skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So 6 years? That's not a long time as these things go.

In my question I was going to add that if it's less than 5 years you are not waiting long enough, and 10 is more realistic. (But decided to just leave it as a question.)

The last internet bubble was 10 years ago, and only now are we are starting to talk about about an upswing again. Economic cycles are measured in decades.

Look at this graph: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp?...

Notice the downturn right before you gave up? Even today we are still not higher than we were in 06. When you start to see the graph look like it does in 88 to 99 then things will turn around.
That makes some sense, that was a similar situation here while o2 was the only iphone carrier - they sold the HTC desire, but not at a competitive price.

It was only after the iphone went to all the carriers (now even the supermarkets sell it on their virtual networks) that o2 started selling cheaper android phones.
So because there are no VCs now, Africa may never have some?

"Never" is a pretty big word, don't use it unless you really mean it.
Standards-based web, plug-ins, and Silverlight
Well I think you're misjudging the character of these guys.

Corporate execs are characterised by an intense self-interest and aversion to anything that will impact them personally. Decisions are not about what is right, they're about what makes them look good and does not have personal repercussions. It's a very amoral environment. Not that I'm trying to criticise or anything; it's just the nature of the game.

That is why your typical corporate elite might have no issue with making a decision which wipes out 5,000 jobs at some unfortunate town. Not his problem. But is he going to help the company cheat on taxes or something, which will bring the FBI to his house? LOL! Absolutely not, not in a million years.

Anonymous's actions are quite inspired. They want to put "actions that will get you personally in trouble with Anonymous" in the same category as "actions that will get you personally in trouble with the FBI". This is an excellent tactic if you're got the balls to show you're serious, and they clearly have. You can be absolutely sure that other execs are paying close attention and, unconsciously, their maps of allowable actions are being rewritten.
Locally, it was a week ago today that the final round of retrenchments at MySpace Sydney office happened.

More realistically, MySpace has been considered just a music/band marketing avenue amongst my peer group for several years now - I'd say at least since '08 or so.
+1 for the mention of the undead. COBOL is the undead. It refuses to die, billions of lines of COBOL still run today and will still run 50 years from now, probably much longer. In my nightmares I see an Undead Arcane Mage cranking out PROCEDURE DIVISIONS for centuries to come.
Ironically enough Naspers, a major South African media empire, owns 35% of Tencent and I believe 28% of DST.
I think the the sweet spot has expanded, there are more startups getting in that are further away from the cool viral social web app or the common subscription productivity and analytics apps. At the same time though the competition keeps going up meaning that even though more ideas further away from the core competencies are getting in for any one startup there is a lower chance.
Compromised EC2 image includes root access SSH key
A friend just forwarded me this e-mail he received from the Amazon EC2 Security Team.

http://pastebin.com/q1VH4rmF

Looks like a public Ubuntu EC2 image was available that included an SSH key to allow the publisher to log into any instance that is using this image as root.
I think the screen resolution issue is easily overlooked - my wife had the Sony X10 mini, with a screen resolution of 240 x 320, and a lot of other cheaper Android phones have a similar resolution.

If an app developer wants their phone to work on the whole range of Android phones, the app interface needs to cope with these very low resolution screens.
> From my time looking at porn site analytics, though, it seems like there are a surprising number of people who spend the majority of their work day looking at porn.

There, now I feel a lot less guilty about readding reddit all day.
Fermilab’s data peak that causes excitement
Zimbali: Our New custom-built 6c/24GB/4Gbps Streaming Server
Deadlines force you to actual go do something useful. If you find yourself postponing work until the last minute -- break down the job to multiple smaller tasks and set specific deadlines for these.

Me - I get something done when I know I have to present it to others (clients or colleagues). So we setup a weekly meeting where everyone gives a short presentation of his/hers work.
What about: I learned C quite well and used it for years but rarely touch it now?
could you elaborate? i've been using my iphone for a few years and this week i've been seriously considering ditching it for a pre just for webOS- but i've hesitated because i haven't been able to find many testimonials.

i think the dev environment alone has me sold.
"I don't give a damn what people keep on their computers" in no way implies "I'm fine with them breaking the law". You're trolling.
"I recently read Parmy Olson’s interview with Yuri Milner on Forbes’s recent Billionaires issue... But as I read the article, I could not help but ask myself the pertinent yet habitually unanswered question: What about Africa?"

Why would you ask "What about Africa?" I don't get it. This article is so generic. Yes, you need a lot of capital and a large, advanced market, and you don't have that in Africa. You also don't have it in about a 100 other places.

Much more advanced countries in Europe can't do it, why would you ask "What about Africa?"
So, "The idea is to empower people, let them take risks and give them more authority over decisions," and yet, "The reorganization also puts Page firmly in charge of Google and its performance in much the same way Steve Jobs runs Apple.". So Page is trying to give people autonomy while also becoming a dictator? Those are two very different philosophies there.
I totally agree that each country is different (I am half-african and I've lived in a west african country for more than 15 years). The issue is way more complex than it appears. But as far as my experience can tell, corruption makes every single effort required to build something a real pain.
People who are different make you laugh? Thanks for sharing.
Well, I would argue that they are doing something wrong.

You're absolutely right to say that there is no reason to do something other then just storing the key locally (since someone who has local access to the key, can presumably access your entire dropbox already anyway). But as the original author points out, the fact that changing your dropbox password does not invalidate existing tokens is an issue.
As a heavy Google services user, I prefer Android overall, but something about the iPhone's keyboard keeps luring me back. Until I spend a couple days with the iOS Google Voice app. Then I put my SIM card back in my Nexus One.
Organisation grows when its people grow. The freedom to take risks, make their own decisions would bring in a fresh look into how things are built & run. But I hope each one of these have good level of stake & passion comparable to the founders.
HowsMyUX.com - a new startup to help developers find designers
I'm the cofounder of HowsMyUX.com, a new beta being announced today. It exists to help independent developers find great designers for short, one-off projects. It was inspired by a problem I personally faced recently, and hopefully there are others who'll find it useful as well. I was building a new iPad app, and started the project with just 2 devs and no designers. I thought I had a handle on cool, simple and elegant UI design, but had a nagging feeling that a real designer could help make major improvements in the app. Problem was, I didn't have the resources to hire a fulltime designer yet, didn't know anyone in my personal networks who had experience with the niche, and I couldn't trust the people I was finding on Craigslist and LinkedIn.

So I decided to launch a site that would help developers like me find the right designer efficiently, and thus answer the question: "How's my UX?". It has similarities to sites like eLance and 99Designs where designers "bid" on projects submitted by developers. Developers get to pick the designer based on reviews for past work, as well as demonstrable knowledge. A couple ways I plan to differentiate from those sites is a narrower focus on mobile UX, as well as fixed prices for each project. I have some other ideas that will be hugely beneficial for designers, but I don't want to discuss them publicly yet.

Any thoughts on this? I'd love to hear your opinion on whether there's a practical use for this, or is the premise fundamentally flawed somewhere? Anything you share is hugely appreciated and valuable.

Btw, we're 2 cofounders currently, looking for a 3rd (ideally a designer). If you're interested, please contact us.

Thanks,

-Mel

http://howsmyux.com
Six large org groups, run as individual companies, individual budgets, divided by product and all reporting to the CEO - exactly how Microsoft is structured.
Mmm, this looks like "number of trailing zeroes in n! when written in base 10", or, equivalently, "number of factors of 5 in n!". If we let that be f(n), and u = floor(n/5), then f(n) = u + f(u). Then, instead of writing out all the powers of 5 up to whatever your integer limit is... if you think for a little bit, this will work:

(defun calc-trailing-zeros-2 (n)
(do ((n (floor n 5) (floor n 5))
(total 0 (+ total n)))
((zerop n) total)))

Methinks this is much better; if there is a performance disadvantage, I wouldn't care about it (and you can add type-decs as you wish; if you do, note that you'd probably have to say (the fixnum (+ a b)) even if a and b are known fixnums). If you want to verify that it works...

(dotimes (i 30) (print (= (calc-trailing-zeros i) (calc-trailing-zeros-2 i))))

It prints a bunch of T.

As for the performance comparison, I'd echo what others have said: I expect the I/O (read-line, princ, terpri) to dominate the run time. ... Now for some experimentation. "randomthing" is an SBCL image in my executable "mybin" directory that executes the "let ..." code at the bottom; achieved with (save-lisp-and-die "randomthing" :executable t :toplevel (lambda () (let ...))). Let's test it:

;Clipboard is "100000" followed by 100000 instances of "500000"
$ time pbpaste | randomthing > /dev/null

real	0m0.453s
user	0m0.352s
sys	0m0.096s

;Clipboard is "100000" followed by 100000 instances of "000000"
$ time pbpaste | randomthing > /dev/null

real	0m0.352s
user	0m0.263s
sys	0m0.091s

In the case of "000000", the "calc-trailing-zeros" part should take about zero time, and therefore the remaining time is all the I/O stuff. Depending on whether we go by the "real" or "user" thing, this tells us that the math part takes up either 2/7 or 2/9 of the time of the whole program.

And just to be sure that "pbpaste" isn't the main cause of slowness:

$ time pbpaste > /dev/null

real	0m0.024s
user	0m0.012s
sys	0m0.009s

Fairly insignificant. Likewise, startup time for this Lisp image can be experimentally determined by having my clipboard only contain "10" followed by 10 integers:

$ time pbpaste | randomthing > /dev/null

real	0m0.032s
user	0m0.010s
sys	0m0.027s

So, yeah, I/O dominates the run time, at least on my SBCL (SBCL 1.0.47).
"In the 19th, with trains, they reached 60 mph. In the 20th, with jet aircraft, we could travel at 600 mph. Can we expect 6,000 mph in the 21st?"
The 21st century still has 90 years left in it. We have no idea what technologies will emerge in that time. If a technological Singularity occurs, well...
Minecraft generated 5 million euros in March for Mojang
This is a great idea. We designers are very confident about creating, designing and executing an idea with a great visual look and user experience not so much build it. So this will be a great opportunity to fund beautiful looking projects.
While I read the book and love TechStars I think for me coming from Australia and our particular situation it doesn't make a load of sense. We either really need the StartFund money or the big push YCombinator give to make it worth the relocation, personally I'd apply to tech stars but for my cofounder I think the risk vs rewards isn't worth the relocation.

Don't know how many others applying from overseas would have the same issues. In Australia we recently got a seed fund, "StartMate", although it being in Sydney and us in Melbourne it may as well be SanFrancisco.
I think the only real hard criteria is that you can make an impact on the market in 3 months with up to 3 people with $20K.

Yes, it certainly limits the more capital intensive projects, but I think there is plenty of other capital infrastructure in place for those kinds of ideas.

Seriously, why would you not apply if it fits your capital requirements and time schedule? It's not very arduous.
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I have a work iPhone, a personal iPad and I used to have a relatively dumb personal phone. I "upgraded" the personal phone to a low end Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy Europa) and I've been really disappointed with it.

Of course, what people now tell me is "but that's a bad phone" - and I think that's the problem that Android faces - the actual end user experience is largely determined by the quality of the hardware and this varies a lot.
> To me (as an outsider) it looks as if the USA, en masse, doesn't believe in science anymore.

I'm also an outsider, but I think this is really a money problem. The same thing happened in the USSR in the late '80s, suddenly there was no money for science anymore, it didn't matter that the Soviet scientists had helped produce great things.
How to Start Out in the London Startup Scene.
Bing App for iPad Now Available for Download at iTunes
Searching Google Images for "patent"? 1st image looks like a guy puking
There is a utility on the same project page called: wkhtmltoimage
I think the current user base is killing Reddit. It's just one huge mess of trolls trolling each other with memes…
Looks interesting, I signed up for an invite.
Активия 
четирите кандидата, които получавате отговарят на профила, от който ние се нуждаем и става трудно за нас да изберем нашия консултант, който да ви отличава от персонала на другите компании - Синтагон AB " всички доставки над очакванията наистина допринасят за развитието на нашата компания - Медивир AB
Agreed.

If you want, here is a list [http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/2006/08/pbs-tv-series-fre...] of videos of his free to choose tv series.
The whole problem is friction. Give me the robots to build an evacuated tunnel from Australia to the US with a maglev train in it and I'll show you what "speed" means.
Another excellent resource is the archive of Erin Catto's GDC presentations (Erin is the author of Box2D). Box2D was first presented in 2006; the 2005 presentation is about an iterative method for constraint solving in 3D.

Zips are here: http://code.google.com/p/box2d/downloads/list
Isn't that where the similarity ends?
Sorry I wasn't clear enough – I was trying to imply that sites like YouPorn, with an Alexa rank of 75 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouPorn), eliminate the need for local storage (save the cache, thanks pipeline_tux).

Further, the article never said anything about video, which I would imagine has only grown in popularity over the past decade.
Kangana Ranaut in Game Movie Photos, Pics, Wallpapers
Kangana Ranaut plays Sia Agnihotri a detective who has stumbled upon a case of her lifetime, is up to in the Game! This is the second time Kangana adopt this kind of a role. Here are few of the Photos of Kangana Ranaut of Game Movie. Check out Kangana Ranaut Images, Pics & Wallpapers of Movie Game.
I think you stop use of it by removing the original host from Dropbox Website > Account > My Computers.
OH remove that heavy background image.
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Cash is King: 8 tips for Optimizing your Startup Financing Strategy
Agreed. It's just another annoying contrarian headline. It's not what the article is saying at all.
Given the name, I would guess the host_id is what they use to identify the computer to avoid having to deal with changing IPs/hostnames/whatever.
But you run emulator only first time (granted, that takes some time). Subsequently you deploy your app to already running emulator. That's pretty fast.
Right now it's at a balance (169/169 points). I'd be interesting to see how this changes over time. We need to do such a poll every 6 months, somebody mark their agenda.
How I set up lisp to run in vim
I think this question smacks of elitism and in-group bias. For projects that require C, not knowing C is obviously a deal breaker. But most projects do not require C, and usually "understanding computers on a far deeper level" is much less valuable than being able to properly and elegantly build on top of existing systems/frameworks and leaving useful code in your wake, regardless of language. Due to the massive adoption of the Linux and Windows kernels as a basis for almost everything else done in computing, there will be a pretty major correlation effect between those who are good programmers and those who know C. Since many in the computing field share your sentiment, it drives others to "prove themselves" by making sure to learn C. Also, C is taught in CS classes. But all of this does not mean that knowing C is a precursor to being a good programmer- it's just a correlated effect.

The ability to build massive (and interesting) projects on high-level languages is growing sharply, and the reasons people would have learned C in the first place are shrinking, since there is plenty to work on without even caring about C. I hope the continued proliferation of quality high-level libraries and frameworks spurs a gradual decline of the divisive and self-congratulatory mindset demonstrated here, since it is not knowing C that makes programmers good. It is the ability to get things done right with whatever language(s) they need to.

(I know C)
Because the author was born and raised in Nigeria.
http://blogs.forbes.com/people/mfonobongnsehe/:
I was born and raised in Nigeria

Its more of a personal article and a call to VCs from around the world.
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Faye: Simple pub/sub messaging for the web
English as a second language: Test results on the most fluent countries
That's the point. It should not be possible to have two computers online at the same time with the same host_id.
This makes dropbox about as insecure as SSH (eg. copying someone's key files (aka. config.db) allows you to authenticate as them)

Yes, you could password protect them but dropbox doesn't prompt for passwords, so you'd need unencrypted private keys. Its obvious by design of not prompting for passwords that if you copied the right bits of information you'd be able to authenticate. It's much better security wise that it uses a hostkey, rather than your password.
It's all fun and games until you discover that you're working for today's bad guys, your address is posted up, and there are cocks drawn on your face on Encyclopedia Dramatica.
GPS: Global/Guy Positioning System
We've got a video blog that aims at integrating technology into the everyday lives of women, our latest episode is about gps, we have some suggestions of applications that women would be interested in, check it out (go to http://woman-2.com/?p=112) and let us know what you think...
There's a few more factors besides the ones in the article.

-Most of the languages high on the list are similar to English

-The countries don't dub movies. This has such a big impact. I learned most of my English from movies.
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Yes, I first encountered it from an old issue of DDJ (Small C) while I was studying electrical engineering at UNSW back in the 80s. Then I had to understand it further while studying the UNIX source code in John Lions' OS lectures.
Please Don't Request User Input in the Middle of a Lengthy Task
Good points.

AWACS – or analogous commercial aircraft regularly in convenient positions?

Or far fewer towers/tethered-transmission-balloons at much higher altitudes?

Or even unmanned constantly-flying communications platforms – 'SkyStation' was one such blimp-based concept from the 90s.

Wikipedia suggests the actual service distance from an elevated antenna is a bit larger than the simple geometric estimate. Also, I think you've doubled the necessary number of 100m-high relays: if each tower reaches the horizon at N kilometers, they reach another equivalently-elevated tower at 2N kilometers.

Seriously, though, if there was something to this, they could eventually splice some optimally-positioned platforms into transatlantic cables (existing or new). Of course then the 'optimal position' would then be more a function of available cabling than of natural geometry/geography.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2421110 instead.
Ubuntu was produced in Africa.
Hi there, I originally made this AMI and I would like to apologise to anyone who's instance has been taken offline because they used this image.

Through inexperience I left my public SSH key in the AMI, which I failed to appreciate the implications of despite a blog comment highlighting that I'd done so.

For the record I'd like to state that I didn't use my unintended powers of root at any point for good or evil.

This post stands as a good education of why it's worth checking images of unknown provenance and how to check your public key store for credentials.

This issue will mainly affect anyone who wanted an AMI to check out Amazon's free tier which has a 10GB limit on EBS.
The word, yes. The code, not so much.
The article starts to hint at one thing I think is really interesting about Africa and other developing nations: by having leapfrogged some past infrastructure-heavy tech, they're in a unique place to get huge bang for your innovation dollar, both access-wise and out-of-the-box thinking wise.

The article cites a lot of examples from South Africa, which is actually a pretty developed country. CIA Factbook has it as the 26th largest GDP in the world, ahead of countries like Greece and Austria. Obviously that's only one metric, but I would guess that some VCs will give it a look eventually. The more interesting question is what will happen to less developed Africa countries - i.e. the ones, whether for better or for worse, you imagine when you read the headline.
I have no experience with Android yet, so I won't vote, but I can say that if it ever becomes impossible to jailbreak an iPhone I will ditch it immediately.
If rejection makes you stop building the company that you envision, love, and put all of your effort behind, then you will never succeed running a startup. This may be a bold statement, but I'd love to hear what Jobs, Gates, Zuck, or anyone else with expertise in the area have to say.
I'd like to see a poll for "Develop for X first" where X is one of iPhone, Android, Web
Did'nt get accepeted, might be living in a van, down by the river
Electronic Reader Running Doom 2
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/03/goog...

"Nur Bremmen reporting on Memburn writes that Google has chosen Cape Town in South Africa for a pilot startup incubator called Umbono - Zulu for “vision”, “sight” or “idea”."