skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're interested in that period on Wall Street (i.e., when debt-backed securities came into vogue), Michael Lewis wrote an interesting book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Rising-Through-Wreckage/dp...
He's talking about selling Linux OS in a shrinkwrap package. On the other hand, Shuttleworth says that services are where the money is at -- something that companies like Red Hat have known for a long time.

Shuttleworth's most interesting comment was a suggestion that XP is being given away for free to certain OEMs. That would be a bold move by Microsoft. The whole ecosystem could change if Microsoft changed XP over to the Firefox model of making money from software.
Vista only for the SDK is a problem.
I would bet on advancement in drugs used to treat MS. They would be applied more broadly in short order.
Google’s Green Agenda Could Pay Off
Yahoo's Zimbra Reaches for the Cloud
Phew... good thing I use the lowercase version.
By salseman, I mean you need to learn the art of selling. You need not think of money only. Even convincing your technology to internal/upper management, or explaining your idea (let's say a Free service) to a single user and enticing him to signup to your service can be also considered as Sales act.

I've worked in a situation, where we were 2 co-founders, coming from technology background. It wasn't a Consumer Internet startup. So we couldn't wait to code in the room and then let "virality" spread out. We had to make new introductions, go to customers' site, present them what we are doing, understand what exactly they want, and then re-define spec based on majority of customer feedback. We were small tech team, in the process of building something. So we didn't have sales team. So we had to roll our sleeves, and pitch the customers. We couldn't wait until we hire sales guys. Once the startup grows, we'll hire sales team.

But my point was, we need to have that selling attitude - always.
What Ray Ozzie sees in Azure's cloud
Review my project for foreign language learning
Hi everyone, Please review my site http://sanbit.com, it is currently in private beta, I jsut want to clean up all the bugs before letting everyone into the site. The invite code is ycnews , you can register here: http://sanbit.com/signup
I have studied foreign languages for many years and my way to study was read books and write down the words on paper with a pencil. My idea for the site is to keep a journal of all the entries (words and phrases) that you learn on the website, You can then organized the words into dictionaries ( just like tags). After you have learned new entries you can then write essays practicing the words you have learned. All the entries/essays and other information you put into the site can be shared so that you can learn with other users and make friends. I think that working and studying with people helps you learn more. You can use the site for learning any language, even for improving your own native language. You can see what a full profile looks like by looking at my public account: http://sanbit.com/u/jason

My bigger picture goal for the site is to have different "modules" that users can use to help them improve in different areas of learning a foreign language such as reading skills,writing skills, speaking skills, listening skills ,etc. So with what I have built so far, the entries would help you improve your vocabulary and the essays would help with your writing skills.

I think the biggest problem I have with the site now is the UI, I think the interface and workflow could be much better.

I really look forward to your feedback.
Sincerely,
Jason
Isn't that the holy grail of business?
chanting

Seppuku!

Seppuku!

Seppuku!

Get it on video and sell it for $9.95
Really fantastic; I had no idea Flash could run so well. Minor nits: I missed Photoshop's ctrl-space/ctrl-alt-space key combos for zooming, and using the numeric keys to set brush opacity (or layer opacity for non-brush tools).
http://splashup.com, yc summer '07
Ubuntu may try exclusive tie-ups with OEMs like Microsoft does.
Student charged after alerting principal to server hack
I own it and his other books, to me I find it more fascinating for the snippets he attaches to each item. I can't tell you any of his laws but I can recount a number of the stories in it.
The first kick is free you know
I live in N. Virginia and my airport is Dullas. It's true that there are people living near it and a lot of traffic by it, but that happened after the airport was built not before. It's certainly not in the middle of a major city. It's already hours from DC and where I live in good traffic. Poor traffic is a nightmare.

Perhaps my perspective is a bit skewed by living in Virginia though, development around here is really like anywhere else in the country.
I like his linked "cliff businesses" where network effects are essential for their usefulness (canonical example that he didn't use: the first phone).

I think many businesses have network effects as an adjunct to their initial usefulness, which can then fade away (like scaffolding) if a network effect of greater usefulness kicks in. Leaving you with what looks like a "cliff business". Of course, it's hard to plan even an ordinary successful business - let alone a two-stager. e.g. Zune's wireless song-sharing.

It doesn't hurt to think about both aspects, and allow for the possibility in product dev, and present both aspects in marketing - at least it then has a chance to work. If it doesn't work (i.e. fails) it's no big deal.
When I read Arrington's post I thought smugly "at least we don't get so much of that here." Alas too soon.
I haven't read the article yet, so I may be off base here, but...

While I don't doubt their results, you make a good point that it's important to not over-generalize the results by mistaking neuronal processing speed for mental acuity. Motor control, maybe, and this may help explain why the elderly are frail and unsteady. However, to make any claims about reduced cognitive abilities, you need to show that neuroplasticity cannot compensate for the impaired processing speed.

However, even if it can be compensated for, it would still a case of "use it or lose it".
That's like saying organic brown rice is going to replace sugar.
Microsoft battles Linux in Africa
I recognize they've done exceedingly well at marketing.

Oh, and extorsioning, strongarming, deceiving, FUDing, bribing, monopolizing, etc.
Yup. Kill the bringer of bad news, as if it's going to save you.
Their "cloud" is already down, looks like vapor to me.
So the IT department isn't competent enough to secure its servers, yet it knew how to find him? Sounds to me like he's being stitched up.
Wii is the clear winner.
Flash doesn't make for a nice user experience

That's ok as a rule of thumb when you are talking about a chalkboard project. I agree with it. But there's a running app here. You can measure user experience based on experience. From my 2 minute play & the comments here. Seems ok on that front.

If that copy/paste/ font sizing etc. bothers you here specifically, then it's a point against.

javascript is far more widespread than flash

I'm not sure how much non pc browsers are going to have a need for this anyway. screen size etc.
I knew astroturfing was around the corner.

We got invaded, like digg, so long to an unbiased HN.
But, alas, you get no credit...
He does spend a paragraph before that talking about the state of the Dow and a lot later on how companies will manage their earnings, so I went with the parent posters interpretation. But you're right, I could have misinterpreted.

Also, I don't know his trading positions. I just find these statements that are _so_ certain to be mildly irritating, when it's been clear for a while that no one really has a knows what is going on or how to fix it.
I wish I could find the link to where I saw the comment, but I'm having tough time. But anyway, I saw a comment by someone who (mostly politely) emailed the school and chastised them for being so harsh on the student. However, they replied that the student actually had a history of being disobedient, and attempting to break the system. It was also noted that the method he used to alert his administrator was NOT in good faith but more of a 'Ha ha... I broke the system what now?' instead of here's how to fix this. That said, I don't think it's right, but it sounds like he really didn't help his case. As much as it stinks, I think we just have to hope that the people with ALL of the facts will form an appropriate conclusion about the case and justice will be served properly, and not as a means to discourage future attempts to 'fix' security holes.
Yes, MS already sell XP Home OEM for $40 for the eeePC... they have the capacity for brutality. From sales so far, it doesn't seem to need to be any cheaper (in fact, a higher price would probably be OK). The ecosystem built on XP's platform is still worth a lot.

What could kill them is a crossover to the web as a platform... ie. as the desktop.

Implementations of Flash, Javascript and Java are getting faster and adding features needed for the desktop (e.g. client-side persistence). It seems inevitable that the old settop box dream will be realized. It was such a cool idea!

The OS might even be non-linux, if it has other features that are needed more. e.g. faster, more power efficient, maybe intrinsically multicore, so it can work on cheaper, lighter devices, requiring less power - like a phone. Linux has bloated, through evolving in the same rich hardware environment as Windows.
Blaine Cook, ex-Twitter & Joe Stump, Digg: Languages Don't Scale
Granted, but the truth is, no one has any clue what's going on, ever. And yet, "Who the hell knows what will happen?", despite being always truthful, is not really good advice at any time. It doesn't matter what the state of the economy is - no one knows what will happen next.. if they did, they could make some good bets on the stock markets and become rich. All that anyone ever has is opinions.

I think that opinion pieces would get tedious fairly quickly if they were constantly paraphrased with "imho"s...
jim cramer has said before that one shouldn't have a position you can't afford to spend an hour/week investigating. however you may feel about his financial wisdom otherwise, this point seems sound. in this case, that'd mean an hour/week for each currency, reading up on that country's economics. you might have that kind of time, i don't know. first world western countries' currencies are very stable, and change slowly over time, their values increasing and decreasing by slow degrees. if the dollar, euro, or pound suddenly went horribly south, the rest of the world would definitely feel it, and their currencies would also likely plummet. so there's no safe harbor abroad for currency.

consider instead gold, silver, platinum, and jewelry. since we're talking about an 'escape scenario', they might be your best option. mr. wemmick in 'great expectations' had a not-terrible plan in terms of an unstable economy: he had gems and jewelry pinned under his lapel, and frequently touted the value of 'portable property'. this might be a better route to take than currency since it doesn't fix a destination, it's easily liquifiable, and very portable.
Is underdog Yahoo poised to beat flashy Google?
Great tips, but ironic that his page is busted as has horizontal overflowing...
if $current_year == $current_year + 1 then:

now is the year of linux
I feel that way about a lot of these "tech bloggers." A lot of them just have the wrong combination of immaturity, poor writing skills, and little sense of journalistic integrity.
Sounds exactly like "intensity cycling". You work hard, progressively improving, til you stop getting gains. Then you take a week off where you do virtually no work, to recover. Then, you start again at 70% of your previous peak, and work up again.

It's from weight training. I just heard of it a couple of days ago, but it's eerily similar. Also, plain common sense (but I needed to hear it).
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/79fu6/7_ways_to...
Unfortunately I'm contractually obligated to keep that information private. If I could tell you the number, I would have no problem doing so, as it would be instructive and beneficial to the startup community to have comparison numbers on which to base their own decisions. Keeping dollar amounts private almost always only benefits the larger company involved. If other companies had better/more data, they would have more leverage during negotiations. Such information is very valuable for evaluating what a fair market price is.
Any halfway intelligent human being can teach themselves a very wide variety of trades. Are you saying you are not intelligent? Or just lazy?

If you practice a bit and learn some simple rules of composition, typesetting, and color, you can be a competent designer. Beyond that level you need native talent and drive but there is no excuse to be ignorant about related fields.
Young folk, don't be discouraged by this article. You don't have to wait until you're 39 to do great things.
I will suggest you turn off the registration process just for the time of HN crew to try it and give you feedback. The registration step is a great turnoff for people in general in testing a new product.
Good deal, the student committed crimes maliciously (if you actually read the story). Next story!
GvR answers 20 top questions from his section in "Ask a Google Engineer"
I was very dissatisfied when I used blueprint for a recent project. For a grid based layout i've found YUI grids to be a lot better.
Anyway, SoAndSo already did this post.
The DS has been astoundingly successful also. Especially in getting non-gamers to buy it and use it.

Nintendo played a blinding strategy - let Sony and Microsoft play "Who has the biggest willy" with their hardcore gaming hardware which renders 4 gazillion polygons a second, while Nintendo makes fun games with wide appeal.
Why this tech recession will be different than 2001-2003
Most older people are concerned about the welfare of their offspring. "Protector" by Larry Niven is an allegory for this phenomenon.
The soul-destroying effect of an elite education
I would love to hear more knowledgeable responses from someone familiar with historical currency devaluations, but it seems to me that:

1. Regardless of the crisis, some currency remains (or becomes) a reserve currency.

2. That country has for the past few hundred years always been an industrial power.

3. The currencies that have effectively died seem always to be connected to countries that are highly indebted or politically unstable.

4. Gold's price may look attractive now, but its price also has a habit of collapsing when people start to return to the market, making it more of a speculative gamble than a safe reserve (at least, talking about TRADING gold, not the physical stuff). If you live in a non-G7 country, maybe holding physical gold is a good idea if it seems like your economy might totally collapse, but in the G7, if your currency totally devalues, it means that the entire world economy has gone to hell and there are more important things to worry about than how much "savings" you have, like how much food and water you have.

Given 3, even if you COULD buy RMB (it is illegal to take RMB outside China, so how exactly would you spend the money, unless you are willing to move to China?) their government is a group dictatorship one "unexpected" event away from collapse, despite everyone's hopes for continued calm running. Britain is too small to resume reserve currency standing, and most of the other US creditors are of questionable long term stability.

Except for Japan. They have insane savings, have not gone to war since WW2, and have a government so focused on stability that Koizumi made huge waves with his "controversial" plan to privatize their postal banking system -- a plan that would not even take effect until several years after he left office. The Yen may not appreciate much, since no one likes to see it go much higher, but I would love to hear someone explain how it could possibly drop much either.
What part of respecting a user's settings makes a website ugly?

If a website is properly designed, it should scale just fine no matter what the font size is. If you need a fixed pixel size for a font to make your design work, you're doing it wrong. And to top it off, a fixed pixel size requirement means it'll break anyways on different systems with different fonts, kerning and hinting options, and other settings.b
It is not astroturfing if you say what company your from.
Free CrossOver Day Today
It's true that it's unlikely, but LinkedIn has been able to do something that Facebook hasn't - monetize. Search had been around for a long time, but Google is who made it really profitable. So, there is a chance that this is more like Google and Yahoo circa 2000 where it was underdog Google and flashy Yahoo.

Granted, being able to monetize doesn't matter to your users, but if you keep running through your VC, you eventually can't keep up development at the same pace.
You can't make a crowd become smart commenters by criticizing the way they comment. Instead, TechCrunch should really move to some sort of voting scheme so that the good comments move up and you can ignore the bad ones. I really don't know why more big blog sites don't do this already - it seems like a straightforward win in terms of user experience.
Really, you don't need a framework to write CSS. It isn't even very helpful if you know what you're doing. For a rapid prototype, you might save yourself five minutes by using a framework, and you'll come out with crappy code that you can't use outside of the prototype.

I can see the value for wireframing, but really, the browser defaults do just as good a job in that case. This is why I've largely stopped development on my own CSS framework. If you watch the video at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/ , the main engineer states explicitly that you shouldn't be using YUI CSS for production sites.
I would argue that lots of white/black differences in America are actually due to distinct differences in the environment people of both groups were raised in. The only factor that makes it racial is the fact that in America, there are very clear and distinct subcultures that seperate whites and blacks if they so choose to be a part of those subcultures, and the socioeconomic properties / scoring on tests of their members are probably more indicative of the subculture's values rather than the quality of their genes.
In a traditional seppuku you plunge the ritual dagger into your abdomen and cut from left to right. This is an incredibly painful procedure, and to finish the ceremony successfully you can't visibly admit to your pain. To accomplish this you have a trusted lieutenant decapitate you swiftly after the act is accomplished.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about this ritual >.>
Google announces new agreement on Book Search
Microsoft's Role Is Not to Innovate... But That's OK
Of course the hard part is focusing ;)
Even worse, the mortality rate for this ailment is 100%.
LinkedIn uses the framework on their site, and they gave a number of great reasons why.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/06/05/implementation-focus-link...
I'm not trolling and I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't throw baseless accusations around. I may be wrong, but that's an entirely different matter.

Airports need to be in places where there is enough space for the airplanes to take off and land. This means that the airports themselves need to be built in places where there is enough space for runways and there are no tall structures to interfere with low-flying aircraft. At the time of building, this means significantly outside urban centers and it means that for a ways around, buildings can only be a few dozen stories tall.

As time passes, commerce and industry builds up around airports, but, in general, large airports are not located within major urban centers. They are at least as remote as many nuclear power facilities. While some airports would then be out of limits, many could be quite feasible.

---

Now given that the primary purpose of nuclear planes would not be transportation between major cities but rather intercontinental flight, which, in case you've never been on one, already requires switching airports a number of times before you get to where you want to go, This could conceivably be quite practical. You would have one or two in the Us, one in Canada, One or two in Europe, one in Russia, one in China, one in Australia, etc. and you would transfer flights to get to where you were going. This is how intercontinental flight already works, so I don't see how it is infeasible or self defeating.
GameJS: Canvas Game Library
I went to community college.

My points:

1) They were made to quickly train people for post-war jobs.

2) Being government run makes them especially bureaucratic. And because of that they are slow to change. They teach you the outmoded industry demands. (A.k.a classes on Java/C = You'll program Windows. Python/Ruby = Web apps). And I'm not saying those languages are not useful.

But top colleges have this problem too. It's a society-wide problem actually. Our knowledge is increasing and changing things faster than people can keep up.

But opening up courses and materials helps. Not to mention the effect of the net in general.

3) The original purpose of CCs influences their operation today. And they've had to shift purposes.

And it's hard to change any organization; just like people. But not only is are CCs larger in scale but politicians run them.

The problem they're trying to solve changed...a few times.

By my quick account:

How do we do quick job training post-war?
How do we restructure for incoming baby-boomers?
What do we do with their children in the age of the internet?

And that's probably not how they framed them. But I don't have enough time to come up with better questions.

4) Enthusiasm is low. The standards to get in are low; For teachers and students. And while I forgot about transfer students, I think they add to my point not detract from it.

Those people want to blow through CCs. But I think you agree with me about student and teacher motivation in general.

Most people don't know what they want to do with their lives; Whether before college, during college, or after it. Most don't even know on their deathbeds.

And those who even ask the question, end up settling way too early; It's a hard problem. And you're supposed to figure it out before 17?

And I was advocating self-learning; Not going to any college. Whether they're good according to US Weekly's algorithm or not; I'm the last defender of the university.

But I did recommend emulating what the most valuable part of those places; Doing stuff with people who actually want to do it.

Side Note:

I thought my post was balanced; I don't intend to ever write negatively. Thank you for the feedback. You forced me to explain myself the long way.

This post is sloppily written too.
Google Book Search Announces Deal with Authors and Publishers
> Linux has bloated, through evolving in the same rich hardware environment as Windows.

I'm not disputing your point directly, but I'd be interested in your data.

For example, there are Linux distros which run well on what I consider low-power devices (I'm thinking of ARM-powered NSLU-2 or WRT54 devices) with, say, 32Mbyte RAM.

I'm also not sure what you mean by 'intrinsically multicore' - are you implying that Linux doesn't make use of multiple cores? Or doesn't do it well?
Anyone else care to (anonymously or not) guess at a possible dollar-amount range? Even if just a ballpark figure?
The Pope on Twitter
I agree that time on TV is a waste. Time on video games, not necessarily.
What about Icesave?