skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I "failed" (your word, not mine) on the App Store for almost two years before getting to some decent, steady success with an iPad app. I put out several apps myself and on behalf of two different employers since day one of the app store, and most of them went (more or less) nowhere.

For the app that does make money, it was really about the tried and true technique of "build something people want", instead of "build something useless you think is awesome and pray".
The entire article suggests he derives much more happiness from changing the world than running a lifestyle business.

By creating a company that aims to revolutionize how banks deal with customers, Payne is having his cake and eating it, so to speak.
There is a computer on my desk, but my e-mail is processed elsewhere, just like my paycheck, my corporate purchases, my calendar, my project management tools, my collaboration suite and a lot of the software I develop. My desktop computer hosts a browser, a text editor, an application server (more or less identical to the one that runs my applications - on a more or less identical OS) and, on occasion, an IDE and its own replica of another set of servers. If I weren't developing software, whatever is on my desk wouldn't be relevant, as long as it could host a browser.

I can also tell you, for the traffic I get on my blog, that Linux is very well alive in the web development world. I am sure my posts won't attract the average VB6, corporate-drone, shirt-and-tie Windows developer, but, honestly, who cares? The worthy among them will evolve into something, given time. I don't care for those who don't.
A lot of people are breathlessly excited about Lady Gaga. Does her existence improve the world? Maybe, for them. Would they be worse off if they never heard of her? Probably they'd find someone else to be breathless about.

Note that the smaller Freckle/etc apps are the ones people actually pay for.
That, plus the US State Dept is evacuating Americans from Japan now anyway.
I think this is the first time I read an article that focuses so much in only one of the Google founders. So far you could only find stories about what the two founders did together, and little about their individual personalities. This kind of article is probably more attractive, and paints Page in a more similar tone than the one people like Gates, Jobs, etc. tend to be written in. Maybe this is a way to make Google look cool too.
There is a big difference between people who tell you what you CAN do, and people who try to tell you what you SHOULD do.

I can't decide which is more aggravating -- that somebody many people respect is out there, in public, trying to shame me by claiming that I'm not living up to my potential... (that my dreams aren't big enough, that what I do isn't good enough for the world, blah blah blah).

Or that the person doing it seems to be ignorant of what I'm actually about and what I actually do, and why, and what my future plans are.

Should I defend myself by explaining myself, or should I just fight the very idea that anyone should expect me to explain myself -- especially after insinuating something so rude, that I was "duping credulous customers" into buying trendy crap?

After some reflection, I'm going to stick to the latter course.

By the way - why me? Wondered that? Me too. I wonder if it had something to do with the fact that, many moons ago, al3x approached me to design the first preview version of BankSimple. It didn't work out, and I always figured that's because they really wanted a full-time designer and I was definitely unwilling to devote more than a little bit of consulting time to it, because I was committed to my own products.

KirinDave is going to come on here and try to skewer me, imply I'm lying and that story is untrue, etc., etc., so I'll just pre-empt it here and state that that is his viewpoint.

FTR: I think BankSimple is going to be really awesome, as well as beautiful, and that al3x is very, very, very smart. Yet this whole brouhaha is extremely confusing to me.
When should you switch envelopes?
Well then Linux is already the most dominant OS ever! Discussion over, because clearly I have nothing to trump your web logs. And lord knows that anyone who uses Windows is hardly human and the fact that we let them live is a testament to our lord Linus. But if you do wish to kill some of them tonight, no one could blame you. Right?
Does he derive happiness from writing sanctimonious blog posts telling other people what to do?
They are indeed making preparations to do this, with two of the hydro plants in Nagano (normally producing 60hz) near the crossover point: Ontake and Nezame. Combined they produce about 70,000 KW http://www.nikkei.com/news/category/article/g=96958A9C93819A...
OOP vs Haskell type classes
On the personal level I know almost nothing about these people (I heard a Mixergy interview with Hoy which was great). My reaction is to the notion that a big company necessarily improves the world more than a small one.
Forcing an OS upgrade is in ms's interest since its likely people will likely stick with the built in one, which is Microsofts browser.

Keeping backwards compatibility is in mozillas interest since people are likely to change their browser than their OS. This means xp users are likely to switch to mozilla than Microsoft.
In terms of C integration, Objective-C wins, giving C priority even over it's own syntax :)

D has pretty nice integration - you can convert (reasonably non-hacky) C headers to D headers and use C functions and types almost as if they were D native.

Explicit type casts, even for most basic types like ulong and void* stuck me as very inelegant.

For known prototypes, it should be possible to do it much cleaner. There are various Objective-C bridges (e.g. PyObjC) which are able to seamlessly convert known C types and ObjC classes to equivalents in high(er)-level languages.
For those familiar with Japanese geography the 60hz and 50hz grids are broken up like this: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/商用電源周波数#.E6.97.A5.E6.9C.AC.E3.8...
Even if you don't have a personal story you should still be able to construct a nice narrative about how your product can help the end user. I think the important thing is to not just list 20 features and expect the user to be awed by your amazing product. Instead, give a description of situations where there are pain points and explain how your product comes in with just the right feature set and pricing to save the day.
Xobni for Gmail, iPhone, Android coming soon
I've been using the Gmail product for a while now. It's pretty awesome.
when these domains start being available to the general public, all the good stuff will already be taken.
I'm saying this earnestly and with care:

The first priority should be finding out what is right for yourself. Ultimately, no one can tell you what is right for you.

Hacker news is a good place to reflect, but hopefully you can read things without having your whole mental framework being disrupted by one article with a different perspective.
No, net neutrality is about not discriminating based on who you are communicating with or the meaning of the bits. For example, if AT&T had a deal to promote Bing, and as part of that blocked or limited traffic to Google, that would be a net neutrality violation (discrimination based on remote endpoint). Or if they detected and throttled VOIP traffic, that too would be a net neutrality violation (discrimination based on the meaning of the bits).

They are discriminating against people who hook up unauthorized computers to their network. That's outside the scope of net neutrality.
Chrome OS X here, clicking buttons inside a modal dialog sends me to the top of the page (away from where the modal dialog is).
Most, yes, but since everyone is doing this, to stay ahead, you have to do something else if you want to do better than them. Hence mining the "regular" internet instead.
People had friends and met significant others before the internet. I'm not saying these apps are bad (they are both bad and good) but that in the bottom line the world isn't necessarily better or worse.
The equality relation on the reals obeys reflexivity (as well as transitivity, etc). You're barking up the wrong tree. For a mathematical example, you'll need something much more exotic than R.
FYI this article is adapted from my book on Google out next month. There are generally two types of book excerpts: those that reprint a discrete section or those that draw from the whole to stitch together an article reflecting the reporting. This one is the latter--when Google announced that Larry would be the CEO, Wired (which secured the serial rights) chose to focus on him. I drew on anecdotes throughout the book, as well as interviews with Larry, to produce this.
Ah, I see. I didn't even notice you could click once to play (the play icon should have been obvious to me). Honestly, I would always click through to the description anyway to see what's up, unless it was a podcast that I regularly listen to.
Steve Jobs was Google's first choice for CEO
> You could even TimeMachine-without-additional-drives... I mean, why should my snapshot system and my backup system be one? How about letting me use TimeMachine locally, and if I plug up an additional drive, TimeMachine asks me if I want to backup to it as well?

Unless something changes between now and RTM, Lion will provide that feature out of the box:

http://www.9to5mac.com/54117/time-machine-can-be-used-withou...

And that's about the only feature that a typical Mac user would benefit from with ZFS, without some kind of "prosumer" or "enterprise-y" external storage device.
Except it appears that, according to an update, CNN is sending 'only 50 "reporters, cameramen and crew"' to the wedding. The WSJ (who first reported this about CNN) is refusing to retract it because, well, that's just the kind of quality reporting you get from the modern WSJ.
I used to be disgusted by materialism and greed, when I was in college, but my first job out of school washed my naivete away. It paid well but it was awful, and not because I had a bad boss (I had two, one good and one bad) but also because we were treated horribly by clients. They didn't respect us or our work at all. Why? Because they had money. No other reason. The fact that my job there was better than what 90% of people have (good pay and shitty conditions, when the norm is low pay and shitty conditions) made it clear that, unfortunately, money matters a fucking lot. If you don't have it, you can end up in jobs like that. So yeah, getting at least comfortable is a high priority for me and pretty much everyone else in this lost generation. Besides, long-term career mentoring is gone in most companies and no one listens to a smart person with good ideas unless he's rich, so what is there to expect from work other than a swing at owning one's life?

Excessive greed is idiotic, like a mental illness. We'd call a guy with 300 cats insane, and not want kids around someone who has a different sexual partner every day, but someone who works 100 hours per week to chase inordinate amounts of money he doesn't need is lauded as a hero. That, I'll agree, is a pathology. On the other hand, moderate greed is (very unfortunately) a survival trait in this morally crippled, creatively desolate, fiercely individualistic world.

That said, though I want to be rich, it's mainly because of the positive things I could do for the world, not what I would take from it. I can't ever see why I would want a private jet. If I had the money, I'd rather invest it in something that can make others' lives better-- maglev transport, green energy-- than fly around in absurdly ridiculous comfort as opposed to the merely ridiculous comfort of international first class. Besides, I'll probably marry my current girlfriend-- she's quite awesome-- so I have no interest in the "party" culture or impressing women, and I'm too abrasive to have a shot in politics, so what exactly would I need to be a billionaire for?
Lion does this by default.
Let's say I buy a box of doughnuts and go down to the street corner and sell them.

For each doughnut I sell, somebody gives me money and I give them a tasty treat. They are happier because of our exchange, if only for a short while, and I know that I have "done some good" for that hungry person.

Now I could just as easily stay home and try to invent the uber-nut, a killer replacement for doughnuts that costs half as much as lasts twice as long. A treat that will change the snacking world as we know it! I can build a factory to make uber-nuts, I can design complicated equipment, I can go on the web and talk about how earth-shattering uber-nut is going to be.

But none of that sells any uber-nuts. It's just me spinning out an imaginary architecture and vision of world domination and using my skills to construct this fake world where it all is going to happen.

For every guy who makes an uber-nut and changes the world, there are thousands of failed attempts. For all of those attempts, most of them result in making the world no better at all. It's a long, bitter experience. As opposed to the guy who actually buys the doughnuts and goes and sells them, where he knows he is doing some small amount of good in the world. For every 20 or so guys just looking to make a difference, any difference, only one of them makes it happen.

Those are some amazing numbers, and you'd be a smart person to take some time and think about them.

What folks are saying is simple: Go make a difference. Right now. Some little, _real_ difference. Sell a doughnut. Find a small niche and improve people's lives in it. Because even if you do one tiny, unimaginative, boring thing that only helps one person in some really small way? You've actually done something. As opposed to imagining you are creating the next earth-shattering invention and then flaming out. Because even if you created the uber-nut that changes snacking as we know it? You're going to do that by making a box of uber-nuts and going down to that street corner and making one person happy at a time. You roll out huge changes by picking one small niche at a time. It's the same difference. The key question here is how much self-bullshitting you want to do versus how many doughnuts you want to sell.
It visually looks a lot like Kod. (http://kodapp.com)
Maybe it's something they make you do if you want to be a banker.
Even VB6 programmers are people, Ken.

And yes. Linux is pretty much alive and well in a lot of places. Face it: most of the world couldn't care less with what OS and browser they use to get to Gmail or Facebook. They don't buy OSs. Dell buys OSs for them.
Seeing Interactive (YC W10) changes name to OwnLocal
The one thing a billion dollar corporation can't do is be a startup again. There's too much at stake.

If you are truly a passionate early-stage founder, then the only option is to leave. Of course, Ellison, Gates, Jobs would never do this (willingly, anyway, in the latter case), because they'll never hit another homerun that big. If Page left it would be a pretty big stake in the ground.
I like your hack, but I'm fairly certain anything important WILL get to you. To be honest, I'm not sure I've had any government dealings that were conducted over e-mail - they're all snail-mail, which I can't stop by living in a red-light district (the real-world equivalent of a .xxx domain I suppose).
Dude, it was in all caps for comedic effect. It's the most melodramatic WOO MONEY AND STARTUPS phrase in my article. Was that an Earthbound reference? I'll give you some points for that, at least.

The rest of your comment is rehashing things that have already been discussed above.
This is really mostly MSM/blogosphere hype. These revolutions started when people set themselves afire, and risked their lives confronting the army/police. FB might have helped (Youtube probably even more, Twitter almost trivial) but in the same way that a cellphone would.

Governments are now using social media to track dissidents as well, so it's not at all clear the net effect it positive.
A desire to change the world, apparently.
Maybe Related:
Over the last few months, I've really come to like most of the 5by5.tv podcasts. Two picks:

- the dev show, good combination

- on the internet, entertaining
The NyTimes paywall crap
Again, you're totally allowed to sell your company for $20 million dollars (or less) when the offer comes. If you're thinking about exits at all at the SEED FUNDING STAGE of your company, that offer is never going to come.
It isn't about the language in this case, it's more about the implementation of a consistent framework. The GUI will obviously change from platform to platform, but the .NET framework (for the most part) works on all of those platforms. That's a pretty big group of patterns and reusable idioms.

Java is also a no-no on iOS devices due to its JIT model. The .NET stack gets around this by using AOT compilation, so the entire .app is native code yielded from the JIT process (as I understand it). No reason something similar couldn't be done for Java, but as far as I know, it hasn't been.

Developer experience from top to bottom is the win here, I think.
That's really what I liked the most about the Backbone implementation. It stays very close to the standard JS pattern--essentially mirroring what someone would do if they wanted to setup the prototype chain and attach methods manually.

It asks you to name the constructor method 'constructor' (when it could've easily been called something short like 'init' instead, for brevity). This corresponds well with the standard 'constructor' property available on each object, which points back to the constructor function that created the object.

The '__super__' property is also a nice convenience, without doing something "fancy" like wrapping each method with logic that temporarily injects a 'super' property into the current instance for the duration of a method call. Although that's definitely clever and convenient, I prefer the simplicity of using '__super__'.
Lion actually makes local snapshots by default but the option to turn this on and off is quite hidden and even with local snapshots enabled the huge on/off switch for Time Machine in the preferences shows that Time Machine is turned off. All other Time Machine behavior is unchanged. This is, I think, quite a clever solution to the problems you were mentioning.

(This might still change before they release Lion, though.)
It's actually the non-floating parts of the 520 bridge that are the most vulnerable to an Earthquake.
Timothy Lee on the FTC's Do Not Track Regulations
I agree. Which type of story resonates more with would-be entrepreneurs? The "I want to help others via my business" story, or the "I hate my crappy job, and want to seek what I perceive to be happiness via my own business" story?

I'm not saying that you can't have a mixture of both, or transition from one motive to the other, but most people's first thoughts are about themselves, others tend to come afterward. We are afraid to admit this in public, but I think we can all agree it exists.

So what's wrong with seeking personal happiness first? Does that preclude you from being more altruistic later in life? If you can put others' needs first, more power to you, but that doesn't make those who cannot worse people.
With A New Name In Tow, MyPad’s ‘Facebook For iPad’ App Hits 3 Million Downloads
Senderbase has some interesting spam statistics which are reported from Cisco/IronPort security appliances around the world. After today is over and the stats are calculated, there might be some interesting data.

http://www.senderbase.org/home/detail_spam_volume
I think most entrepreneurs overestimate the amount of "world changing" they are actually doing.

The original post was off-base, and I think this one is too.
How a small startup took 12 employees to SXSW
> most of the features of ZFS don't add any value to a Mac with a single internal drive

My favorites:

* Data reliability (checksumming, etc...)
* Compression
* Lots and lots of undo
* Including undoing entire OS upgrades
* Cheap and quick partitioning
* Easy disk replacements

I've made use of all of these things this week. It happens that the disk I replaced is part of a two-disk flat pool, but old disk out, larger new disk in and zero downtime is awesome.
I had some nibbles from some google recruiters a little while back, but I let it drop. It seemed to corporate. But this article makes me think I should give them another chance.
WordPress Need For Speed: Optimization with nginx Caching
15k - 70k to develop an app?
To anyone reading this after the discussion took place, there is a follow-up by al3x here where he clarifies his position: http://al3x.net/2011/03/18/not-a-waste.html
How is that an excuse for vitriol?
I think the article explains why this isn't going to happen.
If you have $20 million, you can put as much of your time (which you actually own) into your idea as you think it needs. Once you have proof of concept, you can look for funding and then hire people and have a burn rate. I don't think, however, people with $20 million are going to stake their whole fortune on one startup. That's just irresponsible, no matter how good the idea is.

Also, with that kind of money, you can actually socialize with VCs as equals and, if none of them want to fund you after a few years, it's probably because your idea sucks (as a business). Then you do not hire other people and you do not lose your $20 million.

That's what I would do. I wouldn't hire a single person (for cash, not equity) until I had the validation of knowing other people were willing to invest. This is because I know I'm smart, but I've done creative work (game design, writing) and know that half of even my ideas are bad. Creativity is just about having the persistence and judgement to develop the good ones.
It's not entirely stupid. Although, if you are arguing specifically against the non-regional TLDs, then I would probably agree with you.

.gov was a bad idea.

.gov.us (or .gov.ca.us) is not.

Outside of obviously regional things. amazon.de and amazon.ca serve their purpose fairly well.

I would agree that the difference between ibm.com and ibm.org and ibm.net is impractical at best.
posterous seems to have issues:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:f3LGdaE...
I think serious papers had them till the past decade or so.

Totally agree about CNN. I think they are bad for the same reason quality of most products has been decreasing - short term, please-our-stockholders thinking.
We've managed to setup our own database servers

Heh, I work in IT and have some users like that. They're pretty smug until they realize it takes us a while to set up any infrastructure because we do little things like, umm, backups, which they don't have, and now suddenly really, really need... Oops.
Groupon’s ambitious intend to change how and when we eat
In regard to stratifying domains and simplifying the process of omitting adult content, I think this is a great idea. While the "evil empire" image is easily applied to ISPs (in regard to purposively blocking access to these sites), realistically, unless they want to lose a whole hell of a lot of business, they'll leave it alone.
Kevin Rose Resigns From Digg, Closing Round On New Startup
> I see a bookshelf of technical computer science books. I guess Computational Linear Algebra from 1992 is makings its way up the NY Times best seller list. It must be, because its right here on my desk.

Straw man. I never said Linux is making its way up NYT best seller list. I only questioned your statement that it's dead on the desktop because, frankly, it's not. It's niche.

> Also, I just ran my program and it didn't crash. There must not be any bugs in it.

Another straw man. But remind me, just in case, to never buy any software from you.

> Here's a hint, a little of bit of research will help you not make claims of things that aren't happening.

The same applies to you. Linux is not dead on the desktop. The desktop will give way to other kinds of devices and, surprise, Linux is already pretty much dominant in that space. Dead? Hardly.

And, even if they will no longer be called "desktops" I bet they will still be on desks.