skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ummm, when it comes to operating systems, I never found /usr/bin particularly difficult, and dumbing things down to /Programs, /Users, /Files etc doesn't seem to really be anything other than a trivial and superficial aspect of an operating system. How they multitask, manage memory, keep the file system running etc - these are the tasks of the operating system. How apps get installed is largely up to the app developer. I can statically link and provide one simple big binary, or choose to componentize so that upgrades are less network intensive, but this is just the minutia. OSX already bundles everything into one place (for the most part) and most Unix systems are really easy to understand the structure, /etc for the configuration files, /var/log for the log files and /usr/[local]/bin for the app. libs to /usr/[local]/lib etc etc. Nothing particularly difficult about that. And there are some very good reasons for breaking things up and scattering them around. /var/log would, for example, often be a managed part of the file system, for log rotations and often on a different physical media to prevent disk head movement associated with the logging requirements from interfering with the main purpose of the app. /tmp would often be mounted as a very fast ram drive or some other high speed r/w filesystem type that an app can use for its temporary storage. /usr/bin would be backed up, /var/log, /tmp possibly not so...

There are very good reasons for how many operating systems have ended up the way they are, and simplicity isn't always a lofty goal. Take for example, the implementations of malloc/free. Its very important for these to be very efficient, very fast, very reliable and not at all simple. Simple is good in UI's (sometimes), good in many things, but please, keep simple out of the operating system design...
What are you interested in?
When you're doing the things you love to do, what parts of them are the least fun/biggest pain in the butt?
what do you wish you could do?

Answer any one of those questions with technology and you have the start of an idea and I bet you'll be surprised where it branches from there.
I don't know, being an external PR rep for a large corporation to run your blog and keep your stock prices up seems extremely sketchy to me...

Even this inane article about how apple is sooo cool because they now sell phones includes a passing reference to why they felt the need to charge people for an iPod touch update.

He may have his long boring article full of numbers, but in the real world people change phones all the time, and lots of normal people are just as impressed with other manufacturers touch-screen phones, or don't want a touch screen at all.
Find a customer.

The current changes in economic conditions may swing the pendulum back in favor of a subscription (vs. advertising) model for web apps.

There are 7 million small businesses in the United States. Every one of them needs something. They are everywhere.

Start networking. Let everyone know what you do. Before you know it, they'll be coming out of the woodwork saying things like, "We sure could use <xyz>. Do you know of any way we could get it?"

If you can't find a promising idea and a way to get started on it in 30 days, then maybe you shouldn't be an entrepreneur.

Good luck.
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I'm personally interested now in registrars that are outside of the US. Since the Kentucky ruling seizing those gambling websites, it's become a little bit more important to think about where your registrar is located.

Not that I think that sort of ruling is going to become common, but shielding yourself as much as possible from US court intervention isn't a terrible idea.
Hmm... evidently one man's gorgeous is another man's austere, monochrome, and drab.
I'm mainly saying don't rush into it. This is something you MUST be passionate about. Things WILL get tough. You WILL think about quitting no matter what you do. You NEED to have the passion for your product to want to do it through thick and thin.

As far as ideas to get passionate about, look into your hobbies and see if you can come up with something you'll enjoy. Or do you have ANY frustrations when using another site online? Do you have any features you want from other sites?

Just remember...it doesn't need to be rocket science.
It goes even further than that in OS X. Applications are not the only thing grouped, shared libraries are grouped as ".frameworks". These include all the headers and binaries in one directory structure, and they're even versioned! It's possible to keep the "last stable" release of your lib while also including the "new development", all in one package.

It really frustrates me that other OSs don't adopt this approach. It's good for both developers and users alike.
One of the best things you can do is get connected and get involved. Check out http://www.texasstartupblog.com, it's ran by Alex Muse and he's in Dallas... they're doing their own mobile startup: http://www.biggu.com. Reach out to him and see how you can get involved, and monitor the blog...

In Austin, checkout StartupDistrict.com, AustinStartup.com, Austin Tech Happy Hour, Conjunctured(.com) Co-working, and a lot more.
Eventually you end up with a choice. The older, smaller $100k sub with $100k of permission seeking added on (and somewhat known risk) or the newer larger $200k sub with somewhat unknown risk. In the first-world, that choice is made for me (and likely results in no sub ride at all). I'm glad that there are some places in the world where I can still choose for myself.

I'd take the sub ride.
While you're waiting for inspiration:

* Find somebody to work with. Do freelancing. See what makes freelancing difficult for you or your clients. Figure out a way to do it better.

* If freelancing is a no-go, use web sites. This is what I did when I first wanted to launch a site. Visit every one you can. Sign up for all of them. Make notes of what works well, what really doesn't work at all. When you find a particular TYPE of web site that doesn't have any good models going for it, make your own alternative.

That kind of idea is no alternative to having a Great Big Plan, but it lets you mess with things, stay active, and it means when you DO have your Big Idea you have both a little more expertise for launching and you have users who might be willing to spread the word.
Well it also depends on wether your write all your layout by hand and do all that nesting, or if it's just the end product of your code executing.

For example say you're doing something in PHP and you have a function that spits out a table, then for one of the cells it calls another function that spits out a table.

That is pretty manageable in terms of maintainability, and ease of changing things.
Put down the Django manual and go read Finnegans Wake....
I'll be working with a few friends on a one-day project we dreamed up about a year ago. This is the perfect excuse. :0)
I call it gorgeous because it does away entirely with distractions. It's easy-to-read, it's got minimal-but-present branding with the star logo, and I like the way he handles URLs - which is one of the only times he has any styling present. It's extremely uncompromising and I find that reading his essays feels very good on my eyes, which is really the only way I can judge online content.

Compared to TechCrunch or the Gawker bunch or even a lot of tumblelogs, I think his is gorgeous. I'd even put him above Kottke by a wee notch in terms of aesthetic, though it's admittedly close.
I don't live in the US, but I was under the impression that the vast majority of consumer goods for sale were fabricated in China (or perhaps assembled from parts fabricated in China). Is that not your perception?

I may be wrong, but also, your purchasing habits may not be in line with the majority.

Or maybe you aren't talking about the US? I think the same is true of the UK - are you talking about other European countries? Which of them still has a significant manafacturing base?
If you have downtime then use it to learn new, practical skills. And where better to start than in goldrushland:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/overview.html
Mercurial provides the same "killer feature", which I think nullifies any "killer feature" status for git (implies exclusivity, I believe).
Ah, if you had called it clean or minimalist then I would have agreed...

I guess it really comes down to taste after that =)
How US Tech Makes Indian Gangsters Rich
Watch MythBusters Episodes
It is always a happy moment for some of us when it comes to the end of a Friday. This is because we are going to relax from that excruciating week. I personally chose to relax by watching my favorite TV Shows (my favorite TV show is Heroes) or video (Music video, movies) or playing a video game. Are you like me or just almost like me? But what to do to watch TV episodes which I have missed?
Agreed, but if you want a designer to take that layout and change it to something else, I'm betting that he will have a really hard time dealing with PHP ;)
At least, you know that you are passionate about Django. So, try to do something with Django. Whatever web application that is based on Django. Or, you can try to contribute to Django.
Dynadot.com is an excellent choice.
Interesting how the Clojure talk came as the culmination of the day's talks. Sounds like the Common Lisp people might be giving Clojure a serious look.
You don't have idea cause you already burn out of your passion, I guess.
If I were you, I won't stay in one location and think my next step. I might tend to join some conferences and traveling.
First android phone (T-Mobile G1)
Space launch is just not as hard as we've been led to believe by those sucking at the government teat.

In 1980, a 2nd world country was getting ready to assemble a launch system that would've attained launch costs as low as $600 per kg. (This would've been limited to hardened or bulk cargoes due to high G forces, but that's still awesome and damn useful!) The price of this system was only $25 million (1980.) That's a game changing technology and it's still within the reach of a group of "Silicon Valley duders."

http://www.astronautix.com/country/iraq.htm
Distributed Logging: Syslog-ng & Splunk
You're probably right. What I really meant to say was that it will be at least 5 years before the numbers of IE6/IE7 are low enough that anyone can afford to drop support for them. We're going on 7 years of having to support IE6 (although some sites are starting to drop support for it finally).
Is it just me, or does GMail seem to have become a bit of a low-priority backwater in Google's grand design? There's a difference between simplicity and abandonware, and they're nudging it.
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Most teachers in Indian Engineering colleges are not practitioners. The profession has extremely low pay compared to other options and hence one of the least preferred one among professionals.

Most universities do not go after high performing engineers to join the faculty , but just mass recruit new college passouts who later climb the job ladder to reach senior positions.Add to this all the reservations based on caste and religion. Except for IITs and some government run engineering colleges, its a very weak educational system in place.

The situation in government departments is not different. New college passouts prefer well paid private jobs than the ones in public sector.

Bad teachers and less talented engineers in public sector: A recipe for corruption.
Shouldn't the title have read "10% of Yahoos Leave"? If only these guys paid attention to the outside world they could have seen what's been coming for months, if not years...
The concept of a primary working tree is a relic of non-distributed VCS? I could see working with several branches or versions of a project but not having any single canonical version. I've never done it, but I could see working that way.
Use a ticketing system or issue tracker that creates tickets based off of e-mail (I like Jira personally). Setup an auto-reply to let them know their e-mail was received, and someone is looking into it. If your ticketing system is world facing (which I think is a nice idea), ask them to visit their ticket (Jira can auto-create accounts for people who don't have them yet when they send an e-mail that creates a ticket), and set the priority.

Give your timezone/part-time issues, I'd provide a cell phone or something for people to use in case of dire emergency. If people abuse it, you cut off their support service.

I'd also instrument as much as possible so that in the event of a disaster you are first to know, not last. I use a heavily customized nagios setup that sends SMSes to my cell phone. Works out well.
11. Because Stallman does it.

Went to go see him speak at Loyola the other day. Very interesting character.
walk through your next week and carry a notebook, making a note of all the things you think of that you wish existed, but don't. when i do this, it's generally through little irritations, conveniences that save me 3-4 minutes, realizations about people's work process -- that kind of thing. go fishing in the real world. do this until an idea for a product hits you. it will, and likely soon: something you want or need that no one provides.

in the meantime, get into a startup, on an equity basis. look for contribution to the work, not a paycheck. learn the atmosphere, see what works and what doesn't. get involved with your local user groups and search for a partner, someone like-minded.

put down the tech for a bit and read. spin down the head for a bit. my best ideas happen when i'm not thinking about them.

it's really a question of the want-to. if you have that, you'll be okay.
nearlyfreespeech.net
Have been using for 2 years now. Love it.
I wonder just how much of the world would have been explored had Shackleton, Columbus etc worried too much about if their boats were insured.

Antarctica...ummm, that's all very interesting sir, but tell me again how much personal accident liability you have on The Discovery... :)
My opinion is that the real reason of the existence of the actual model of installation was to prevent people from making a copy of an installed software. Maybe it was even more important before the internet to prevent people from copying the most expensive software at their work, library and school. Now it doesn't really matter when the original install CD is easier to get from a torrent site.
Too many people aspire for mediocrity; Not many people aspire for GREATNESS
It would go a long way if MS would retro this into IE7 via a browser update. IE6 is slowly being moved from, but IE7 will be around for years to come.
idealess = the worst
Biggest Fraud in History (non-political)
I am just curious if anyone knows of anything remotely equal to this one?
Maybe trying working in a field that uses computers but doesnt program them? Sales person? Manager?

I would try to put myself in other peoples shoes and find the pain they have. That's how I come up with most of my ideas, think about what I'd like to be able to do, but cannot, due to technological constraints.
Godfather of Bangalore: Real Estate in India
I saw ads for this when I was scuba diving and Honduras, kind of funny to see this story on CNN about a year later.
Yep! But hey, always worth a discussion.
Sounds like a great position to be in. Seriously though, I think you have the right idea of taking time off to LEARN. It is so critical.

To echo some of the other commenters, I would recommend two things.

1. Learn what you're passionate about. What kind of applications do you want to build? In what capacity do you want to be involved in your next company (employee, CTO, CEO, etc.)?

2. Learn from smart people. Email 20 people you look up to. Ask to have a 20 min conversation over the phone. Be bold! You might be surprised how helpful people are.

Best of luck!
It must be just you, because they've kept adding things that I've found immensely useful like imap and pop checking for other nongmail-accounts. I think they do a lot behind the scenes to make it great.

Gmail also works great. At some point a design reaches a limit as to how much better it can be.
Hosting Gotchas (Back-up offsite now)
I like this approach also because of security reasons. It could make application sand boxing easier if it can only read/write in its local directory and the users directory.

Getting rid of the dll nightmare is a very good point. I'm also very impressed by the method used by Apple to support multiple machine codes into a single app.

On the other side, application scanning at boot time is not a very exciting strategy. Why not binding this with the file index like tracker that a good OS should have ? The index would be updated in background when files are created or deleted and so will be the application locator and document type binding.

I am more am more convinced that this is a new direction to go in addition to make the OS the most lightweight possible and eventually generalize virtual machines. It is hopeless to secure current windows PC against becoming zombies.
I work for a large consulting company and I think a lot of company's have trouble looking outside their box. They know that things are failing but they have no idea what they need to do. In most cases large companies fail because they get stuck at local maxima where small changes make things worse even though there are much better aproaches they need to shake things up to find a new area.

PS: A classic example is Monday Night Football which we promoted as a good option help the NFL prosper. But, you can also point out a lot of dumb things they do because that's the way they have always done things etc.
I suppose you could restrict programs to only running out of certain folders to centralize it, but I think the only way this kind of thing could ever really get better is a sink or swim approach. As in, if your computer is setup insanely poorly(like if I can't find your programs in the huge mess you plunked them into), don't look to me for help with it, cause I'm just gonna recommend a nuke from orbit approach, with a further instruction to do it right next time. Tough love counts as help, right? Still, I know, I know, it's never gonna happen...
"still almost 100% techies in India never prefer or think about joining ISRO/DRDO which are world-class research organizations."

I've consulted for both the DRDO and the ISRO on some very technical projects.

You are partially right. Manpower is a problem in both organizations, with the best people going to the United States. That said "world-class research organizations" is a bit of a stretch. There are specific departments which do world class research, but by and large ISRO and DRDO are far from that ideal.

Plenty of "scientists" pushing paper and just wasting time in the office and waiting for 5 o clock in the evening so they can go home. Being part of the Indian government, the wastage of resources is appalling (to someone who's worked in the private sector / run his own business)
On that note, try to find locals who are interested in code/technology. See what interests them and see how it may relate to what can interest you. Share ideas and see where they go!
Yes the imbalance is destructive. The high salaries of American doctors and attorneys are due to the access to those fields artificially closed, not only from the foreigners, but also from most American. Would you want to introduce such system to the high tech industry? No code writing until you have a degree and a special license? Even if you would, you still probably couldn't elevate American software engineers' salaries to the level of doctors and lawyers--the doctors and the lawyers can only get away with it because they have captive audience. If you brought down the American software industry to the level of the healthcare system, Americans would simply start using programs and web sites created abroad. (I read that many people go abroad for more expensive medical treatments, e.g., heart surgery in India can cost $10k and is not in any way worse than the same procedure in a US hospital which costs $100k+)
What you are not getting is that while outsourcing does mean cheap labour for Europe and US, it is not necessarily cheap for India(you mentioned keeping in-house). What you think is cheap are standard wages in India. It is cost cutting for US companies but not for Indian companies.
Sometimes scaling down is more profitable
Ha! That's awesome!
In my opinion, one good business strategy is "fast follow."

* Find a business that's getting good traction.

* Copy it mercilessly.

* Think of how you would improve it and implement the improvements.

* Profit!

Even if the final step might not be a monetary profit, you've accomplished something, and learned from the experience.
Reminds me of the Palm Folio (http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/30/palm-foleo-announced/), though Apple's will probably be more capable.
Networking is a key to everybody's success, not just women.

Some hackers have a tendency to see success through networking as a lower sort of success.

As in, you weren't smart enough to do something on your own, good thing you had a lot of connections.

But that's a profoundly naive view of the world.

Nothing that you can do/build/write/etc can be:

1. Easily understood. Almost anyone gets it at first look

2. Incredibly valuable.

3. Requires little to no resources.

Only if you have all of the above can you become successful with no connections.

But unless you can make people instantly young again, using nothing but your pocket lint and hand waiving, you will need networking.
IE6 has been phased out fairly quickly for IE7 and I'm sure IE8 will come in just as fast.

CSS seems like it's here to stay and it will still be around when it's finally fully implemented.

This is good news for web designers everywhere.
> As an OS designer who prefers well-thought-out simplicity over ever-deeper-layers of complexity,

He could always use Colorforth:-)

Joking aside, you can do something kind of like that with "starkits". You don't even have to unzip them.

http://www.equi4.com/starkit/
I am well aware of the situation in India, while it is true that there are competent engineers at ISRO, it is also saddening that the govt. is not allocating sufficent money for research. Most of the brightest talent is absorbed by private companies as it is a much better choice compared on monetary basis.
No one is born with brilliant ideas. A professor of mine once said, "If you don't think you have any good ideas, lower your threshold for what you consider good."

Take any idea (even a bad one), and plan out how you'd implement it. Rinse and repeat over time. Eventually you'll start getting better ideas, and seeing opportunities where you see problems.
I think this also raises the issue of "personifying your company." Whatever you do, try to show the human side of things as much as possible rather than acting as an autonomous servant.
You better be on the upside of the downturn
Casual piracy is easily stopped, you could argue that it's already been 'solved' with online activation.

For hardcore pirates, it doesn't matter really as they'll find a way to get their booty with or without the 'install' procedure.

You can still have an application that doesn't install, but uses activation to ensure it's the only copy running.
Dang, beat me to it.
Ways of organizing a navigation bar
From your experience, what is the possible ways of organizing a navigation bar and what are the pros and cons in each case?
But It Works On My Machine…
I'm always pleasantly surprised when an application I download doesn't 'install'. When I click the downloaded file and it just ..runs, my typical reaction is "oh, well isn't that nice".

But then my next question is always, "where should I store this unicorn of an application" My first instinct is to create a Program Files folder, and then make a shortcut, but I know that's just wrong. So typically it ends up stored with other random program/iso files but rarely used because there is no Start Menu shortcut to remind me that I have it. The one exception being Thunderbird Portable which I use all day.