skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine.

No, 15 years ago you could reasonably write a search engine for 15 years ago. It would suck by today's standards.

You want to handle Javascript? Easy! There are plenty of tools to choose from now. Run a browser as your crawler, visit the sites, and read the generated source instead of the static source. Shove that into your 15-years-ago search engine, and there's no difference.

>Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were

You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.

>Writing anything that can reasonably see and parse web pages...

has become a community effort, instead of a bunch of isolated silos where people reinvented the wheel out of necessity.

The resources required aren't so large just because it's so much more complex, it's large because it's so much faster, and you won't survive if you can't compete. How long did we languish with crappy Javascript engines? How much would you need to know to actively compete in that section alone now? It's easy to make a slow-but-functional browser, and if you looked around you'd see some people doing just that. Making a fast-and-resilient one is as hard as making a fast-and-resilient anything, especially where human input (ie, HTML) is expected to be consumed.
I don't have access to original Bernstein materials; does anybody know how they define "brand appeal"? Apparently Apple has over 66% of whatever that is (such that their fraction is "more than double" the remainder), and yet only half of the respondents "preferred Apple over all other brands".

As AllThingsD certainly doesn't pass along a definition of "brand appeal", in the context of the article that 66% claim is neither fact nor spin. It is nothing at all.
I am sorry, but adapting to a vendor is not how IT departments run (especially when a vendor aims to replace your IT departments).
Hacked: BeautifulPeople.com
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There's quite a difference between the majority of traffic and the majority of users.
I think they should go further. A more Microsoft-esque thing to do would be if someone is using IE to require the use of Chrome Frame.
That's really cool! I have never seen that project before. I checked our colors compared to the results of the study:

Anxiety: #2288ff vs. #595884 (anxious)

Hostility: #ee0000 vs. #E0192C (angry) -- hostile only had 100 samples

Depression: #3300cc vs. #283152 (depressed)

Confidence: #ee00cc vs. #FF7F00 (confident)

Compassion: #11bb00 vs. #00696F (sorry) -- not sure on this word choice but compassionate wasn't available. Loving was #004E6F

Happiness: #ff8800 vs. #FF7F00 (happy)

So I would say we did well on all except maybe Confidence. However, confident shows up as almost the same color as happy, so we would have to differentiate somehow anyway.
Seesmic dumps BlackBerry: Start of a stampede?
Scientists Find an Achilles' Heel in AIDS Virus (Using Random Matrix Theory)
We have a sales guy who is solely focused on biz dev. He is paid on a straight commission.

After our disagreement last week, my partner decided to hire someone else to help out with marketing, which was previously exclusively my domain. I do think we need help, but the way this hire happened was far from ideal.
Hi HN, this is my OS X window management application and it's got some unique features I thought fellow hackers would enjoy: the latest update adds tab browsing for Safari, Google Chrome and Terminal, combining this with 'type to search' makes for really fast window and tab switching. Watch the screencast to see what I mean.

Developing a OS X window manager is risky business, Apple could wipe it out at any time and Lion's certainly got some really nice features with Mission Control. But I reckon Optimal Layout's still going to appeal to keyboarders, what do you think?
We do not have revenues yet as we have not launched. The plan is for that to happen in the next month.
Can you elaborate why $(document).ready() should not be used?
There's also LinPhone:

http://www.linphone.org

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Linphone

It has clients for: Linux, OS X, Android, and iPhone.
So your competitive advantage is that you can actually meet the people in your area.

Go to every single technology meetup of any kind and promote your site. Network with any and every person in your area that would be able to use your site. Build up awareness on both the company and employee side.
I'd recommend going over the postscript http://perl.plover.com/yak/design/samples/note.html and note that all the discussion here has already happened years ago. IMHO if the majority of listeners misunderstand your talk and don't get the point you're trying to make, then you made a bad talk. Seems like his real point was to distinguish between the GOF book and the Alexander book were about. That's great. Present that point in a thoughtful and careful way, not by going off on GOF in a way that will turn off listeners/readers and occlude the more subtle point you're trying to make.
15 years ago the thing we call "web application" hardly existed. If web page "has nothing except JavaScript" (e.g. GMail) is probably is web app and indexing it makes little sense anyway. If someone misuses JS on content site, that's another story.
And your comment about innovation makes no sense at all. Capabilities of modern browsers (Canvas, geolocation, local storage, offline apps, etc.) offer more opportunities for innovation than "old web" could even imagine.
There were a lot of people claiming that the smartphone market would never approach this size, though.
After a string of projects where I worked so fast I made half the money estimated, I switched to fixed bid -- my next contract saw a 300% increase in my effective hourly rate.

If the risk of going significantly over is small, it can work out in your favor.
That's why Facebook's numbers are so astounding. 500 million ACTIVE users, 250 million LOG IN DAILY.

PS- CityVille has 18.3 million daily average users.
Yes, that step alone makes you (the original poster) a hero. Our feedback is the most constructive way we can cheer you on.
I don't understand why everyone feels a need to argue over whether Apple is a Software company or a Hardware company. This is not a fruit-or-vegetable question. They do a lot of both, with roughly equal degrees of effort and success.
Did you post this using the lynx browser?
If you were launching a technology or developing a product, would you rather have five great engineers rather than 1,000 average engineers?

The former...

What's interesting to me is that the author makes statements like this apparently based solely on his intuition, which seems to be completely uninformed by any experience with programming, and dubious analogies to sports and investment banking.

Not to mention inexplicable assumptions that (1) great programmers are, on average, less likely to be able to work well on teams and (2) the ability to work on teams is encapsulated in the evaluation of a programmer (at least in the minds of Zuckerberg and Andreessen).
Yes, I agree with all you write now.
It just seemed such a weird issue though.
Hard to imagine how something like this can happen accidentally.
Debian Stable is for servers. For desktop, obviously you want Debian Testing or Unstable.

Of course its a matter of choice, but if you stick to Debian Stable for your desktop, such issues are to be expected.
Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1
According to some numbers I can find for Sweden (which probably doesn't classify as an undeveloped country), Android caught up with iPhone during Q1 of this year (1), and is currently growing faster than iPhone.

(1)http://www.mobil.se/nyheter/android-ifatt-iphone-i-sverige-1...
US nuke regulators weaken safety rules to keep old reactors running
he wants to fire you, but not come out and say it directly. were you offered/receiving pay/equity prior to the disagreement?
11 Best Practices for Peer Code Review
It is not harder or easier. It is just different than it used to be. Things that used to be hard are easy now. Problems that didn't exist 10 years ago exist today. I develop a spider.

For the most part, the bulk of the web's content is as easily accessible as it was years ago. You make a request and you get a blob of HTML back. If you have special requirements and need to get into all the nooks and crannies you create a DOM implementation and embed a JavaScript engine. Then you parse the page into a DOM and start firing off events. There are quality open source JavaScript engines available. JavaScript and AJAX are a breeze.

Flash is a different story. If you have any requirement to follow links or process content in a Flash movie (you'd be surprised how many sites still have Flash nav) you pretty much have to write your own runtime. Unless you are big enough to have Adobe do it for you.

Depending on what you are doing with the data that your spider collects, chances are writing a spider is far easier than writing a browser. There are at least 4 widely used browser engines and plenty more toy browsers floating around.

I can guarantee that writing a spider that can deal with AJAX is not the biggest challenge of developing a search engine. Scaling it, fighting SPAM, understanding the content, indexing and then being able to provide quick lookups are much, much harder.
Google stops supporting anything below the current shipping version. I think Chrome 12 is the shipping stable version, and Dev is at 14, so in chrome time, version 10 is archaic. But Chrome has the automatic auto-update feature which makes something like 90% of installations upgrade to the latest release within a week of its publication, so versions aren't nearly as much of an issue.
Bit of a flame bate comment.

China's gov wanted to be #1 in solar and their factories were undercutting Evergreen solar so it was either move the factory or go bankrupt. My uncle worked at the factory and while he doesn't like it (he lost his job) he agrees with the reasons.
Because its easy to track and prosecute...

hacker breakins, difficult to track and prosecute hence FBI pretending to do there jobs by taking the low hanging fruit..
It's true that engagement means more than installs here. That is why Foursquare is going after casual users. Dennis Crowley knows folks who don't check in often are key to really growing at scale.

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/20/foursquares-new-growth-st...
Bill Taylor obviously has never read the Mythical Man Month. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

The article totally misses a critical point: communications and coordination, which goes up exponentially with the number of players.

Group Intercommunication Formula: n(n − 1) / 2

1000 developers give 1000 * (1000 – 1) / 2 = 499500 channels of communication.

[edit] All Bill has established with his sports analogy is a team of 5-6 players that communicate effectively is better than a team of 5-6 players that don't communicate. That is a total strawman, it doesn't map to 1000 (software) players. [/edit]

In hockey, there are six or fewer players on the ice at one time. Would 1000 hockey players all on the ice at one time be better than six? Not a chance! They would not be able to move the puck because they would be tripping on each other. Even if the ice rink were expanded to hold them all, they still would suck as a team because their communications and coordination would be totally broken.

The same problem happens with software developers: 1000 developers working on one problem will trip over each other too. The only way 1000 developers will succeed at all is to decompose one big problem into 100-200 smaller problems that teams of 5-10 (funny how that works out) can then solve.
Other people noticed this on the dropbox forum:
http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=40113
> But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad.

Citation needed. The original Galaxy Tab sold ~2 million in the first 3 months, the Playbook sold ~250k in the first 3 months. [1]. Were Windows tablets selling that well?

[1] - http://www.bgr.com/2011/05/18/250000-blackberry-playbook-tab...
Ask HN: Why is the search  box at the bottom of page?
It's best suited at the top
Personally, I think that the data in Peopleware is somewhat weak, and I'd like to see updated studies. However, surprisingly what Peopleware says (iirc) is that the #1 way to increase productivity of developers is to improve the working conditions.
No, your logic falls flat. Because what you're suggesting is that a competitor needs to notice and recruit talent before you'll even consider making an offer. In which case, you've already fallen behind by letting a competitor get to the talent first.
Marco contradicts himself:

Neither Google nor Microsoft will ever be able to tailor their software to other manufacturers’ specific (and varied) hardware devices

...followed by...

Anyone can cobble together the same processors, DRAM, flash, and radios as Apple, put them into a plastic case

What is the iPad? It's a touch-sensitive screen. It has a border and a few buttons. What is every non-Apple tablet? The exact same thing. In terms of other hardware, tablets are far less varied than PCs.

Microsoft and Google don't have to tailor their operating systems to varied hardware -- in terms of interface, all tablets are the same. The problem is they're a few years behind Apple in the whole software ecosystem.

The big point, and here Macro and I would certainly agree, the iPad has a reasonable software ecosystem and everyone else doesn't. I don't see Android or Windows making a dent in this anytime soon but, assuming the tablet market has legs, it will happen eventually. But for now, it doesn't seem like a non-Apple tablet is a good buy.
"But aren't you a part of the relevance equation? The ideal results for a search like [bitcoin crash] should be different for a Japanese-speaking searcher in Tokyo vs. a German-speaking searcher in Munich vs. a bitcoin expert vs. a programmer trying to diagnose why compiling bitcoin is crashing vs. my Mom who has never heard of bitcoin before, right?"

Maybe, but that is not the point.

Besides, you are mixing localization (japanese vs german) with personalization (expert vs naive), and what is worst is that you are assuming that Google knows so well each user so as to be right (and that is either impossible, either extremely creepy), at every single instant of his life (a person can change interests).

Furthermore, to grab your example, how can Google know that an expert in bitcoin and expert in bitcoin compilation and crash solver, is not just interested in hearing about the "market" crash of bitcoin?

Google CANNOT read the users' mind. And even if it did, there would not be a need for "personalized search", as the "mind reading" would give enough search criteria to nail the results more easily (albeit, most people do not know exactly what they want, so it will still be an iterative process, which is good, as randomness is the seed for evolution).

So, back to the point, it is that in the quest for "adequate results" for each person, Google is turning web search into a non-deterministic event ().

Imagine the web being a library, and the search being searching for the library's book database, why would the search for a given book return different results to different persons? It should always return the same results, if the person doing the search is not satisfied with the results, then she/he will add more criteria. In other words, let the person do the filtering!

Once that Google accepts that in his quest for "better results" (where 'better' is a concept decided by solely Google and whose ranking parameters and algorithm are unknown) there is a potential (probably demonstrable already) for a "filter bubble" with positive feedback loop on user behaviour, which, as with any positive feedback loop, can go out of control, exacerbating certain ideologies and fueling extremisms.

And there is a fundamental difference between a "self guided" (as in self controlled) filtering, where users would knowingly filter out results in order to find those that they like, and a "google guided" (as in externally controlled), filtering.

() strictly speaking, search will not be deterministic as the web is a dynamic system and it grows, so search results can vary with time, but they should not vary from person to person at a given time.
I hope they're advertising it enough that people who have never heard of Uber actually use them.
The other thing is that the "100x" number isn't really applicable. Yes, your super-developer that you met may do the same task 5x faster than somebody else, but the real thing that sets him or her apart and makes them valuable is the set of things that they can do that a mediocre or inexperienced developer simply can't do, at all. It's hard to use the "times better" metric to measure that.

And when you look at it that way, I think it's easier to "see" the super developers out there. There's a lot of people who are faster, but still mediocre. While I can put that to good use, I don't think it's the same thing.

You might surprise yourself. It isn't necessarily all about speed. Continuous deliberative practice can take you a long way. You may never bash out code at warp speed, but you might find you can still step up into the "doing things few other people can even do at all" domain.
IE9 is not a modern browser http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326048
"But aren't you a part of the relevance equation? The ideal results for a search like [bitcoin crash] should be different for a Japanese-speaking searcher in Tokyo vs. a German-speaking searcher in Munich vs. a bitcoin expert vs. a programmer trying to diagnose why compiling bitcoin is crashing vs. my Mom who has never heard of bitcoin before, right?"

Maybe, but that is not the point.

Besides, you are mixing localization (japanese vs german) with personalization (expert vs naive), and what is worst is that you are assuming that Google knows so well each user so as to be right (and that is either impossible, either extremely creepy), at every single instant of his life (a person can change interests).

Furthermore, to grab your example, how can Google know that an expert in bitcoin and expert in bitcoin compilation and crash solver, is not just interested in hearing about the "market" crash of bitcoin?

Google CANNOT read the users' mind. And even if it did, there would not be a need for "personalized search", as the "mind reading" would give enough search criteria to nail the results more easily (albeit, most people do not know exactly what they want, so it will still be an iterative process, which is good, as randomness is the seed for evolution).

So, back to the point, it is that in the quest for "adequate results" for each person, Google is turning web search into a non-deterministic event ( * ).

Imagine the web being a library, and the search being searching for the library's book database, why would the search for a given book return different results to different persons? It should always return the same results, if the person doing the search is not satisfied with the results, then she/he will add more criteria. In other words, let the person do the filtering!

Once that Google accepts that in his quest for "better results" (where 'better' is a concept decided by solely Google and whose ranking parameters and algorithm are unknown) there is a potential (probably demonstrable already) for a "filter bubble" with positive feedback loop on user behaviour, which, as with any positive feedback loop, can go out of control, exacerbating certain ideologies and fueling extremisms.

And there is a fundamental difference between a "self guided" (as in self controlled) filtering, where users would knowingly filter out results in order to find those that they like, and a "google guided" (as in externally controlled), filtering.

( * ) strictly speaking, search will not be deterministic as the web is a dynamic system and it grows, so search results can vary with time, but they should not vary from person to person at a given time.
We've been developing for desktop/laptop computers for years now. They also give developer plenty of space to play with. From your comment I conclude that developing for desktop must be the hardest thing ever, not talking about the 27' iMacs.
I don't think so. Everything I love about my phone is possible only because the company that built the hardware also wrote the software. Whenever there is any kind of wedge driven between hardware and software, the resulting experience suffers, which costs me time and frustration (and a tiny bit of my life in the process).

Software is the soul of a device, and hardware is its body. Either component in isolation fails to provide a useful, functioning device. It follows, then, that when the hardware and software are developed together that the most well-functioning device possible may be achieved.
Haha, this is the same exact thought when I was introduced to Facebook in 2007. "Okay so...I can uhm..look at pictures of my friends and write messages to them through tiny boxes? Okay, why would I not just use Email?" I was sure the website would be a failure. They even required you to register before showing you any content! How could that ever work? Actually I still have no idea on that one.
my guesses:

1. You want to force the user to read the page first.
2. It's not that important
"Current and previous major releases" is a peaceful approach. There is no discretion involved - at no point was an active decision made to cut off your IE 7 users.

Plus, your FF 4 users will know exactly when FF support will be dropped - the day FF 6 is released. Simple.
That's like asking why PG hard-coded table-based layouts into Arc. Or why PG's own paulgraham.com uses html markup that was deprecated many years ago.
Righthaven Loss: Judge Rules Reposting Entire Article is Fair Use
That's an excellent point. I don't know what kind of advertising Uber is actually using, but my Twitter anecdata says that there's already starting to be a nice bit of viral push to go with it. I really hope it'll be significant, because I absolutely love Uber and I'm planning on fully supporting them tomorrow.
I'd take a step back at this point and think about what it was you wanted when you first joined.

Signing something at this point would clearly put your relationship on a legal footing as a contractor, when I get the impression that you feel more like a partner. IANAL.
"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

-Warren Buffett
Have been using these guys for a year or more now, at 3 different companies. Amazingly responsive support. Best thing I've ever spent 6 bucks on.
On Refactoring
This comment seems to disregard the ample quantitative evidence presented in the article.

Marshaling substantial citations, the article argues that three things have happened simultaneously:

- The productivity of US workers has gone up.
- Corporate profits and upper-tier incomes have gone up.
- Middle- and lower-tier incomes have stagnated or dropped.

The above comment is suggesting that the problem is a lack of productivity in the US workforce ("lots of Americans not working intelligently.") But the data in the article suggests that the problem is systemic--specifically, that gains from higher productivity accrue only at the top, and that there's little disincentive for employers to do a speed-up.
not sure if promoting this to existing customers was a good idea for uber. They sent me the marketing email. I'm a happy customer. But i didn't realize their prices were 2X cab prices. Now that is stuck in my head every time I call an uber
Groupon Responds To IPO Backlash With A Cheeky Feline
StartSSL attacked
They do when they don't have a choice (which is also mostly the only way you can get most people to change at all).