skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>it's about time Nvidia/ATI/Intel/others pull their own weight and fix the damn issues with their drivers

It's been about time for 15 years, and they still haven't. Video card drivers are #1 reason for windows crashes. Microsoft put a lot of pressure on these companies (and Microsoft knows pressure) and it still didn't help.
MS could (and probably would) write an Angle style abstraction layer that runs WebGL on top of D3D9 or D3D11 anyway, so I think source going to the kernel isn't a big deal.

It's possible that because MS has more knowledge of the graphics drivers work in Windows they know about some dangerous security holes that Mozilla, Google, or even Nvidia or AMD aren't aware of, but its equally possible that they just don't want to support WebGL for political reasons and this is a semi-technical excuse.
I dunno about the age thing. I'm middle aged in programming years, and had no issues landing a job at the only Python/Django biz that I know of in central Indiana. I started attending local python & other meetups, and connections flowed naturally from there. That's how I got this. I poured a lot of time and energy into this pursuit, and it paid off.

It has been the purest, most gratifying & deeply rewarding transformation of my life, ahead even of 10 years of service as a Marine. Why? Because every second and calorie I poured into self-education about programming was out of pure passion, not because I was contractually obligated or faced court martial otherwise.

Programming is the most perfect creative outlet for me, and very day im absolutely giddy about going to work and am a little disappointed when it's quitting time. Achievement unlocked. If you want to do it then do it.
Beyond the normal "it should be useful" etc, I find that I'm way more likely to pay for something if the company has a honest human face/startup/etc. My subscription with Pinboard.io fell in that category.
The sad fact is that RIM just can't seem to decide where it's going as a company. They have an entire host of phones that are totally obsolete[1], their tablet doesn't run an operating system that was built in house[2] and for some reason they decided to force people to have a blackberry phone to get the very features most people would use the tablet for.[3] So if I'm in the market for a phone, why on earth would I go with a blackberry?(And no, BBM is not enough)

[1]http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/02/rim-announces-blackberry-...

[2]http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/rim-introduces-playbook-t...

[3]http://www.intomobile.com/2011/01/10/blackberry-playbook-tab...
Linterna Verde: El look de Blake Lively en premier de la película
I've been wondering if all this negative Groupon stuff had anything to do with Google and Facebook wanting to get in the game.
Files can be named anything but / in Unix.
A kinder interpretation is that he meant: be an expert in that field who can also code.

Which is probably pretty true already, much as everyone can use a word processor or spreadsheet. Programming to get a job done is not that hard, especially with languages like python. Over time, the tools will get even easier.

Being a tool-maker seems to have some mileage left - but that will also be made easier over time.

EDIT it's hard to predict what will happen, but for several decades, programmers earned above average wages. Cool... but weird. I saw a great explanation, that during that time, not everyone who wanted a computer had one, and each transition (mainframe/mini/workstation/PC) increased the market size, and therefore the demand for software. Higher demand --> higher wages. But according to this explanation, PCs maxed out their market around the year 2000. While this mightn't be strictly true, as the third world is unconquered, and people buy second and third devices (e.g. smart phones), the rate of increase has slowed.

Those above average wages will never return. There will just be average wages. But if you like programming, that's OK.
First, the fact that Apple has stubbornly refused to support USB3. The first Thunderbolt hard drive is due this summer. Seriously? Would it have killed you to support USB3 and thunderbolt?

In the past, Apple has tried to push the hardware world into this new standard or that, and invariably have failed, and adopted the industry standards. Appletalk gave way to Ethernet (Yes, I'm that old). Various Mac busses yielded to PCI. They gave up on SCSI and went all IDE. They eventually buckled and replaced proprietary serial ports and ADB with USB. Intel replaced PowerPC.

Don't get me wrong. I love having Firewire, and I use it for audio and video. But I'd rather have USB3, because I have massive choice in USB3, very little in FW800, none at all in Thunderbolt.

Next, and similarly: Bluray. I know this one is more debatable, but I have a large library of Bluray movies. I'd love to take them with me and play them on my Mac. I'd love even more to have a Mac Mini with a Bluray drive, so I can eliminate my standalone player in my entertainment center.
I was discussing the same thing with friends. It's impressive how a company have three years ahead of competition, more thinking that the money is not the problem.

In other words, it seems like even if MSFT, Nokia, RIM and Google have virtually infinite money they can't catch up. That's a real competitive advantage for Apple.
You might want to read what you google. :-)

That was from Apr. 14, when they didn't really have that much of a clue -- and different sources in that article said different things.

Edit: But sure, I asked for "a reference". Maybe I should have asked for "a reference that is more than a claim by some company man (not a researcher in a paper etc), with an unknown agenda"... :-)
I've seen many people type "google" or "google.com" into google's search bar, while on google.com. Then they typed "facebook.com" into the search bar or something silly like that ...
Astounding; this quote nails my experience. Learning to program de-programmed the mechanical, "proceed until error" non-thinking conditioning that plagued my entire adult life.
Why aren't cookies updated on iphones?
In terms of traffic, Google is the most popular site in the world, not Facebook. http://www.alexa.com/topsites
I saw that this story link was really just a recap of an original source (which appears to be down for maintainance now). The original source linked to these two papers, which upon a quick read had some content that I wasn't familiar with, so thought it might be news to others too.

In general, when I see blog recaps I almost always go to the source. This blog entry, like most good ones, will link to their sources.

I wish I could say it was because I'm an expert on OpenGl and security. I'm really just a rabid link follower.
"Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less."

Sales figures in countries outside the USA where the iphone is on all networks shows that statement to be extremely unlikely to be true in the USA
"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect."

O RLY?

http://blogs.forbes.com/nicoleperlroth/2011/06/07/winners-an...
Phrases like this make me feel a little bit queasy:

Cost Optimization Program:
The company also announced that it will begin a program to streamline operations across the organization,
which will include a headcount reduction. This realignment will be focused on taking out redundancies
and a reallocation of resources to allow us to focus on the areas that offer the highest growth opportunities
and align with RIM strategic objectives, such as accelerating new product introductions.

(Source - Research in Motion's first quarter results for fiscal 2012 - page 2 - retrieved from http://press.rim.com/financial/release.jsp?id=5051)

I wish that companies would ditch the PR speech when they announce layoffs.
Ask HN: Please review my niche startup: noticekeeper.com
Hi All,

I have, in my spare time over the past 8 months or so, been working on a web application. It's a niche application that scratches an itch for US Bankruptcy Attorneys. There are some desktop applications that do something similar, though their handling of events tends to be not as nice.

The problem that I solve:
1) Attorneys receive automated e-mails via the US Bankruptcy Court via the Pacer (CM/ECF) System. These emails contain a reference to the case name and number, some docket text containing various bits of information about the specific notice that triggered the email (each notice triggers one) and various dates of events (approaching court dates, last dates to file, etc.).

* NoticeKeeper parses through this information and organizes it in an easily accessible/searchable away. Creditor information is also automatically imported as well as various claims and amounts filed by a debtor.

2) The biggest headache of these notices, however, is a link contained within each email. This link can only be clicked once. Once clicked, the attorney or paralegal is taken to a location where they can download a PDF copy of the paperwork that has been filed for that notice. They get one shot at this. If they click the link but forget to save the document then they must pay the US Bankruptcy Court ~10 cents PER PAGE (not per document) to receive another copy (some of these PDFs are 50 pages in length.)

* NoticeKeeper finds all "one-time-click" links within a notice and visits the page for the attorney. Each PDF is downloaded and stored locally on our server(s). We then convert the image into a web readable form as well as archiving the PDF for later download ability should the attorney wish to do so.

Business Model:
NK is set up as a SaaS company. We sell directly to the attorney and/or law firm. We're currently looking at pricing the basic plan at around $30/mo for 1 or 2 attorneys with a few paralegals. Plans would increase based on how many attorneys want to be in on the plan.

Anyway, while most (all?) here would not find this site useful, I believe it certainly scratches an itch. I'm looking for feedback on the idea, design, and market speak.

Thank you,
Rob
Ditching caffeine did wonders for me. While I tend to feel a little less "manic" when I'm focused on something, I'm also way more clear headed so I'm certain I'm actually more effective and thus able to reach a much deeper level of concentration.

And don't even get me started on how much better I feel first thing in the morning, or how I can get through a whole week now without headaches, or how my energy levels don't spike and crash like crazy through the day, or how much better my digestive system feels without all that coffee in it... and what all those things do to one's concentration.

It's insidious as well, because you gradually drink more over time; nobody goes from a standing start to 5-8 mugs a day. If they did, they'd feel like hell. So as you seem to acknowledge, after over a decade you're not even making an informed choice any more; there's not been a single moment in all that time that you haven't either been affected by caffeine or it's temporary withdrawal.
Adobe hasn't had a real "focus" since John Warnock left the building years ago. M&A isn't a "vision thing" and now the company is floundering. They built their stack during the golden age of the PC which looking back at it lasted from the 80s until last year, and now it's too late. Adobe won't die but will fade or will be purchased in time just like the mainframe makers were eaten up by the PC companies. I'd love to see Apple buy them out but my guess is that their messy legacy would be unappealing to a company that values clean interface design — although they might be worth it for the patents.
A few months ago Facebook started aggressively suggesting users make it their homepage. Perhaps this is evidence that campaign worked.
Clickable: http://noticekeeper.com
the first time i read this i remember thinking to myself, "oh boy, i wish i'd read this 8 years ago. i would have still been a programmer, but i would have chosen a different degree..."
... Because data.gov isn't releasing classified information?
This is a false dichotomy. Mozilla and Google could both be unknowingly introducing the possibility of bugs and errors. The depth of their testing could be inadequate -- bugs could occur only on certain combinations of hardware and driver (and even, versions of drivers).
Strategy on One Page
I'm not really a fan of RIM, but the Playbook gave me a very good impression when I first played with it at Best Buy. It isn't an iPad, but it was far more pleasant to use than any of the Android tablets currently on the market.

The decision to ship it without email or calendaring, though... I don't know what they were thinking.
Touche, though I still wouldn't knock pg's insights, even if they're just general inferences. His track record at identifiying winners speaks for itself.
Bitcoin trojan caught in the wild
It seems likely to me that the dual specialization strategy Zed describes is beaten by the strategy of being an opportunist who has the ability to code as one of the tools in their toolkit.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/12/05/the-fine-art-of-opportu...
Let's mourn together at the memories of long lost code.

I'll drink to that.
Actually, thanks to the backlash they got in Windows XP pre-SP2 times, they are very security-conscious now. Blessing in disguise.
But that other thing is almost always present - it's not another thing you have to carry, it's adding capability to something almost everyone carries around.

And again, back in the day, there was no incentive to add new fangled credit card readers, when everyone just carried cash and checks around anyway, etc., etc.
The basics are simple. Do a search for a cheatsheet, do a quick look over on it and practice some of the commands. Use the command line a little every day until you get the hang of it.
Senate Panel Pushes Adoption Of P2P Video Streaming Software
Apple probably has the most experience creating top-notch interfaces of any company in the world. Added to this their experience creating leading edge consumer hardware, and how can Google or Microsoft, even less so Samsung, Motorola, RIM, hope to compete? Apple has at least one big advantage over any company I can think of. They do it all, and do it better than everyone else.

Apple is really hitting their stride, after almost 30 years, and the state of the market is perfect for a company just like them. With how closed they are, though, I don't think they'll dominate. That seems to be fine with Apple, though - they're not after the next Windows.

I think the momentum behind Android, and the wide variety of companies using it, is going to keep it at the #1 mobile OS spot. The future of the ones other than Android and iOS doesn't look great for phones. Tablet are still so new, that it's difficult to predict what will happen.
I never understood why people think just because you are a hypocrite doesn't mean you still aren't entitled to all the rights everyone else is under the law.

It's a sad prospect to suggest that your basic property rights can be taken way for that. Doing one thing and saying another is a part of free speech, IMO.
Actually, I tend to think "Rails is a Ghetto" is one of his most beneficial works. It was angry and juvenile at times, but I think it did help make rails grow up. It also called out a lot of the fanboy-ism in the community and helped people who actually cared about engineering to rise.
Thanks Jim we have found a couple attorney's like that.
The root of the problem lies in the OS and their SDK. For a while BlackBerrys were the best platform to develop for. Symbian, pain is the ass. JavaME, even worse. WM6 was a little bit better, but it still was a pretty bad WinCE fork, with all the glory of the Win32 Api. Now along comes Apple in 2008 with an extensively documented SDK, that includes all kind of high-level APIs, and an IDE with tools, that actually work.

This has never been the case in mobile development before. Although ObjC was a stranger to most people back then, it's certainly something you can learn and work with.

Next comes Google, again massive APIs, everything perfectly documented, tools that work. On top of that, the language of choice is Java and the former best platform for developer, Blackberrys, just looks severely outdated in comparison to Android.

RIM's root APIs basically didn't change since the age of monochrome-displayed Blackberrys. Over time they patched in support for colored displays, then 2-way navigation wheel, then 4-way navigation ball, and later on touchscreens. The reason the BlackBerry Storm has an extra 'click' in the screen (you could tap the screen to highlight something e.g. a button and then press the whole screen down, like a mouse button, to actually click the button), is that the whole User Interface APIs relied on onFocus and onClick events, something that comes from the times of the 2-way navigation wheel and is fundamentally incompatible with the way touch devices work.

Now in retrospect its easy to say they should have rewritten everything a couple years ago and started with a new OS from scratch, but that's a big risk to take and generally not how big companies work.

Anyway the new generation of modern smartphone OS'es is now in full swing and RIM OS is pretty much dead. Microsoft knows that, they started from scratch, Nokia knows that, they gave up on Symbian. RIM? They probably can hold on to business customers for some years, but recovery is gonna be hard.
Ppl always repeat the profit of Apple, but why? What exactly is that relevant to, unless you're a shareholder or Apple employee? Is it just a comment to indicate that Apple isn't about to go out of business?

To each his own.

This is really the important statement. Phones are in a state now that I think we can actually have 3 viable OSes in the market. I know families where the dad has a BB, the mom an iPhone, and a child an Android (or Sidekick back in the day), and no one cares. It's not like PCs.

When I go and look at a WebOS device or WP7 I'm not worried about the fact that they have small market share. For the most part it doesn't matter that much to me as a consumer. Sure WP7 only has 20,000 apps. But unless you're Robert Scoble, you'll be more than happy (and if you're Robert Scoble, apps don't even count until you hit 500k).

It's a very different world, and I think we'll see things evolve quite differently.
webOS will have a resurgence.

I wanna believe.
Looks, like this is the answer:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2663497
> This really could have, and should have, been done a while ago, but it's seems like Mike Lazardis is on some kind of a ego trip.

No, he's just doing what any good CEO of a large enterprise should do - increase shareholder value. They've pushed strong numbers from 2007 and have only recently started to plummet. (for now obvious reasons) Innovator's dilemma at its finest.
his is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre programming job,

I think what he's saying is that a biologist that can program can vastly increase their output. He's not saying that being a programmer that works under biologists in a biology lab is better than being a programmer in a tech company.

And I agree. Being able to hack scripts for number crunching, quick simulations, and so on is vastly useful when you're not working as a programmer.
Solid post, thanks for sharing.

Never even knew that such an event existed - cool idea.

Possibly moving to Chicago huh? Keep me updated!
For musical instruments, at least, there are clearly defined technical exercises with no artistic value. They are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to be able to perform artistically.
Are you familiar with DOS batches?
If so, you can try starting writing some automation on DOS and then translating them into shell scripts. It was the way I started.

If not, you can try writing some basic automation scripts. Look for all of the repetitive tasks (copies, opening programs, clearing temps) and try to automate them. You will, unavoidably, start feeling comfortable and knowing all of the tools.
Well, I tried.

On question 4, I answered "never". That meant that questions 5 & 8 are not applicable, but you require me to answer them anyway. What am I supposed to do?

Also, every question has an asterisk after it. I looked for a footnote. There isn't one. What's that all about?
I don't understand why Microsoft couldn't have just endorsed OpenNI, fixed the drivers, created some Visual Studio/.net integration and been done with it. Would have spent half as much time in development, cost them less and given them the same exact product. And anyone, even without a Windows Machine or Visual Studio could have worked on this.

I definitely answered my own question.
Show HN: wanted to check out websockets, created a liveblogging tool
Using "facebook.com" as a search keyword yields a strange result: there is a steady rise until the first days of January 2010 when a sudden drop of ~50% occurs. From then on, the curve remains flat.

Any idea of what happened?

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=facebook.com&sa=N
The spectators can root for whoever they like as long as the outcome is in doubt. Your scold only applies to the judge.