skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inaccurate. Adobe updating their Flash media server to deliver iOS-compatible video. Not difficult considering most FLVs are H.264
Including public holidays, it should be noted.
The same issue for the text input occurs in more mature markets like Japan and Taiwan as well. As I remember, the iPhone had crappy Japanese input when it was first introduced. I am told it has gotten better but I don't really know. Anyway the conclusion ("you can't expect your mature-market products to fully satisfy emerging-market users") does not really fit the introduction since the writing system a country uses does not have anything to do with the maturity of its market.
Incidentally, Flash still outperforms HTML5's Canvas on both desktop and browsers.

http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2010/09/17/flash-outperforms-htm...
paid apps are great, we have a few: FaceTab Pro, MailTab Pro, Disk Doctor, London Cycle Pro etc... about 50% of our income is from paid apps.
Joe Stagner Quits Microsoft: "Free from the Borg Collective"
American Innovators Lose Big in Newly Passed Patent Bill
Or they'll hire someone else who is willing cut even more corners to hack the thing together in a few months, but leaves the codebase in an even worse state.
I hear you, but I have to say it's mostly stuff that Lenovo packed into the box for me. There was a little bit of the 3rd party programs; Adobe; Skype; but mostly not. See my reply here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2978973
if people complain, you know you have something worth complaining about :)
Thanks for the correction. I keep mixing the two up :-\
I disagree, it is dying, though slowly as I say. Regardless of what Google is doing, the two top-selling smartphones and the best-selling tablet by far do not have Flash. These devices now have a huge install base, and that undermines what used to be one of Flash's biggest selling points, which was that everyone had it. At the very least, there needs to be an argument for doing something in Flash where in the past it would have been a no-brainer.

Android device OEMs do try to use Flash as a differentiating factor, but I seriously doubt that argument has much traction at all. They're using it because they're desperate for selling points, not because it's such a good one.
it's not really a secret that most of Hollywood, the media,
and much of progressivism and culture in general is
organized around liberal jewish values.

Cross 'jewish' and that line make sense. There is nothing specifically 'jewish' about those values. If anything, they're Greek. We don't owe a lot to the pre-Socratic societies, apart from them inspiring the Greeks to their greatness. In Western civilization, everything after that was inspired by what the Greeks made of what came before them.
When you listen to chinese songs, there are no tones. People still understand the songs. One cannot sing tones.
There is no single UK culture, so telling people to adopt the ideas of, say, London, isn't any better for people in Edinburgh than telling us to think like Californians.

I think the key point is not being afraid to find your own path. In the start-up world the Valley dominates everything - there is a huge push to get to California or you're not going to achieve anything big. Governments around the world want to make 'the next Silicon Valley', leading to 'silicon roundabout' in London which is an attempt at the superficial trappings of the Valley without any of the substance.

People are starting to realise that the big VC-funded start-up isn't the only way to go - and people outside the US are starting to see that modelling themselves after American companies and American ideals isn't the only way to go either.
Google’s Zagat buy could give search critics more ammo
Hahah yeah I would if I could. SSD sounds wonderful. Waiting a few years on that one.
"Regardless, the book has been absolutely foundational to the genre. Nearly every convention of the modern space opera can be traced back to Dune."

Examples, please? I haven't read Dune, so maybe there's something here I don't recognize, but I would have said modern space opera traces very directly back to good old (and very much pre-Dune) space opera...
Great series, thanks for sharing.

I am especially curious how effective you guys found paid advertising to be - the conventional wisdom I've heard is that it's pretty pointless for advertising App Store apps.

Are you guys still doing any paid advertising these days, or is it mostly organic/word of mouth/cross promotion at this point?
Windows 8 boots super fast, says Microsoft
I'm actually wondering if this article isn't a troll. Imagine seeking investment funding and when you're presenting to a room full of VCs. Someone asks what your business model is and you respond with "Make more money than we spend". You might get a few chuckles, but the next question is going to be "But seriously, what's your business model?".

They're going to want you to address what value you're delivering to the customer, how you plan to address competitive threats, what market segment you're going after, how you plan to take advantage of network effects, and so on. And yes, what your revenue generation and strategy for ensuring profitibility is going to be.
Sorry for the typo - blaming my fat fingers on the iPhone and I'm past the edit time window to fix it.
The irony is that the author is being clever by redefining the term "business model" to reflect his disdain for startups that don't take profitability seriously. That's fine and good, and I feel the same. The problem is when people ask you your business model there is an actual expected response, and it's not pithy and content-less cultural commentary. At best you come off as arrogant, at worst you actually offend people with the implication that they are one of the idiots who believe you can run a business without profitability.
Had I not just gotten a Mac I would have checked that out. Thanks.
Vodafone opens silicon valley startup accelerator
As they all should!
Agreed. The world of startups and incubation is not zero-sum.
Car analogy FTW!
Could you clarify what exactly isn't working? Everything works fine here (Safari 5.1)

Feel free to submit via email if you want: marc@betali.st

Marc Köhlbrugge (Founder of Beta List)
Bootstrapping a Software Product
> It will crash when booting and corrupt my data

I'm sorry but i have to call you out here; i would be suprised if MS hasn't thought of this in some way; whether detecting changes and initating a more complete boot or dealing with it in the GUI.. but even if it required you to select a 'full' shutdown/boot, i would say it was completely worth it for a 7s boot time.

Further, i find your imagination regarding the practical handling of these power states rather lacking. The way i see it there will simply be 'reboot', 'power off' (which hibernates the kernel as described in the article, reloading it where checks show necessary), and 'standby' (which also writes ram to disk allowing resuming from hibernate with power loss -- i would imagine this could be turned off with a setting). So, contrary to your rant, i am going to bet that there will be one less standard option. But i guess things were better in the w95 days?.
Yes - The Post PC era has started and why I doubt the PC World report
I think the answer is that most people do go a little mad.

I know I do.
Thanks, but I'm technically not a teacher. I started this last year in my kids school because they had computer classes and were only learning how to use Open Office. I realize they will need those skills, but I figured that I could at least give them some exposure to the joy of hacking/programming.

Volunteer dad...activate!
Aside: you can, sort-of.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090220172053.ht...
Though I think I prefer Long Sun and Short Sun. :)
He wanted external X. That's already supported natively by SSH. Just install the app, and run ssh -X to have it forward the display to the local machine.
SnowFlock: Rapid Virtual Machine Cloning for Cloud Computing
Cool, new to me. I note that the Wikipedia page says LG muttered about suing Apple over the iPhone. :-)
The courts take the law seriously, it's the lawmakers that are ridiculous.
HN discussions for parts 1 & 2...

Part 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955214

Part 2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965929
I wondered about that too, and then I thought that it could be a very smart idea in the right circumstances.

While working with external parties who expect things done by a certain date prevents the 'no deadlines' policy from working (by definition), we have observed that typically work expands to fill the time allotted for it. This means that from an internal product development point of view, telling your team that your product should be ready by Q3 of next year will almost guarantee that the product will be done by Q3 or later (with copious amounts of scrambling as Q3 approaches). When you eliminate the deadline, workers (I would argue) are more likely to complete the task in the actual time it SHOULD take, instead of letting the job expand to fill the deadline. (You could argue that instead workers will be lazy and take longer than it should take, thus demonstrating that deadlines are necessary.)

You have the actual development time, and you have the artificial deadline. If the actual development time is longer than the deadline, then trying to meet the deadline will be stressful and quality to be sacrificed for speed. Alternatively if the deadline is longer than the actual time, then work will expand and the team will be less efficient. In both cases, working without a deadline should prove the better outcome.
" Why is it in Ruby that everything is an object, even integers, yet as soon as we need to format a date, we all turn into Dijkstra and bust out structured programming?"

" ... functions don’t provide a sufficient amount of power to tackle hard problems."

" objects > functions"

Why start an otherwise well written post with such trollish statements?

There's a lot more substance in the following paragraphs but instead everyone is focusing on those.
Ship early and listen to real customers - then adapt.

This reminds me of the Customer Development model championed in Blank's "The Four Steps To The Epiphany".

I agree and work toward that philosophy even though it is sometimes difficult. For example, finding a manufacturer that can provide fast turnaround may be difficult and more expensive but it would probably be worth it for the additional agility.
Right, except the Android tablets are not better than an iPad (read: no individual Android branded tablet has exceeded the sales of the iPad).

Apple's position in the market isn't static. If a competing product came out and was better than iPad's offerings (read: matching engineering, design and ecosystem brilliance) people would certainly entertain a different product. Now add Flash. You can't see how that would be possible?
While I am a voracious reader, I have just started reading sci-fi. (Just finished dune, Starting with stranger in a strange land).
Just in case anyone's interested, here's a list of the books mentioned in the article and some famous hackers and entrepreneurs who like the books:

Snow Crash - Sergey Brin

Dune - Michael Arrington

Stranger in a strange land -Michael Arrington ,Linus Torvalds

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy - Michael Arrington

Ender's Game- Mark Zuckerberg

Anathem - Michael Arrington

Source: my hobby site http://vipreads.com

Links to individual people:

http://vipreads.com/sergey-brin

http://vipreads.com/linus-torvalds

http://vipreads.com/mark-zuckerberg

http://vipreads.com/michael-arrington
Cloning a fluff entertainment app doesn't really bother me, but I come from a games background, and the app store is rife with shady cloning of full games that follow a monetization model similar to yours.

I have a couple that have had two of their games completely cloned, and filled with cheap 'casual appeal' graphics (one of which made it to #7 on the app store). I find this a kind of dirty way to make money.

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/221862/hey-thats-my-fish...
Slides obviously miss a lot of context if you didn't attend the presentation, so I'd love to chat with folks or answer questions if anybody has them.
Flash crashes and short term volatility don't affect investors, they primarily affect other traders.

The issue is not whether a 30 second hold on a stock is better / worse than a 3 year hold but whether stock markets still serve their purpose of providing capital for companies. The vast majority of trades are for stock that does not capitalize the company.
Was just thinking that, no matter how George Lucas messes up Star Wars, it can never compare to the damage done to the original Foundation books by Asimov's ham-fisted tying together of everything.
This is extremely not a zero sum game, the more the better!
Nobody posts their in-house services failures on the web.
Chinese and English are remarkable in how they address ideas. In Chinese, for the most part, there are only basic words -with little available in the way of synonyms for supplying nuance.'

So you ask someone how do you say big. How do you say gigantic, how do you say long, how do you say capacious, etc. It's all "da" ”大“。

So when people come to me in English and say something like you know, capricious is not exactly the same as whimsical, I can say, that's only because you think it can't be. But it can be. It only is because we've integrated words from French, Latin, Scandinavian, etc. which give us the breadth of choice. But it's kind of artificial anyway and if you force yourself to think about basic meanings -there is little difference. (Law excluded).
Thanks. Paid advertising is pretty much useless, unless you have very deep pockets. We just splashed a bit of cash on it as we needed to do everything possible to break into the Top 25 'Golden Zone'. We also got a very good deal at $0.01 CPC and they matched our initial deposit of $250.
Thanks to HN's URL shortener, with a little help from copy-paste, my mac is now singing the page source of github's 404 page
Very smart. Your goal is not to innovate, it's to succeed.

This is very important as it's counter to the common belief that success is based on having a "new" idea instead of just taking over an existing market.
Agreed. Further to my point, the average person will take a look at a lego block vs. the video they want to see and make their assumptions and decisions based on that, assuming other factors match or exceed iPad's.
To those of us who border on OCD, unlimited scrolling is not nice; it is an anti-feature. If HN added new content every time I scrolled to the bottom, I don't think I'd get anything done.
We switched from a 30 day to a 14 day (2 weeks) trial period.
We found out that if the user does not use the service within the first two weeks, he is not very likely to use it in week 3 or 4 as well. When we've split-tested sign-ups we did not find a significant difference. But the conversion rate tester -> paying customer increased. We're at a 3:1 rate now (B2B, pricing starts at 19.90, open end), no free plan offered.

The trial period is accompanied by a follow-up email sequence (day 0, 1, 3, 7, 11, 14 after sign-up) to ask how's it all going and it includes a lot of supporting material (tips, videos, links to support pages, offer to schedule a call or screen sharing session) to get interacting with them and to make sure they really ask if there are questions.

The user can unsubscribe from this sequence (unsubscribe link in every email), but nobody really ever does. We get the occasional (maybe 1 out of 1000 testers or less) complaint about how annoying the follow up sequence is. We just remove those from the list. I remember 1 guy who was really annoyed but became a user anyway :-)
So usually the testers really appreciate this information because they get the feeling there's someone who cares.

In all the follow up emails we make it clear that it would be easy to extend the trial period, a short email asking about it would be enough. We had one guy in a trial period for over 160 days. He wanted to use our product but his project did not take off as fast as expected and we just kept waiting (no follow ups). He's been a user for years now.

So if I was to start a new project, I'd start with 14 days and run the occasional split test from time to time.
I loved that anthology and was so intrigued by her Wikipedia page that I bought and read her biography, which is excellent. Would have loved to meet her before she was undone by depression, what a woman!
With a supercomputer, it's easy to tune lots of parameters, and make models that fit the past well. I'll believe it when they make some falsifiable predictions about the future.
Touch control on different connected surfaces through camera
That's why we built http://kicksend.com
The "new" interface is actually entirely JavaScript and just exchanges JSON with an HTTP endpoint. This removes a big chunk of "slow" in Rails, which is view rendering. Of course, the actual services behind this endpoint could be based on Scala or Rails or any other language and are probably heavily cached.
Hedge Fund Takes Big Stake in Yahoo
> when you do leave a company, you don't always get the vacation days as a bonus in your paycheck.

Depends on the state. In California, vacation time is earned as it is accrued and thus must be paid out on termination (voluntary or not).
No linux version yet !!! Cant test out ..
Did this line confuse any one else?

As a graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Morris created his claim to fame: the computer worm.

For a site writing a list of "hackers" I would hope they could tell the difference between the father and rtm.
There is a statistical margin of error. They will need to make many such predictions. Also, the act of predicting an event might cause it to become more or less likely to occur.
I'm a fan of Greg Egan (which is on there). Quarantine and Permutation City are really great books. Schildt's Ladder was good but a bit too hard for me to grok.
Perhaps, but unless you're someone like Steve Jobs you're not going to come out with a TOTALLY new idea that no one in the world hasn't done or thought of already. Even Disney ripped off Kimba to make Lion King. http://www.hemmy.net/2007/04/28/disney-lion-king-ripped-off-...

If someone is stealing your ideas and executing better than you, then maybe you need to find out what they are doing right, so your next game does just as well or better than the clones.
Maybe, but apple only make 'premium' laptops (especially since killing the macbook), not comparable to an 'average' (read: a few years old, fairly budget) laptop.
Right. For the JDK developers, the First Commandment is, "Thou shalt not break existing code, ever." Almost all of the things people dislike about post-1.1 Java stems from that, especially the non-reified generics.

It's valid to say "I think they should value some things higher than backwards compatibility." It's not valid to say "they're idiots for doing it this way." (Which I don't see in this article, but I see in plenty others.)
>A position should be a position and not a matter of beating the other guy to a momentary, transitory state

You are arguing to shut down the whole stock market then. Even value investors like Buffet are in the business of beating the other guy to understanding that given stock is over or under valued.

As for transitory state, the point of the stock market is to reflect what is thought to be the 'true' value of a company at any given time.
BillToMobile Lands Deal With T-Mobile
Earlier examples of cyberpunk exist. For example Tiptree's The Girl Who Was Plugged In is so modern, could have been published today. Dick said that he was greatly influenced by this story as was Gibson for Neuromancer.
US Military Plane Forced Down By North Korean Electronic Attack
I think time plays a large part, yes. I also think it is a left-right brain divide between maths and creativity.

I think people want to be good at what they do. The best designers can either "waste time" on becoming novice programmers, or they can perfect their core craft. If they spread too thin, they might soon stop becoming the best.

I guess it also depends on the role you play in a company or start-up. If you can help out other teams and communicate, that is very useful for a start-up or small business, but not something I think is appreciated in some larger companies: You get judged and hired on one core role and are expected to do that very well. If a big company needs design, they likely hire a full-time designer, not ask that DBA with a keen eye.

I am sure there are a few hack-of-all-trades that mastered full webstack programming, data analysis, community management, marketing, SEO, usability, copy-writing, design etc.. But I also feel it is unrealistic to expect one to be able to switch to the other, regardless of their individual talents and expertise.
Spring Social 1.0.0 Released. (Spring Framework extension)
Mac users and Linux users agreed that Flash sucked. Windows users just saw it as the thing that let them play games and videos in the browser without downloading some stupid plugin for every different site.
Anvil of Stars also my favorite Greg Bear book. Nobody read my review of this book on Amazon, so perhaps this is a better place for it:

I've read hundreds of science fiction books where humans have military conflict with aliens (though not yet the Forge of God). In nearly all of them, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought an interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:

1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.

2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.

3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.

The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.

This is the only SF book I've read that envisions future military conflict this way, and for that I give the book 4 stars. In my mind, this clearly deserves a place among the top 10 science fiction books in the military SF genre.

However, I did not care for the characters and character development and dialog which occupied the sluggish first half of the book. It wasn't until they started exploring the killers home system that I had trouble putting the book down. I did enjoy the dialog about ethical considerations of what the human ship was going to do, and the aliens they joined forces with were an interesting twist to the story and well done.

Bottom Line - the key to this book for me was an exploration of military encounters in space that struck me as vastly more plausible than the typical SF novel. Rewrite the book to remove most of the first half - and it would have been 5 stars for me.
Has anyone here played around with it (or its RCs) yet?