skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our government isn't really bottom up. And you've pointed to one of the reasons; it takes a while to become popular.

Otherwise, dynasties by inheritance interfere with what could come from the bottom up. And dynasties = popularity by brand.

And...

...I usually can't draw the further inferences in public (too heretical). But let's I'd like to see what happens on HN.
Nop, not using them.

Remember PlayNotSure and how people got screwed?

Can't trust them...
ROES is a clunky app, IMO and ripe for some competition. If tweaked right, an app like this could take some market share from ROES.
Nothing vastly new here (especially if you've watched Douglas Crockford's videos) although I must admit I quite like the local

var global = this;

concept for when you're creating more than one element in the global namespace/object. The reason you wouldn't use window is of course that your code will port to non-browser platforms, and you don't use unqualified names because they look like a mistake (e.g. you left the 'var' off)
This one line made the entire post worthwhile: We don’t strive to be balanced. We strive to be correct. I don't know if TC is correct, but I like the sentiment.
Sure, it's not morally wrong to criticize your users... it's just not going to work.
Bah, humbug. I read through the changes and thought they were a breath of fresh air for the dinosaur OS. Doesn't all good art borrow from a previous generation and add it's own spin?

We've learned that it isn't sweeping changes that make a gadget great, it's the subtle reconfiguration and simplification that does.

If Windows 7 can help give my parents a better experience on their computers, I'm all for it.
You fail at hacker, friend. OS wars are just getting warmed up.
Possibly true, but "anyone with a clue knows that X" is a really annoying conversational gambit.
I don't understand this guy's rage against the tray. Almost every desktop system, be it OS X, KDE, Gnome, or XP has something similar. What would he prefer? A taskbar entry for wireless networks? No information at all?

He also comments that we are "finally" given options to control tray icons... he must not be too observant then, because starting in XP you could choose to always hide or always show icons, or leave them alone. (e.g. to tell your Antivirus to always hide until you expand, but make sure that your instant messaging app stays in view.)

Maybe its just me, but these new OS reviews and previews are always the most ignorant, half baked and opinionated pieces of tech journalism...
They have posted two keynotes and said they will upload the rest of recordings. See the links on http://twitter.com/merbcamp.
I would have applauded OS notifications being an RSS feed. Well, not necessarily that exact feature, but some combination of "out of the box" thinking along with "embracing the way the world actually works instead of stuffing them into a windows box."
The review hasn't addressed the most important question: will it run smoothly on 512MB of RAM, the maximum I'm willing to give it under VirtualBox.

Currently I often run two instances of XP with about 300MB RAM each and they're quite fast. Vista was built with an assumption that everybody has at least 2GB with half of that going to Vista itself and another half - to Internet Explorer. I hope they learned that some users have a lot less RAM and they like running other software too.
I doubt they care that much. Even the real low end computers from Dell (~$300) ship with 2GB of RAM now.
or people with less time on thier hands.
Actually, in terms of remote classes, Stanford is in a very special situation. Stanford has been providing distance learning in engineering for 30+ years, primarily to local high-tech companies. Delivery was done through dedicated TV circuits (most client companies are local), VCR tapes and started switching to Internet in 1999. That means that the classes, the facilities, and all the associated processes are fully optimized for remote delivery. Curious side benefit for full time students in CS is that you really don't need to go to class, and can just watch it on TV/Internet.

This used to be called SITN (Stanford Instructional Television Network), and is apparently called SCPD ( http://scpd.stanford.edu ) now. Check out the offered courses. They cover full BS & MS+ in Computer Science and many other engineering fields.

Many large companies in SV are members, and offer mostly free access to Stanford courses to the employees. It's a nice perk and an advantage when recruiting. It's also a significant source of revenue for Stanford, something they will think twice about giving away. It's a standard problem of a market leader having to cannibalize it's own market. So, it's great if somewhat surprising to see Stanford starting out in this direction.
Well... the cheapest notebook from Dell is actually much closer to $400. It has exactly 512MB of RAM. And it does not run Windows, it runs Ubuntu.
They better care about that.
You can but who can ever prove it.

You have to have absolute knowledge to know if someone else has absolute knowledge. In the end you have to take people's words on things based on their acquired and intuitive knowledge.
Hmm, what is 'CSS Design' exactly?

This guy seems to be conflating design, which has principles that apply to newspapers, magazines, billboards, interactive kiosks, and web sites, with CSS, one specific technology for implementing your website's style.

No one should be worried about specific technical flaws in IE6's implementation of CSS at the same time they are worrying about how much white space they want to use in their design, whether to use a 2 or 3 column layout.

This article might have some good information here or there, but I'm not sure it is conceptually laid out well. This leads it to read more like "10 steps to a sweet web page!!!" than an introduction to design for the web.

My somewhat unoriginal advice:
Read about design, decide how you want your page to look based on its contents, sketch it out, pick some colors, and THEN worry about translating it to XHTML/CSS.
I agree Detroit has taken a huge hit, but I'm not sure it's going to die.
VW vies for title of world’s biggest company
One way that you can do this is through a retail stock broker, like TD Ameritrade, with CurrencyShares ETF's ( http://www.currencyshares.com/ ).

I've done this with positions in the AUD and Swiss Franc. Those two currencies tend to move in opposite directions since the Swiss Franc is a safety currency due to Switzerland being a relatively insulated mature modern economy. AUD on the other hand, tends to be a growth play since Australia's economy is heavily based on the export of natural resources (think mining). The two currencies tend to move in opposite directions increasing the likely hood that your wealth will be protected in most cases. You can also use options to protect your positions on the ETF's.

I keep 10% of my savings in foreign currency (via CurrencyShares) and 10% of my savings in precious metals (Gold & Platinum Coins (Philharmonics and Maple Leaves)). The rest I keep either in a targeted retirement fund or my local currency (USD).

Obviously, this portfolio hasn't worked out very well for me, recently. :(
Red Really Is the Color of Romance
setting up mod_rails on slicehost is pretty straightforward
Subtle reconfiguration isn't always enough though. I'd love to see the Windows Control Panel cleaned up, for example. That would take a bigger overhaul to do properly.

On the flip side, where I agree with you, are subtle things that could be improved like removing all the nag screens they added to Vista. Unfortunately, many of the subtle changes in Vista were steps in the wrong direction, like moving the buttons around in IE7. What did that help? It just confuses users. At least some things, like adding extra protection against phishing, were a good thing.
I find it interesting that Microsoft is using HTML/Ajax instead of Silverlight. I wonder why.
just signed up for an invite. Thanks!
This is outrageously cool. Thanks for sharing
That's interesting. They'll be "comparable" to google docs, which Ballmer called "pretty primitive" just a couple of weeks ago?

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/steve-ballmer-disses-goo...
An RSS version would be cool. If you aggregated multiple machines, you could keep tabs on a whole office that way.

The way I interpreted their notifications was that they'd add it as some sort of daily or scheduled notification in the system, like a popup. I can't stand the existing popups they've added in Vista (warnings, etc) or many of the ones they had before (yes, I really do want to move that file to the recycle bin, thanks), so more notices just seems like a step in the wrong direction.

RSS though, great idea! :)
They also copied the dock and expose.
it's exactly because it's different that we're going to prevail

cmon simma down nyaa

give your inner cynic some delicious salt-water taffy
The reason I don't see myself as having and attitude of "entitlement" is that I feel you have every right to look elsewhere. If you don't like my terms and conditions, you are not obligated to meet them. I don't have trouble finding work with flexible conditions and a good salary - so when I previous employer tried to change those terms, I quit. But if I hadn't been able to find a new job, I wouldn't have complained - my employer has the right to say "take it or leave it", and I have the right to "leave it". Anything else is just complaining (provided I have the legal right to "leave it", which is why I'm irritated with the H1B terms, which uses non-market mechanisms to undermine the basic contract of a free market democracy).

Now, ahem, best of luck with that low, low price outsourcing deal.
"Howard currently manages a hedge fund and has done so since June of 1998. The fund has evolved into a long only fund..."\

uh oh... nothing says "disastrous returns" more than "long only fund" right now...
Sweet, here's my motivation why I'll be working from the Sierra next summer. I just need to get a satellite connection... ;-)
this looks useful, thanks for the link.
To Woo or To War? When When Should An Entrepreneur Fight, Flee or Flirt?
An interesting contrast of the recent book, "The Art of Woo" with the ancient classic, "The Art of War".
Yeah, a commenter in the story mentioned it works in Firefox and Safari too, which is pretty awesome. Maybe it's that they're trying to take cross-browser compatibility seriously in this one.

Business-wise, it would be a good way to grow the Silverlight install base though...
(unless you plan to specifying it manually for every tag)

That's exactly what you would do. Knowing that everything has no padding and margin can sometimes make life a lot easier than trying to hunt down phantom default padding and how each browser displays it.
It's not clear either that someone couldn't implement a LinkedIn clone on Facebook's API. FB isn't ignoring the corporate space, for example their "networks" feature is tied to a corporate email address anyone who is a member of a company network, you can trust that their identity is real. LinkedIn is even trying to get in on FB's turf, with its status updates.
Looking for something with a low barrier to entry, but with room to grow. Something not unlike AWS, but totally tuned for Rails. I'm thinking about building such a solution if nothing else works out. For my personal use if nothing else.
Talent is drive.
This is a bold-faced lie. I use fluxbox, and honestly, I have never even used the swap partition on my computer with 512mb of RAM. I don't even recall seeing it use over half of the system memory.
Blip.tv Figures Out How To Serve Ads In iTunes Videos
Nice take on an ancient classic (Art of War) and a recent look at persuasion (Art of Woo).

Fight, Flee or Flirt - love it.
Something to consider (not quite turnkey depending on how you look at it) is deprec. Quite a few people still swear by it:

http://www.deprec.org/
At PDC today during the keynote, they said they were running the current builds (which are not completely optimized yet) on netbooks with 1GB of RAM without issues. It's not exactly what you want, but its a step in that direction and it may get there.
This is just a cheap shot at an unpopular target. But finance has real value. Do you want a loan? Finance. Invest in stocks, or real estate? Finance. Complete a merger? Finance. Have your check clear? Finance.

Some finance companies just play poker with their assets, and the industry has been cartelized and corrupted by government interference and perverse incentives, but most financial service firms provide real value to their customers. That is why they will endure.
Seriously, will we ever get away from this "x changes your brain" nonsense? Everyone, at every waking moment of their life, experiences "chemical and physical" changes in their brain. That's kinda how it works.
Let me know when they actually make some usability breakthroughs instead of slapping more translucency on the widgets and throwing more things to read on dialogs.
I don't really know what you're talking about here. I can press CTRL-+ on both the linked article and on his sample site (linked at the bottom), and the font size increases as I would expect it to.
This is pure blogspam; the real link is http://peter.michaux.ca/article/9081
Writing Insecure C, Part 1
Can you explain what about Facebook is inherently dangerous to a career? Perhaps what some people put in their profiles would be damaging, but even that depends on what their field is, and how controlling and employee image focused their employer is.
Virtual business cards / online rolodex. When you're running a company your business contacts are super important. So every time that I get a business card in some context I look the people up on LinkedIn, then I can also see more about their background, and I don't have to worry about losing their card or adding them to my address book.

Incidentally, I didn't get LinkedIn before starting a business either. I'd even canceled my original account because I found the deluge of people that I saw at work every day adding me as a contact rather silly. Now, though, I use LinkedIn (or its European competitor, Xing) several times a week.
Business: It's Not Really About the Money
Where I work, one of my bosses motto's is to always have everyone do sales in some small way, atleast a bit each week.

I am the lone programmer at the company, so essentially I am the CTO (It's what my business card says, shrug) ... Apart from my day-to-day programming and online marketing tasks (seo, google adwords, etc etc) I pick up the phone at least a few times a day.

Not only that, but when your boss gives you all the info behind what we're buying, how we're doing it, and why it's good for us, you begin to learn a lot.

I totally disagree 100% on anyone who thinks all they should be good at is hacking away. You may be damn good at that, but diversity helps so much.
They could simply use em measurements everywhere before.

Actually, the size of an 'em' isn't even defined relative to the size of a pixel by the CSS spec, so the claim in the article is dead wrong about it helping you use em when you mean 10 pixels. 62.5% of an unknown value isn't 10 pixels.
In what way? What innovation is going on in the O/S world? What has changed radically over the last 5 years?

I used to care about the O/S, when you had little choice, when redhat was this small little sapling with a ton of things to do to get to windows. When macs were this weird other world that wasn't so unixy. When windows 95 came out and suddenly this whole new world opened up.

In those days, the O/S was the platform. Now, it's probably more important what browser you use than what O/S you use for most people.

But we're past all that now, an O/S is an O/S - there are a ton to choose from, they all do pretty much the same thing, and work the same(ish).

Now, the main aim for an O/S is to stay the heck out of the way IMHO.
Virtualizing MySQL , are you stupid ?
The right way to address this would be to not setup a physical presence in those countries, but instead offer their (localized) services from outside the borders. When an oppressive country was looking for information on a dissident, they would have to prove the target was a criminal under the host country's legal system. But that would require a real backbone instead of a cushy press release.
"Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista."

Vista already looks great. It's what's under the hood that matters; I'm not excited.
Wtf? Are you being sarcastic? Your standard Ubuntu install doesn't use Fluxbox, it uses Gnome+Compiz.
You can do this sort of thing regularly through sites like giveawayoftheday.com

Long-term results are mixed and (as henning notes) this sort of stunt does not attract the type of customer a business wants (that is, those willing to spend money on quality software).

Bogging down your support staff with a bunch of cheapskates looking for freebies can increase costs while doing squat for revenue, all while seriously cheezing off those of your customers who actually paid for your product.

If you're new and you're desperate, go for it. Otherwise, you might want to consider a different advertising strategy.
Can you be sure your current views are better than those you held a decade ago?
Yeah, they have the mini notebooks that are pretty underpowered for that price. However, the regular 15" notebooks are about $500 and ship with 2GB of RAM. Its also worth noting none of the mini notebooks even ship with Vista (Ubuntu or XP are your options).

As long as Windows 7 runs well on 2GB most people won't care. One of the reasons vista reception was so poor was that 1GB RAM simply didn't cut it, but that's what every low end PC shipped with.
Microsoft Office Embraces The Browser (Thank You Google)
...What is this? It's illogical, offers no evidence to support its thesis, and is more pretentious than anything I've read in a long time.
Not quite--what you are doing is setting the font-size, and hence the 'em' to 10px. px and em are both independently relative to the font-size. There is nothing about the size of a pixel mentioned here.

It would also be very naive to argue that working in units of 10 is not much, much more convenient than working in units of 16.
Heroku is great.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the main drawbacks at this point are that your app can't send email, and you can't do cron stuff.

The free service is great, and I'll have my wallet out when they offer premium with those types of features.
Rails Machine(http://railsmachine.com) makes setting up and deploying rails apps very easy with their capistrano tasks(https://support.railsmachine.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id...). I've been with them for over a year and I highly recommend them.
Make sure you use Git or some other DCVS which allows offline commits ;p
hmm, someone should change the title. this is an artist's interpretation of what it may look like. it's nowheres near official.
Perhaps there is an AWS machine image tuned for Rails?
This finish ruined an otherwise B-minus curmudgeon-y article:

It has to do with the comparison that is made, usually by insinuation but often overtly -- throughout the mass media, and especially in the elitist mass media -- between the educational backgrounds of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Few people really care that Obama went to better schools than Sarah Palin. I certainly don't. We care about the fact that Obama is significantly smarter than Palin, and accomplished a lot more with the opportunities he had, rather than washing out of four undergraduate colleges.

In what is Sarah Palin self-taught, anyway? Shooting wolves from helicopters? She's obviously uncomfortable with ideas that challenge her narrow worldview, as her anti-library crusade illustrates.
To quote the CSS 2.0 spec:

The 'em' unit is equal to the computed value of the 'font-size'...

Therefore, em is in units of font size, and is not independent of it. It's totally unrelated to 'px' values, except by luck. Not all browsers default to 16px text. (And yes, it's true that px are actually defined as the distance subtended by an angle of 0.0227 degrees at a typical viewing distance of the device, but they're typically used interchangably with screen pixels)
Sorry. I was meaning more along the lines of things like Quicktime, Real Player, and other such programs the user has installed as a means to an end, but now can't easily figure out that it's always running and starts to wonder why their brand new PC is running slow...
It's more than a glorified rolodex, really. With LinkedIn you get much more of a "push" approach to business networking, whereas the rolodex and telephone model is much more "pull" based.

I can examine the profile of someone I've worked with before and know before I contact them if they know someone with whom I'd be interested in connecting. I can get notification that they are changing jobs, looking for work, or trying to find someone with a specialization, and they can notify other people at the same time. The rolodex and telephone model make this much harder, and so normally suchnotification happens far later, when you call to otherwise just keep in touch, unless the matter is otherwise extremely urgent.

It also serves as nice electronic substitute for resume and references. There's nothing for you to lose, and it allows you to update both in real time, avoiding the need to submit a new resume and list of references to potential employers whenever you want to add something new.

I know that at the last couple of places I've worked, part of the recruitment process was looking over my LinkedIn profile -- around the time I was being considered, I got notification that someone from the place I was applying had viewed my profile. I don't know whether it helped in my case, but I can't imagine they would even bother if it was always a waste of time.
10% conversion rate would be astronomical for a site like Facebook.
What's the browser like on the xbox? presumably some subset of IE7?
You know it was redesigned in Vista. The default work image has it set to classic (I assume because some options are difficult/impossible? to find in the "new" view).

I actually prefer it. Some items are 2 clicks instead of 1, but it beats scanning/scrolling.

(Then again, I like the UAC, and it doesn't bother me that much. I keep it on, and I basically only see it when installing programs or configuration changes, which I have to sudo in ubuntu anyway...)
Try outlook web access. Try searching in that. It's a ridiculously horrible experience.

Or try adcenter as I said. Watch those billion iframes with their individual spinner loaders going round for 10 minutes while it loads.
I've planned to actually look at YUI grids. This was a nice discussion, and I need to check out the others too.
You can send email from a 'blessed' app (just ask them and it's likely they'll give you their blessing). I'm not sure about background jobs, but I imagine it's in the works.
You know... smart folders have an equivalent in Vista as well. I'm pretty sure the new "libraries" thing is just a redesign and not an actual new feature.

While I'm at it, hasn't file previews been around since Win95?
Yep. Just rendered speculation.
I'd like to see Apple address that too in Snow Leopard - Leopard runs like a dog under VMWare which makes cross-platform development a pain.
Opinion: Corporate Morality Is Not a Group Effort
Deep question: Take away Microsoft and how much money is Google willing to give Mozilla for the search bar?