skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think myspace's greater flexibility was its downfall. The problem was that over time, the end-user experience stagnated while the company focused on maximizing revenue from ads and such. Based on comments above, it seems that while facebook was busy introducing incremental social networking improvements myspace was busy trying to make users click more so that more ads would load.

Myspace had some of the most annoying ads on the web. Heaven forbid you tried to use the site without adblock.

I think that was the bigger problem. Had they continued to focus on improving the end-user experience rather than extracting every last bit of value, they might still be a viable competitor to facebook. The freedom to customize would be one of a very few features facebook could not easily copy.
But can you also include the arxiv?
How to Find a Lucrative Business Idea Creatively
Linus makes fine points, but it's asinine to say that standards don't matter. His entire contribution to the world could not exist without them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvU4zAErpmw

:-D
I get a daily email made from the RSS feed. That way I can quickly scroll through things (clicking on the links that seem interesting) and know that I haven't missed anything without junking up Google Reader.
Right, or go into some sort of tombstoned mode when resources are needed and the app hasn't been in the foreground for a while.
He's passionate about imposing his "vision" on everyone. He's a control-freak of the highest order.
Qaddafi? Gadhafi? An explanation on the various spellings
After given the "travelling salesman" optimization assignment, on the handup, I handed up my KD-tree implementation and at the end of the write up I suggested the lecturer check out a similar article on bees to this (may have been the same one, was a while ago)

got extra 2% bonus :)
The first bit of evidence linked to by that article is glibc's maintainer complaining that he's being asked to improve the strfry() function, after a detailed technical analysis. If you don't know what strfry() is, that response does look unreasonable. But he's right! strfry() is, literally, a joke function.
Teaching an Old Dog New Bits
Oh, yeah, that would be good. Thanks!
An example:

"War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press."

When considered against thousands of years of human history, documenting wars large and small, and the events leading up to them, such a view of the innate goodness of fellow man that is pure and would never wage war but for the corrupting influence of the elite, comes off as incredibly naive.

When compared and contrasted with, for example, Machiavelli and his discourses on the first decade of Titus Livius, Einstein comes off like an episode of the Care Bears.
That said, it was MIT's experience back when the SAT meant something (pre-1994) that class rank (i.e. grades) were one of the two best predictors of subsequent success.
Some thoughts about competitive portfolio companies
>If this is what's going to save the ghost of Ericsson, they're toast.

Do you mean Nokia, the company that just abandoned their own software platforms and signed a deal with Microsoft?
Posted with slides on my blog.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved...

I had been waiting for the video to come out -- they usually use them to promote the Business of Software conference. So, let me make my one plug: go to the Business of Software conference. It was one of the highlights of my professional career, and I got advice and inspiration that directly helped get AR launched the following month. This talk barely gets in the ballpark of quality of some of the presentations -- and the real reason to go isn't the presentations, but to meet people who doing great things in software. (More than once I found myself asking "Who the heck let me sit at this table?! This guy bootstrapped a business which sells nuclear power plant control software and now has N employees and Y million revenue. I make bingo cards for a living!")

Thanks for the praise by the way.
More good fodder for bubble discussions. Assume for a moment that he's right, that “Most of them will be overpriced” and “Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest.” This is also an accurate description of the dot-com and telecom bubbles. And this leaves the poster children like Facebook, Groupon, Quora, and now Color.xxx in a very vulnerable position: to sustain their mega-valuations they have to show that they can sustain being so so so much better than everybody else.
Although I like the attitude on some level and in this case he is obviously right, the problem with it is that our (and others I know) programmers feel like cowboys after reading HN posts like this. 'Ruby master bla says I don't need comments and documentation man!' 'Testing is sooo 00s; we use our brains!' 'Specs and standards are paper, read Torvalds; he uses that in his watercloset! Yeah he isn't talking about specs, but those are paper too!'.
You are right that "the purpose of many the constraint techniques seem to be aimed at creating puzzles that are amenable to humans, not solving them"

I shared the link because I found his sudoku generator and the constraint methods interesting.

> That would be backtracking.

Let me quote the first para in full:

The solver uses depth first and/or breadth first tree search
with constraint propagation to prune the search for the next
best move (forms of forward checking.) There are space/time
tradeoffs between depth/breadth first search and the constraints
used; sudoku(1) has options to control the combinations.
The common characteristic for all constraints, here and elsewhere,
is that they avoid trial and error. Its fine for a computer
to guess and backtrack but a definite breach of puzzle manners
to require a human to do so.

I could be wrong but, yes, it does use backtracking to find the constraint that can give a number for an empty cell but it never has to change a number it has put in a cell. That differs from the trial and error approach that moves forward by guessing values and checking if it leads to a valid solution.
I just posted another technical article on the Crash series:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/26/crash-bandicoot-...

or the HN link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2372240
This hit the product I work on and I agree 100%. We had to scramble for days to fix this. (Find a test case, diagnose it, make the fix, release a patch.) It was a pain in the ass. At least the solution was a 1 liner.
The Magical Mystery Show of Consciousness
Linus himself has said that he has an ego the size of a small planet.
So I had this talk down cold when I arrived in Boston and then learned I had misunderstood the rules for talks. I thought I had 7.5 minutes to go through 15 slides with a clicker. 48 hours prior to doing this talk I learned I had 30 seconds per slide and then the slide would autoadvance.

This totally fubared my joke timing, so I had spent the entire night prior to this speech practicing, going so far as to do so over lunch in my hotel room, to the amusement of the cleaning lady who also needed the room. I didn't stop being terrified out of my freaking mind until "swan dive", which was the moment that I knew I had the crowd.
MIT doesn't care purely" "about ability to be a great engineer as opposed to a well-rounded human being", some* of the latter is required. And in my experience that isn't too hard to find, how many great engineers or scientists that you've known or heard of are only interested in their work and have no interest in, say, music (that was common at MIT in the '80s at least).
While I agree with his focus on users, he has passed up a valuable coaching opportunity and probably antagonized a whole bunch of developers. He turned a potential coaching opportunity into a pissing match. Ridiculing volunteers on a open source project is inappropriate, irrespective of whether the opinion of that person was right or wrong.
Very interesting, but these OSes are actually just 2 branches of the "unix" tree of OSes. Too bad he didn't include Windows, or OpenVMS, very different operating systems.

The only experiment using Windows NT vs NetBSD that I'm aware of is this: "The Measured Performance of Personal Computer Operating Systems" (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/papers/sosp95/). On the same hardware, for cross-platform tasks, NetBSD outperformed Windows NT. This was in 1995, so it was probably Windows NT 3.51 and NetBSD 1.0 or 1.1
Arguments in and about Ruby
Hmm, maybe it was the RC.

Also, I may be completely overstating how slow it was. It definitely wasn't unusable, but it felt slower than it should have been. This was after multiple wipes to multiple ROMs too.
in the night, while the lights in the room are on, open something white in your computer (i.e. a document).
Take a piece of white paper and compare it to the white document on the screen. The correct setting is the one in which the background ("white") of the document on the screen looks most similar to the document in real life.

Cheers.
I like comment 132 better - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477#c132
Our good coverage is in part due to analysis by the likes of Ericsson on user movements/density. Make the laws harsher on storing location data and we could see a drop in network quality down the road.

Having worked as an employee (not contractor) for 3 of the 4 major Irish cell companies I know that data like this is heavily protected internally (I never saw any subscriber location information). There are data protection laws already in place to stop this information leaking.

Why do you want to limit the information a company can keep on its users? Are you a fan of this new EU cookie directive?
Everyone else is big brother. Which is how it has always been, actually.
Lambda’s New Coat: 21st century syntactic Mexps
Bzzzt. You are having a common nerd/guy adverse reaction to the word "emotional", but as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies staffed with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for 15 years, let me assure you, everyone is receptive to emotions. They're just different emotions†.

Watch Patrick's talk. Particularly the Google slide.

† "Fear" is one my industry has used to great effect; "egotism" is another one.
Everything you say is accurate. At the same time it's worth listening. Buffet's got a great understanding of business models in general and knows a lot more about high tech than people give him credit for -- starting with a close friendship with Bill Gates. Yes, it was a very general statement and I would love to know more but take it for what it is: he's recognizing a couple patterns (most stocks badly overvalued, hard to pick winners) that he's seen; and it seems like nobody's convinced him yet that they're on the short list of winners [or he probably would have mentioned them]. So, while he's not necessarily right, it's still very valuable input from a strategy perspective.
If we solve these two problems, by making all web based apps download their logic to the client, and by disappearing the browser entirely, then that's a native app. It's running locally and it's independent of the browser.

I agree with you on this, although the one quibble I can see is that part of the appeal of web apps has been the idea that you (the user) don't have to update them, because that all happens on the server side. This can be solved trivially of course by just having the client side app check it's origin server for updates whenever the user accesses it, but there's a possibility of that that could end up rather messy unless update management was a centralized part of the OS, rather than a free-for-all (Java Updater and Acrobat Updater, I'm looking at you!).
New private community for startup founders, beta invites available.
> Features...

Patio11 would probably suggest putting a question about benefits and experiences during usage in there too.
Ask HN: Shop at any retailer in the world without leaving Facebook page?
Pretty much every retailer in the world will have FB page one day. How will it be possible for FB to make people shop at them without leaving FB page and eventually grab a percentage from each transaction? What's needed? Inventory of each retailers moved to it's FB page?
Startups get approached all the time (ones with traction & articles written about them) so simply tell the founder you love the company and would like to invest.

If he has raised money he will not be turned off by your approach.

Your best bet is to join in a round (if it is open) otherwise, it may not be feasible given the other investors and legal issues involved.
I like how the bees are said to figure out the answer faster than a supercomputer, when the problem involves "several" flowers. Unless "several" is 15+ flowers, a supercomputer is going to have an optimal solution within milliseconds, before the first bee has even reached the first flower. Now, if the bees had 1000 flowers to visit, I would be more interested.
Hey, at first glance it seems like you're taking the tungle.me concept and layering on voting for the venue -- is there more I'm missing?
Awesome. Next, get rid of "Save", which is an even bigger problem.
I wonder how long that will last though. Google just hasn't seem serious about developing and nurturing the Android Market. If somebody like Amazon came along and relieved Google of the burden, would Google take them up on the offer? Amazon would run it more like Apple runs the AppStore, albeit without the competitive restrictions.
The upstream glibc bug is worth reading too. My favorite bit 'Everyone is interested in using the code idiots write'.
-10, do people use this junk?
And as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for over 15 years, let me assure you that this is untrue.

So, yeah, it's a question of approach. Which was my entire point.
A spec is a contract between programmers, and in the long run, following specs is good for users. Letting Adobe ignore specs and then bending over backwards to accomodate them doesn't seem like a good policy.

And even if following the spec weren't better for users in the long term, it is technologically superior, and Fedora is free to choose the technologically superior alternative over pleasing the masses if they want. Despite what Linus suggests, there is no Ten Commandments of software that dictate the rules here.

I guess Linus could have used this opportunity to convince a naysayer like me why I'm wrong, but instead he was just insulting and didn't address the real points at all.

(And FYI, I'm a diehard Linux user)
I couldn't agree more with this.

I may be overdoing it a bit here, but personally I don't agree with Torvald's p.o.v. at all. While user experience is obviously important, allowing mistakes like this to go unchallenged by simply providing a work-around just encourages people to write broken software. Specs exist for a reason. Ignoring them is not it.

I do this in my own software as well. If a user files a bug because input X fails to process as expected -- and it turns out his/her input does not meet the spec -- I do not supply a fix. Even if his/her supplied input is widely used in 'the wild'. While this alienates a considerable user base, I refuse to be part of the problem.
I guess the next one in line should be getting rid of file as a concept. Not much point knowing where exactly the song you want to listen or a movie you want to play is stored.
The hardware isn't only getting faster, it's also getting more innovative. Here's a really important point: The new capabilities of the hardware (like accelerometers, for example) will always come to native apps first. Color couldn't be a webapp. There's natural urge from develops to want the full potential of a device. Meanwhile, no device maker is going to wait for their new feature to become a web standard before they ship it. You just can't do hardware innovation through the browser, because the whole point of the browser is to abstract the hardware away into a common generic, platform.
مشاهدة مباراة مصر وجنوب افريقيا
If you look at the history, the comments at the beginning were much less abrasive. It's only after the discussion continued for a long time that he started being more aggressive in his comments.
That's a deceptive title. The real point is more important (but less sensational):

Reality is what matters. When glibc changed memcpy, it created problems. Saying "not my problem" is irresponsible when it hurts users.
I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any menu ever, "quit" is one of the few that I thought confused no one. Then I read something like: "in Ubuntu, we have some elements waiting to help out: the messaging menu, the me menu, and the sound menu" and discover the concept is stuffing functionality into a maze of predetermined slots based on a set of usage assumptions. I don't think any of this is responding to the needs of users, I think its the equivalent of rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom.
Can we please stop with these articles, that with due consideration I will refer to as "fucking pieces of shit"? My HP48-G could probably brute-force the instance size of the problems that they threw at these bees in less time than the bees took, and there is also no particular reason to believe that the bees actually solve the problem, which is to say, 100% of the time find the perfectly optimal solution. Anything less is not a solution.

There is a long history of people simply assuming that things could solve an NP-hard problem when in fact you only get an approximation: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf

Bees may not be dumb, but they work at the speed of living things. In one flap of the wings of one of the bees I bet a naive brute-force algorithm could have solved the entire instance these researchers threw at the bees with time to spare. TSP is exponential to truly solve, but I guarantee the researchers didn't throw a very big instance at the bees, because if they had I guarantee at some point the bees would have chosen a non-optimal path.

This isn't even abstractly cool; it's anti-knowledge of a kind with quantum mysticism, if not quite as toxic. Reading these types of reports and taking them at face value leaves you with a less accurate understanding of the world.
Quite frankly, I find your attitude to be annoying and downright stupid.

How hard can it be to understand the following simple sentence:

THE USER DOESN'T CARE.
Creative Capital is a organization that provides support to artists
I don't think the PlayBook, Xoom, etc are going to stay around for long enough time. All the iPod killers were launched and died quicker than a committee could make a decision on what to standardize on.

The iPod killers were somewhat standardized as they used Microsoft's DRM. The iPad killers are way less standardized, the only dependable cross-platform standard for them are html5 (i.e. using WebKit).

How many tablet vendors can you depend on still making tables 2-3 years from now that will be backward compatible with their current tablet?

The enterprise sector dislikes Apple because of the uncertainty of future Mac products, but for tablets it seems like it is the other way around: you know that Apple will still make iPads 3 years from now, that they will be backward compatible, how big screen they will have, what the primary SDK will look like.

How many of the competitors can you say that about?
Ask HN: Would people pay for quality journalism?
Right now it seems like both digital and print journalism are in hot water. The New York Times has resorted to a pay-wall to offset declining circulation and AOL is shuttering several sites and laying off hundreds of people while quietly discussing an editorial process that's based on profitability and not quality.

It just seems like there has to be a better way.

I have this idea for an exclusively digital magazine. I know they already exist, the Daily seems like the most prominent one of recent days, but I don't think they're living up to their full potential.

You don't see enough longform investigative journalism, which outlets like the NYTimes are known for, coming from digital publications. HuffPo deserves credit for getting so many high profile contributors, but the overall merit of the site suffers from a lack of a strong editorial presence.

What if you got excellent writers from old and new media to contribute to a monthly magazine or even weekly magazine? What if it was edited just like a traditional magazine? What if instead of just being a gimmick, the interactivity provided by a platform like Apple's iOS or even just a modern web browser enhanced your reading experience and provided relevant information?

The Daily actually does some of this. They've included panoramas and interactive graphics with some issues, but it's still a daily rag run by News Corp, so the content is hardly worth paying for.

I'm wondering why there isn't an all digital magazine with articles of the same quality as what you find in the New Yorker or Harper's. There really isn't a news website or blog alternative to those kinds of magazines. I think people would be willing to pay for that instead of an NYTimes.com subscription, which lacks the same level of curation and consistence in value.

Thoughts? (If you are wondering, I have no plans to start such a magazine anytime soon as I'm not really in any position to do say right now).
If it's a great product with lots of potential, the startup may already have an oversubscribed round so you'll have to pitch them on why you should be allowed in. It's best if you can bring something other than $50k to the table since a startup is always looking for someone who can provide either mentoring, connections, and help with other aspects of their strategy.
It’s the last slide and you should click the fullscreen button to be able to read the text: http://www.slideshare.net/patio11/software-for-underserved-m...
Betrayed by our own data
I didn't downvote, but I would like to know the difference between an "Average User" and a "Somewhat Technical User" in the context of the StackOverflow community?
And smart. This is an important ingredient.
I kind-of agree with dtby because I've been able to sell some of my web software because of my massively exhaustive list of features. For my customers, it left them thinking, man we have to have this, we had no idea there was a software solution for all these problems.
Random, but is the intro from the "Stuff You Should Know" podcast?
If a Sudoku has one and only one solution, then it is always solvable without guessing or backtracking. It just might not be within the scope of the human brain. There exist (many) configurations where every cell is influenced by every other, so to solve any one cell essentially requires a simultaneous solve of the entire puzzle. There's no theoretical reason a human couldn't do that too; it's a problem simply of computational capacity not fundamental approach.
Wow, thanks Barry!
You are way to kind!
Sorry to hear about your startup falling apart.
Wish you the best!
Thank you. May I quote this?