skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not criticizing truncation. You need to do it on long names. I'm saying it looks like the designers of the GNOME UI are using truncation as a quick fix for a flawed design.

Yeah, I thought it looked pretty obvious because it was so bad it just hadn't been gotten to.

While I can't articulate on whether pango's ellipsizing is as smart as Apple's, it should be as simple as changing a single property from PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_END to PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_MIDDLE.
The x86's real selling point is that it's the best platform for running Windows. Now that Windows is becoming less relevant its in trouble. In some sense Intel has more riding on the success of Windows than Microsoft does...
There's just one hole in your plan. The more bugs you have on your phone the more searches it generates :)
Also, if you do this on the desktop or in the finder with grid/icon view, OSX will word-wrap for a couple notches before trying to "middle-truncate". Loss of information is their last resort.
Same. No particular need for an IDE personally, but I'm glad Appcelerator is doing well.
Correction: When I specified whose lunch Groupon was eating, I said 'advertisers'. I should have said 'advertising agencies'.

From an advertiser's perspective, Groupon's pitch is really compelling. Instead of spending money on traditional media-buys to generate some interest and a few sales, spend the same money generating a lot of actual sales, and call it a day.
Right, and the numbers themselves are kind of dubious, too:

On Dec 6, Andy Rubin blogged that there were 200,000 activations a day. On Dec 8, Andy Rubin tweeted there were 300,000 activations a day.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/introducing-nexus-s-w...

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/08/andy-rubin-google-act...
Economy of scale for hdtv displays.
I'd say competence in a business model that is broken is identical to incompetence in a current or rising business model.
All About Health
Facebook is a High School Reunion, Twitter is Digital Kindergarten
Agreed, I've found a sweep spot using Blueprint along with the jQuery UI elements to rapidly create a decent looking site.
Sensible includes/templating with PHP or whatever stack you're building on. This is so useful when done well, but I don't know how many times I've seen otherwise intelligent people sitting there copying the same markup/code into every file or banging their head off the wall when Dreamweaver or some other bloated suite tries to update a "template" on 4500 files and upload them to production.

The idea is simple: anything that you're going to put in more than a couple places/files, should be pulled out and put in a separate included file. Your doctype declaration? Your nav bar? Your generic site-wide footer? Put all these kinds of things in includes, update 1 file later and your changes take place everywhere.
Hey Matt, thanks for the kind words. We really appreciated the work you did, and yes, that RSS connector is still there.
It's a bit different. It takes iTunes all of 10 seconds to download an average song, that's why I use it.

It takes BitTorrent a couple of hours at least to download a movie. With Netflix streaming I'm watching in under 30 seconds.

There's a lot of value proposition left in Netflix's services.
We use RightSignature to handle the signing of all internal/external documents. I'm biased, but I think it's the best SaaS document signing application available :)
I made the lucky mistake with Pluggio of not charging from day one. Not because I didn’t want to – but because I didn’t have the payment stuff setup and I was too lazy to do it before launch.

Sorry, but laziness isn't a compelling enough reason not to charge for your application.
I'm in the same situation (wife, kid, mortgage, etc). I've been working on escaping from the 9 to 5 for at least 5 years trying various different things. I have always battled with the thought that if I could only work on this full time... I don't live in Silicon Valley either. I do get very disheartened but overall I keep motivated and going. I do think of all of this as my education. Each project I try builds on the last even if indirectly.

I now have a side project that is growing pretty consistently. It took me at least a year to realize that this could really be something. Over that time there have been periods where I have given up and not put much time into it. So far I've always come back. I can now look back and see that the months I gave up revenue stagnated. I can also clearly see what I did that increases revenue. I can also see that if I keep working at the same rate (some evenings and some weekends) and revenue increases at the same rate that it should grow into something that will replace the 9 to 5 in the near future. That is particularly exciting to me as I want a business without the stress, complications and long hours. I now look forward to not working full time on it.

So keep at it. Something your working on now maybe the solution. It doesn't have to be big and exciting. There's plenty of people trying the same. It's not easy for sure but certainly doable.
I love how economists make all sorts or ridiculous claims by looking at the historical stock market. Two or three data points is not a trend, if you have 3 users and they all register, that doesn't mean your conversion rate is 100%.

Sometimes we forget that 100 years of data is nothing compared to human history and does not signify anything about the future.
Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour, by Colin Percival
I am sorry for my brief post. I am talking from the perspective of the user. Of course hearing the view of the developers would be very interesting.

I am on ubuntu and I would like a lighter alternative to Thunderbird for my netbook.

I think that a google product along the lines of TB wold be interesting, but I am not sure if they see that as a competition to Gmail that is Ad-compatible.
Patent litigation trends 1995-2010
> Has it ever occurred to you that the way you are interpreted is because thats how you portray yourself.

Yes, of course. What I'm saying is that I don't deliberately portray myself like that. It's very difficult to get tone right in internet communication in general, and I don't have that solved, and nor do most people.

3) Sure, there was lots of guilt at the time. We lost $25K that belonged to small-time investors, as well as spending the $20K YC gave us. As well as that, we promised lots of things to lots of people, which we didn't deliver. I'm not sure it's what motivated the post though. The post certainly wasn't targeted at the people we felt we had failed.

4) But who would we be apologizing to, and why?

5) I really wasn't trying to assign blame. I was rather trying to be as forthright as possible about the causes of our failure. Assigning blame would be ridiculously difficult anyway. Who would be to blame for the breakdown in relationship between my co-founder and I? Both of us? Neither of us? Just him, just me? None of those are really satisfactory answers, and even if they were, there's nothing to be gained from them.

> you did give up. you were three month in to it.

We were about 8 months into it, but I think this doesn't affect your point. What I'm trying to say is that you're trying to assign a pejorative label ("giving up") to something which doesn't merit one.

> -- now, thats just condescending and disrespectful though

It must be possible point out stuff like this without the assumption that I'm being condescending, which I'm not (at least not deliberately, see above).

> Actually, theres a bit of irony that you comment on the fallacy of "startup work is more important than anything else"

I didn't love what I did anymore, I was waking up dreading the days work, so this seems to be exactly on point.
This one could, sadly, be true: WikiLeaks was hosted here
The guy sitting next to me thought it was a virus.
remember Moore's law? that was based on two or three data points :)
Many things that affect the economy depend upon how much "stuff" is already there. A broader technology base means more innovation (= higher real GDP) in the future, because innovations build off one another. A larger money supply (= inflation) requires a larger growth in absolute dollar terms to achieve the same effect, because the important measure is the percentage growth in the money supply, not the absolute growth. More people (= population) have more babies, which leads to more population growth in absolute terms. Whenever you have to multiply out changes instead of adding them, you get exponential growth instead of linear.

There're some notable exceptions, eg. growth in the unemployment rate is usually linear, because it's already computed as a percentage. Growth in the absolute number of people unemployed is exponential.
> If they didn't want to invite criticism, they shouldn't have release screenshots of a product they don't want criticism of.

I am sure this will be a learning experience. It's alpha software, after all, and it is released in order to allow people to learn what works and what doesn't in the real world. As usual, with open-source, if you decide to use Gnome Shell right now, or in April, you'll be running the bleeding edge. I would say that, if you want to run it as stable software, you should wait until October. Open-source is developed in the open, as it invites intelligent criticism and grows stronger with it.

> Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings

Unless you want to design themes, you are not supposed to do that. I rarely do. I think I haven't done that since 2003 or so, and I was really going for a full customized desktop at the time. I did it because I wanted to do it.

> And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies.

I would like to point out a lot of Gnome has also been developed by a lot of full-time employees of for-profit companies too. It was you who called them "spare-time developers". I am not sure how it will play out with Novell's demise, but I trust other companies, like Red Hat and Canonical can chip in if needed.

> I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source

I then certainly misread your post. I didn't realize you meant "spare-time developers" as a compliment. My bad. I am sure open-source has a lot to gain from the criticism of a bunch of spare-time experts.

Meant as a compliment, of course.
It sounds like maybe a speciation mechanism could help with that, ie. don't let two individuals cross-over if they are too different by some measure.
Show HN: Rewordious - Domain Thesaurus
Ever have an idea for a domain name just to find out that it is already taken? Followed by spending too much time searching for available domains based off synonyms, when you should be focusing on building something? Yeah, us too.

You can now use Rewordious to:
- Find synonyms based on up to three keywords (use brackets to keep a certain word static)
- See what sites are available and which are already taken
- Register your new domain (just GoDaddy for now, Moniker soon)

http://rewordio.us

This is our first weekend project since leaving our jobs in NYC to move to the Bay Area. It is something that has been rolling around in our heads for a while. If you have suggestions or enhancement ideas, let us know. If all goes well, you'll hopefully hear more from us in the future.

Thanks!
Artistic quality is one of those things that defy definition. It may be that it's aesthetically pleasing, or it may be that its design communicate some other inner quality or a completely different idea. It may be that the inner quality, in itself, has some aesthetic quality, much like a beautiful mathematical proof.
Clickable: http://rewordio.us/

Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024927
Aside: to unpack that, x86 is the best for running all the x86 software out there. It has by far the greatest range of software, which is why wintel sacrificed so much for back-compatibility.

If that catalog is at all usable in a phone form-factor, then it is valuable. Worst case: you dock to a monitor/keyboard most of the time. But who knows, with built-in projectors, and an eeePC size keyboard covering the entire phone, perhaps it is a goer.

The biggest problem is if the form-factor is totally unusable for desktop software, when there is no desktop. Personally, I think it would be awesome to run regular software on a tiny tiny phone. Awkward, but awesome.
They aren't different. There was a post-Korea inflationary period and subsequent recession in 1953-1954 as the Fed restricted monetary policy to quell the inflation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1953

There was also a recession brought on by the oil price spikes of the First Gulf War:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession

The trend still holds up, it just wasn't worth mentioning in those cases. I'm more interested in why we got the Great Depression in a period of relative peace.
Exactly. Really the article is about paying more for more skilled developers (or at least, ones with skills that you need) rather than just senior vs. junior.

IMO, both the employer and developer are to blame in the scenario given. The developer hasn't kept his skills current, sure, but also the employer/customer requires the new hotness by next week and nobody has thought to train any of their existing developers in it (and end up paying a 130% premium).
Yes, here are a few explanations:

Because of compound interest money grows exponentially - the more money you have, the faster it grows.

Suppose I start with earning 10,000 a year, but my neighbor earns 20,000. Now suppose we both each 5% raises each year. After 10 years I earn 16288, and he earns 32577.

Now graph my income over the years and look at the gap between our incomes. In a linear graph the separation keeps getting larger and larger (we started with a 10,000 separation, and now have a 16289 separation). But that's wrong - we are both gaining equally as well. In a logarithmic graph the separation will stay exactly the same (and notice how when we started he earned twice as much as me, and he still earns twice as much as me after 10 years).

Suppose I'm in the business of selling stuff.

If I earn $1 per widget, and I can afford to keep 1000 widgets in stock, then I earned $1000. My neighbor however can stock 2000, and earns $2000. Now suppose both our profits go up to $1.50 per widget - now I earn $1500, and he earns $3000.

Now compare: In a linear graph he had $1000 more than me, and now has $1500 more than me. If you graph this over time he will look like he's doing far better than me - the income gap will keep growing - but really, he's doing exactly as well as me, it's just he has a higher base.

A logarithmic graph will show the relative difference between us - he has twice as much as me, and that doesn't change at all.

These explanations would be so much better with some graphs - is there a web service that will plot these things for me as live data?

One final example:

Suppose we are both businessmen, and we want to see who is better, I start with $100 and manage to grow it to $200, my friend started with $300 and grew it to $450. Who did better? I earned $100, but he earned $150 - clearly he did better right? But if you notice while I doubled my money, he only 1.5'd it. I'm clearly the better businessman, yet I earned less money.

On a linear graph it will look like he did better, since he now has so much more. But on a logarithmic graph the truth comes out - I did better. (And over time I will far exceed his income, and a logarithmic graph will show this correctly, but a linear one won't.)
It's a bit unpleasant if you're on the wrong side of the equation but it's just market forces. Mobile application developers were scarce while normal developers were plentiful.

The big lesson is that you should continually refresh your skills and develop new things on your own time.
Do you know any examples of GP's actually being used to solve non-trivial problems ?
a reference to back up this particular claim maybe?
I don't think he is missing the point; I think he is just pointing out the absurdity of this article which seems to value Hollywood opinion and the inefficient Blockbuster's demise over something that 17 million people are happily paying for.
There is also a public tutor [1] based on the course - basically a set of slides and audio (I think taken from an actual course) plus sets of questions to test your understanding of the material. It's interactive though - so you can submit your answers in scheme and they're tested on the server.
I think this it's a discontinued experiment as there are only 2 tutors. For me, this approach works very, very well; you can read the material, listen to it and self-test your understanding with basic yes/no answers.

[1] http://icampustutor.csail.mit.edu/
While I an appreciate that person's position of getting to market quickly, but I find it hard to believe that you couldn't competently train shart engineers in a week or two on mobile app technology.

I recall at one of my companies we had some incredibly strong devs, but all with Unix backgrounds. We needed them up to speed on Windows and COM. We did two courses for them -- probably WinTellect or something (one Windows, the other COM). In less than a month we had a small team of Windows devs that were as strong as any I'd seen.

We hired for really bright people first. Moving them to the technology was pretty easy. And if one month is the difference between making and breaking a market, you may want to reassess the market.
It seems like it should be much easier to do this in Lisp. In other languages wouldn't you need to work on the AST instead of on the source code to have much chance of generating syntactically correct programs ?
New Yorker cartoons captioned literally
2011's Garfield minus Garfield (not my site, but I wish it were)
True, and technology is far from the worst field in that respect. Professional sports or modeling are two professions in which you will lose your value no matter what you do. You have a limited shelf life and you have to make the best out of the years you have.

As a developer you at least have a choice. It's possible to earn a living as a software developer in your 50s or 60s, I've met a few.
Using git hashes + pip + virtualenv for Django
Are Users Aware They are Running Android?
Since you still haven't provided any research in support of your claims, I suppose it doesn't contradict anything. Fair cop.
Read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' Cliched as it might seem now, it address the abstract and almost mind-destroying properties of quality as well as anything can.

Short answer: The feeling of high quality occurs when perception exceeds expectation; the feeling of low quality occurs when perception does not meet expectation (wikipedia).
How do you infer that "[SICP] was about 'hard' math" from "some of the math [in SICP] was hard," by the way?

You qualified your inference with a conditional (to be fair); but I still find the implication irritating.
That's the way I see it. I don't want movies littering my hard drive. I just want to be able to watch movies. Netflix lets me do that without pissing off my ISP or forcing me to buy external drives or wait hours for the torrent to finish.
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/dick.rumelt/Docs/Cases/...
How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask?
Excellent app, imported my delicious bookmarks, set up twitter/fb feeds, works like a dream.

The only thing that would make the experience complete would be tag suggestions based on previously entered tags in the bookmarklet popup (you know, type a few letters, get a list of tags). Or maybe a list of all tags, I don't know, a simple alpha-sorted block of tags.

Even if you don't do any of those, I would still use it though :)

Great stuff!
-Tom
Kinect Dev Goes Google
I'll second this -- Innovator's Dilemma is a great read, and after having read it, I see it happening in practice all the time.
To be fair, Listen isn't an official google project, it's a 20% project, and the devs that started it probably just got bored with it, and/or busy.

http://groups.google.com/group/listen-discuss/browse_thread/...
HubSpot Close to Raising BIG Money Out West; Sequoia & Google Interested
We're using it at Loggly for our HTTP inputs.
I knew there was a reason linux helped me in school in the 90s!
On a lot of services you are automatically followed by the founders, like greeters at the door of a party. One idea could be to either seed some initial links (via suggested users) or add some top links (links with high frequency) from either yourself or Alex.
* THIS HOWTO HAS NOT BEEN TESTED YET *

But yes, I think someone is hacking on the Vibrant, but last I asked in #cyanogen or #koush, I was told that no one wanted to work on the S-G-S phones until more source was released by Samsung.

Also, that guide follows the same template as all their other build guides. If it works, I'm impressed, but I suspect it is a preliminary copy/paste job waiting to be filled in or expanded upon.
I think the clipping might be fixed. I don't see any in the dash (GNOME's term for the dock) or the application picker in the screenshot at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design?action=AttachFile...
What terrifies the Hollywood types is they'll lose the mass audience for their product. The days when you can get people to pay $150/month for cable are coming to a close, and the people who control distribution are on their way out.

I don't think there's anything they can do about it, but you can't blame them for trying to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible.
You should get a 1099-MISC from them if the amount you earned was over $600. They should have requested that you fill out a W-9 prior to this which is a form that gives them your social security number (or federal ID number if you've got a company entity).

However, it is possible you might not get a 1099 even if you're supposed to receive one, and, you're still responsible for reporting it.
Freakonomics is not in the newspaper. The newspaper refers to the print edition. Freakonomics is however in a profitable and highly trafficked web site.

The NYT web site business model works pretty well, but not enough to support the entire newsroom operations. However, the print side of the company still creates revenue to cover all that. The question is what business model will support that as print declines.

To your larger point I also disagree. They discuss their other ventures that they own (book, radio etc) which isn't owned or related to the Times. Therefore I'm guessing it's difficult for them to cross promote efficiently and drive people to different places. Moving to freakonomics.com makes perfect sense.
Writing a Dynamic Web App with Racket (Scheme PLT)
Interestingly, there is no CPI increase accompanying the present period. Maybe it's delayed a bit, as it was for WWII.
That's the idea of buybacks but there's no guarantee it will result in an increased share price. Take Cisco for example, by the end of this year they will have made around $82 Billion in buybacks while their stock has remained flat over the past 10 years.
Moore's diagram's in his origonal paper, presumably. However, while he only plotted a few data points he presumably used his experience with the semi-conductor industry in general and so actually had more.

ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf
Buybacks are much preferable, IMO. They only create a tax liability for the shareholder when the shares are sold, as opposed to dividends which are taxed the year they're disbursed.
Cute doesn't cut it when people are relying on your business. I sure hope no SaaS vendors take this approach.