skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. Your comment made me think, what would I do if I was the CEO of RIM? To be honest, it caused a sense of great dread, having to try and turn a company with that kind of inertia around, without screwing the pooch. Especially if $3 Billion is on the line.

I find it more comfortable to be a little guy, where I can make a mistake that only wastes a little bit of money, or time. I'd prefer to have small and frequent failures than one HUGE one!

That's what got me thinking about the culture in RIM - and perhaps the culture in any sufficiently large firm.
Didn't Google grow a lot more than 400% over 5 years? I can't really see this as a proper excuse.
Android Growth Stalls, Apple Gaining Steam With New Smartphone Buyers
Article didn't mention it, but Justin's blog post did:

"Standards-based: XMPP, Jingle, RTP"...

We're working on publishing the spec, which should be available soon. In fact, it's already implemented in libjingle:

http://code.google.com/p/libjingle
The strategy you're proposing might be rephrased as "trust that our customers will be stupid enough to buy our product." I understand where you're coming from. There are plenty of shallow-thinking execs that fit your stereotype. But relying on that as your core business strategy? That strikes me as very shortsighted. You can't realistically pin all your business's hopes on the assumption that executives will maintain prejudices that harm their companies.
I didn't have it either. You may have to go up to the top and click "New Version" in all red.
proves the original author's point wonderfully, doesn't it?
Still no mention of iMessage...
Anyone working at Facebook: what happening at Facebook on Google+?
The original letter emphasized that RIM is too corporate and that that's stifling innovation and progress at the company. So what does RIM do? Fire off a press release that extols the virtues of and attempts to justify that bureaucracy.

/Facepalm
It really isn't that much. Look at it this way...

The way a corporate balance sheet works you don't spend money manufacturing your product. What you do is convert the asset from money to a physical product you can sell. But that asset is still on your books as being worth whatever you paid to manufacture it.

RIM claims to have "shipped" 13.2 Million smartphones in the last quarter (as opposed to "sold"). Assume their phones cost about as much as Apple's iPhone (Via iSuppli: $187 to build) and you have $2.46 billion worth of assets in the channel. And that's only smartphones. It doesn't count the playbook.

Keep in mind carriers can return shipped phones. So really RIM's $3 billion only serves to put them at even every quarter

So in the grand scheme of things it isn't that much.
How about social search? Sparks has a huge potential, doesn't it? Facebook's greatest strength is its huge social graph. However, they still didn't create a really valuable social search.

Facebook can easily mimic google circles. But, who will be better at combining search and social to add some new value to both?

And hangouts? It could be quite hard for someone to make a good implementation, and still have a huge user base as google.

Anyway, circles seems like the easiest feature to implement for the likes of facebook. Good social search, and group video chat, this might be more difficult (facebooks classic chat isn't even working most of the time).
Did the original letter even get that much traction? I got the impression it would have blown over tomorrow. Instead now they may get a Streisand effect.
Yep, this is how I invited most people in.
Why is it "obviously difficult to address anonymous commentary"?
Not for apps that back up to S3 :)
Quite coincidently I saw this on Reddit today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEGUa3uekIE

The video is a stereotypical 'Idea Guy' - asking for a rock star developer to develop his project (for almost free), on the promise of 'riches' when they strike gold.

It is amazing how many people share this view these days (even more so after the 'social network' / success of facebook).

Despite the video author's lack of technical knowledge, there is still no excuse for his lack of research into creating a start up like that and the low value he puts on the technical co-founder.

I guess the real question to the author of that video would be. Apart from the idea, what do you as the non technical co-founder bring to the table?
Whatever point you thought you were making, you weren't. And even if you were, it certainly wasn't obvious.
I will put money down that internally RIM executives are dwelling on the letter and taking action

Really? Are you buying some RIM shares then?
What this teaches us, is that Bush's "we don't negotiate with terrorists" is a valuable idea. Every company should have a bi-law which states it will not respond to public letters. This letter, even though it got the point across, is heavily damaging to the brand.
Take that number and compare it to the numbers you see on their statement of operations. That $3B doesn't keep the lights on for very long if demand for their product evaporates.
Different strokes for different folks i guess. I know a lot of people will be fans of this, but

>we pair program to write all of our software. We work on Mac Pros with two keyboards and two monitors. We work in an open team room; no cubicles or private offices.

No thanks, if I'm the developer. And if i wouldn't do it, why would i make my employees.
We use it here at Optimizely and have been very happy. It hasn't been smooth sailing all the time, and we've gradually grown our stack to include EC2, S3, and several CDNs as well, but overall we're very happy with it and have no plans to leave.

The biggest benefits for us are the scalability (huge), ease of deployment, and the monitoring. The biggest cons have been lack of support for SSL on custom domains (HUGE hassle) and lack of official support.
Same here as well. Though, probably not getting paid quite as much as an intern at Bloomberg. Still great money for an internship and I too am working on internal tools, which earned me a decent raise.

Paid internships are great for folks like you and me. In school with some good foundations in programming but really need to learn a lot more. The best opportunity for that is on internal tools where if we screw something up it won't be customer-facing and potentially lose money.
I had to do a double take on your comment because that holy war ended a very long time ago and with very good reasons.

Here's a pretty good summary: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83073/why-not-use-tables-...
To be fair, timekeeping software really isn't as trivial as you might like, at least assuming that we want to move beyond the raw recording of who worked when out into actual management of such things. Requirements come from federal, state, and local laws, as well as negotiations with all relevant unions. So even before you've gotten to the usual BS requirements laid on by management, you've already got a large pile of requirements that A: are legally mandated and B: written without so much as five minutes consultation with a software engineer.

But, yeah, on the other hand that's just the usual business software story. 10x budget overruns are probably not called for.
Why would you want to limit their market?

Because right now, trying to be everything to everyone is proving to be a losing strategy.

This whole "nobody's going to carry two phones" argument is clearly being made by people that haven't worked with larger corporations, or the people in them.

You're perfectly right that they won't carry two phones... they'll just carry their free, company supplied blackberries.
Rankings Change with Plus One Update
Have you seen the rankings of terms like social network. They have been all over the place in the past week, with Facebook jumping into the mix because of the plus one standings.
Perhaps this thread has gone too long, but the comments are overwhelmingly against doing work for free.

TL;DR - It’s an interns fault for taking crap free work, in essence putting their future in someone else’s hands.

My experience: 3 years ago I was an accountant and thought about killing myself nearly every day. It used to take me 10 - 15 minutes to get out of my car every morning just to walk inside. I was able to use free work to transition from a boring career to one I enjoy in an incredibly short amount of time.

Rather than go back to school only to finish in debt and start at the bottom I was able to trade valuable work that I could do (finance/accounting) for experience in work that I wanted to do (development/data analysis). I would always suggest short projects so as not to overwhelm either party, but this turned out to be very favorable in the long run.
One major caveat is that these were not company created internships. I wasn’t in the business of letting a company compile all of their shitty work only to pass it off on someone to do for free. THAT IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CALLED BULLSHIT ON.

If a job seeker shows just a little initiative they can force free work to have a training component that is defined in advance and one from which they will benefit. Too many workers put their future in someone else’s hands by assuming the company has some training program mapped out for them. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the types of employees who continue the cycle of useless and exploitative internships that you rail against.

If you are doing work for free, YOU are on the hook. You hold most of the cards because there is nothing forcing you to continue working.
Sounds interesting and all, but how is this "amazing"?
Those who say that the city's payroll needs are complex are entirely correct. A city government that size will inevitably have a mind-boggling number of variations in the business rules that the software must model.

Yet $600 million? I've built accounting software, and though it wasn't as complex as what NYC needs, I'm 90% sure $600 million is astronomically higher than what a reasonable price would be.

What about the original price of $63 million? That still seems awfully high to me, but I'm not sure. Does anyone have an opinion on that?
Facebook launching ipad app next week
Unless Apple intends to release low-end iPhones with equivalent iMessage only data-plans, iMessage isn't a true competitor to BBM.
For anyone who comes back across this, yes you can put people in an infinite number of circles.
No. If an incubator wanted equity but wasn't offering capital, they wouldn't get many applications.
No, "were" would only be used if you were supposing a condition different than reality. When used in the first person, it's the past subjunctive. So a valid sentence with "were" might be:

"If she were a man."

As the writer is in informal in the judgement of the commenter, the commenter therefore should use "was".
More suspicion (is the letter real?) and blame (sane person would never do this) followed by more passive aggressive denial (we are aware of a tangential situation and are addressing it - to hell with your comments, letter boy). Then boasting - 3B in cash, we are doing just great!

How many times the above strategy has worked for someone in as precarious position as RIM?
We've put Nginx in front of GAE and it works without any issue. I haven't tried any other methods such as Varnish though. We aren't really throwing too much traffic at the GAE app which is "behind" Nginx, but we fully expect it to handle a reasonable amount of traffic.

I'm sure there are many people who have done this. I'd be interested in hearing how other people have solved the lack of SSL...
Zuckerberg is running around killing animals, just as usual

http://theseattlesalmon.com/business-vs-cultural-news/busine...
If you're in the habit of addressing the message instead of the messenger, it's not.

If your instinctive response to criticism is to try to figure out why the speaker is making it, rather than to try to figure out whether it's accurate, anonymous critique is very hard to handle.
Video Backgrounds - volume 3
video backgrounds, volume 3 collection of video background animations and animated backgrounds to download royalty free
"If you're going to use a CSS grid, this formatting spills over into your HTML via those dorky ambiguous classnames that really remind me of Dreamweaver."

Not if you're using Compass with its mixins: http://compass-style.org/examples/blueprint/grid/two_cols/
SEO for Google's New Look
It looks like the new look of Google searches focuses more of Google becoming a commercial business and, as of now, it doesn't look as good for SEO purposes. Google, when it first arrived, looked very impartial and focused itself on research and presenting material in a simple format. Now, with the personalizing effect, it has gone away from being a tool and tends to look more like a home. I was curious to hear what you thought of this strategy. Also an interesting side note is I heard that Larry Page recently said that everyone's bonuses are tied into the success of Google's entry into social media. Definitely food for thought.
MICROMAX EG333 DUAL SIM TOUCHSCREEN PHONE WITH TATA PHOTON PLUS FEATURES
Latch, very fair point. I did a bit too much hand waving there, but maybe more like $0.10/GB would be more accurate.
because you can't fire someone if you don't know who they are.
I'm thinking about the response I'd choose if I were in one of the CEO seats at RIM, and I'm not sure I could have improved on this response. As noted, it's kind of content free and does not acknowledge any responsibility. But RIM had to make SOME short-term press release response that communicates the company strengths. No response would carry risk of a strong negative press and social media response.

At the same time, I'm not sure they could have clearly addressed any of the specific criticisms in the open letter, for fear of prematurely revealing company strategies and plans. (And don't give me a line about how companies need to be more open; every company with any competition has to be ever vigilant about that, for competitive and other reasons.) Note also that they didn't claim any of the specific criticisms were invalid.

(Well, actually maybe they could have toned down the FUD on the source in the first paragraph a bit. But I think they had to include some of it, frankly; unless/until a RIM exec publicly claims responsibility, none of us know for sure it's from who it claims it is.)
Well, if it hadn't been anonymous, it would have been easier to fire the guy.
> and taking action.

i think right now they are in the meeting discussing action plan to put together plan of actions.
I'm curious, what are some of the complexities involved in a timekeeping system?
I've heard about a lot as well, especially in the banking industry, yet not actually met anyone. Does anyone have any data or any numbers on how much someone can get paid doing cobol legacy maintenance? Just for educational purposes of course.
JQuery 1.6.2 released Or so says the front page...
Math in practice: origami
You're one step ahead of me: I love the ideas in Google+ and want to use it, but I haven't gotten an invite yet!
5 things you didn't know about ... multithreaded Java programming
New Botnet, Now 4.5 Million Machines Strong, is 'Practically Indestructible'
I understand that part of accounting, but I didn't think that it was listed as "cash" on the balance sheet.
Mashape Provides Tools to Distribute, Discover and Hack APIs
...I'm using Femtoo to track when new JQuery releases are published - the front page of the website says 1.6.2, but the current release is still listed as 1.6.1 - I'm a bit too quick for them!
I got an invite, to my google apps domain account. Can't use it.
"Canadians are too nice"

Come on, as if the practice of holding on to people isn't widespread. It's called "office culture".
An API Isn’t Enough: You Need an App Directory
Well, don't I like an asshole.
Maybe a minimum wage policy has a wider remit than "the economy."

That doesn't make much sense to me. The consequences of a minimum wage law are purely economic, on the people as a whole and on the employers and employees affected by that law, as well as on the people who aren't employed due to that law.

Why bother with any regulations, or indeed employee rights at all?

Some regulations are helpful; some aren't. I'm just talking about the minimum wage.

As for your arguments about immigrants - people may migrate to live "the American dream", but how many people's situations are actually improved?

That question is for them to answer. If they don't find their conditions improved, they're free to return home. (Obviously, I'm setting aside cases of human trafficking and so forth--that's an entirely separate issue, and I think we both agree that human trafficking is wrong.)
I wonder how soon/if tarsnap will update their pricing.
The only reason they aren't comparable is because the intern is an intern. Not because the intern is a neophyte.

My point (possibly not particularly well made) was not that you should take on inexperienced pretend employees, treat them like real employees for three months, then get rid of them; but that you should take on inexperienced real employees and treat them like real employees.

Three months is a pretty normal probationary period for a real employee, so you can just as easily get rid of one if it doesn't work out; as you can an intern.
I've never built a time keeping system, but this is how I put that number in perspective. For $63 million I can hire everyone who's ever been a Django core developer (people I've worked with, and who are excellent) for 5 years, at 500k a year... and there'd be money left over.
Graphical User Interface gallery
Eddie Murphy said it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpPdgrr5diM
3DCart Introduces First Daily Deals and Group Deals Features for Online Stores
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

"Windows NT's kernel mode code further distinguishes between the "kernel", whose primary purpose is to implement processor and architecture dependent functions, and the "executive". This was designed as a modified microkernel, as the Windows NT kernel does not meet all of the criteria of a pure microkernel."
normally I'd agree but LtU is an exception: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=975116
I was unclear. I'm talking about combining the three. Blackberry doesn't currently have a good web experience,
and? they have 50 paying customers. I'm within 10% of two thousand customers, and my business, realistically, is only worth about $300K in total. (Now, I'm not going to sell it for less than about 3x that, but $300K would be it's fair market value based on the industry standard revenue multiplier.)

I mean, yeah, if you aren't poor, $300K is not enough to give up your dream if you have big plans for the company; I'm going to keep trying for better, and I encourage others to do the same. But you need to realize that for most companies without traction? $300K is a lot more than it's worth to someone not emotionally invested in the thing.

In reality, it's often quite difficult to get more than a years worth of revenue for a company. There is no reason to feel insulted at that kind of offer, even if you do need to turn it down.
I'm confused. Who forces people to work for free?
I never understood the outrage over this. He's advocating ethical farming practice, not going on a killing rampage. The "only eat things I kill" is his way of highlighting the ways that the meat industry is doing the world wrong.
Brilliant site. Please, allow users to post comments and "translations" for each post!
I'm interested to hear that you think monitoring is easy - it was something I forgot to add to my "cons" list; all you get for free is the web dashboard that lets you look at logs, and ereporter to send you daily exception summaries. One of my biggest "want"s in fact is API access to logging.
ARM claims that soon they can catch up to where ATI was eight years ago... ummm congratulations?
Because they are expensive, they have very little battery life, they break easily (expensive again), they may get stolen (I can leave my 10€ phone anywhere, I wouldn't do that with my 600€ one), they do everything computers do, only at a tiny impractical screen, there is a notion of more radiation from smartphones, they make it much more attractive to waste time, they are much slower to boot up = people don't want their smartphones do be always on/standby, they are more unreliable in terms of glitches / connectivity issues / bugs.
I didn't read that as "we're taking a break from innovating". I read it as "we're about to do massive layoffs because we're gonna abandon our most successful products and bet the company on something unproven". But I don't know anything about what's going on with RIM.
The End is Nigh: Justin Timberlake Acquires Ownership Stake in MySpace
Looking for a mobile meal from a gourmet food truck?
Agreed, my examples were contrived, and there are better ones, but that doesn't mean one can't build a business off of them (and I know people who have).

All one needs to do is go to freshmeat or ohloh to see loads of stuff that could be leveraged to fulfill a need and ultimately build a business. You know that it fulfilled at least one person's need, because it was created to scratch an itch. Sure, maybe they aren't polished or sellable out of the box, and many of them are infrastructure (rather than end-user-product) related, but that's where the work of building a business comes in.
My opinions are my own and I can't speak for Facebook as a whole (or in any capacity, really, which is why this will forever remain an anonymous post).

I think Google will gain some traction initially, but what we're working on in my group is light years ahead of the Facebook you see and use today, and probably not the same direction that Google is (or can be) heading.

Yes, we've had our stumbles with privacy, but will Google be any better? Any legitimate complaints that I've heard are either something we're resolving or is an inherent problem that any social networking site will face.

Am I worried about attrition of users as Google ramps up? Not really. It's too much work to maintain multiple social networking accounts and at the end of the day, all your profile are belong to us.
And for a select few of those vendors, they do have sales tax modules. For another quantity of people, they just bake sales tax into the cost of the item:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/102-8466...

Who knows who's calculating the sales tax for the select retailers.
> Java and C++ are designed for serious work. In these, you take types, error checking and exceptions seriously, you keep the code clean and robust, and you R the FM thoroughly for every single external function you call.

So how do they compare to Haskell, especially when it comes to types and code cleanliness?

For those who don't have Haskell listed in their path, I'll tell you: Haskell takes types a lot more seriously, but they're so different from what a C++ or Java programmer would think of as types that it's difficult to make a direct comparison. Ditto error checking, which, to a large extent, is baked into the type system such that it's a compilation error to not check for a lot of problems. Cleanliness is practically an obsession, to the point you'll wonder how anyone can write useful code in Haskell until a switch flips in your head and you begin to wonder how people can live with Java and C++. ;-)

Frankly, every language you learn should cause a switch to flip in your head like that.