skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The iPad does everything that a regular computer user does. Facebook. YouTube. Email. Web browsing. It does all this out of the box."

Doesn't basically every device with a browser do these out of the box?

If we're talking apps I wasn't aware that the iPhone pre-installed Facebook and I didn't think there was an iPad app for Facebook. Is this a new thing? I've heard of Android phones having it installed, even having buttons for it, but I don't remember seeing it on my iPhone.
gthank, roc. Very few situations are black and white. Sure Android may not be open as other open source projects but that doesn't mean they it is closed. Also google are not talking about closing it down. They are just talking about a delay in widening who has access.
It's easy to get positive feedback from people, but when it comes to negative feedback, people tend to hold back in fear of ruining relationships. Yet, we know negative feedback is one the most valuable things you can get when it comes to self development.

We built this app to make it easy for people to get honest opinions from their friends about what it is that they hate about them.

The goal is not to promote hatred, but rather to help people identity their weaknesses so that they can work on them and hopefully become a better a person.

I would love to hear what you guys think about it. Any feedback or thoughts for improvement would be much appreciated.

Thanks.
An Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age: Morality on the Front Lines
All this talk of Facebook taking over Google's market assumes that social search is inherently better.

There are plenty of things we search for that our friends and family wouldn't be able to advise on. How many people on your friends list could offer advice on any large portion of what you search for?

Facebook will probably become the go-to place for product searches, but I think we're moving toward having a lot of domain-specific places to find information.

I expect Google to move away from being a search engine and focus more on being a SaaS company over the next decade. The search service is already taking on the role of a fallback when search functions on domain-specific sites fail.
No, advertisement.
Groupon's "Real" U.S. Revenue Numbers for February
Of all the problems Myspace had those two are probably the least significant, if they're even problems at all.

Honestly, I never got the impression that there was much competition at all. Myspace was too early, made some design mistakes, and focused on the wrong initial market. Meanwhile Facebook focused on doing their own thing, which turned out to have way more potential, and zoomed by Myspace when social networking finally caught on. It just turned out that social isn't a space with many consolation prizes for second place.
>OT: I also want tagging in my file system. My understanding, purely from reading, is that BeOS was one of the few/only to really do this. Anyone have pointers to a current, maintained file system that does this?

The closest thing I'm aware of is KDE 4, but it's not using a special file system. I haven't used KDE 4 yet but it sounds like it's integrated into the overall desktop system, including Dolphin, the file manager.

It uses NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for Personal, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge). Quick description from wiki:
"NEPOMUK-KDE is featured as one of the newer technologies in KDE SC 4. It uses the RDF store Soprano and, on a technical level, allows associating metadata to various items present on a normal user's desktop such as files, bookmarks, e-mails, and calendar entries. Metadata can be arbitrary RDF; as of KDE 4, tagging is the most user-visible metadata application."

The KDE site for NEPOMUK looks like it has some good information: http://nepomuk.kde.org/

General NEPOMUK specifications: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Deli...
I don't think you can generalize much about a group of three hundred million people. If you accept that premise, then there just isn't very far you can go when talking about a country's honor or morality.

The people calling the shots in a country might be a small enough group to make statements about their honor or morality meaningful -- but then statements like "my country" don't mean too much either.

I think the Powers That Were (and largely continue to Be) in the US have probably done wrong by many people living in Iraq, although I'm less sure about this than I used to be.
I have traditionally used honeypot fields in this manner. Recently, however, I have noticed some false positives because of autofill features in browsers (especially Chrome). To work around this, I would add to the above that it may be useful to remove the field with the submit event on the form and then test for it's presence on the backend. Alternatively, just use the timestamp approach.
CRUD is a good part of it and I'm planning on using RoR, but there's also part of it that will interface with a POP3 server and do some regex on the messages that it grabs. The pricing model for the app will be a recurring monthly fee based on the number of clients the customer has signed up for the service. I'm still looking at options for handling the payment (recurly, braintree ..etc) and I've never built an app with a payment system, so I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around that sort of thing.
The whole conversation feels like a troll.
There are ways around that. Web workers for browsers that support them and continuation-passing style for those that don't.
Its funny I don't know (can't think of one) of a high traffic site that "died" due to technical failures (particularly scaling failures). Twitter had massive problems during its growth phase, Reddit has had similar problems. Does anyone have an example of a site that got "killed" by technical issues? I'm really curious.

Bad products tend to die or get replaced by superior offerings. Thats the nature of business.

Not being able to innovate rapidly because of technical lock in is the only way these types of issues can "kill" a site. But its very hard to quantify these types of issues. Between this article and Kevin Rose's statements about hiring B&C level programming talent it seems like a lot of engineers are getting tossed under buses, for poor management decisions.
As noted in the article, Buffett also shuns tech investments - and Buffett has said he doesn't invest in something he can't understand well, and he doesn't understand tech.

And he's not wrong. Nobody understands the conditions for the future success of companies on the edge of new technologies on the kind of level that makes Buffett comfortable enough to invest.
Will Steve Jobs Save You?
I'm confused. Where on this page does it mention anything about corporations? Is that merely an editorial from the OP?
Yes. It's a funny/sad reminder - although astounding - that Apache and Cherokee were not, in their origins, a software.
I think this could all be avoided if Google separated the code from the Android brand. Code releases could be much more common (and include situations like Honeycomb where they don't think it's ready for general consumption) but enforce tighter control on what a vendor is allowed to call "Android".

For instance, anything derived from the Gingerbread line could be used by Samsung/HTC/whoever, and sell it under the Android name, but anyone using the Honeycomb line would be barred from using the Android branding until Google was confident that it was ready (which, really, would happen sooner if it was open for hackers to fix). At the same time, smaller groups and homebrew folks can still get access to all the code they want to hack on and run their devices.

While I do think the article makes valid claims against Android's openness, I think decoupling the branding would go a long way to allowing a community to sprout up around the code.
Ah, but do you understand that the chance of a false positive can be much higher than 5% even with your "95% confidence limit"?
I took it to mean that there are some languages that certain developers won't touch, and php is one of those and ruby isn't. Can't we agree on that?
Another case of technical people assuming all business failures are technology related. Just like Digg failed because of NoSQL even though Reddit is frequently down due to technical issues.
What do you mean by "heavy toolset"? There's too many already-written tools and utilities?
Latest news on the LHC
Exactly, Buffett's whole investment philosophy revolves around margin of safety. What's the margin of safety in a fast growing speculative space such as tech? Zero.

Not to say that you can't pick winners, but it is wholly different from buying a controlling interest in a company which has the potential to reap high profits with tighter management (see, Coke, Wrigleys, Wendy's, Railroads, etc).
Any site at the scale of MySpace is going to have hundreds of hacks to make it scale that no one wants to touch.

I disagree.

From what I saw while I was there, Google scales through good process and discipline. I'm sure there are hacks that I didn't see that make things more efficient. However if you are truly dependent on scary hacks just to keep running, then you will fall apart when your scale increases, those hacks fail, and nobody knows how to make it work. Which is why Google is so big on scaling through good process and discipline.

As for why Microsoft is possibly a poor choice, there is a lot more institutional experience out there for making Linux scale than making the Microsoft stack scale. Furthermore Microsoft forces you to pay a hefty licensing tax for very unclear returns. So you're paying money to sail into uncharted territory and hope you can make it work.

But all that said, if they have architectural problems, odds are very high that the biggest problems are in the software that they wrote rather than the technology stack they use.
Employment and Stock Options Plan Explained
I'm arguing that Google didn't even believe that the binaries were a good product for 10-inch tablets. My bet is that Motorola forced their hand a bit, as opposed to waiting for the software to actually be complete.

It's a pretty long list of issues with the XOOM software even today.
That part isn't, yes. Most people don't care how open (as in freedom) their device is. They care how open (as in they can use it well). This is a decent argument. However, I think it's ridiculous to suggest that the Android model is vastly different and more complicated than iOS's. Installing an app on Android is virtually the exact same as iOS, and being able to install from other sources is optional and adds zero complexity to installing from the market. Apple has definitely made iOS seem easier to install apps to, but that has more to do with their excellent design and marketing than the fact that their market is locked down.

The part in the title about "The iPad is 99% more open" is 100% semantic bullshit (which happens to be a pet peeve of mine, obviously). Additionally, "None of this crap about it being closed is accurate." is wrong because he's talking about open (as in accesible) while the people he's saying are wrong talking about it being closed (as in freedom). No one was making the argument that it's not accessible to users, so it's a strawman. I don't think it was intentional though, just a failure to think about the fact that he's using a completely different definition than the people he's arguing against.

He does have a point, but it's also stuck in the middle of this confusion over terms. His argument that "None of this crap about it being closed is accurate." is indeed completely wrong, because that claim was never made. The point about the perceived complexity is correct, but again I don't think that has to do with the inability to install from other sources.
The GPLv3 has provisions specifically for preventing the locked bootloader deal seen on most phones today.
I'd really like it if these FB apps had screenshots of what the service actually looks like. If I came across this organically, it would not inspire enough curiosity to grant oauth access.
In my opinion, some of it also had to do with inconsistent and ugly hacky Myspace user experience.

White / Yellow / Green / Red fonts on black backgrounds with animated gifs + glitter and broken plugins will be the response to the question "What comes to your mind when you think of Myspace UI experience?"

In comparison, the facebook experience was a lot more fresh, clean and unified.
Baidu Tests Web Browser as China Search Leader Expands Range
You have obviously never been to Denver:)
Early stage of an inPulse smartwatch appstore?
Here is what I would do if I were you:

1. Start Freelancing until you can live on free lancing work alone. If you don't have time stop taking classes.

2. Stop taking classes anyway, and start an open source project. You'll be further ahead this way anyway.

3. Ask for a raise now and see if they will give it to you. I would expect they are underpaying you about 40K when you factor in the 20K + no benefits. If you can get a 15k raise out of them you'll be doing a lot better.

4. Go start your open source project on Github today and then come tell us about it!
I long resisted using the pomodoro technique because, frankly, on the surface it looks a bit stupid. But then one day I tried and found that it is surprisingly effective. I am not sure why, perhaps it provides a sort of marching rhythm to the work time. Anyway, it works.
Can someone explain to me how shipping devices with Honeycomb without supplying the source is not a violation of the GPL?
For one, a glorious failure taints the name. Not many (any?) ships are called "Titanic" anymore. I tried to find good examples of famous failures having their domains reused but wasn't able to.

webvan.com still exists as part of amazon.

pets.com points to petsmart.com

An untainted domain is an asset, which is why there are many squatted domains. A tainted domain is a liability.
Heaviest ever antimatter discovered
As the age-old saying goes, "A poor workman always blames his tools." Where is the accountability? I would be much more interested in hearing some retrospect on what they did wrong.
Perhaps I was overly strong, but my point was that whatever you're learning at your job, you'll learn it faster if you're starting your own company. I worked a few jobs right out of college and I learned some stuff that I think is applicable to our startup, but I was still virtually clueless when we actually went to start it.

When it comes to the quickest way to put yourself in a position to successfully start your startup, there's no comparison between learning at your job and just starting it.

This is super important because the longer you wait, the more risky it becomes to start your startup in the first place.
Wow - weird that highscalability put up and edited version of my comment on Scoble's blog.

I have a bunch of friends from MySpace and one common theme I do hear is that they feel that a better architecture (not connected to the stack) would have let them ship stuff quicker.

The interesting thing here from Nick Kwiatkowski's comment on that page is MySpace did a lot of things you'd often see on advice posts here - like "Rearchitecting/rewriting from the ground up is almost always a fool's errand". It seems like there is a limit to technical debt you can endure. If you rewrite too quickly, you'll be made fun of as the company which killed their product by trying for a massive rewrite/re-engineering effort. Take too long and somebody like FB gets to ship features very quickly and leap ahead of you.
Glima : Wrestling For Warmth
Just start building it. What's your MVP look like?

Braintree makes the payments dead simple and for <1k you have someone integrate it all into your application. Don't worry about payments until you have the app built.

It sounds like you're afraid to make mistakes on the engineering side. Just start building the thing and don't worry about engineering. You can always refractor code later!
Awesome... this guy at Cisco wrote a watchapp which controls their sliding door http://inpulsewatch.com/blog.asp?a=blogdetails&blogid=4
Yes, I only clicked because I thought it was about the Cherokee web server.
One on one pitches are more conversational. So the slides are designed to be something you have a conversation about, not something you simply present.
I expected Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki to be on this list. I would recommend it but more importantly I've seen many people who know a lot more about functional programming recommend it. It is probably a bit more useful for the average programmer than many of the books listed here.
I've begun to dislike Youtube because of the fact that it doesn't offer downloads.

I dug up the video on blip.tv. If you are interested http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2086330 (yes it allows download).
LiveJournal maybe.
I may not be normal, but I've never minded filling out a reCaptcha. The only time I get annoyed at captchas is when they're poorly designed.
sad?
Totally forgot about this point. Starting up right out of college is great because you know how to live like a college student :).
Eden Development has closed
He's an active angel investor in California. Also, he was hilarious in Dude, Where's My Car.
Bachelor Thesis: Scale the realtime web
I heard very good things about VRaptor (http://vraptor.caelum.com.br/en/). It may be able to convince me to forgive Java.
The problem here isn't that MySpace ran on Microsoft or was in Los Angeles - the problem is that the reason why there was no motivation for any change (move to SF, migrate off MS) is because the founders are small minded pitiful individuals that couldn't envision a life beyond 10mm dollars. They just sat there and knew that if they could keep the site (myspace) going just long enough to vest their shares that they could grab just enough money that they wouldn't have to work.

In addition, I believe this is further evidenced by their behavior post-myspace (mindjolt and such projects). They are sitting around collecting just enough money with a high enough title that they don't have to work but are guaranteed a paycheck.

These people are NOT innovators, and are NOT market shakers, they are just people that want to collect a paycheck. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Groupon, by the nature of it's business takes in a lot of revenue. But it doesn't keep most of it. Much of that money is paid out to the business running the promotion. Maybe someone else knows the approximate split?

Revenue has some bearing on Groupon's ability to generate profit, but revenue is a vanity metric.
Friendster. Maybe there are lot's of others who just had technically competent competitors, so we never knew about them in the first place.
Friendster:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l...

VB: Can you tell me a bit about what you learned in your time at Friendster?

JS: For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side — we had millions of Friendster members begging us to get the site working faster so they could log in and spend hours social networking with their friends. I remember coming in to the office for months reading thousands of customer service emails telling us that if we didn’t get our site working better soon, they’d be ‘forced to join’ a new social networking site that had just launched called MySpace…the rest is history. To be fair to Friendster’s technology team at the time, they were on the forefront of many new scaling and database issues that web sites simply hadn’t had to deal with prior to Friendster. As is often the case, the early pioneer made critical mistakes that enabled later entrants to the market, MySpace, Facebook & Bebo to learn and excel. As a postscript to the story, it’s interesting to note that Kent Lindstrom (CEO of Friendster) and the rest of the team have done an outstanding job righting that ship.
Reality: It is almost unheard of to get a raise from 20K all the way up to market rate. You need to move to another job.

Given your situation, I would advise creating a portfolio so your clients/potential employers can see you work and then get a client for a short term side job. I say "short term" because you will invariably underquote the true cost of your first job so you don't want to lose too much. <g>

Never, ever (ever) try to sell yourself as being cheaper.

"I was wondering if I could work fewer hours? I like working here but I'm going to need to take on some side jobs to so I can afford to work this one."
OR:
"Would you be willing to give me a reference Bob? I need to start working some side jobs so I can afford to work this one."
Maybe I'll just clarify what I mean by a megacorp. I'm talking from experience at working for a company with well over 100k employees. My most motivating and entertaining jobs were in companies with less than 50 employees. These however were the most tiring, so bootstrapping and "side thing" was out of the question.
Cartographic projection procedures for the unix environment
Interesting. I found problems with certain crappy browser toolbars that helpfully try to autocomplete forms they encounter, including hidden fields.
The source that they're witholding is not GPL.
C) inspire a Greasemonkey script within a few hours
Keyboarding was by far the most useful class I ever took in high school, even more valuable than all of my 8 AP classes together. Nothing has proven more useful on a day-to-day basis.
Yes. The only way I'm able to spend a reasonable about of time on here.
Fun, a number of blog plugins have picked up the hashcash ideas, e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/.

Add 100ms-of-2011-avg-cpu computation and tie it to the submit button (avoiding any complications interleaving with user activity). So that deals with first-order dumbbots and makes life a little harder for Javscript-executing (but still volume-based) folks. Marry to a bayesian system to handle the third-order mechanical turk-style miscreants.
The Unofficial Guide to Using Color
Color is not stupid, it's evil.
I wish I could go back to those naive times when I thought Color was just a silly VC move, an overrated photo sharing app, a confirmation of bubble times or anything like this. After reading some of the PR they've been pushing to fight the massive bad rap they got on their first day in business, I'm convinced Color is bad, evil bad, 1984 bad.
For instance, according to 'Color CEO: The Tech Justifies the $41 Million' published on RWW, "When you take a picture or video, Color gathers a variety of information. It collects sound levels, Bluetooth readings, light readings, antenna strength, the time - even the direction you're pointing your phone - and more and uses it all to determine your proximity to other users."
Wow! Scary thing... I'm not sure they do have the technology they claim to have, if all this is true or pure PR. But if they do, I wonder how will they use this data? What for?
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'll play safe and not install that thing.
But surely for Honeycomb this isn't necessary. If Motorola wants to lock the bootloader then they can do so. This doesn't prevent Samsung or Archos from using the Honeycomb code. It just prevents people from rooting and modifying code that runs on Motorola's device, which is their perogative given that there is no end to HW manufacturers for Android products.
I like the way you think but I'd caution you on working on your own project while on lunch as I think some employers may not be welcoming of you doing that while on "their time" with "their resources", even if you're on your lunch break using your own software/hardware.