skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I pretty sure Google knows all of this. And are counting on it. They want them in people's hands, and they know once they are, all of those problems play into their vision.

And those people don't know what Google Docs are either. And when they get an Excel document where charts don't render correctly, or comments are screwed up, or pivot tables don't work against their datasource, they'll be POed.

Google likes this. Excel screws up? Perfect, just use Google Docs. Mission accomplished. People are surprisingly flexible if you throw up a barrier. An hour or so of pissing off a customer is a exchange Google is willing to make if it give them a shot at a new Docs user.

Or when all their friends are playing WoW and they realize that this device doesn't play it.

Really? Hardcore gamers are the last people who would use this, and the first people to recognize that.

Or when they want to Skype with their grandkids they realize, they can't do that.

Hmm, Skype doesn't work? I am sure the company with their own browser based video chat system is crying a river.

Or when they take the photo editing class and realize that the laptop doesn't run the software so they trot halfway across campus to use the lab that has the software installed.

As the owners of Picnik, they are again very angry, I am sure.

Or when they go to get all their stuff on iTunes and sync their iPhone with it and realize that they still need their old laptop.

Apple uses their mobile platform to encourage people to use Macs, why can't Google encourage use of their mobile platform with their laptops?

There are always going to be a million reasons why a new device won't fit the current system. But Google is making a big bet on the future, and for my point of view, this seems pretty ingenious. And an utter cash cow if they pull it off.
Please see my post here: http://tomstechblog.com/post/Quick-Post-on-Chromebooks-for-E...

Again I don't mean to dump on Google who is at least trying to address the market. But they did so without asking what the market actually needs/wants or looking at what smart schools are currently using (and the related costs)
What's a well-designed statically-typed language whose syntax resembles more Ruby than Java/C/etc.

I'm thinking something like SML. Any others?
A good example you can cite is Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Despite both making billions, the recent publication of Paul Allen's autobiography shows how equity impacted their relationship and friendship (and still does to this day). Whether Microsoft would have had the same success if they had been 50/50 is another question.

Thanks for writing this. I know of several people who have been trying to vocalize their support for 50/50, and you nailed it with self-interest vs. fairness. Ultimately, the decision should be made in the company's best interest, and not either of the co-founders, resulting in the best long-term results for everyone.
If they have one in the $100-$200 dollar range I'll be seriously considering buying one for my Mother. All she uses is a web browser and google documents.

This would be perfect and would solve my issue of her randomly getting toolbars installed and somehow getting Firefox into a state of uselessness.
I too thought this would be a kindle or ipad-like device that browsed the web for cheap. I was excited. Then I saw it was a crappy netbook and was disappointed. The form-factor makes a big difference for me, since I already need a full-featured laptop for my work.
I've noticed this is slowly becoming me. I actually don't know my way around Windows 7! It bothers me sometimes when I can't answer a question about someone's home computer (although I could still figure it out if pressed), but friends and family are less expecting of free tech support these days because I'm more willing to say "I don't know, sorry."

They probably assume I'm bad at my "computer job" (programming) by now though...
sigh

Look, it's not about the hardware. What software is that $289 machine going to run? Windows? Right, so you'll be removing viruses for years after people continue to watch seedy porn sites? Sounds like fun.

This device is intriguing and useful because of the software; it stays out of your way and keeps you safe. That's worth the price to nearly everyone who isn't a nerd.
When writing emails at work I often find myself starting sentences with 'Obviously,' and then taking it out later. I find it very rarely necessary.
I mentioned cappuccino and sproutcore in other replies here. Sproutcore looks interesting, and there's a great team behind it!

I mentioned GWT. As you know, it's Java that compiles to JS.

I don't see how YUI is different from jQuery and plugins. I don't see a router or templates in the yui docs.

Sencha targets mobile.

You asked what's missing. Well, none of them are based around jQuery, arguably the reigning king of minimalist js libs. Minimalism means less learning, easier to use. They are all pretty heavy. I imagine making something more like web.py or Flask or weby, but for frontend JS.
One big point about this, esp if it takes off. It answers a big question:

How do you get J. Random User to use Linux?

Don't call it Linux. Don't make it look like Linux. And Chrome for Windows synced over to an identical looking ChromeOS means he's escaped Microsoft lockin without even knowing it.
All of your points also apply to the iPad.
Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN
Hi,

I wrote a bunch of jQuery plugins for IndexTank on https://github.com/flaptor/indextank-jquery/tree/indextankiz...

I'm working on instant search right now .. So I'll have it available soon
I didn't downmod him, but I'm not going to upmod him for relitigating all of libertarianism on a thread about a specific regulation.
Hi HN readers, we're expanding the PintPay beta and allowing a few more folks to signup. We've added a new beta code for the first 200 hacker news readers. The code is "HN" (no quotes). Thanks!
if a seemingly random stream of bits travels across the internet, from a seemingly random collection of bits on a cluster of virtual machines... does it make a sound?
It's really impressive that all the graphics are done with the canvas.
Nice idea, and you can replace cat if you need to clean up the paste:

:r!perltidy
(paste coworker's ugly perl code)
ctrl-D

and you have nice looking code pasted.
I could, probably. Depends on if I keep the wrt router around, but then I'd need to muck with permissions for the adults in the family. They're not doing internetty stuff on the ipad, mostly garage band and angry birds.

Right now, they're just on safari whitelisting and mail.app's whitelisting, and that works well enough for nearly 7 and 4, but the PPC mini that they're on is not liking flash anymore, they're getting really frustrated when the little edutainment sites don't work because they're too flash intensive and something dies.
Explore The World
www.scandal4u.com with the title of Explore The World is a unique site of all types of scandals and videos from all over the world for your entertainment. We hope you will like our efforts.
I just made this. It's not showing youtube comments. It shows Facebook comments on TVDinnr urls.
Spotify (0.5) now supports ipods. If the browser is the OS, can't chrome/chromeos do the same trick with a music webapp.
;-)

Nah, I'm a journalist, on the receiving end (and also, being a journalist, poor).
The Tricky Chemistry of Attraction
I still have a recurring appointment to clean the crap-ware off my mom's Win7 computer. A system that I don't have to do that on is still a selling point.

Google's working on having me do even less as the IT guy for family and friends, and I fully support that.
You can buy one for $400ish.

For Google Apps for Business you can get them for $28 per user per month, this includes the hardware and periodic hardware refreshes.
I should elaborate that the point I guess I was trying to make is that a lot of the time we think we have no trouble expressing ourselves "in English" we aren't strictly using "English" to do it.
... Except for all the photos and videos. Well that and how they aren't selling a computer, they're developing an OS.
Summary:

PG said during YC to not waste time on conferences and trade shows, but he went to two and got a lot of value out of them, so how to reconcile the advice?

* they're a waste of time if you don't have a finished product yet. "A year ago, before we even launched our site, we though it would be a great idea to attend the NAB conference in Las Vegas. 4 hours into the conference we realized we would be more productive sipping White Russians and playing Black Jack."

* they're beneficial if your product's shipped. "A conference, or a trade show, is beneficial only if your business is mature enough"
It depends on why you go.

If you expect to learn really high-level stuff, you're going to be disappointed.

If you expect to learn the basics for something you never thought about or heard of, it's a gold mine.

If you expect to meet lots of people who are interesting, well, you'll get out of it what you put into it. You have to put yourself forward, or you won't meet anyone. But if you do, there are some awesome people there.
The way I was accounting for it you have to replace the drive in 3 years, you have 3 drives. So you've got a cost of $210 that recurs every three years (purchasing the drives). If you distribute that cost across the 36 months that is a $5.83/month fixed cost (doesn't vary by storage usage because you have to replace the entire drive). Unlike Google which can amortize depreciation on a per-GB basis because they are spreading out the replacements amongst many thousands of drives, as an individual you're on the hook for your own drives regardless.
Yea, backbone looks by far the most well-developed.
It appears that that list is only for people who have downloaded The Expendables. The article gave the number of people being sued for that movie, and it was much smaller than the total. It is the total list of all IP addresses for which a suit is in the offing which I was referring to.
Go and read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2528382 . Big, popular blogs are not the only way to go mate.
The game works on Firefox 4.0.1 (Ubuntu Natty, from the repos, x86-64). No sound, though. Is there supposed to be sound?
Anyone know how to copy an S3 bucket to Google Storage?
Pairing two candidates against each other? That sounds pretty bizarre.
She manages insurance of some sort -- I don't know the specific details. She does have a completely separate, dedicated working space for it. It's as far away from the kids and the noise as possible.
The sound is Flash.
So like, 28 * 12 = 336 ... do I get a new one every year? What happens if I lose it? What happens if it breaks? What happens if I cancel my service? I don't see this as a lucrative option unless Google really gives way on all of those questions.
http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

you can try it now

you can try the whole thing on a compatible laptop when the chromiumos builds are the same as the chromeos these ship with.
> There's nothing wrong with hacking deciders
> to get them to make good decisions

This assumes:

1. You are always right.

2. The deciders are a bunch of idiots.
What was your lowest low and how did you deal with it?
I think the Geek Squad charges at least $50 for malware removal. And, your mom would have to take the computer to Best Buy. That her child will do it for free dilutes Google's value proposition :)

In all seriousness, Google's proposition to businesses and schools is probably stronger than the offer to individual users. Corps/Schools feel the real cost associated with Windows desktop administration. Unlike individuals where Windows issues feel random, these organizations know the mean time between interventions and can therefore compute their expected annual service cost per Windows desktop.
Check about:gpu if it's slow as hell. On my 3.2 GHz iMac the GPU does not enable when Chrome starts up which is probably because I run dev channel.
And I wasn't saying it never works. I was simply saying that it doesn't work that way regularly, or even often.
It’s Official – Cell Phones are Killing Bees
Well, changing the language to Nederlands got me a different page -- one that I can read but I can make sweedish chef like interpretations of.

Looks like Dutch users can expect wireless from kpn, with a gig of transfer per (garbled) for free, and then it's 20 euros/200MB.

Hell, I should have done the English/uk, They're getting internets from three, and It's 3gig transfer free for the first three months, then pay as you go after.
If you are doing TDD and are aiming for near complete specification and coverage, then dynamic languages and static languages will pretty much require the same number of use cases.

However, most people don't do TDD. With a dynamic language, your compiler isn't doing entire categories of checks for you. You're putting more responsibility on the tests, so you wind up writing more of them sooner and running them almost as frequently as static language users run their compilers!

Since people generally stop long before 100% coverage, you wind up with far more tests for the average dynamic project than the average static one.
Thats silly when you can install Ubuntu on the same laptop and be done with it no?
It sounds perfect for businesses. Employees can't screw it up. Sign me (err, my clients) up please.
No, for businesses or schools this is a monthly price that includes software and hardware updates.
Google's $20/Month Chrome Laptop: What are the Hidden Costs?
Then do a "n days without a network outage" sign instead.
Factual’s Global Local Schema
Huh, it seems really smooth on my macbook air, using FF6 nightlies.
> Everything is a commodity.

Well, no. That's a very unhelpful generalization that tries to subvert an established nomenclature for an easy, hip-sounding soundbite. The term "commodity" is very precisely defined and has nothing to do with "hiring probabilistic machines".

A commodity is a product which can be supplied and purchased at no difference in quality. It doesn't matter if I buy petroleum from maker A or maker B, because both are, to the extent that I care, petroleum. Commodities allow you to deal with abstract notions of goods, separate from the physical goods, thereby fundamentally changing the way you trade goods, since (for example) you can buy from the cheapest supplier and sell to the highest bidder, with no concern for the actual stuff being exchanged.
People who think they know SQL often don't know SQL.
You probably do not have GPU enabled. about:gpu might tell you why.
The CR48 has the Gobi 2000 which supports GSM and CDMA, so I'm thinking they would use it in the new Chromebooks announced today.
Kind of like this, for Reddit: http://redditincident.com/
Agreed.

I'd love to start a discussion here about LTV! So, AFAIK:

LTV is simple: customer revenue per month * months with your company

Segmenting beyond that - it is not very possible because google analytics hides your per visitor data. If products like clicky/google analytics would dump out full data sets, this kind of software would be very easy to create.

Otherwise, you need an end-to-end solution. Meaning from visitor to customer tracking.

Does anyone know something I don't about segmenting customers LTV?
You're missing the point. Your dollars aren't going toward performance, they're going toward ease-of-use, stability and reliability.
In Praise of Strawmen
People are reporting that it works fine in other browsers, too.

The Chrome store is just a front. Almost everything in it is actually a website, with the thing in the 'store' just being a pretty icon to it. And everything in the store will work just fine on other browsers, to my knowledge.

So while your point is valid, we actually aren't at a time when it's a problem... And I'm not convinced we'll get there. Tech has been changing quickly lately, and multiple browsers are now standards-compliant... That's pretty solid.
Just tried it out on Chrome(11.0.696.65) on my macbook pro, it worked well for me.
If this is as unplayably slow for you as it was for me check about:gpu in Chrome.

Latest Chrome dev channel (12.0.742.30) on OS X is not enabling the GPU for me on my 3.2 GHz iMac and it really is not clear why. There is no about:flags entry for any GPU-related things either.
That's a good point! I tend to treat others as I want to be treated, and it's hard for me to remember that that's not always best.

The golden rule should be 'Do unto others as they would prefer' instead.
Paypal is one of the few that is in a position to do it. With direct bank account debit they do have one option. As paypal gets used more and more online, paypal will be able to get retail merchants to accept paypal payments. The timeline to effect change like this is extraordinarily long. Think about how hard it is for AMEX to be accepted everywhere and the merchants already have the hardware.
Are you a Sporacle? Oracle spoof video
Smooth as butter in Firefox 4.

The concept of 'Chrome-only' web applications is appalling to me, and can only remind me of 2000 when people just developed for IE6. This is REALLY BAD for the web.

(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.)
Incentives Play Role in Success of Netflix
Does anyone know what engine they used to build this? Or did they build it from WebGL's base?
It works for me in both, but it's tremendously smoother in Safari. In Chrome the fans on my i7 MBP spun up and the framerate was low. In safari, the fans didn't come on and the framerate was high. Not what I would have expected.
A fascinating jvm they missed is azul. They claim they can handle 300+GB heaps with pauses < 10 ms by radically changing how gc works. Skim this: http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/azul_pauseless_gc.html Essentially it continually compacts the heap, but simply doesn't remap all pointers to an object. They then tool the OS vm system / TLB with memory barriers and fix up pointers on access instead of fixing up pointers on relocation/compaction.

Also, this is a pretty interesting talk about what exactly goes on in a modern jvm. Worth listening to
http://jeremymanson.blogspot.com/2011/04/cliff-click-in-jvm-... The speaker works for azul systems.

Regarding the article, I wonder if it's worthwhile or if there is any research into recycling objects or something like c++ placement new? I guess it doesn't really make sense because in java objects are mostly just a collection of pointers, whereas in C++ objects can themselves be fairly large.
Sound works for me. Firefox 4.0.1 (Arch Linux, x86-64). Do you have the codecs for mp3 installed?
works on UZBL as well
Because the ecosystem of web standards is very weak. Because each browser decides which standards to implement and, sometimes, how to do it. Because cross-platform testing web applications is very resource intensive even if you are using automation tools such as Selenium.
Absolute fun. :)
CLU comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_programming_language

A hello world sample: http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showexample.prx?exp=59
The challenge on Android is that Google needs to split revenue with carriers. I agree 5% will be sweet for android developers.
Google isn't offering exclusive native access to a platform and isn't hosting content... they're simply offering payment processing and a storefront. 5% is nice, but can't be compared legitimately with Apple's 30% cut.
it's the infinite scroll. no one likes them.
Only if you're working from the theory that a lower cut would've translated to lower prices, and users aren't buying Android software because prices are too high.

As users generally don't even think about, let alone make buying decisions about, who's getting what cut of the $2 price of a video game or the $7 price of some ebook, I don't think it would have mattered.
That's a lot of words for an argument that assumes what it's trying to prove.
But that's the point! Spanish has that 1 word (which I don't know) that he has used in every situation. In English, he uses all those different words, depending on what slant he wants to put on it. English is -much- more expressive. (At least in that case.)
The Chromebook has a lot of parallels with the electric car. For a lot of people it is a real improvement for the normal routine, but there are a few use cases outside that routine for which it just won't work.

ChromeOS has a lot of potential in institutional settings (much like the electric car) where corner cases don't exist or there can be a small handful of special purpose machines for those cases. IT costs for most organizations would plummet and manageability would go up significantly. I can't imagine how much money and software is used to lock down and secure Windows machines and back up data nine different ways. And subsequently how much is spent recovering or mitigating the loss / theft of sensitive data.
EMC announces Greenplum HD (commercial Hadoop distro)
Face detection in static images with Python
Working well and fast on IE9, just paste the url.
When it comes to competitors, I'm indifferent. When it comes to being a user, I get a little aggrivated that my options are limited because Apple has decided they need to compete not just in the consumer electronics market, but in the eBook reseller market as well.

I fear the same fate awaits services like Netflix and Pandora as well. Two apps that I flatly will not trade for Apple offerings. I will cease to be a customer if either of these two companies are pushed off the platform, and I'm an aboslute die-hard iOS fan.
Technically, Apple takes a 0% cut for web applications delivered through Safari to iOS devices. You can easily bookmark them with a shortcut icon on your home screen.

So, I would say the title is misleading. 5% does seem like a fair cut for handling payment processing and storefront, but it's not like Apple is charging anything for access to a web app. They're just not providing a storefront to do it with.
Okay, I'll bite. Why is Lynx better than Links? I was under the impression that Links was the newer one, though I hadn't done much research.
You don't think Google taking a lower cut on the Market wouldn't incentivize more of the successful iOS developers to take Android more seriously? You don't think anyone would say, "hmm, if I develop this for Android, they are only taking 10% rather than 30%, maybe I should give it a shot."

With higher quality apps on the Market, Android owners might be more willing to fork over money for them.
Your cost analysis doesn't take into account the time value of money. Being able to spread all those upfront purchases out over a monthly cost that includes IT support and the latest hardware at all times is definitely a valuable proposition. You are assuming a 4 year life on your netbooks. If one of them breaks, tough luck.

However, like you said, the usefulness of Chrome OS for students is definitely debatable. In a few years, a web-app only classroom might be more viable, but right now, it doesn't seem too practical. Plus, a tablet form factor seems more useful than laptops for classroom use.
Kindle For PC Updated, Rebranded
I didn't say raw material don't matter; just that they're a small part of any developed economy. Usually raw materials only make up around 5% GDP for developed nations.

Modern warfare is hugely expensive, and it will result in huge damage to that country's infrastructure and workforce. So you'll wind up crippling 95% of their economy in order to steal a small proportion of the remaining 5%. It's unlikely you'll even break even.

It's far more profitable to trade. No infrastructure is destroyed, and you get a feedback loop of wealth creation.
Or when they want to Skype

They can buy imo.im which lets you use Skype on a the browser. Problem solved.
Sounds like GPU acceleration works for you in Safari but not Chrome. about:gpu.