skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll grant you that the article is mainly about "why Chrome?" rather than "why not Firefox?". In other words, though the title is not 100% linkbait, it does have a very high linkbait factor.

But even the question "why Chrome?" isn't answered well. Here's the Larry Page answer that you refer to:

Page said that the monetary benefits Google will gain from Chrome will come from the better and cheaper-to-develop web apps that its engineers can build using a better browser, as well as increased user loyalty and freed-up user time so they can search more.

The meat of that response is the part about "a better browser" -- it's certainly the only part of the sentence that relates to the "why not Firefox?" question, since Google is more than capable of releasing a Google-cobranded Firefox. But what does "a better browser" mean? To answer that requires getting into details like "here's how the codebases are different", or "here's how the project management and release scheduling is different", or "here's how the overall goals of each project are different", or maybe even "here's the real political situation with Firefox vis-a-vis Chrome". But we don't get any discussion of such things. We get some warmed-over press conferences and PR-quality quotes from Larry Page.
For the same price point, maybe. But, hard drives are one of the most expensive components of a laptop. Choosing between $500 and $600 is a big deal. Network backup like Mozy is competitively priced, especially when you consider the high chance of catastrophic loss that laptops have (stolen, lost, dropped, flooded).

Plus, if you were going to trade 50% of capacity for safety, there are a lot of other kinds of safety precautions to consider. For example, file history versioning (like a local, always-on Mozy or Dropbox or Subversion) would probably protect the user from more data loss than RAID, because most data loss is due to human error, not mechanical failure.

That said, I would really like my laptop to have RAID-1. Actually, I have two 100GB hard drives and an Ultrabay...maybe I will give it a shot on my Linux partition.
Can anybody on Twitter tell me how Twitter is at all a useful service? I've read all the "Twitter is opt-in goodness" but every time I've used it it just seems like another self-whoring arena.
London Stock Exchange crippled by system outage
I think you're underestimating the power of early-adopters/sneezers. For instance, lots of people have kids, and their friends have kids...

Whats important here is that the type of people that will pay attention enough to go to tc50/demo aren't just going to go there and then not say anything about it.

They'll come home, get on their macbooks and start blogging what they saw ( some really nice programmers building a kids network ). Some of their friends will check out the links, maybe share it on facebook, myspace, or , gosh, in an email. And so forth...
http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-...
Yeah.

The other big one, 37signals, is named after the signals sent into space in search of intelligent life. No clue re: 43things. All the other numbers exist because every other url was taken.
why did the Google Engineers sit down to make the Browser of Future?

I've spent 2 years of my working life with the Mozilla codebase. Also, 3 very close friends work at Google, and I must know at least 25 people who work there.

My take is that mechanical_fish is completely correct. There was no secret strategic reason for doing this. Some engineers at Google simply wanted to make a better browser, and decided that the Mozilla codebase was too huge and crufty to deal with.

Not a day went by working with the Mozilla codebase that I didn't think I could make a better browser from scratch, if only I had enough time and all my smart hacker friends wanted to pitch in and help me out.

Google is probably still the most "bottom up" out of any of the huge firms out there, and they have "20% time" and all the personnel needed to make this happen. Once the guys got somewhere on their skunkworks version, the higher-ups probably thought "oh cool... another browser, we should put that out there. And hey, as a bonus maybe we don't have to keep dealing with the Mozilla foundation"

Personally, I'm jealous because they basically implemented everything I thought sucked in Firefox. I had no idea Google had this up their sleeve (very impressed that my Google friends kept this a secret from me; yes, they knew about it), so until September 2 I had a minor dream that maybe someday I could spearhead the next killer browser. Unfortunately I spend too much time at my day job and on hacker news. Execution is everything folks, get to work!

Of course I could be wrong and this started out as a sinister plot to own all your data and give the finger to the Mozilla foundation, but I really doubt it.
Yeah I agree - factors over the decision are unclear, and not made clear at all from those quotes.

Google really want access to more of your data (to give you better data it's true) - and they need to control the experience to do that... I can't imagine any other reason for Google's moves at the moment.
Ask YC: Would YC create a similar event to TC50?
Assuming the attention and audience on HN, wouldn't it be interesting if YC decided to create an official event similar to TC50 or DEMO but irrevelant to their funding cycles?
Use p4merge or DiffMerge with git mergetool on OS X
Hmmmm.... Maybe we should run the test suite one more time before we deploy.
Computer breakdown halts trading at London Exchange
Mistakes on terrorist watch list affect even children
I don't see how you could make a "mock" programming language implementation. Either it's a complete implementation, in which case it's just as real as any other implementation, or it isn't, in which case it's an implementation of another language.

Incidentally, the reason we didn't make our implementation too Mzscheme-specific is that we wanted to make it portable across Scheme versions. In fact, it started out written on another version of Scheme, Scheme48.
Techcrunch50 recorded sessions
The toughest creature on Earth has survived a trip into space
I don't have the experience you have, so I have to side with you on that basis alone.

I don't find Google's moves sinister - they want to provide a better user experience in order to be a better (and more successful) business. Google's strategy has always been one that works symbiotically... If they think more of my data is going to help them do that, well, then they might be right... and they might be right that most people will be happy with this.

I don't buy that this is a skunkworks project though - there are a lot of key individuals contributing to this.

Putting out a browser like this is a pretty serious undertaking. It'll take a lot of resources to maintain, and carries the Google brand in an extremely public way. So whilst the origins might be up for argument, I think this is a very deliberate and strategic move on Google's part.
What is the problem of search?
That's probably only true if your customers are individual consumers. When we were selling to enterprise customers, we realized most of them didn't even look at our great website. Most of the selling were just done with good old fashioned salespeople that contacted the Marketing VP and chatted with him.
I'm sorry to have disappointed you with my poor commenting skills, ashu. Unfortunately, if you didn't like that last comment, you probably won't like this one either.

- Open source maintainers / hosts have significant control over the direction of their projects.

- Adblock Plus and CustomizeGoogle may well become default extensions or even core Firefox features in the future. It is my belief that Google's influence over the Firefox project has thus far prevented that from happening, even though Firefox users would have appreciated it. Now that Google is promoting a Firefox competitor, their influence over Firefox may wane (although their re-upping of the default search deal may forestall that). I doubt your claim that Chrome and Firefox will evolve in lockstep on this issue has any basis in fact.

- There is currently no extension mechanism and no way to block ads (Adblock Plus) or prevent profile tracking (CustomizeGoogle) in Chrome. Rather, Chrome goes in the opposite direction, sending every one of your keystrokes in the search/location bar back to the mothership. So the two browsers are not "JUST LIKE" one another at all.
Zune- Getting A Headstart On The Ipod
Analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk's data quality
Top Lawyer Is Selected  As U.S. Mulls Google Suit
Intel's X25-M 80 GB solid-state drive
A Mars Odyssey--"Hubble Repair Mission Concerns"
Crowdsource the Future
Space is extremely cold, near absolute zero

Space cannot be cold.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22space+is+not+cold%22

there is the threat of [epithet deleted] radiation from stars.

...And from black holes, supernovae, and other sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Cosmic_ray_sources

It is considered the most hostile of environments

No. The center of a star might be considered more hostile.

where unprotected humans would last for a fraction of a second.

No. "Animal experiments show that rapid and complete recovery is normal for exposures shorter than 90 seconds ... There is only a limited amount of data available from human accidents, but it is consistent with animal data. Limbs may be exposed for much longer if breathing is not impaired."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum#Effects_on_humans_and_an...
One thing that I wonder is what sort of implications these will have on databases, both from an algorithms perspective (since disk access algorithms will change) and overall latency. I've been putting a little time to optimize our disk reads for the graph-store that we're using for Directed Edge and this has me wondering if long-term they'll be less relevant...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=298876
Gamer backlash against Spore DRM
> for concurrent applications, Erlang is a clear choice.

No it's not. Not necessarily.

Concurrency is a means to an end, not a goal. Erlang is great for problems which lend themselves well to modeling with a large number of communicating processes. A parallelizable number-crunching task is not such a problem.

By the way, just to be clear, by "number crunching" I mean something like rendering CGI.

> Even with cpu-intensive number crunching, I would rather write an erlang linked-in driver in C and use Erlang's concurrency model to run the code rather than write multi-core enabled map/reduce type things in C. (ewwww)

Concurrency in the Erlang VM will not magically translate into concurrency in your driver. By default only one emulator thread at a time is allowed to execute code in the driver.
You can override that, and then probably have to deal with a lot of synchronization and locking issues in the driver. Why bother?

Most number-crunching software out there is written in C, C++ or Fortran -- probably for a good reason (I have no experience in this area). There are many libraries, frameworks and tools to help you with parallelizing things (e.g. OpenMP). Erlang is simply not a good choice for this sort of software.

Too many people focus on how Erlang is well-suited for multicore systems. Forget multicore. It's neat, but the real awesomeness of Erlang is in distribution and fault-tolerance, not parallelization.
NavSpy (social-grid mapping) featured on Dragon's Den
3:13 - 4:30.
good point. data centers do not have their own military contingent like navy aircraft carriers. Wonder what that does to the cost equation. It seems to be somewhat fixed so if we make this big enough...

One could also try different technologies which make it harder to weaponize the nuclear fuel like pebble bed reactors but then thats never been deployed on a ship.
i would say add a publish a group feature would be nice. i currently do this with remember the milk so my boss can keep tabs on what i'm doing.
You're right in many ways. I think I'm thinking too generally at the moment and not about specific tasks :)

Erlang has its strong points just as every other language. =]
Dragon's Den is an angel-investment gameshow wherein entrepreneurs pitch to a 5-member angel panel, hoping to win by achieving equity sales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons%27_Den_(UK)
And they chose windows over linux for Reliability: http://www.idgconnect.com/software/windows/london_stock_exch...
I'm having a problem..

I assiagned a hot key. Then I didn't restart the computer yet.

Later, I was in the safari search bar, and whenever I hit 'a' it would toggle the program. I had to close the program to be able to hit 'a' again.
iPhone, iPod Touch
"So what is to be done?"

I don't know. It's possible for someone to be almost completely free now, if they have enough money and are familiar with the tools required (crypto, etc). My hope is that increasing technology will prove too disruptive for government as we know it to continue to be effective at protecting its local monopolies, but it doesn't seem like a sure thing, and with higher tech comes higher numbers of existential threats (biowarfare, etc).
Google Docs and Chrome represent nothing significant in the marketplace right now relative to IE and MS Office, yet I have no doubt that Microsoft considers these offerings to be serious threats. Analogously, Adblock Plus and CustomizeGoogle, both aimed directly at Google's primary revenue streams, are no doubt taken very seriously at the Googleplex, regardless of how low their usage currently is.
Now I want to play tetris, but I need to work............
Through the startup hothouse & out the other side
I am, among other things, a sysadmin who babysits several RAIDs, including a 10TB one.

I can confirm that the large capacity SATA disks have a noticeably high error rate, which I have never seen before. It used to be that RAID protected you from disk failures, but we aren't seeing that nearly as much now as we are unrecoverable bit errors on otherwise healthy disks.

I have set all our RAID controllers to scrub the data and compare the mirrors every weekend. In the past couple of years we've only had a couple of unrecoverable read errors, but many recoverable read errors.

Recoverable read errors are still bad, the disk gets taken offline and out of the RAID set for up to a minute while the controller retries many times until the data can be read. Then the sector is remapped to another part of the disk.

So yes, it is a real problem, but it isn't too hard to manage in this era of filesystem snapshotting plus high speed RAID6 controllers. In return we've been given huge amounts of storage space.
Yah, I also though that part was pretty unrealistic.
I want it to have a SATA interface so the problem would be solved in hardware.

I don't see much difference between SATA and Firewire; in both cases Drobo is hardware RAID.

Time Capsule fails if the disk fails (and backups aren't stored elsewhere).

But then you just make a new backup.

To protect against disk failure, you can use backup or RAID. (RAIDed backup is a little expensive for personal use.) Backup also protects against file deletion or corruption.
>And there's not a single mention of the possibility that the Google engineers sat down to design a stripped-down Browser of the Future, took a good look at the Firefox source, took a good look at the Webkit source, took a look at each other, and said "Webkit".

Isn't that the same thing the Safari team did, back when Webkit's granddaddy was called KHTML?
Viewdle is very, very cool.
http://www.viewdle.com
Windows Home Server actually uses a duplication scheme that makes sure all your machine backups (and shared folders) are stored, in full, on more than one drive on the server. It behaves pretty much like one big drive and duplicates across all the drives as needed.

It's pretty likely a consumer won't need more than this since that equates to three copies of your data at any given time (laptop, server disk B, and server disk C).
How many active users does Twitter have again?
Datacenters... sure that's what they want you to think. Haven't you read Snow Crash?!
Sure the candidates are not picking web servers and what not, but I'm sure they had some influence by hiring the most qualified staff, who were versed in the subject at hand, who hired (or hired the staff who hired ...) the people who made the website.
Didn't know that about 37signals. That's cool.

I think the other 43 domains followed 43folders, they succeeded it by a year or three IIRC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_encryption_theory
Top Lawyer Is Selected As U.S. Mulls Google Suit
Is that an Apple wireless keyboard or something else?
Unbunch thy panties. And stay away from DC, you'd lose your mind here :^)
Just wondering if you have any stats to correlate with that assertion.
It depends on who you follow.
I would love to have xobni for my thunderbird/Mail.app on OSX (I don't really want to move to outlook just for it on the mac, if outlook even runs on the mac??).
I'm old and cranky at 43.

It doesn't get any better.
Exactly. Any fool can see that all Obama did was set up some Gentoo instances, compile Apache and PHP with the appropriate CFLAGS, and let his people do their work.
i watched animal planet and this guy was bird watching and he got attacked by a bear out in the wilderness.
it should be but only tech people care about this conference, if it was done by the inquistr.com it would have been off the hook, they cover more than just tech, and that is what our customers read.
Where are those legal documents from PG/YC?
Our company in nothing more than a community based around an advanced programming interface for the basic consumer.
Actually it's exceedingly simple: You don't work the same muscle groups more than every 2-3 days. Your argument suggests that if I do legs in the morning I shouldn't be able to do bi/tri that evening for example, which is pretty asinine.

We are talking about two different things. I was power lifting which involves different workouts than total-body or body-weight exercises, for example. For the most part, though, the morning was reserved for cardio and very little lifting, mainly just some body-weight exercises.

40 minutes twice a week isn't nearly enough unless you're not looking for very good gains.
What about Santa Claus? I keep thinking of this issue these days, how much it used to hurt me when I started understanding that there was no Santa Claus. I keep wondering if I, in the future, should tell my kids the truth right away about the whole Santa Claus thing.
There are very rapidly diminishing returns, and keeping up with all the new time-saving tricks takes a lot of time!
Interactive C# shell
Better YCombinator news with y pipes (filter links + fetch each page)
* filters outs posts which have words like "Ask (HN|YC|PG)", links to techcrunch.com and other noise
* fetches the pages linked to in each of the post.
United Airlines Briefly Lost 75% of its Value Because of Story from 2002
http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html
A less diplomatic person might describe this as a giant, catastrophile circle-jerk.
umm, unless you are going to sue the company that made the scissors I don't see your point.
Do you have any evidence to support your assertion(s)? How can you be so completely sure of what is going on strategically inside large organizations like Microsoft or Google?
Ugh, Adobe -> Akamai, my bad, sorry.
Ouch! Here's Umair's response, in case you missed it:

"max,

"if you're seeing chrome as simply a story of commoditizing complements, you're missing its lesson entirely and totally. browsers don't become commodities because of chrome: exactly the opposite happens, which is the point of the post.

"you're following the logic of last-gen platform wars: we commoditize complements because demand for our primary good rises. yet, there are also costs to commoditizing complements: what we do in the process is poison our own ecosystem. that's the story of microsoft and sony: a million applications, games, etc - with innovation totally stifled.

"see the point? "commoditizing complements" is a zero-sum equation. chrome is most definitely not.

"i strongly suggest you read the post and discussion more closely next time."
Funny that I've never seen an ad for Walmart or P&G on Google. Pricing (at least for Adwords) is determined at auction so I'm guessing a Google/Yahoo deal will not have a great impact.
half of my updates on twitter are replies to friends or coworkers, so it's mostly about communication about current projects, discussing news, etc.

and I only follow people that I've met irl
I followed Merlin. :-/

Seriously, most of the things people would say there - Merlin and Zeldman especially - were more geared towards humorous than they were towards at all interesting. RSS worked a lot better if I was looking for productive content.
Then I guess it's a matter of different social spheres. Where I am nobody uses Twitter.
The language he implemented is "Mock Arc" - an imitation of Arc. From the project home page:

I decided to call my implementation Morc, as in "mock Arc," as in an imitation Arc.
Popularity of Salvia May Thwart Medical Use
depends also on what you do. i work with many companies and many entrepreneurs so that's where twitter is useful. solo-entrepreneurs, consultants, bloggers might also find very it useful.

also, if you go to local programming/hacker meetups, you're bound to find a few who use twitter.
Any decent hardware RAID controller has a background "patrol read" which takes care of this problem.
I had an issue with the August shipment (re: it never came) so I shot these guys an email about it earlier today. They were back in touch within minutes with a note that said they'd look into it, then follow-up again this evening.

They tracked down the issue, upgraded my shipment to overnight delivery, and refunded my money...

I highly, highly recommend StartupSchwag. Great customer service indeed.
I hate to bring in politics, but I wonder if it had something to do with this:

"COURT DOCUMENTS have revealed precisely what Google thinks of the Bush administration's demand that it hand over information on its punters' search results.

According to Siliconvalley.com, Google has called the Bush administration's request for data on Web searches 'so uninformed as to be nonsensical'"

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/02/20/googl...

Something similar happened to Qwest when it refused the Bush Admin's request for illegal wiretapping:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p.htm...
My first reaction upon seeing the Amazon site was precisely that: "How immature."

I would be astonished if Spore flopped. Right now, we're seeing hardcore gamers and freeks (or freetards, or whatever they're called right now) complaining. The mass market hasn't heard a thing about Spore.

On a whim, I told a friend about Spore two days ago. Her instant reaction: "I need to uninstall The Sims 2 to get this." I think that'll be a common reaction. Spore has a big marketing campaign going on right now, but it could win the world over through word-of-mouth alone.
Google Releases More Patches for MySQL
I had a similar experience with the Rubik's cube, although it was worse. I would constantly imagine a rotating cube, to the point that it made me dizzy (and oddly enough the only thing that made the dizziness stop was playing with the Rubik's cube).
The Anders Norås Guide to Weird Computer Science
Not many people

Well, yeah. But they could, and that would be nuclear for google. I'm amazed that the people in this thread honestly believe that the HTML rendering code is anything but a side-issue at google. Management probably just said to the engs, "Okay, use whatever's best" and that was that.

Almost every dollar google makes comes through IE and Firefox. It's like...if Fedex only had two drivers, one of whom was a UPS shareholder, and the other a revolutionary socialist. I don't know how google could not view this as a strategic problem. Msft could say "to hell with google", set live.com as the default search on IE and give firefox a billion dollars to do the same. R.I.P. google.