too many models at a manufacturer (or in this case, per OS)".

GM fragmented their product line too much to offset the manufacturing and R&D costs to support all of those models. Narrowing focus was more to save their own skin than to make the consumer's life and easier. I would guess (this is purely off the top of my head) that the number of GM's sold hasn't changed that much... but what has changed is GM's profit margin per model, and thus cost savings allow cost cuts to the consumer which may have increased sales. HTC would have the same problem if they produced 2-3x the number of models they do now.

To me the original article reads more like "cars with four wheels have too many choices... one company needs to make four wheel ones, one needs to make two wheel ones, and one needs to make unicycles". That's the jist I got from it anyhow.