skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there’s a very good chance that we’re seeing the sort of marketing campaign that will be studied in universities for years to come. I’m not sure which way it will go. It might be looked back upon as the spark that ignited a massive resurgence and a prime example of one of the all time great ad agencies at the peak of their game. Or it might go down as act of hubris on par with Gigli but with ten times the budget

Matt, I think you may be onto something there. Things in front of us always seem bigger than they really are, but when they went from M$10 on Jerry Seinfeld to directly responding to the "I'm a PC" commercials, this went from being another M$300 ad spend to a very high stakes gamble.

When they were doing the Seinfeld thing, it could have been a defensive move. They solidify their support with their core market, and Apple's ads solidify their support with Apple's core market. It stops and further switching, but creates a stable stalemate with Microsoft maintaining huge market share and continuing to farm its customers for upgrade revenue.

But directly responding to the Apple ads changes things. Now it's a kind of winner-take-all strategy. If they succeed, they could reverse the trend and win customers and mind share back. But if they fail, they accelerate the defection and actually get their own customers talking about Apple's advertising!

If Microsoft spends any serious money on this "I'm a PC" series, I don't see this ending in a stable stalemate. One or the other is going to win out. It "I'm a PC" flops, Microsoft looks very, very bad and validates Apple's advertising. Of course, if it succeeds it could undermine everything Apple has worked on and claw back their gains.

So... I would have to say that before canning Jerry this was not going to be a B-School case study. But now that the #1 player with 90+% of the market is breaking all the rules by referencing a competitor's advertising...

Yeah, I see this as a B-School case study no matter how it plays out.
Warren Buffet in 2002 Berkshire Letter - "Derivatives a Time bomb" [pdf]
Plug and play between VC tools isn't desirable to me, for a few reasons.

One, while transition is a pain, it doesn't happen much. Over 10 years on two different projects, I've only ever switched their VC tools once. I can guarantee that even "standard" interfaces would morph over 10 years.

Two, and more important, "equivalence" could be detrimental. For instance, CVS has an explicit tag command that hits every file, but Subversion treats this as a special case of a server-side copy. These are not the same. It's the evolution of a concept, and if Subversion had been expected to support CVS' 10-year-old "standard" for tagging, it would be hindered by it.

Finally, the article seems most concerned with preserving file history. This is a much smaller problem than standardization, and involves just two tools. It also isn't necessarily a problem. For instance, in one case I just decided I didn't care about moving history, knowing that I could always bring up the old tool if I wanted to see something (and to this day, I haven't had to use the old tool).
What an incredibly misleading headline based only on circumstantial evidence. First of all, PR2 is not hard to get, you get indexed and you're already halfway to a PR2. It's true that Google has devalued the impact of inbound links recently, but that in no way means that suddenly getting inbound links with good anchortext is worthless. Also, toolbar PR rounds up, so for all you know the PR could have been 1.000001.

In short, don't listen to this guy, and keep getting those inbound links. They can't hurt you, and, from the hundreds of sites I have ran, I know they do help.
Interesting article; I actually thought Kayak received pay per click, leads AND commissions in various forms depending on the airline.

This is a good one too: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/23/mobissimo-has-1223-the-...

Some of Mobissimo's main problems are that their name is forgettable and their home page isn't near as slick as Kayak's.
I'm afraid I don't know anything about haXe; it doesn't matter if it's a superior language if it makes it harder to collaborate with non-haXe Flash developers and to use Adobe tools such as the Flex SDK.
It's an interesting insight into the business models of many Web 2.0 startups- your early beta users will most likely be tech savvy, and thus the least likely to click on your ads. In other words, don't expect to make money from AdSense anytime soon.
i don't think its about hairiness. its about things like legacy code, speed/efficiency, knowledge base, etc..

fortress isn't ready yet, hadoop is java-based (which means slower performance and possible code rewrite), and occam can't jump through the same flaming hoops that C/fotran can (i think -- i'm going on word of mouth). these are all great tools for HPC, but i don't think that they line up with the needs of existing scientific programming. fortress will, though, most likely, once its ready.
People tend to boggle when I decry Lisp as being hopelessly low-level.

Intriguing. I'm not really convinced by your example though. In the spirit of conciseness is power[1], can you provide a short program that should be formally expressible in a good enough language, but isn't concisely in Lisp?

Or maybe your definition of low-level is different from mine?

[1] That's the PG version, of course.
The Strangest Factor Yet for Rising Obesity? Indoor plumbing.
What if that site is hosting your first and only email account?
Flywheels are actually used in some state of the arts yachts to keep the yacht level no matter how the weather is. It is mounted midship in the hull below the waterline and keeps the yacht from rolling. Ferretti uses this system.

Since storing electricity is a problem at sea, and most yachts carry a truckload of batteries maybe there is a business opportunity for some flywheel-hacker...
When you have an accident, what happens to the giant spinning wheel in your car? Does it roll out and down the road?
For convenience:

Christopher S. Putnam said ”unique to flywheel designs is the gyroscopic effect, which causes spinning objects to resist changes to their orientation.

As stated a flywheel resists change in its angular location. In playing with various test apparatuses during the 1970,s & 1980’s, we strove to design and build a “floating” cradle to contain the flywheel. This cradle would in theory keep the flywheel facing in the same direction no matter how the vehicle moved and/or turned. Theory does not always pan out in the real world.

Christopher S. Putnam said ”all of which must be released very quickly if the flywheel breaks apart or falls off its axle.”

We did sufferer various breakdowns, as the flywheel’s mounts would shatter under the extreme forces that such a device operates under. Also we had a casualty when one test apparatus had a minor flaw in structure of that flywheel.

We had powered-up the flywheel and was preparing to test yet another combination of bearings, magnets, and high tensile frame structure. It was giving off a most pleasant thrum and there was hardly any deviation in the floating axis. Suddenly there was a weird sounding pop, and the warning systems came on-line. This shut down the power to the flywheel and engaged the slow-brake to power down the spin. Unfortunately this was too little and too late. The floating axis shifted and sent harmonic vibrations throughout the support structure. With an ear-piercing squeal the highly spinning metal gave off its death cry. The device literally came apart sending shrapnel in a vector perpendicular to the common axis of the flywheel. The safety shield that incased the device did not live up to its design as the debris tore through it like so much tissue paper. Unfortunately there was a fellow standing in front of it when this happened. Like a scene out of some sick horror flick, he was instantly split from crotch to forehead. Considering the amount of damage, it was amazing that we suffered only the one death.

The project was canceled shortly after that.

…as interesting as this article is, I wish that I had not read the damn thing. It brought back bad memories. Memories that are just as vivid as if it just happened. I was standing next to him, and as he fell I tried to catch him…
Cable TV is about $100/month. Let's call it $25/week or $3/day.

Yuppie beans are around $3/pound, so $1/day should do for protein. Carbs in the form of rice or potatoes are cheaper. Veggies and fruit are about the same.

In other words, food can be about as expensive as cable tv.
If he is right, solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells.

A 9-fold improvement is nothing to sneeze at.
I picture a teenager using a Tina Fey as Sarah Palin soundboard to talk to Yahoo Support... "I can see Russia from my house!"
The Economist has lost lots of credibility with this one.

I have lived and run companies in Shanghai for 8 years. The number for China is completely wrong. Firing someone in China is straightforward. There are rules to guard against improper firing, but they are fair and balanced.

The current maximum is 2 years salary and that is under rare conditions. Normally, you pay someone between 2 weeks to 2 months. The new labor laws generally stipulate 1 month pay for each year of service.

This is further negotiated, and generally reduced, by contract with the employee. And that assumes you did not fire them for a "reason" which can be put in contract as well.

You could have a contract saying employees must follow company policy. Company policy, in turn, may say employees must be clean and follow certain dress codes. You break company policy, you get fired, no excessive payout. Its very simple.
Heh, I bet MS is gonna call theirs something with "Silver" in it, and market it like its from a product suite.
I just found my stabilization system + battery storage for my super secret artificial island plan :~)
or seek alternative revenue models.
Sounds like "I'm selfish". Blunder?
Hmmm. Interesting.
this doesn't bother my support for python. i never use these things in quite these ways mentioned, and now if i do, i can just refer to this page ;p but ya know all languages have some weird things going on.
That's not what I've been hearing...
> Business people have shown over and over again that they are just as incompetent and inefficient, if not strikingly more so, than government.

And therefore the combination is more competent/efficient?

It wasn't biz that gave tax breaks to banks to buy Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac stock.

> This is why regulation is vital.

All regulation is vital? Or is some regulation "vital"? And, what are the odds that we'll actually get "good" regulation as opposed to the crappy regulation that we have? (Note that some of the Enron-reform regulation caused some of the current problems. Oops.)
It's common knowledge in the SEO community that the public PR number doesn't correlate with the internal calculated PR number that google uses. It's not that there is a lag, it's just not the same number.

However, yes it's true, that obviously there is much more to ranking for a given search term than just having a lot of PR.

There are mountains of empirical evidence that gaining links from authority sites does in fact give you a better ranking.
Competition Inside Corporations?
TomTom ONE 130 GPS
TomTom ONE 130’s distinctive design puts a full-size touchscreen and the power of GPS in a slim, lightweight device. Switch on and go right out of the box. The crystal-clear display, 3D graphics and turn-by-turn spoken instructions help you find your way to any address in the US and Canada – all with just a few taps of the screen. Foldable EasyPort mount makes it easy to take it with you from car to car.
So - a Test for you Savvy Entrepreneurs
The future is... boring
Nokia N95 8GB UNLOCKED (Free GPS Navigation Serv. For 6 Months)
Nokia N95 8GB Houses Technology comparable to that of a miniature computer. Not that the Nokia N95 8GB 5 Megapixel camera included with The Nokia N95 8GB is by any means a sight for sore eyes, on the contrary.
TED: David S. Rose on pitching to VCs
Time to end gender bias in startup support?
Logic gates implemented in Dwarf Fortress
Mainframe Programming vs. Woonix Programming
Knock, knock, who’s there? | ServiceLive Blog
Google:  Closing Phoenix Campus
New Zealand: Land of Hobbits and Opportunity
The Grim Reaper has visited Digg
Rubyology: Great Interviews with Great Ruby Developers
Django-Registration Tutorial
Look Who's Irrational Now
why is this a new problem? What changed?
Cisco buys instant message company Jabber, to make money from IM
Introducing BackType Alerts
I pick an arbitrary question, and treat the answer like a second password.

eg: what is your pet's name? qw9er8rty
At some point users are responsible for their password info. If it's their only e-mail account, hopefully they use it regularly enough that they don't forget.
The advantages of having an embarrasingly small number of customers
Translation: "It's me."
I kind of agree - I find the particulars of class definitions to be quite unintuitive in Python, compared to other languages.
The second video on his site says that it took him "many months" full time.
"Extraordinary claims, he said, demand extraordinary evidence."

The single worst statement to happen to epistemology. Extraordinary claims require the same type of evidence as ordinary claims.

Ignoring for now the category problem of delineating extraordinary claims from ordinary ones, we find a deeper issue: It seems to be the case that asserting a certain category of truth-value statements require a different level of verification than another category is itself an extraordinary claim. Yet there is no extraordinary evidence that this claim is true. Hence the argument is self-referrentially absurd.
How economics experiments got field workers to pick a lot more strawberries
From DNS' impact on experience to "green" Modular Innovation
Additionally, claiming X doesn't exist and not being able to prove it doesn't make you religious. Common counterexamples being X = invisible pink unicorns or spaghetti monsters.

It's a surprisingly simple concept, considering how few people get it. I wonder whether there's a more effective way to communicate it.
Samsung M3510 Beat Unlocked
The Samsung M3510 also features something called the "BEAT player", Samsung's Digital Natural Sound engine (DNSe), plus an automatic audio equaliser and digital rights management support.
nothing.. it just shows the beginning of a historical record of Buffett repeatedly warning about the danger of derivatives, and the financial world as a whole not listening. This week would be Mr. Buffett's 'I told you so' moment, if he was so inclined.
what a long, rambling ad hominem fallacy.
I'm already a google alerts fiend, so I've been looking forward to these for a while.

Great work guys.
A flywheel-based battery, on the other hand, can reach energy densities 3-4 times higher, at around 100-130 watt-hours per kilogram.

The problem is that the author compares fly-wheels to lead-acid batteries. Lithium-ion batteries can easily achieve 150-200Wh/kg beating flywheels. Plus, there are huge advances being made in chemical batteries such as those made by A123 Systems.
That, and:

http://www.theangrydrunk.com/2008/09/19/im-microsoft-and-i-d...

Microsoft is digging itself into a hole, 'twould seem.
I read a tip, I don't remember where anymore sadly, about taking a key word from the question, adding some password-like string to it and calling that your answer.

So: "What is your pet's name?" n0tm4hp4s5w3rd-pets-name
and: "What street did you grow up on?" n0tm4hp4s5w3rd-street

You still have to remember an arbitrary string, it is SLIGHTLY more accessible than mashing randomly, and certainly more secure than putting the real answer.
The new ads by Microsoft are good.

What will be better is how Apple will respond to the ads.
No backstory? How am I supposed to feel about this? I have no idea who these 90 were. Is Digg banning IP's or are these people allowed to just create another account.
Surf Jack - Cookie Session Stealing Tool
Very interesting, although I take some issue with the thought that gasoline is more dangerous than a fly wheel. Different dangers perhaps. In spite of what the movies say, the energy in a gas tank can't be expended instantly in the explosive way a disc can come apart.
When I met him a month ago, he was still working full time. Perhaps I misunderstood him.

I think he had worked 4 months on the app during evenings and weekends, and his first iteration (in time for GDC I think) took about 2 weeks.
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

– Albert Einstein
It was for using Greasemonkey scripts to aid in digging and shouting stories.
It's interesting that they bought Jabber Inc. and not Process One.
Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School
The Politics And The Connection To Fear
He spent time on CNBC a few years ago talking about the exact same thing with Maria Bartiromo.
I have a dream. It is a dream that one day EULA will be written in a plain language.
It's not exactly fair to call John Gruber a "Mac fanboy" and dismiss him at that. He's got a point with his postings: Microsoft touted Seinfeld for a LONG time and then dropped him after two weeks. They announced this not from the ad firm they hired but from their PR department, which is indicative of the fact that this wasn't a decision straight from the firm. That all leads to the conclusion that Microsoft is slightly panicking. Considering how adamant Gruber is AGAINST things that Apple does that he DOESN'T like, I think it's fair to say that he has a reputation for being fair-minded. And, you know, if a ton of fair-minded people like one product (Apple), perhaps there's a logic behind their liking it. You never know. It's possible. ;-)

As for your saying that this is good because it can't be understood: I'm going to call BS. Being deliberately vague never works for anybody. The ads WERE understandable (hey, guys, Bill Gates is pretty cool, and we're not a faceless empire!), so your point doesn't quite work, but things that you can't understand are either things you can LEARN to understand or they're poorly done. Simple as that.
This podcast from NPR's Fresh Air is also a good overview of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and AIG bailout:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9468642...

There is also a link to a "Our Confusing Economy Explained" which is a good introduction to the financial "weapons of mass destruction".
For what it's worth, I worked in television while in college, running the tape machines, and various behind the scenes stuff. From the perspective of TV stations, a new spot can definitely go online within 24 hours (usually less). The actual time is generally already bought and paid for months in advance...but there's always time available for the right price. Anytime you see an ad for a show or movie or event for the station itself (e.g. "Watch Friends every day at 6 and 8 PM"), that is a spot that is for sale, for the right price, until the day the spot runs.

Here's how it worked from a technical perspective ten, or so, years ago, when I worked in the industry:

Ads come in automatically via satellite twice per day, in big batches of 20-40 spots. They are automatically recorded onto a single tape (a computer was put online for this a few weeks before I left the station--it was a different ad distribution company, I believe, and so only a few ads were running off of this system, so I'm not deeply familiar with it, but it was fully automated, with no human intervention required to go from ad network to air). The single tape was then processed by a tape operator (me) onto individual tapes, and labeled with a barcode, for use in the master control automated tape loader. Turnaround time was usually an hour or two from the usual spot feed, and the spots were usually airing by the next day.

When an ad had a mistake, a special feed would be scheduled...sometimes within hours of the mistake being found and the ad producer being notified. A new version of the ad could definitely be online the same day. With the automated computer system, I suspect it could be replaced in minutes.

However, spot production is a somewhat different story. Depending on the size of the production, it could take weeks to schedule all of the pieces to fall into place. That said, with enough money and enough muscle (which Microsoft has in spades), a large scale production could be done in days or even hours.

To put things further into perspective, the station I worked for (WB 39 in Houston) also had a production division, and would occasionally make spots practically in real-time for local advertisers to tie into ongoing events like Rockets games. Adding running commentary of the game to spots, by the usual spokesperson for the company (like Mattress Mac), was a reasonably common practice. If Microsoft really wanted to change directions fast, they could do it. It'd cost them two or three times as much (if they were a normal customer...though their agency may have eaten some of the cost just to keep MS happy through these trying times and the perceived disaster that is the spots they'd already produced), and the agency would have to re-schedule other customers productions (or pay lots of overtime), but it could definitely be done.
(Of course, it's always possible that the person who did this was stunningly dumb about it.)
I think the level of greed in this country changed. While we may have been greedy before, banks and other financial institutions thought that the profits from structured products would never end. Sadly, not only has the market for these items run out, those that are still in the system almost brought it down.

Many people are excited about the government's recent announcements concerning their plan to take these products out of the public system, but my gut says that we still have more trouble coming. It may not specifically be another failure, but the events of the last year and a half (and specifically the last six months) have not fully run their full course through the markets, i.e., we will still see a recession.
I'm a happy customer of A4 and CB, and I'd love to spend $10-20 on more games of that caliber.
Cheaper plans, better coverage (in Chicago suburbs), friendlier salespeople, better contract terms, lower cancellation fee, etc.
"Opinions seem to be wide-ranging, and of course your day wouldn’t be complete unless you heard mine. "

HAHAHA
Favtape Relaunches As Muxtape On Steroids
I disagree, the whole point of the statement is that ordinary claims don't require verifiable evidence because they're ordinary and we expect them to happen.

If I say it rained yesterday, my word is evidence enough to satisfy most inquires about the weather. If I say it rained and God reached down and protected me with his hand, well, I better have some serious evidence if I expect anyone with a rational mind to believe a word I'm saying.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence is a well known and well accepted self evident fact.
There's a good book "Purely Functional Data Structures" by Chris Okaseki that deals with these issues.
http://thebuilderblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/az-island/
This just in...

Apple has changed their advertising strategy: Justin Long is now going to call himself Safari and John Hodgman will be referring to himself as Internet Explorer.
Tagged fighting_fire_with_fire
Star Simpson's first interview on the Boston airport LED sweatshirt scare