skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... adolescence will in the future evolve into a period of experimentation and education that will last from the teenage years into the mid-thirties. In a kind of wanderjahr prolonged for decades, young people will try out jobs on a temporary basis, float in and out of their parents' homes, hit the Europass-and-hostel circuit, pick up extra courses and degrees, and live with different people in different places."

I am 30 yeard old and that's a description of my current life. Perhaps the author is old and doesn't realize that the world he foresees is already here.
Anything updated periodically probably works better with RSS (subscription model), while sites like Hacker News seem better at aggregating interesting scattered content (and hosting the resulting discussion). There's certainly room for overlap (e.g. "look at the interesting post on this blog, subscribe if you like it"), but people submitting every single update as they occur will probably detract from the signal here.
Reading, traveling, zazen, going out and sports
The goal is to change the perception of the general populous which (due to brilliant ads by Apple) believe that "Vista sucks".

I don't think it's because of apple ads at all. Most people have an early adopter or someone who recently bought a new machine in their circle of friends. And a big chunk of those people have had problems.

So most people are 1-2 steps removed from someone who doesn't like vista (my dad says copying files is slow, for instance). So I suspect this marketing won't even really work that well. The issue isn't whether vista is prettier or "faster", the issue is whether vista will be broken on my machine.
Not only that, but Singularity allows fine-grained security along the lines of capabilities. (Arguably Erlang has something like capabilities baked in as well.) This is the way security should have been done for internet-connected end-user controlled computers. What we have now is security meant to be managed by super-knowledgeable super-users.
Before they got to alpha, was it called "pre-Posterous?"

What I'd like is a way to unify all of my Facebook/Myspace/Twitter microblogging.
I want one.

Really.

It's just the thing to code a Universal Turing Machine with.
MySpace Announces Five New Senior Execs (Four Of Them Have MySpace Pages)
I wasn't very impressed. Comparing bandwidth to oil seems like a silly way to start (hint: bandwidth isn't something that you have to pump out of the ground in faraway lands), even if the rest of it actually contains some good points before returning to the contrived comparison in the conclusion: "Americans are as addicted to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem."
What would impress me would be a 2x gain in a 2 core machine, specially in threads that neither depend on each other nor share any data.

Anyway, as a Zope/Plone consultant, I would be delighted to see Python making an effort to better support multi-core CPUs. Obviously, I would love if Ruby did that too.
I suspect Microsoft uses good science in its internal studies.
How do Gnome Apps look like on KDE 4.x? I really dig their improvements, but nearly all applications I use are GTK-based [Firefox, gVim, SqlBrowser]. Do they get the same window look/feel? Font settings? How well are they integrated into KDE desktop overall?
Are you implying that there isn't any game-changing areas of an OS anymore?

What about the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface?

What about cloud computing (as stated in the article)?

What about the future of the internet (call it web 3.0 or whatever)?

Looking at the timeline of operating systems and "game changing" improvements, I would imagine that it will continue to grow exponentially as it has been for the last ~30 years. Microsoft, Apple and Linux all have a great chance in contributing to these advances.
It's easy to find holes in the analogy. But part of his point is that this is an easier problem to fix, because the scarcity is artificial. If we could legislate more oil into existence, that would be an easy problem to solve, too.

I'm not sure how serious an issue bandwidth really is, though. It doesn't seem to be the limiting factor in many activities.
Which means don't hire ugly-code-writing programmers, aka bad programmers.
I don't (why does anyone care?)

My point is that I've been noticing a lot of "gotcha" being played, and being played the most by Microsoft. Something happens that grabs the attention of consumers and the blogosphere, you have some great contenders and people are excited about the idea as a whole. There are options, some good some bad, some great.

Then, along trudges Microsoft. They want to put their spin of the idea on the market, except it hardly works as well as other things out there, and there's a price tag. Point blank, they want you to pay for mediocrity. I'll provide examples:

Cloud computing
---
Early competition: Amazon Web Services, AppEngine
Microsoft jumps in: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080729-microsoft-bets...

Online music stores
---
Early competition: iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo
Microsoft jumps in: http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-opens-MSN-Music-store/2100-10...

Universal browser environments:
---
Early competition: Adobe Air
Microsoft jumps in: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/04/15/introducing-mi...

Now, I know not every one of these services has been free or open-source, but it just seems to me lately that Microsoft has been playing this very pointless game of copy, brand and monetize.

I would much rather see MS focus on fixing their operating system then try and compete with great ideas, that were flawlessly executed. I'll be honest, as soon as I saw that MS was wanting to bid, I immediately got less excited about cloud computing
You don't change the world with a marginally better mousetrap
This is Hacker News. I expect every article to not be "a light read."
I think its perfect marketing. Ignore the people that are having trouble with compatibility while still working on those issues back in Redmond. Meanwhile show the people that Vista does still work for the ordinary user who buys their computer from dell, hp or sony. Too many ordinary people heard that Vista was horrible without having any direct experience with it.
Bitbucket.org - Mercurial Hosting
4 exabytes?

EDIT: err, 16 exabytes, I'm thinking now
This article is written by someone who has very little business experience. There has always been "business technology" and IT has been marginalized in the business decision making for a long time. It's always a cost-benefits analysis and as people understand technology better and more and more frameworks are built they expect changes to take less time. The frameworks that support the most flexibility win over the ones that are built correctly without as much wiggle room. If you find one that does both, well, that's a golden system.

I work in financial services. Perhaps my industry is ahead of a common theme due to it's nature, but this article says nothing new and hypes the idea that technology is impossible when combined with business.
I think it works when the 2nd half of the marketing campaign pushes the idea: "Vista SP1 has fixed most of those issues now". (disclaimer: I have no idea if that is true or not, but it should work as a marketing campaign)
Good responses. I seem to be in total agreement with you all. Very well stated.
Am I the only one who wants to call "bullshit" on some of these claims of having a hobby?

A hobby is something you can actually get better at. Watching TV is not a hobby.

A hobby is something to which you give sustained effort. Some people claim to be into cooking and have dinner parties, but if you do that less than twice a month I don't think that counts. I realize that many of us have been ruined by modern convenience living and the programmer lifestyle, so it is an effort to get a meal for four or more together. But cooking for other people is supposed to be normal; it's not hobby material.

And photography: everybody has a digital camera now. Get real. Unless you have gotten in a vehicle with equipment specifically for the purpose of photographing something and no other reason, you're not really a photographer.

I hesitate to call MMOs a hobby. They do meet the definition, but the physical experience -- sitting in front of a computer , collaborating with others in virtual spaces -- is very close to the sort of work most of us do for eight or more hours a day already. I think if you garden or do bicycle couriering, you're allowed to claim that MMOs are your hobby, but otherwise no.

Please understand that I'm not condemning anyone, but I think a lot of us are deluding ourselves. We don't want to admit how narrow we are, and how we really spend our leisure time. I'm willing to bet that programmed entertainments, like TV, movies, games, or pornography top the list of actual hours spent. It's sad, because at the age of 80, I don't think anyone's going to look back on their lives and say "DAMN! If only I had gotten through all my Galactica DVDs...." Maybe RescueTime should do something about this.

As for me: I used to have hobbies, but now I don't. It's a serious problem and I think it contributes to an ongoing low-level depression. I do read an enormous amount, but as stated above, this is not a hobby. It's a really bad situation. I think my hobby is dreaming up startups which, for visa and other reasons, I can't do much about.
As long as you don't mind that it's raining and the people don't speak English even at the city hall.
Automated testing has less of this problem. It still has the problem that some testing must be done manually, and there is a large spike for code in production.
I'm dealing with a satellite connection because state and local governments don't yet understand the role of IT infrastructure as an alternative to highway infrastructure. Problem is, the flow of highway tax dollars doesn't include IT either. I've seen some calculations to suggest how much oil could be saved if office workers were allowed to tele-commute one or two days a week. The debate is moving in the right direction, but this failure is a clear instance where the federal government needs to take a much more active role - just like with the Interstate Highway System.
First Solar (FSLR) Q2 Preview: Market Expecting a Blowout
it just seems to me lately that Microsoft has been playing this very pointless game of copy, brand and monetize

Isn't this what Microsoft have always done?
"Inflation" isn't zimbabwe's problem. Zimbabwe's problem is political tyranny. It's a nation hell bent on self genocide.

We need to stop worrying about inflation there and "just let it go". Build a fence around the whole country and don't let anyone in or out until nothing moves inside but the wild animals.
Google's information gathering techniques
That's exactly right: the scarcity is artificial and will hurt any country that implements measures to limit bandwidth.

I'm wondering if we could find a study or report that measures online commerce output in relation to a country's commercially available maximum bandwidth. That could be a pretty graph to look at.
Nice to know it does that for somebody. I'm using the x64 version of Ubuntu on a desktop with a USB wireless peripheral. Since I installed in March I've spent months without a functioning wireless connection and several weeks without a functioning wired connection. Currently I have a length of cat5 cable strung out under my door, across a hallway, and into my roommate's bedroom where the router is kept.

My Ubuntu laptop also no longer has a working wireless connection. It's slightly older hardware (3 to 4 years) and I've given it up for dead.

I love using Ubuntu, but unless you luck out in the hardware compatibility lottery, it is a second job to get a system up and running. I actually did not have a functioning Ubuntu system until I quit my job and had the hours to devote to configuring everything over a period of 3 to 4 days, and then another 3 to 4 days when I updated to 8.04.
Hmmm. So does this mean the Zimbab's shouldn't be expecting a visit from you anytime soon there Robert.
I'm a big fan of allowing people to post in multiple places. Especially when you're talking about flickr and/or Twitter which serve different uses than a blog might.

I think the primary thing I want to make me feel better about Posterous is some control (even if it's just a raw CSS editor) to make my Posterous page look better. Currently it feels like it's the bare minimum and it's actually somewhat painful to see my content displayed there.

I'd probably have not been as interested in having it pushed elsewhere if it looked better on posterous.

Keep up the good work, though. New feature seems to work like a champ.
Agreed. Angerwhale (my blogging engine) has a feature for transcluding blog posts from other Angerwhale instances. So, if you want to comment on something, you can post a blog entry about it and then transclude the post as a comment. Then the comment thread from your blog becomes a sub-thread in the including blog (and so on recursively). That way, when you comment on a comment, everything ends up in the right place. The original post that everyone is replying to is the canonical source for all replies, regardless of whether or not they are "comments" or other blog posts.

Anyway, this is the Right Way as far as I can tell... but it appears that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world that use Angerwhale. Maybe I should make the mechanism compatible with WordPress or something :)

(BTW, I should mention that I like FriendFeed's solution to this problem better than Posterous'.)
It amazes me that someone who is clearly talented at cracking networks (so by inference we could say he's quite intelligent) would believe that they would just store that kind of information on publicly connected networks - if it exists at all that is.
I wonder if a lot of relational database schemata intended to store monetary amounts can't handle amounts in the quadrillions.

PostgreSQL can only go up to 92233720368547758.07 (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/datatype-money.htm...) -- 17 digits. Zimbabwe is pushing its limits.

SQL Server 2000's money datatype limit is a few orders of magnitude smaller (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa933242(SQL.80).aspx), and so a 15 digit number can't be stored in it AFAIK.
> It's easy to find holes in the analogy.

That's the sign of a bad analogy. He should have just made his point (a sensible one) and got on with it, without what to me looks like attention-grabbing hand waving.
Joel continued on a similar topic a few months ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

In particular it goes into "IE8 and web standards"
Amazon Outsources Its Checkout Cart
Well, aside from cross-blog publishing, I see a lot of benefit to announcing a blog post on Twitter and also store the photo over on Flickr. Those seem like no-brainer features that would be appealing to a lot of people.
Study: Men Outnumber Women on Most Motorcycle Websites
I appreciate your admittance to zealotry.
Yes, it does. What did they think Hasbro was going to do if they turned down the offer? Shrug and walk away?

I'm surprised Hasbro even made an offer, honestly. I thought they would have pressured Facebook to do something like this right away.
I have two physical machines, but I use virtual machines all the time for testing purposes, I think most people do. I have no idea what he was talking about with being "forced" to use virtual machines, virtual machines have made testing a hundred times easier than it used to be
Anecdote: The only THREE people I sent to posterous.com all were somehow totally confused about how to signup.

I had to point out to each of them that it says you don't have to signup.

Really, it's very strange. People are trained to sign-up. It might make sense to change your front page to include a "Sign up now" button that just is a mailto:link or something similar. Maybe with a subject of "No signup is necessary! Just start sending email to posterous and you win."

Who knows-- just some feedback that I often have to talk people through the initial posterous process.
Yeah, that's what everyone's been saying for about 3 years now. It's what a lot of people say about every technology, including the 99% that don't catch on. It's so cliche as to be meaningless.

its not a cliche. people are making real money. microsoft should be concerned
one more for this thread:

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
One of the first things to tackle would be access to clean water.
Ticino 360° Sassi Grossi
What about the WIMP

do i need to buy win7 to use this?

What about cloud computing

plays to the strengths of linux, not windows

What about the future of the internet

MOBILE. steve jobs is right on this one and msft will end up having an even larger "skunk works" project to try to catch the iphone
Grails And Git QuickCast (screencast)
Competition on a forum SIOC dataset
The biggest question in my mind when reading this article is "how are the relative costs and values actually being calculated?"

How can we say that $1.00 spent on clean energy will bring $11.00 in benefits, when $1.00 on counter-terrorism will bring $0.30 in benefits? How much of it is speculation?

In other words, what was the method for quantifying the amount of benefit that we see from the investment?
HD Moore pwned with his own DNS exploit, vulnerable AT&T DNS servers to blame
Is this your reasoning, or your observation?
Doing away with bare pointers and having "object references" was an even better one. You get the most useful part of the power of pointers, but none of the potential headaches.
The people of Zimbabwe are not a buffer zone.
Try getting a single apache or IIS instance to run on 50 servers in a cluster

WHY???? the whole point of the web server is to be a stateless middleware broker. do these fifty servers now have one virtual port 80? do all fifty need to be restarted on a config change? the premise of one web server running on a cluster makes no sense

i can saturate an outbound gb ethernet connection with apache on one box. what are the other 49 supposed to be doing????
It's good to see some competition in the marked where Github seemed to be the only player for a while. Extra kudos for Mercurial support!
Is Embedding Infringement? MPAA Sues Two Sites
New & Improved Splitview
http://www.nirmalpatel.com/web.html#splitview

This is a refactoring of my work to create a split view for news websites that I follow. It has been made more modular so that I can easily add more sites. Currently, it provides "Split View" links for HN, Reddit, Digg and Techcrunch. Other sites can be added easily if needed.
Novelists (and short story writers) who publish a first book in their twenties are perceived as wunderkinder. It is considered much more usual to begin publishing books in your thirties. I'm basing this on my experience as a keen reader of "literary" fiction and as a fiction writer (with a handful of pubs, but no book, dammit). And no, if I published one today, I wouldn't be considered a wunderkinder ;-)

Now, I'm pretty confident in my assertion that this is the general perception, but I haven't compiled the facts to see whether perception coincides with reality. Certainly, I can think of many young first novelists from over the years: Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace. Yes, Neal Stephenson, you hackers, you. But if you check out the press and reviews on their first books, you'll find that almost the most salient fact about them is their age.

Assuming most first fiction books are published in the writer's early thirties, why would that be? Writing fiction requires a lot of disparate skills. It takes a long time to develop them, and they tend to develop asynchronously. The typical case, is a young writer with the technical skills, but not enough life experience to really get inside anyone's head, which is necessary in fiction, of course. (Certainly, it sometimes works the other way around.) Some young writers are so good at the technical aspects that the reader is willing to look past shallowness of characters, a tired theme, etc. And their books are published despite flaws. I'd say this is the case with Zadie Smith's _White Teeth_ for instance.

And of course (he says cynically) sometimes books are published for reasons other than their quality.

Murakami, BTW, has all but disavowed his first two novels.
build a new OS and provide backwards compatibility using virtualization (closer to Solaris Zones)

opensolaris - they can't even give it away

honestly, who has dropped linux or freebsd for opensolaris?

this is a cautionary tale for MS - no one will care about your new os
You can change the world with something only marginally better in markets that are less competitive and less well-established than general internet search... unfortunately cuil chose search.

Facebook is a marginally better mousetrap, Wordpress and Movable Type are marginally better mousetraps...They just happened to enter markets where the other options were not the greatest.

Marginally better can also be accomplished by simply removing a feature or two... 37signals, Twitter
Well, if the revenue model stays where it is, the music industry is in for an agonizing (for the establishment) long-term smooshing into the long tail. (Imagine an astronaut being pulled into a noodle by tidal forces as he falls into a black hole.) I'm not sure anything can save it, however. Maybe the devastating changes it's going through now are "saving" it?
I've accepted that you have to plan your hardware if you want to use linux. I purchased a USB wifi dongle for my laptop that I knew worked, because I knew the internal chipset would not.
Let me guess, your alter-ego is '/dev/zero'?
This isn't the right implementation of this model.
Engineer's Dream
I bought a new USB wireless adapter with an eye on compatibility. Unfortunately, no USB wireless adapter is well-supported. There are a few that work out of the box for an unencrypted network or that work with old versions of the distro, but will not work with the most recent version and WPA encryption.
Um, I can barely keep up with one blog... who the heck has time to post to more than one?

Best of luck to them, but I'm obviously not the target market!
"solving problems largely caused by disorganization is just a sigh of relief at best."

In most cases, it's a source of attrition and a waste of talent, because finding time to actually FIX it is such a huge task that no one has time for it, and good developers won't want to spend their time stagnating long enough to learn the ins and outs of the spaghetti code to be able to implement incremental fixes.
dr. phil should start doing apple cult deprogramming on his show

"now, ya say ya stood in line fer 22 hours to buy a phone? that ain't right"

"ya know other operatin' systems do have web browsers"