skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They haven't been very easy to defend for about 4 or so years now. I've been saying that although Apple's products are technically nicer than Microsoft's at the moment, I'd rather see MS in a position of dominance than Apple, just based on the way that the companies have been behaving in relatively recent history.
The movie adopts a populist slant. A more-accurate take on the intermittent-wiper story is over here:

http://robertplattbell.blogspot.com/2008/04/we-have-met-enem...

I'm sure you've head of Robert Kearns, "the windshield wiper guy". Kearns will tell anyone who will listen how he has been screwed out of his invention by the big car companies. Unfortunately, the reverse is true. According to the Washington Post, Kearns was offered almost $30 million for his investment (some sources say close to $50 million) in the 1970's, only to turn it down, insisting that the car companies buy his invention directly from him. After years of tedious litigation, and losing nearly everything (wife, health, home), Kearns has finally won far less than the original offer, most of which went to lawyer's fees.

It is very unfortunate, as Kearns perpetuates the myth of the big corporation being out to "get" the little guy. Worse yet, inventors such as Kearns convince many corporations to adopt an "NIH" (Not Invented Here) policy with regard to outside inventions.

The tragedy of Kearns is that he has fought so long for what he believed are the rights of the little guy -- while his battle has actually harmed the chances of solo inventors in the future. Please don't do us any more "favors", Mr. Kearns!

A good friend of mine recently took a job as corporate patent counsel for a large sporting goods company. He has tried, mostly in vain, to get outside ideas submitted by solo inventors considered by the company.

His biggest obstacle? Not management... Not the engineers... The inventors themselves! Many inventors who have very good ideas fall into the same trap of mistrust and vacillation. If the company expresses an interest in the invention, the inventor immediately thinks that the company is going to "screw" him. Eventually, management gets frustrated and drops the idea.
Byteonic.com » Financial market collapse impacts Java job market the most
"Apple had no control over the DRM: they needed it to get the companies."

True and false. Apple needed some sort of DRM. However, they didn't have to refuse to license their DRM. They had a competitive advantage and they leveraged it in a consumer-unfriendly manner. It's what they do now.
I think they change practices like that on a semi-random basis so that people can't make those predictions.
For some reason that typo gave me a rather amusing mental image of the neighbor's kid trying to eat your lawn ("shove it in his maw"). Yeah. Stupid brain making connections where they don't exist.
I will once it's on Mac. Till then it's the nightly WebKits.
I'm not sure that running in your lounge can be described as "comfortable", especially compared the many potential awesome runs in your area. e.g. my run near my office in Mountain View - http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/t...

Although I guess running through downtown Tokyo would be a cool gimmick.
Stocktwits gets Angel Funding
On the other hand, this might mean they will allow tethering, which I think would be better. Personally, I'd rather a 1Gb cap with tethering than unlimited without.

The fact that you can't tether the iPhone is a real annoyance - particularly when (like me) you're in a country with bandwidth caps anyway.
how much shit will you monkeys take?

gee i wonder how the fanbois are holding out...they cling to the faux cool of apple products like a bum clings to his malt liquor. what a quandry! now they have to make this jive with the relentless bad press apple is getting and deserves over this totalitarian horsehshit
The iBear thing is stupid and kind of creepy.

The internet controlled switch is a good idea. It exists, of course, but most examples are expensive and aimed at datacenter type applications. There is also the X10 devices.

I think that most startup oriented entrepreneurs are overly focused on web apps right now. I think people overestimate the costs and complexity of hardware, and even desktop software.
Coorindated Universal Time - every wondered about the history of "UTC"?
His name is Sean Moss-Pultz. http://moss-pultz.com/

Interview: http://www.fsckin.com/2008/01/20/interview-with-sean-moss-pu...

His mission statement for Openmoko: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/announce/2008-June/00002...
Isn't that the one that was a giant trainwreck as far as, you know, actually using it?

http://www.vimeo.com/1366042

From the video, it looks like the FreeRunner is a long way from a usable open phone. And not all the issues are with the horrible software it ships with. The hardware looks like it sucks, too.

Have you tried an iPhone? They're awesome.

edit: Other reviews I've found of the FreeRunner are absolutely frightening as well. It looks more like a $400 toy to hack on than a phone one might actually use.
That there is the point. A phone is something you have anyway. Everyone has one. You get it on a monthly plan. You use it to communicate. Even if an Eee does all your computing, you'd still have a phone in your pocket.

If your phone does all your computing, the Eee stays home. If your Eee does all your computing, the phone still comes. Unless, your Eee starts making calls, it's a extra.

People were carrying around big uncomfortable phones @ ridiculous call prices. Once they got one, it went everywhere. Laptops, even 1kg ones, are a sometimes food
Overzealous Browser Language Detection
Maybe I'm not being clear. The difference between the right algorithm and the wrong one here is whether or not items that have already been randomly swapped can be swapped again. Simply performing n random selections on the list is wrong, and the easiest way to see why it doesn't work is harder math than you probably want to ask people for.
Meanwhile, proving the other answer correct does require an inductive argument (pretty similar to the one that a selection sort works).

If your intuition led you to the right answer, that's cool, but for those who guess wrong, it sucks for them. The question doesn't do a good job of distinguishing between people who are smart and people who aren't because both the right and wrong answers seem pretty right because they're both stochastic. Unfortunately, only one is truly random.
I was expecting the elves to come back charging exurbanite consulting fees to maintain a system no one else could understand...
Rahim Fazal, co-founder of Involver, started his first business when he was in high school, and actually told his parents he was dealing drugs -- just so they wouldn't find out about his company and make him focus more on his schoolwork.

it's sad that our society is soo conditioned to corporate ladders... when in fact entrepreneurs are the bread and butter of our economy.
Deploy by svn. It's amazingly simple, and simple is usually best.

If you're smart you can orchestrate db changes non-destructively. If less smart use capistrano.
This is also a good resource:
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

Lets you see what your site looks like with various forms of color-blindness.
I can text reasonably well.. (aka - by sight while driving using T9). I don't know ANYONE who texts regularly with a QWERTY keyboard on their phone. Maybe it's just an australian thing? Certainly none of my teenage female cousins have one - nor people I catch a train with...
What did their refusing to license their DRM have to do with impacting the customers? I'm not being sarcastic: I don't quite understand what effect that had on users.
The idea is pretty old too:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/07/19/icebox-on-wrist-to...
Really?
How so? It's not that they were necessarily selling to the same people 6 times? In one sense all they were doing is "making something (in a format) people want"

Some people read blogs - that's great - they got the info
Some people only just found out about them and want the easy full back story - that's great - buy an ebook.
Some people hate ebooks, but love the tactile feel of paper - buy the book
Some people are more audible and need to hear it spoken to them - go to the conference..

All they did was come up with an idea once - and then present it in different and more appropriate ways to different people. How is that Trump tactics?

Note - I realise that some people will buy the content multiple times - but honestly - this is a capitalist society, and they obviously derive some benefit from it...
If I've learned anything on Hacker News, its not the idea that matters, its the execution.
For those unfamiliar with Push Singh:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art...
Love it. Just yesterday I thought about finding an internet radio site, then forgot. You reminded me.

Everythings worked great so far. Only found is a small display issue when playing. Heres a screenie of the issue (the last line of the music description is cut off, above the blue tool bar)
http://www.digitalcarpenter.com.au/uploads/Screenshot-OneLla...

Only seems to happen in Firefox 2.0.0.16 on Linux. I tested Firefox 2.0.0.16 on windows and it didn't happen.
Self in the Argument List: Redundant is not Explicit
It makes it impossible to legally play Fairplay-encrypted files on non-Apple devices.
yes, pagerank works for Knol.

But how is pagerank determined? In the usual way, of the aggregate pagerank of incoming links (and other factors that google uses).

I was suggesting that there might be a better way to rank knol articles, than only using Pagerank. This might not turn out to be the case; but that's what I was suggesting.
My god. Reading through that list, it's amazing when anyone (including myself) ever manages to get anything done, or that society works as well as it does.

Yeah, I guess I'm a glass half full kinda guy.
First Casualties in Android-iPhone Wars: Hi-Tech Hipsters
Atom smasher will have to wait until spring
Its rather ironic that this comes on the same day that Android launched with its fairly open approach.
When I read "modern society," the implication I read is that this is different from older society. But in this case, that's certainly not true. We've always been like this.

The more you learn about this, the more you should appreciate that we are not rational creatures. You don't need to get disgusted. Just accept what we are, and try to be rational and not emotional when it matters.
I didn't know this - thanks.
That's very intriguing to me too. It feels like it's loading up faster than a simple web-page!

I like the design even though the ability to use a smaller version of the page could be interesting (think that you have a specific small page open all day, kind of like the reduced version of iTunes).

Overall, I was very impressed by the responsiveness and the quality was pretty good for the stations I tried.

Good luck! it looks very promising.
Investment Banking Classified - Sociopaths Wanted
Am I the only one who realizes that this phone solves the syncing problem better than Apple & certainly for a much lower cost (free!).

Your contacts/email/appointments move across computer & cell phone with every update.

Copy & Paste is solved by the G1.

There is 3.5G coverage & GPS built in as well as open standards for applications, so before you know it, you can video conference from your G1 over the net to friends in Argentina, Europe or Asia.

Improved maps with a compass, walking directions & street view definitely does not hurt either.

The G1 phone matches or exceeds the iPhone in everything except storage, which you can pay extra for.
Or just use "techcrunch". I don't think they've announced there yet...
It has become my browser for browsing, while FF has become my browser for dev (because of FireBug).
Once FireBug works in chrome, I suspect I'll switch over completely, can't imagine what would keep me on FF.
yet we are capable of rationality. accepting irrationality to me is accepting things like torture and all other needless suffering. it is not malice that most often leads to evil, but simply ignorance.
Sorry, but do you really think Vista's slow uptake is caused by actual bad user experience? It's not.

It's because every techie will adamantly proclaim that Vista sucks, even though they might have never even tried it.

As far as I'm concerned Apple is a straw on the camel's back away from me doing the same to them.
I don't think that they're knowingly sacrificing the long term.

I assume that they either don't consider apps as representing the selling point individually (hence a need to get maximum developers on board & developing) or don't think that this is harming them significantly.
What's an example of a db change that "smart" people can do where Capistrano allows you to be less smart?
> They did announce plug-ins, you know.

Yes but so far I'm not aware of any. Not even the google toolbar AFAIKS.

For me plugins like online bookmarks (delicious), current page/site info (seoquake) and web debugging (firebug) have become 'must haves'. There are many others that I have tried and found I did't need but it is nice to have options.
- Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications by Cal Henderson

- Scalable Internet Architectures (Developer's Library) by Theo Schlossnagle

http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/

... and a whole buncha links on google with "scaling", although "scaling mysql" seems especially popular
Best Buy Remix - Welcome to the Best Buy Remix Developer Network
An excellent example.

It's interesting that for years 'industry magazines' have produced glossy dungheaps to sell ads on. They can do this because advertisers want to believe that there is a publication that reaches 70% of all HR people in the tech industry or 45% of all OH&S people in the mining industry. In some cases there is such a paper. In many there just isn't. In the latter, the ads are carried by these idiot mags.

Now there's a way. Create your own. If you can.
Vista's slow uptake is due to immense corporate inertia and a lack of any apparent value to overcome it. Has nothing to do with techies.

Corporations keep using the same tech until the incentive to switch overcomes the considerable cost. Vista just hasn't given enough incentive yet. XP had a similar problem, though not as bad because the OS (especially once driver issues were ironed out) offered more relative to the previous one.
Only worth $30 hr if you would have been working $30hr instead of cleaning.
Microsoft didn't act like this at all. If they had, Windows would never have reached the market share it has today.

You don't have to ask Microsoft for permission to develop an app for Windows. You don't have to pay them to do so or sign an NDA. They don't have a kill switch to remove it.

They may include a free competitor in the next OS, and you can argue that that is an unfair abuse of a monopoly, but they at least allowed you to try. And Firefox's immense success shows that if your product provides enough value, you can still compete.
Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?
I recently installed emacs since a lot of people (yes - yc users) seem to think it is the best code editor around. I read that it has a steep learning curve, but that it would be worth the effort. I accepted that and started using it as my primary editor to get my hands dirty. After 2 weeks of use I'm still not productive in it. I can think of the following reasons for this:

- I use my mouse a lot, and it seems that emacs is made primarily for keyboard input. I don't use keyboard shortcuts much.

- A nice looking GUI and well designed intuitive interfaces matter to me. Emacs is extremely lacking in this respect.

- I simply haven't spent enough time with it - the learning curve is steeper than initially expected.

What do you think? Am I missing something obvious, should I carry on in the belief that this is a divine tool that just takes time to master, or is emacs simply not for me?
Is it?

A full time servant is common in poorer parts of the world. I assume that accessibility has to do with wage differences. If you make 5X ph what a maid charges, you can afford it easily & it makes good sense. If you make 1.5X, not so easily.

Wage inequality will make this accessible.
It also makes it impossible to DRM non-Apple provided files on Apple devices.

As much as I'd like to see DRM go away, if it has to exist, there had better be one spec that lets me buy from any store to play on any device.
Actually for me gmail wasn't really that related to Web 2.0. The main definition used is at

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/...

The exception to 'social != $$$$' is of course Google's page rank algorithm which is essentially a social/collective intelligence system. The financial success of first Google then other companies is probably what motivate the term more than anything else. It is a shorthand way of saying

'The internet is not a financial failure. It's back and we it doesn't need all those MBA's who helped create the crash in the first place.'
Deploying a long-running JavaScript application, like 280 Slides (and most Cappuccino apps), on one hand can be trivial (just copy the client resources to your webserver!), but also can be an interesting challenge. Namely keeping clients running an old version of the client-side code using the corresponding version of the server-side app. When you add in something like Gears for offline access it gets even tougher. There was a good presentation at Google IO that covered all these issues: http://sites.google.com/site/io/taking-large-scale-applicati...

We wrote a little custom code (we call it "bake") for deploying Cappuccino applications:

"bake": http://github.com/280north/cappuccino/tree/master/Tools/bake...

sample "bakefile": http://github.com/280north/cappuccino/tree/master/Tools/bake...

It pulls your code from git (but could easily do local files, scp, rsync, svn, etc), runs an optional build command (like "ant"), copies source paths to destination paths in a deployment directory, gzips the deployment directory, scp's the code to your server(s), ungzips it, and does a little magic...

Each version is placed in it's entirety in a uniquely named (unix timestamp) subdirectory. We could just redirect from "/" to "/1221268756/" (for example) but that's incredibly ugly, so we use the little known HTML <base> tag to trick it. The index.html file in "/" is identical to the one in "/1221268756/" except it has a <base> tag which tells the app all URLs are relative to "/1221268756/" instead of the default containing directory ("/").

And it actually seems to work really well. The big advantage of this is you can set your cache expire date arbitrarily far in the future, and your entire app will be cached until you change index.html to point to a new <base>. 280 Slides, which is ~2.6MB uncompressed, loads on my computer in about 1.5 seconds if it's cached. The only problem with this approach is when you deploy, all clients will have to re-download every resource, even ones that don't change. A more granular system would be ideal, but significantly more complex.

I looked at Capistrano briefly but decided against it for some reason I can't remember. Perhaps that would have been better, but c'est la vie...
Or 5 lines in python:

pre = ("blue", "friend", "mo", "nap", "net", "pod", "tag", "war", "web", "wiki")

post = ("2.0","blogging","casting","chalking","dating","driving","jacking","pedia","scape","ster","tagging","zilla")

len_pre = len(pre)

len_post = len(post)

print "\n".join([" | ".join([a+b for a in pre for b in post][start:start+len_post]) for start in range(0, len_pre*len_post, len_post)])
I think part of it is not just wage inequality, it's efficiency: I estimate she is actually making $30-40 an hour by batching it, and because she is likely faster than I am (since I am relatively poor at cooking). On my end, it's costing me relatively little per hour for how much time I am saving

I would classify it more as recognizing the comparative advantage she has.

Even though I cost a lot to hire for a web project, even someone earning less than me would be better off hiring me than trying to build their own plugins for their CMS - it might take me an hour, and they can pay me with lets say 2 hours of their work. Or, they can struggle and spend 20 hours of their time trying to get it working. This is a real life example - they hired me for their second project, and were very happy based on the time they saved versus having their inexperienced guy do it. Of course, there is an argument to be made that having their inexperienced guy do the work builds knowledge capital, but I'm talking about strict efficiency here.
I found the original post text just by putting their URL into Google Reader. Gotta love web-based RSS aggregators that cache. Here it is:

It seems that Apple has shut me down. I can no longer provision any more devices. The developers website that had a "remove device" link is now gone. I looked at the help tab but it still lists "removing a device" as one of the options. I guess Apple just shut my account down. I believe that all the copies of Podcaster I released will keep running. I will try to make an update and test it on my iPhone. If it works, I will release it to every user. I would recommend keeping version 1.0.8b around just in case.

On a more serious note, what does this mean for me?
All I wanted was for someone from Apple to contact me and tell me how we can work it out so that I get into the app store. Instead, Apple took the cowards way out by simply disabling features in my developers portal. This seems like a childish move for a company that has been proving such high quality service and products in the past.

I plan to make Podcaster for the Android operating system. At least there, I will be welcomed instead of being walked all over. I will also try to port the app to a jailbroken iPhone.

So a final note to developers. Try to stay out of Apples grey area. Don't build anything that would compete with Apple. Don't spend too much time before you submit to the app store because it could be all for nothing.

P.S. Podcaster got a 4.3 our of 5 star from 63 reviews. You can read them at http://www.nextdayoff.com/reviews.aspx

UPDATE: I just wanted to add that I am not surprised that Apple has stopped me. The application seems to still be working and can still be installed if you signed up before 9/22/08 Midnight EST. If you are one of these people and still want to try it, email almerica@gmail.com
I will also be making updates to the application and will still fix a lot of the issues users have bene having. Give me about a week.
They have been well-known, but it's because they were saying smart things even back in the dot-com bubble: amidst the insanity of Pets.com, they were the ones citing the Dutch tulip mania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) on their homepage as part of their pitch to potential clients and the world as a whole.
I believe that free choice actually leads to a better result for consumers. If you don't agree with this position then what you have said makes sense and you are probably a good fit for Mac products.

My belief is that over time consumers will notice the lack of available applications with respect to the other available platforms.
Or "as good as going to the gym"...

This might have some benefit for the elderly but for a reasonably fit adult... no way.
Rich Kilmer: Ruby's Best Feature
it would be redistributed

I certainly don't suggest that it would be a global tax. Rather, a globally consistent tax. All money would stay within the given countries.