skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what, initially I was inclined to disagree with you but based on my own experience that is exactly how I felt for some companies that offer compelling products but don't offer the following:

a. Online Demo (this is very important for me as I love to test drive something for a while before I purchase.)

b. Easy way to pay for said product.

The reason being is that if a company cannot do this for me then it is most likely I will forget about that company in a few days and move on to someone else that could offer me an easier alternative.

There are a number of things off the top of my head but I'm pretty sleepy at the moment. But that's all I could think of for now.
Why laptops will kick desktop PCs to the curb
Speaking of the "library culture" of Javascript, JSAN has been receiving more and more attention these days.
I am not sure what the deal with Knol is but its pages ranks high very quick. In one or two years some people will earn will live off their income from Knol articles they wrote NOW and maintained well.
Been hearing alot of good things about this framework and community. Currently I'm submitting libraries to the CI hive. Will they be compatible with Kohana?
Rebase for Mercurial
The last thing I thought of was to go on twitter. :)
Is Web 2.0 the great VC return equalizer?
Be careful. The video hardware drivers on the beagleboard will not be open source. There will be open source kernel modules, but the real stuff will be binary only and no doubt supported for only as long as it serves the IP house that owns those cores.
Haven't there been comparative studies done on Linux and Windows operating systems as a whole? I think that the quality of both systems has been found to be comparable.
Paying for style
A second vote for Acrobat.com's ConnectNow. You can have up to 3 people (including you) and it works great.

I've also used Glance: http://glance.net/site/Home.asp and it works - basically VNC but easier to use I think.
How to Set Up Reliable E-mail on Your Server (Continuing Series from Slicehost)
The coverage is just...

Twitter could possibly be the future backbone of the net.

If you vote this down, your not seeing the big picture!
"Chuck Norris"-ing code
Google's take rate on advertising is much higher on their own web pages, so it makes sense that they'd like to move the ratio toward Google-owned pages.

YouTube videos seem to pop up a lot on the first page of search results despite the near absence of content that might normally drive that kind of performance. Also, YouTube links often show up in the middle of the first page, which smells algorithmic. Perhaps the same kind of thing is happening with Knol entries?

So... questions for HC:

1) How much of the first page of search results can Google 'take' before people notice? (There's a reason they called it Knol instead of something like Googlepedia.)

2) If users notice, will they care as long as they find the info they're looking for?
Depends. It would probably need certain customizations to fit into the Kohana system. Definitely check into the Kohana IRC channel, the lead developers who ported the CodeIgniter libraries themselves will be in there and will be there to help you (#kohana on irc.freenode.net.)

The fundamental differences (general structure, etc.) between Kohana and CodeIgniter are currently pretty low, so it shouldn't be too much.
Skunkworks are probably the corporate version of open source. They work well.
Do such comparisons between OSS and non-OSS take into account the vast wasteland of failed projects littering SourceForge et al?
Notice how highly "Visual Basic" places in the index. This is silly because if you've looked for a technical job using the conventional avenues (you aren't a demi-god fending off job offers left and right) recently you'll know that no one uses pre-.NET Visual Basic anymore. Most .NET shops use C#. VB.NET is not a popular programming language in professional software development. The reason it's there is because there's tons of legacy content from the late 90s and early 2000s before everyone switched en masse to C# or Java.

Really the TIOBE Index is pointless and just serves as a way for people to come up with phony "numbers" that lend credence to what they want to believe.
I think that Base, while interesting, was a harder product to understand (much less use) for average users.
Study: Left-Handed Males Earn 15% More Than Right-Handed Males (All College Educated)
"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

Let's see. I'm on Twitter, follow ~100 people, have not seen a single post about Toronto.

I read Google News main page, see stuff about explosion in Toronto.

Conclusion: Twitter works for breaking news if you are prescient enough to follow people who are going to be where news happens, when it happens, and you check it quite often.
"Our findings are quite contrary to expectations. We do not find any evidence that
left-handed individuals earn less, as might be suggested by the literature referred to above
which generally finds that left-handed people tend to suffer more from factors that would
reduce labor productivity. On the contrary, we find that left-handed individuals with
higher levels of education have higher earnings than right-handed-individuals. More
specifically, among the college-educated men in our sample, those who report being left-
handed earn 15 percent more than those who report being right-handed. The size of this
effect is economically and statistically significant."

"...Left-handers have a 3.5 percent
greater return to a year of education than right-handers, whose return to a year of
education is 4.6 percent; hence left-handers have a return of education of 8.1 percent (=
3.5 + 4.6). We therefore pursue this education difference in detail."

"We still estimate a 15.9 percentage
point larger increase in wages for left- than right-handed men for completing some
college, and a 26 percentage point larger increase for completing college (in both cases
compared to completing no college)."

"The difference occurs only in the group with
16 or more years of education: of men entering college, those that are left-handed have a
return to completing a college education that is 16.4 percentage points higher than the
23.4 percent return received by those that are right-handed."
Breakpoint conditions with GDB
Yes, though I don't think you can say anything really objective about the "quality" based on the data available. I found some of the statistics in the case of Windows source indicative of lower readability and maintainability...defined global funcs and structs counts are higher than the Open Source systems (FreeBSD and Linux) and file length is significantly longer, even though Linux is a significantly larger codebase (the largest of all of the systems analyzed). But, of course, that's just numbers...roughly meaningless without context. And, obviously, Microsoft manages to keep shipping code that mostly works, and they hire some of the best developers in the world.

Here's the paper:

http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/conf/2008-ICSE-4kernel/html/Spi...

And some additional commentary:

http://www.spinellis.gr/sw/4kernel/

Anyway, while I've never seen the Windows source code, I have looked at FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris, and all are pretty good. I think FreeBSD may be the cleanest (partly because it tries to be fewer things to fewer people than Linux), but probably not technically the most interesting. And, of course, I've only taken a few quick trips through FreeBSD and Solaris, and I've actually written driver code for Linux. Doing real work in a codebase always makes the warts more apparent.
Quite true, they tend to be small though. I'm imagining large groups of programmers simply tackling projects as they saw fit within a code base. I'm not sure normal employment is quite up to the task - maybe if you paid people per feature or spec'd bits out topcoder style.
Picking datatype for STATUS fields
There's also waterfall vs. incremental approaches.

Most (successful) open source projects can be added to easily. That is, they are modular, with a basic core architecture, so a contributor can discover then understand then modify the part they need to - and those projects that aren't modular will be replaced by those that are.

There is an assumption here that the concept of the project is understood well enough for a workable architecture to be known - without this, it's harder to add contributors, because they must first grasp the project as a whole.
I can think of a few apps that could use this library. Man it's really difficult to express enthusiasm over the internet.
How is search not 'media?' Haven't media companies traditionally made their income from advertising?
Hadoop Streaming
Replication, caching, and partitioning
Social Disorder
David Pogue's Gadget List of 2008
I am overwhelmed ...
seriously I never had such a precise dose about investors.

I am reading all articles one by one for last 6 hours.

And I will continue doing so. Because everything I find here so right and complete.

thanks a lot...
Hacking Business Models
Dennis Ritchie: Trying to release old versions of Unix
I think you hit the nail on the head with number 2. Users are creatures of habit, and that goes doubly for Google users. Add to that the fact that for the average Google user, URLs are for geeks, and we can see where it may be very difficult to get people to realize that the knol pages are Google controlled content. Even more difficult to get them to care. They got their information. Case closed as far as they are concerned. On to the next Google controlled page to get the next piece of information they need.
The "vast wasteland of failures" is not at all unique to OSS. Its just that when proprietary software fails, nobody really notices, because the reason it fails was because nobody noticed it and bought it.

That's one of the differences between OSS and proprietary software; OSS fails when nobody cares enough about it to continue developing it; proprietary software fails when nobody cares enough about it to use it.
Also, the truth of the majority of most FOSS projects is that the lion's share of the work is done by a minority of the contributors.

Extremely true--and I'd go further on this and say that the lion's share of the work is often done in the minority of the time spent by those minority of contributors. That is, some of the most useful improvements are also the ones that take a surprisingly small amount of time to implement; the bottleneck for many of the most useful changes is not coding time, but good ideas to implement. There's always a bunch of hard, complex projects that are lying around, but what is always in short supply are the easy, simple projects whose hardest part is coming up with the idea/algorithm/concept for it in the first place.

Of course, the other bottleneck for "short and simple" changes is convincing a developer to do it... or even convincing oneself to do it.
Oil is not completely fungible. There are different grades of crude. Natural gas is a bit more fungible. Once it has been processed to whatever standards apply it is completely fungible. Power is even more fungible.
No, Google is an information aggregation company.

I'm spending the summer in a town I don't know much about, and today, I wanted a sandwich, and my refrigerator was empty. So I went to Google Maps, and typed in "Intersection of $street1 and $street2, $town, $state to sandwiches". Yes, "to sandwiches." And it gave me a list of sandwich shops ordered by distance from my apartment. I clicked on one, saw the map directions, and went for a walk to grab myself a Subway.

Think about this for a second--the vast number of different levels of data aggregation, along with language parsing and tagging, necessary for such a seamless system to exist--yet it becomes incredibly useful in practice. And with useful services, especially useful services that allow people to search for commercial products--be it a sandwich or a computer--comes advertising money.

But the reason they can be an advertising company is because of their information aggregation. The ads are just a way to make money off of their core idea.
I'm pretty sure Google ISN'T boosting knol, because a search for knol yields... Wikipedia!
More important than total popularity is the popularity in a particular category. What's the most popular language for a certain type of task? C is certainly not exactly ideal for quickly setting up a dynamic website, and no sane person is going to use something like Java to write a video encoder. A better question would be, when there is a reasonable choice between many languages for a given task, what is the relative popularity of those languages?
So what works for 5 million people who all live within a few hundred miles of each other, may not work for a huge country with over 300 million.

Of course, the answer for Denmark was offshore drilling, so maybe the USA should be looking at that as well.
Don't be snarky. This thread started with a single, reasonable comment:

"I disagree that drilling will help. The key point of the article is that it was a cultural rather than a resource based shift that helped Denmark become energy independent."

To which you replied with something simultaneously vague (do you pose all of your arguments as questions? Are you practicing for Jeopardy?), and a straw-man misrepresentation of the original comment:

"I take it you're happy we haven't drilled any of our resources, haven't built a refinery in decades, and haven't built a nuclear power plant since the 1970s...are you saying that because we've basically forbidden the energy markets to work efficiently inside our country, energy prices are going high, and it's a good thing because maybe the culture will shift like Denmark?"

...which you followed with several long expositions about the virtues of the free market, and your inability to adequately predict the complexities thereof.

So based on my reading, to the extent that you're making any argument at all, it seems to be that regulation is the primary cause of energy price increases, and therefore we should lower production regulations (...and also drill more...) to lower prices. This argument has little to do with the OP (that we need to use less energy), and as I pointed out, it teeters on the (faulty) premise that if only we could de-regulate energy production, we'd somehow be moving closer to the Efficient Free Market Utopia That Will Solve All of Our Energy Problems (tm), while ignoring the fact that we heavily subsidize wasteful energy consumption.

So, at the end of the day, I'm led to the same conclusion as the OP: in a "free market" where we subsidize the hell out of wasteful consumption, and do little (or nothing) to promote systemic energy efficiency, the obvious first policy step involves reducing our wastefulness -- not drilling for more oil.
How to survive ? 
I have a small problem ahead. Here is the very brief problem explanation. I am living in Turkey and just finished CS and accepted for the grad study and also I am accepted from one international company which offers a good salary and international team experience. But I am not sure any of these paths since I want to try my own way with a start-up. But things are harder then US or Europa I guess. For the last 12 months a friend and I have been developing a Web 2.0 (with Rife and GWT) application for a field in Turkey which is big in terms of vast number of possible users(and possible income for us :). We are about to make a relatively healthy release.. anyway the thing is (which is also the problem) we have absolutely no money! To get some investment from organizations like Tekmer(semi-official seeding organization in Turkey) or investors, there is always the problem of either the bureaucracy or the very clever investors who asked for %50 percent share of everything. To start our company we need some income, but to have some income, we need to sell sth. any comment or suggestion will be appreciated..thanks
> "If you have to convince yourself to keep going on The Idea, that’s the wrong one."

That's the part that really spooks me. A lot of the things I've done that I'm most proud of are things that at various times I had to convince myself to work on.

I like what Steve Jobs said: '...I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.'
When you start producing media content, you become a media company regardless of what you call yourself.

With search and advertising, Google was and still is a services business. With the ventures in other areas, they are often entering the markets as media producers in competition with those they used to serve.

The reason for branding these ventures in different names is not to confuse consumers and markets in general (so when you ask a random person "what does Google do?", they can reply "search ...oh, and adwords.").

In due time, the ones that become successful will be affiliated with the parent company (Google) anyway.
@alex_c and @jamesbritt You have valid points, but I think in the wrong context. The magic here starts to happen when you are aggregating many disparate people's twits. Using the summize/twitter search for a particular term or region works very well. In this case, I caught on to what happened in Toronto a few hours ago from a twit I saw. As I looked deeper into it, none of the mainstream news channels were covering it, while there were dozens of twits about it. Some of them linked to several Youtube videos, one of which I included in the post.

I'm not the only one to notice the breaking news Twitter effect in general. Arrington and others have posted about it as well. I just find it disturbing that something that big happens and over 12 hours later, its doesn't even have a blip on the "mainstream" news. God forbid it was something more widespread than this accident. Instead, we get to watch more celebrity coverage, and then 3 hours of talking heads yammering about said-celebrity(s).
Cuz it's hard.
http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

Control-F and find Consulting in this essay

On the other hand, it might be worth giving away 50% to get the money you need. Once this venture is successful you won't have to give away 50% in future ventures. Make sure for that 50% you get enough money to go all the way with your project, which will mean taking money in stages.
good article. but i may be biased. :)
they haven't already? Last I heard Laptop greatly out sell desktops.

I think boxes will be around for a long time. Servers. Custom made systems.

But as a consumer devise it's been in trouble for a while.
We should be able to save a heck of a lot more oil than we can drill through revolution in our ways of doing things. If we replaced almost all of the petroleum fueled commuter travel for trips under 25 miles, this would probably have a much bigger impact on retail gasoline prices than drilling. If we pushed for a shift from petroleum feedstocks for the chemical industry to methanol, this would also potentially have a bigger impact. Note that both of these are achievable with technology we already have.
Google's mission: To organize the world's information, so as to better sell ads on top of it.
My Best Advice About Social Media
Here's an idea... let's try paying them by the line of code or number of bugs fixed. Oh wait, maybe that isn't such a good idea.
Am I the only one who finds notebooks less confortable for coding, than desktop computers? The position of the keyboard and screen isn't very good for my back and hands...
Techies, Dogs and Obama, Oh My
I'm left-handed with a degree, currently earning 0% of right-handed males...
According to National Post (Canadian Newspaper), 270 million PCs were sold all around the world in 2007.

I wonder how many were built by hand , like I did.
So plug in a keyboard and monitor. One point of the article is that laptops are now good enough to be most people's primary "desktop" computer and they're also portable.
Remember the failed Olympic Triple Cast? It might have worked with advertising, but it was pay-per-view.
'Cloud computing' heightens privacy risks, warns US military CS professor
FTA As dancers and acrobats whisked across the National Stadium in Beijing, anonymous users uploaded more than 100 video clips of the ceremony to YouTube, but the site, owned by Google, swiftly removed as many as it could. Similarly, some live video streams on Justin.tv, a popular source for international video, were also removed. According to International Olympic Committee guidelines, the television networks with the local rights to the Games are the only legal sources of video in each country.

I think its time we grew out of the idea that companies can buy the Olympics. Its supposed to be for everyone. All that BS about unity rings pretty hollow when its for sale for $900 mil.
The absolute best and free: www.dimdim.com
Upmodded for the dose of reality provided by the blog post's comments...
No, I like the keyboard to be a lot closer to the monitor, maybe even under where the laptop would be. That would be quite awkward.

Plus, laptop screens -> much more money for the same quality screen.
The problem with that approach is that it assumes everyone is foolish. A rational actor presented with information that oil supplies will decrease in the near future would adjust his behavior as he sees fit. Moreover, the market will price in the costs of continuing to rely on oil.

Sure, price in the externalities of oil use, but I don't think we should raise prices beyond that just to reduce demand.
Few people realize how close a patent troll came to preventing us from having cars.

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsseldona.htm
I've been very impressed with the Apple documentation in the SDK. The included applications cover a lot of ground in the UI, and thanks to the speed of the development tools, it's easy to code and learn a step at a time.

I've had a fun few hours this afternoon building a very simple image processing app that uses custom table view cells as a way to show each step of the process.

The foregoing said, there are other materials coming out, but I believe that the NDA surrounding the SDK is holding these up.
I think you need to take this in Seth's Audience's context. He is not writing for startups. He's writing for businesses.

Take Amazon (established 1994). It was a great success as a startup in 2-4 years (IPO in 97'). It got big fast. It made waves. It challenged the way the industry needed to work & it presented a net gain for the economy as a whole.
It became profitable in 2001/2 (7-8 years). A reasonable definition of a successful business . By 2004 - 2008 (10 - 14 yrs) it's a stable business it is clearly here to stay.
The elements of its strategy that made it successful in the second half of its life (the profitable one) are the slow & steady ones. Reliability, customer service, trustworthiness, customer goodwill, a long lived affiliate program...

But I agree, some of the examples he gave were probably not the best.
It's hard to believe that Knol has already become so popular that it would rank on the first page of generic searches like 'buttermilk pancakes' if Google wasn't giving them a bump.
lol. You would be dropped from their study then. If you read the report, they drop a lot of outlier data points. Which is something to watch out for in general, as it means the researchers may have been biasing their results(most likely unintentionally) to find something they could report as significant.
knol.google.com is the 1st result

wikipedia is the 2nd
They will probably never even bother to try collecting on the judgement. The girl has no obligation to get a loan, it is up to RIAA to collect it against a person who has little income and very likely no assets. They won't even try.

This was all to build up rock solid precident they can use in other courts but it didn't quite go to plan. So to RIAA,this is a huge failure.
Executive summary:

Quite fair.