skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is probably a more interesting metric, which is seeing the referrer lets you know how someone found your site. And Google consistently scores higher numbers here on my personal web site.

However, that statistic says more about ranking too, since sites higher in the ranking in Google's results will get more referrer hits, if the same site was lower ranked in Bing's index it would get fewer hits from Bing. In the ideal case one could compare the relative referrals from a site which falls in the same spot (preferably #1 for best sampling) on both indexes.
Convenient as the other only logical acquirer is also in Seattle.
Amen, as a Canadian I can't believe how difficult and poorly treated we are from our neighbours to the South.

I recently visit NYC for a meeting and I was harassed beyond reasonable questioning. What type of software does your company make, (like he would understand...).

In comparison I had to visit Europe, the EU allows up to 90 days for business or travel. I was not even questioned once about my stay.

I'm at the point that I believe we should start playing hardball and use our leverage as the largest energy provider to the US in helping us resolves these ridiculous border issues.
While I appreciate the fact that many "traditional" MVC frameworks fall down when it comes to threading, events, long running connections, event handling, actor-based concurrency, asynchronous processing, and multiple data / presentation resources ... I don't think MVC is the root of the problem.

In fact, MVC doesn't really have anything to do with those issues: it is a pattern addressing the separation of concerns, whereas the shortcomings in the article relate to specific implementation of frameworks that also happen to follow the MVC pattern.

That said, there certainly is a new direction emerging for web applications: we're entering the world of sophisticated software. :)
Flash also has text spans for displaying blocks of text. It is not too hard to figure out the line-breaking if you were doing the rendering on the server - Java fonts and other text related code gives a pretty decent approximation to what the Flash Player does. However Flash's text fields which does the wrapping for you and has rudimentary HTML support is a lot easier to use.
Do you mean start a company, or build a product? As another UK expat in America, starting my first company here (and having run a company back home), the process for starting a company in the UK is slightly more efficient than in the US.

If you're talking about finding investment, that's a different matter. But finding investment is only "easy" in a few places in America. It's certainly no easier to find investment in the city in which I am based than it is in London.

Edit: (and I'm not so sure we should all be building companies that need hundreds of thousands of dollars to get off the ground. That places exist where we can do that in the world is great, but bootstrapping creates different types of worthwhile businesses.)
I also noticed the problem with darker colors. I introduced several ideas in the article: using a different metric or a different colorspace. This could help, but if we really have a lower points density in the darker zones, the good solution might be to find even more colors on the internet.

Your proposed solution looks to be a mix of changing the color space and the metric. Maybe we could use HSL/HSV with a metric that reduces the weight of some component. It could therefore consider less the fact that the three components are high/low, but focus on the "real" color side.
Sure. Like I said, if you're actually measuring it, then that's one thing. But supporting older browsers usually isn't that hard if you know what you're doing. Obviously there are some features that you just can't backport and there's not much you can do there. But more often than not I read comments like "as a policy, I just won't support IE < 9."

In any event, the cost argument is the purview of the business owner perspective, not the Web developer. And it's hard to look at in isolation. I don't know that many sites that wouldn't love to have another 5% of traffic. Yeah, it may cost more to support older browsers, but driving traffic to a site costs money, whether through ads or spending time on inbound marketing. Trying to bump conversion rates on your existing traffic costs money and time as well.

There's obviously a balance to it. At the extreme end, I know of businesses that support anything with > 0.5% market share because at the volume they operate at, it's worth millions. At the other end, I see startups fight tooth-and-nail working on their funnels, while throwing away legitimate sources of revenue.
Why would I go there to download a new version of Firefox? I went to 'About Firefox', it downloaded a 10 MB update, restarted, and here's Firefox 7.
Revenue-driven industry is dead
While it's unfortunate you're being thrown under the bus for this issue (I cannot prove Facebook is tracking me via my browser headers or not, it's simply dependent on how much trust I give to your company), this is a really healthy and important development that people are coming to. Facebook isn't the -only- company which has the potential to track you across the web; it's incredibly easy to do with ads, Digg buttons, Tweet buttons, and whatever new social network hits the stage. Some of these organizations may not have had such high profile cases as Facebook, which for all of its mishaps has at least responded to user's concerns.

We need to enter into an awareness about how identifiable we are just browsing the internet. Average users need to know this. It's not like Facebook can force browsers to not send identifiable content and its refusing to--web browsing has been designed to allow third party content just like that. So we need to start exploring the ways in which this amount of trust to third party content isn't so implicit.
Does Amazon make no money from AWS and their other ventures, like the Kindle? It seems hard to believe that possible tax reformations could kill such a huge company.
I dug around in the Chrome bug database a bit and learned.

Windows Chrome now has better update notification: http://crbug.com/27941

In April the update notification was further improved: http://crbug.com/71202#c24

OSX Chrome still needs better update notification: http://crbug.com/45147

There are different UI challenges on the Mac that have delayed the improvement there. No wonder I've been missing it.
Ahem, it's not a "weird attitude" to offer less salary in return for equity. Of course equity is worth something.
ARC includes zeroing weak references, which need runtime support. These are only available on iOS 5.

The rest of ARC still needs a bit of runtime support, but the functions it needs are basically just wrappers around the standard Objective-C memory management messages. They exist because they enable various optimizations. Apple provides a shim library for these which allow ARC apps to run on iOS 4.3. I'd guess they could run on even earlier OSes, but I believe that's not officially supported.
76 IEs? Not likely.
You know, I actually judge people by the way they dress. This might sound like a very shallow thing to do at first but I think you get a non-trivial amount of information about a person just by looking at how they dress.

Fashion is a visual language and everyone is, deliberately or not, communicating something with it. If you communicate that you don't care about fashion, that's not a problem. If you communicate that you can't really afford very fashionable items, obviously, that's not a problem either. However if the way you dress is telling me that you don't care about yourself or your environment, that could be an issue.
Huh? The only way it's like Chrome is how you can move the tabs above the other controls on top. 3.6 feels very slow now, I can't use it and have never felt that I wanted to.
Welcome to Bureaucracy.
So the trick is to find a direction orthogonal to all economists, and thus find out what the economy really is going to do? Not a bad idea.

I guess the hardest part about it is not letting an economist read about this direction, and claim it as his own...
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Kondratieff+Cycle

Wikipedia: "Kondratiev waves (also called supercycles, great surges, long waves, K-waves or the long economic cycle) are described as sinusoidal-like cycles in the modern capitalist world economy.[1] Averaging fifty and ranging from approximately forty to sixty years in length, the cycles consist of alternating periods between high sectoral growth and periods of relatively slow growth. Unlike the short-term business cycle, the long wave of this theory is not accepted by current mainstream economics.

...

"Long wave theory is not accepted by most academic economists, but it is one of the bases of innovation-based, development, and evolutionary economics, i.e. the main[citation needed] heterodox stream in economics. Among economists who accept it, there has been no universal agreement about the start and the end years of particular waves. This points to another criticism of the theory: that it amounts to seeing patterns in a mass of statistics that aren't really there."
Apples and oranges dude...
This would be infinitely more helpful if it would also list the platform you can develop on - ie Linux, Mac, Windows.
I agree. I love DropBox (and happily pay the $100/yr fee), but at 50GB isn't not enough for my photos & music. They are going to need to be at least in the ballpark of Google's pricing.

If Google was $50/yr for 50GB I wouldn't switch. But if they are $20/yr for 50GB then I would seriously consider it.
It's true that in the 1800s, other jobs appeared for displaced textile workers. It's not obvious that the conditions that caused those jobs to appear will persist indefinitely.

Historical trends continue except when they don't. Housing prices are a great example.
I've done a "developer poll". Email all developers: what's the best and worst thing about your job right now?

Then fix his worst thing, and have a talk with him about how much you appreciate this work.
So you don't track users with the "like" widgets? Even when they don't click on them? That would contraddict everything I read from FB until now.

> I suppose you guys can line up to say I'm lying

I never sad you lied. I just sad what you explicitly state on your privacy policy:

"We receive data whenever you visit a game, application, or website that uses Facebook Platform or visit a site with a Facebook feature (such as a social plugin). This may include the date and time you visit the site; the web address, or URL, you're on; technical information about the IP address, browser and the operating system you use; and, if you are logged in to Facebook, your User ID."

http://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info#inforeceived

If that's not "tracking" I don't know what is...
I may not be the target market, but downloading a crappy mobile application, finding out it doesn't do what I want or I don't like it, and deleting it (or not) is not a big enough pain to download a mobile application to solve this problem, find out it doesn't do what I want or I don't like it, and then ultimately delete it.

Downloading an app that tells you to download apps is not a business model - regardless of what kind of social connectivity graph search you have going on in the background.

"Discover good software" is harder than "making good software". Lets all start on that problem first.
Facebook Gives $10 Million in Free Advertising to Small Businesses
Humans Can't Learn (School Skills) From Video Games
Amazing. Thanks for the links!
Advise Me HN: Parallel Computing n00b
Hi, I have recently picked interest in parallel computing. I watched some clips on CUDA now i've just seen an introductory tutorial on some chip which was in the playstation. I'm prepared to get an SDK and don't want to be locked into some technology that wont fly, or begin learning something that is a 'no no'. Help with pointers.
"The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done."

From the article:

Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would "open its kimono."
This guy is either genius or insane. Guess we'll find out soon enough.

The Touchpad pricing eroding the price perception for all tablets, including the iPad, does sound like a bit of common sense, though.
Interesting point. It's been a long while since I've met someone who shied away from Facebook, (at least for that reason), but refusing to be tracked by Google seems more common. I don't suppose you are one of these people?
Hi there! My name is Jessica, and I'm one of the creators of the Hansel and Gretel app. We are thrilled you guys have taken an interest in our app and my personal portfolio site- it means the world to us. We are experiencing issues with our developers but we're working as hard as we can to get back on track. I would love to keep a conversation going with you though. Feel free to shoot me an email at jess@pbjpublishing.com, and I'll let you know when we finally hit the app store!
Watch The Thing online
Watch The Thing online
Watch The Thing trailer online Paleontologist Kate Lloyd Winstead has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime
Err, this is a joke, right ?

I mean, this guy raises concerns about an hypothetical Facebook/Google Megacorp controlling everything, and surrendering all your everyday computing to Microsoft is supposed to be the solution ?

I'd be scared to know my entire life relied on Live.com being up. (same thing for Google or Facebook, or Apple, or whatever non-local provider).
If you're on Firefox, just install NoScript.
Do you see MS putting Amazon in their critical path? I easily picture Ballmer saying NFW, but would love to hear why MS would hand such power over to Amazon.
I'd like the full touchscreen for more screen real-estate without the necessity of increasing the size of the form-factor.
>you need to show how Amazon loses that 6% price advantage against a 3% operating margin and survives

This assumes that people only shop at Amazon (or online) because it's cheaper. Not so. It's more convenient.

Last winter when we got blasted with snow in N.E. there were no snow blowers to be had within a two hour drive. I bought one off Amazon with next day shipping (for an extra $5, I'm a Prime member).

We have Amazon boxes arriving at my house every week. Paying sales tax isn't going to slow that down.
> I don't think there are any problems installing a Linux distro on any Mac

None whatsoever. In at least Ubuntu's case, you need do little more on modern Intel Macs than insert the CD and reboot. If you want to keep OS X around (and have a few other goodies), install rEFIt first for better partition and boot management.

In some ways, dual-booting Linux and OS X is less problematic than Linux and Windows has ever been.
Yesterday, at the NYC YC meetup, pg said that a big difference between them and all the other incubators was that they are a few people that advise startups 100% of their time. He has like 160 startups under his belt. A lot of experience. The others just use "advisors" who will spend an hour with a few startups here and there. That just may not be very valuable.

Apart from the money, what are the other terms? Board seats? Etc?
A good real estate agent would sit that person down and find out from them what kind of house they'd be likely to want. So questions like how many people will live in it, how long a commute can you have, how much can you afford, etc will all come into play. And from that info, the agent will be able to show a few houses and home in on what the person really wants.

I remember buying my first house and that's pretty much how it played out.

The point is that the RE Agent takes the buyer seriously enough to figure out if they are just fishing or ready to buy and doesn't just blow them off with flippant responses.
I agree. I overblew that point in my post.
Still, there will be 5-10 significant IE versions at play.
And more competition can only help. The argument that a fractured industry needs less competition seems strange.
There are plenty of problems with this strategy.

1) Dividend might get cut. All the banks had their dividends drastically cut, and their stock prices kept dropping. I'm talking pre-crisis, EVERYONE was saying that the financials were screaming buys. When a stock's dividend yield is too rich relative to its stock price, and it can't get its stock price to appreciate, many companies will tend to just cut the dividend outright.

2) Just because a stock is low doesn't mean it won't go lower, especially if the prospects for growth keep dropping. Look at CSCO. People bought in at 21 thinking it was a good value investment. Now they are trapped longs, waiting to get out at break even. The same goes for MSFT and HP at this point. These are called value traps, because your money gets trapped while you wait for a pop.

The worst case scenario, which happened in 2008 to many, many stocks and which I believe will continue happening, is that you buy a "value" stock, the we get a recession or another crash, the stock price halves, and then the dividend gets cut or eliminated altogether. Then you're left holding a crappy stock for months or years.

The point is that your strategy is not fool-proof. I believe there are probably plenty of companies where it might work, but there are also plenty of companies in-this-day-and-age where you could get massively whacked following this strategy. And history in the last 3-5 years shows that it doesn't work that well.

I did it with WaMu and lost a boatload. Watching cashflows, etc, etc is fine during a healthy environment, but right now, we have no clues as to the underpinnings of many, many companies, because you really need to understand how to interpret financial statements better than a casual observer. Look at Groupon... would you have been able to tell that their cashflows were positive only because they collected their moneys quickly, but paid their merchants slowly? That takes significant amount of experience to understand this. Probably for most of us here that isn't in the industry, it would have looked great.
"YOU CAN'T SOLVE A DEBT CRISIS BY ISSUING MORE DEBT"

You actually can. The issue is who is the creditor and debtor. Krugman wrote about this.
"He said that he’s oblivious to why something can’t be done, or why something is difficult, or why someone doesn’t want something to happen."

I'm calling BS on this one. I get it. It's about attitude. You can't let someone convince you that just because something is difficult, that it can't be done, but to advise young people to be "oblivious" to these facts is to send them to battle ill-equipped. There's the danger that the listener will walk away thinking that they should ignore anyone who tries to share valuable information with them as soon as the message becomes "this is difficult".

Knowing why something is difficult has another name: experience. Being successful means seeing a way around the difficulty.
Nice point. You can build a great ruby site without Rails, but Rails gives you a nice framework to make the process easier. Similarly, you can build a business without an MBA, but an MBA gives you a convenient framework to help with important decisions.
Flat and unlimited pricing can often be a problem. Flat means EA pays as much to manage all their game-press for all their games as an indie dev does for one.

Also, I realize you're keeping it simple now but have you thought about figuring out scarce resources (likely bandwidth) and charging based on that? Or, even just setting a threshold at which there will be extra charges. (1GB traffic/day or 2GBs stored.)

When I see a company offer unlimited deals I wonder how long they'll be able to offer that.

Looks neat, if I had a product being released it's stuff I know I wouldn't be as on the ball with as you now are. I'll sign up (even at current prices) if I release anything.
Oops Documentary Mistakes Video Game for Battle Footage
What a load of BS. How is this different than the $100 free credits they hand out everywhere? Oh that's right, it's not.
This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Apple products have proven to be appealing even through the Great Recession. More people will buy iPhones and iPads. Amazon has an infrastructure no one comes close to with online ordering, inventory and delivery. People trust Amazon and it's just growing.
OnStar Reverses Decision to Change Terms and Conditions
+1 for this. Rather frustrating that "Assigned to you" includes those from my organization's repositories, but "In your repositories" does not. It's not that the language is that hard to follow, it's just not quite the functionality I was hoping for
The Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) hacked
There's a big difference between Facebook and Google running/operating everything, and Microsoft offering a single sign-on service.
'Guilty until proven innocent' is the method applied by US immigration.

I remember applying for a visa for my wife and it said so in plain words.

The government is basically saying to you: 'prove that you are not a terrorist/spy/fraud'
I can contrive one. Class A holds a strong (i.e., retain) reference to an instance of class B in a property "myB". A also has a property "myC" which B observes.

- (void)dealloc {
self.someOtherVariable = nil;
self.myC = nil; // Sends KVO on myC. B sees half-deconstructed A.
self.myB = nil; // myB now is dealloc'd and stops observing A.
[super dealloc];
}

Admittedly this is a real edge case and probably bad design, but it's not overtly terrible. I have a couple cases where objects observe their owners.

BTW thanks for the blog, Mike! I love it.
The Y Combinator Family
Finding investment, talent, or even just being able to tell people you're starting your own business without getting a look like you've just told them you've got a second head... the US (even the remoter parts) has a far better support network for entrepreneurs than even large UK cities.

Agreed about bootstrapping, but even that is easier in the US where people are more conditioned to pay for services, consultants, etc.
Facebook forms PAC
I'm actually not, but it is quite common among online tech communities like HN or reddit.
Exactly. But you have to admit that it is a clever spin of their PR department to counter the growing amount of negative PR.
That's true. I buy tons of Amazon stuff. Sometimes because it's cheaper. But most of the time because it's more convenient (even when it's more expensive). I factor in wasted time/gas/energy to go to the store and Amazon wins out almost all the time.
I've written some blogposts before for friends tech blogs among other things and one post was a TechMeme top headline. It eventually lead to thousands of page views, not just from Techmeme clicks but including other sites covering it from reading TechMeme.

It's definitely got some influence and is hugely important for bloggers as it gets your name out there. Especially if you blog on your own and not for a larger entity.
That citation appears to say it's pure propaganda, which really makes me wonder why you'd post something you know to be untrue both on your blog and on Hacker News.

I could post my own fairy tale about how a teacher decided to divide grades equally among a whole class and the newfound accountability to their fellow students pushed the slackers to become hard workers and everybody not only received an A but earned it. They're both plain fantasies that exist only to pander to people who already agree with the message.