skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, I think even this article is a little to rosy on Sun's prospects. On the software side, they've basically ceded the high performance server world to linux. Tools like dtrace and zfs, while nice, aren't really dealmakers to normal people, and let's be honest: those are really Solaris's only competitive advantages against RHEL or Ubuntu.

And in hardware, they've bet the farm on Niagra which, contra the hopeful quotes in the article, really isn't all that great a CPU. It's two process nodes behind Intel (and one and a half behind AMD), and it's a largely unchanged core from the late 90's that doesn't scale beyond 1 GHz or so. The power efficiency point is valid, but only for some workloads (highly parallel servers, basically), and only by a tiny bit. Newer quad-core Xeon's are nipping at Sun's heels as we speak, and have vastly better per-core performance.
I think it could have been a success, but I do wonder how much a one-off product like this can really make. There is money in novelty items, but I think the only ones making real money there are people who already have distribution and willing markets.
Actually I think the article sums everything up that was wrong at the end:

"I learned that a markup of 150 percent doesn't mean much when you're only making 75 cents per item."

And of course the final nail in the coffin:

"These are hilarious. You gonna give these to us? I bet you could sell thousands of them."
Actually I think that Seth routinely misses the point.

He's a great marketeer, but he's not a product manager anymore than a usability specialist.
I read that as "If you need the survival of the platform vendor to ship an app, then it isn't a platform".

Which in a bizarre way is also true I guess.
You forgot reason 6:

* iPhone has a tiny market share across 2 devices and requires you to learn an entirely new development, deployment and management environment compared to Symbian, Blackberry or Windows Mobile.
Er, did you read the article?
Maybe I missed the point, but this article doesn't explicitly say 'social features'. It simply says that the firefox community is bettered by more people using it. Granted social features are the first that come time mind, but I can imagine some others.

* A standard platform for whatever plugins you like
* Aggregated usage data
Bonus points to anyone who can come up with a reason to ditch either Google Talk for domains or Windows Live Communication Server to use this instead...

... anyone?
Oh, I know. My erstwhile startup seemed like a hot area when we began it a year and a half ago, and people in our target market said "Thank God" when I said what I was building. Now, nobody seems to care, and none of our competitors took off either.

I'm saying that even under his best assumptions about the market, his product was not profitable. He ended up getting customers after all, but even under generous volume and gross margins, it couldn't cover overhead.
I'm in the same boat. And the number one annoyance is that it's not keystroke compatible. I have the standard editting keys in my fingers for loading files (C-x C-f C-a C-k pathprefix TAB path TAB etc..). That stuff breaks with ido and I get stalled and have to compose myself and figure out what I'm doing.

Wouldn't it have been possible to preserve both the classic editability of the path string and have fuzzy matching?
So, Firefox needs to add functionality that makes the surfing experience better for all users when more users use Firefox.

Totally. I have a couple ideas. One is to improve the Javascript library so that richer and more responsive applications can be written.

Another would be to pull the rendering components into their own processes so that I don't lose N tabs of state when one plugin decides to lose its mind. Getting a multiple-core performance boost would be gravy here, too.

Firefox got pretty good mileage out of being just a browser. URL in, rendered page out. Chrome stands to do the same thing to Firefox that Firefox did to IE, in that it represents a clean, simple, technically enhanced browser.

Google has come out and said "here is some stuff, please just copy it and put it in yours", and they'd be walking a really fine antitrust line for dubious benefit if they actually did have a large market share.

But the response to Chrome shouldn't be to launch new features.

I'm assuming this doesn't mean "add no features at all" because the rest of his article would make no sense in that context. I can only imagine that it means "the FF team's response to Chrome shouldn't be back end, technical features". (Sorry if I've built a straw man here, but I really can't figure out what else this could mean in this context.)

Why does nobody take the Chrome release and comic at face value? What causes this idiocy in the echo chamber saying GOOGLE is the NEW MICROSOFT, it's BROWSER WAR! Don't copy the FAST JAVASCRIPT it's a TRAP! Deploy TAG CLOUDS!

I'm completely mystified and would love to have someone explain this to me.
Spore is about evolution. Or is it?
You're over simplifying things. It's often not easy to determine what people want, because often people cannot say. For example, an iPod.

For example now, you have gotten stuck on this idea of condom cases. I personally don't want anything near to that. BUT, if the design were really interesting, I may want it. So you can't research if I want that, because even if you asked me, the answer I would give would be ambiguous.

Business School people come out with this idea that you can find out what people want before you have a product on that market. You can't! What you can do is identify a PAIN and fix it. You can identify something to be OPTIMIZED and fix that. If your product does not clearly fit any of those two categories, then all you can do is GUESS that people want it, then throw it at the market and move with the market to take the product in the correct direction.

It's easy for you to say condom cases are wanted after reading the article, but a condom keychain or case does not solve any specific pain. It's somewhat convenient thing, but I can easily live without it. It can work in the market, but it may not work.

The correct approach to this type business is to guess the best possible product that could sell in the market. Then put it in the market, and the market will tell you what it really wants. Then you modify to fit the market. But you have to factor this process into your finances, and you have to factor the risk factor in. The more unclear your market is, the greater your risk factor, and your finances have to be large enough to accomodate this risk. This was not true for the guys case above.

You are running with the wrong attitude if you think you can get things right all the time on one shot if you do proper research. It can happen, but most businesses will refocus after being on the market, and there are many many business who did the research, but didn't get it right. They failed and you never hear about them.
Seth's Blog: If there's a point here, you will miss it.

Anyone care to explain what on hell he was arguing for?
Computer Poker Research
So he knowingly sold and gave away condoms even after learning they were defective and had been exposed to air? What a douchebag. Why is this guy not in jail?
This is exactly the type of person I am trying to be.
N.B. From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.
Maybe it's just me and the people I know, but the real value of firefox - other than the obvious advantages over IE - is the plugin functionality.

So when Google Chrome came out, I immediately thought of it as a IE killer - not a Firefox killer. I'm almost scared for them to start providing plugin support/features/etc as it could just end up being Firefox.

Have you ever blogged about Halo's Law?
Yeah, kind of like the "find the right denominator" (oversimplified) discussion in Good to Great. If he could have optimized on profit per keychain, he'd be in great shape.

Of course, that's much easier said than done.
Just out of curiosity: How many people on hn code in some dialect of lisp and not use emacs for it? Seems relevant considering the topic.
More than anything, I respect awareness. I respect people who are self-aware, and cognizant of the world around them. I respect people who appreciate themselves and other people and the universe around them as the mystery they are, yet who still try to make inroads of understanding.

Compared to awareness, creativity, determination, and integrity, awareness stands alone.
I think they were a novelty item and not intended to actually be used.
Isn't that a harmful effect of humbleness? Less teaching happens!

I can tell you, most of what my parents and teachers and mentors and peers and students have taught me was completely unsolicited. I didn't know they had something to teach me. But I sure am glad to have their wisdom with me now. Even in the dim light of memory, I've had things people taught me decades ago finally flower to utility in recent years.
Once a year or so, I look up the picture of that online and ponder. It brings a tear to my eye.
and light doesn't travel in a straight line (it radiates in all directions)

I only found about that one recently
At least one, considering that PG wrote he used vi.

Apart from that, I think an 'easy' editor would help beginners. I you know neither Emacs nor Lisp, Emacs is quite a tough beast.
Mainstream Discovers Mobile Video- Early Adopters Sell Their Nokia's En Masse
My Early Christmas Wish List | Betty's Big Bad Blog
You're right the end made the article. Some articles posted on HN I have trouble getting through the entire thing - glad I did on this one.
Now the important question is...is that the fault of FORTH, or the fault of the developer? Are the developers novices who cannot handle the POWER of FORTH?!?!
LinkedIn To Launch Its Own Ad Network
At one point in the interview Dean says that's he's naive. That's a great thing since anybody else would write what he's accomplished off as impossible without even trying.

Not to take anything away from his work on the arm but I find his comments on the US's education system and our cultural values from the last two videos the most interesting.
One Less Newspaper Subscription
Same here - I only use FF b/c of the add-ins. After that, all browsers are equally suck in my book. Chrome was fast therefore I like it. It doesn't have add-ins so it loses to FF.
This excerpt was awesome. Thanks for posting.
Yeah, $25k may seem high, and probably varies a lot on location. $25k is what I would recommend if someone was in the early stages of a business case.

$600 is really only a day or two's work for a professional developer. Depending on where you're at, you could spend double that just nutting out the exact requirements.

That said, as my first line was trying to allude to - it's horses for courses. You can go a lot cheaper, or a lot more expensive depending on what you're after.

If you have the right contacts, and you want something whipped up, $1-2k might be more than enough.
I thought his biggest mistake was thinking that he can sell millions of these keychains with ease. Since the only people capable of buying those volumes are the big retail chains and not those small mom-n-pop stores, he should have gauged the potential response from these retail chains prior to importing the key chains.

I would think that it would be obvious to the laymen that such a product would appeal only to the small novelty shops, so there is a ceiling to how much you can scale this business.
I've checked out Newscred before. As a journalist, I'm always interested in new news sites (working on one myself). While I'm very skeptical that newscred ratings actually represent what you say they represent, I'm all in favor of you giving it a shot and seeing where it leads..

One question, though: How are you dealing with copyright issues? For instance, this article featured on your front page appears to be a complete lift of a Gizmodo article, photo and all.

http://newscred.com/article/show/title/iowa-state-researcher...

What's your policy on that? Are you hoping to sneak under the radar? Are you only lifting stories from people who publish full feeds?
CAD program using GUI, procedural programming and inheritance - from 1963,
Entrepreneurs Under 30
That's an interesting point you bring up. There is nothing wrong with people giving you advice, but there is a fine line between people telling stuff because they want to show how much they know, and peope telling you stuff because they care for you and want you to progress in life.
There is a difference between "handwriting" and "writing" and it is certainly true that there is an overemphasis on handwriting - to the severe detriment of writing skills.

Being able "to write" (as in, put thoughts and ideas together as words) is much more important than being able to write (as in handwriting), yet schools do tend to focus significantly on the latter.

It's important to know how to write by hand, but it should not be considered even vaguely superior to the art of communicating or "writing".
here is the wikipedia page for the program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

Truly impressive and lightyears ahead of its time.
The Day I Woke Up Without Arms And Legs. (Morten Lund)
Why Arrignton doesn't talk about alternatives to the iPhone? 12 million iPhones? ok.

How many Symbian powered mobiles there are? how many WindowsMobile powered smartphones there are? how many Android devices there will be in a year?
This is the situation vesting was made for. Four years vesting, one year cliff, if they don't work out you fire them. Even a cofounder.
I am finishing a course called "Business Admin. - Entrepreneurial & Small Business Management" and I still feel that the majority of the classes are corporate focused, especially marketing. Almost everything they teach is in the context of a mature and competitive market. We never hear about entering new markets.
coooooooooooool
I think a lot of posters are missing the fact that the author is complaining about cursive writing, not printing. Of course kids need to learn to print. But the result doesn't need to be beautiful, flowing, and elegant; it just needs to be legible. Let's spend our time making the letters that they write useful, not beautiful.

When I was in elementary school, I routinely lost points on assignments because I chose to print instead of writing in cursive. (I also lost points for using a pencil instead of pen. Apparently I should correct my errors by rewriting an entire essay, not by erasing. What the fuck!?)

Even at the age of 7, I considered this silly and realized that the public school system was a waste. I was right.
I write something maybe once a year. Maybe once a week I have to sign something. Sure it's a useful thing to be able to do, like speaking a foreign language, but it's no longer a necessity in many working lives.

Teaching typing to kids would be far more useful once they can write well enough to get by. Spending ages on getting lovely neat joined up writing seems a bit of a waste these days.
Google doesn't care that you use gears or not. They want you to use the internet to get to it. If your on the internet chances are your seeing their ads.
loved this line "You're not in business until somebody sues you."... surprised no one commented on this yet.
A lot of the commenters here have brought up that you need handwriting in order to take notes, and that putting pen to paper has some meditative qualities that help flesh out ideas. I agree with both points, but neither one is a rational justification for requiring penmanship of students.

I still take notes with pen and paper quite regularly. I can read my own chickenscratch just fine, even if no one else can. Who cares? In fact, while in college, I developed a sort of hyper-condensed personal shorthand, to the point that my notes are basically a code that only I'm fluent in. That was key, because it let me spend more time listening to the lecture and less time drawing fonts. To paraphrase pg, "terseness is what written language is FOR" ;)

If anyone else has to read it, then you type it. Most of my teachers in high school and college required papers to be typed anyhow, and this is becoming much more common. It's only in elementary schools that we subject children to emotional abuse for their lack of calligraphy skills.

As for the meditative qualities of putting pen to paper, that's still not an argument for requiring penmanship. Most of my "fleshing out ideas" writing looks more like a flowchart anyhow, usually with plenty of the aforementioned chickenscratch shorthand all over it.

I don't wish I wrote less clearly. And I can write just fine if I do it slowly. It's just that my penmanship is almost entirely a purely personal activity, so as long as I can read it, there's no problem. We should teach kids to type fluently, think clearly, and draw script that they can read.
I've actually found myself using both or either depending on the task and the computer I have.
Facebook Application Verification Program
The sad reality is that Windows Mobile is the most open readily-available phone platform right now.

OpenMoko is nice (and I own a Neo), but for some reason they decided to write all the applications in C. This makes developing for it a real pain in the ass. Do I really want to set up a cross compiler and emulator just to change a few lines of code? No, and that's why I haven't. :)

Maybe I will write a CL-based "desktop" for mobile phones some time in the future.
Can you quit spamming this comment to every thread that mentions the iPhone?

(See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303708 for example.)

It is especially annoying because your use of code formatting for text stretches the page and makes the other comments unreadable.
think about using the consoleFISH on www.serfish.com
Official Google Blog: The social web: All about the small stuff
Wow... that's incredibly awful advice.
I was just joking last night how a startup or business "launching it's own ad network" has become the new "launching, becoming or integrating a social network."

Not sure what happens if a social network launches its own ad network. Apocalypse? Dead pool?
Get a Windows Mobile phone then. I routinely use Skype from mine.
Nobody under the age of 25 has any trouble learning how to type.

Hmm, I don't know about you, but about 4-5 years ago when I learned to type it was pretty difficult. It took me a year school classes to get up to 40 wpm.

And recently I started re-learning how to type - using Colemak. But it's significantly easier, since I already have the finger dexterity. Either way, I think that your exaggeration is slightly too much. For younger kids, learning to type isn't as easy as you seem to think it is. (And most of the people I know now only type at 50, maybe 60 wpm - had they been taught earlier and with more emphasis, they might be typing at 100 or 120.)
So, you need to be able to write with a pen so that you can read it.

I can read my handwriting just fine. And, my chickenscratch is easier to write at a higher speed, so my ideas are less choked.

It makes sense to teach the arts. But requiring traditional penmanship as a measure of writing ability is absurd.
I value FSF opinion, but +1 on the code formatting issue.
well, in RockYou's case, you could get around Facebook's privacy settings, which is seriously not cool. Imagine the outcry of Facebook's initial newsfeed, and multiply it by 10, and you'll find that shutting down RockYou was a good choice.

Its really about the platform owner's stance and what's at stake - for Facebook's TOS, breaking it means that Facebook could be sued for privacy issues, etc. Its ironic because Facebook has more sensitive information to protect than the iPhone, but is overall a more open platform.
Next up: adsense/adwords will have a social network built around it.
I have been thinking about this problem a lot recently and I think I might have a solution. Dissatisfaction with the state of social news sites seems almost universal, digg has almost unspeakably low quality, and reddit is slowly bleeding to death, and we all know that Hacker News has not been immune to the same disease of "lowest-common-denominator-ism." There must be a solution, certainly there's enough data sitting around on all the various services that meaningful inferences about user preferences can be drawn!

Enter my idea: http://con.nect.us/. It's currently under development (it's my senior project at my university) and will be finished by December. My advisor is Tim Davis (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~davis/), the brilliant man who wrote many of MATLAB's sparse matrix libraries, so I have an excellent mind to tap to help me solve my linear algebra problems.

It goes like this: con.nect.us will track user activity across many different websites, linking your username on reddit or digg or wherever with your account on con.nect.us, as well as take submissions for news itself. It then analyzes what people like and how people are similar to each other and recommend new content accordingly. Hopefully this will help us avoid the curse of the least-common-denominator and start to experience the web better.

If you want to be informed of future developments, there's an email submission form on http://con.nect.us/

Also, the name isn't finalized, so if you think you have a better one, please send it my way.
This is excellent! The config couldn't be any easier to understand. Fonts work right out of the box. Personally I would like some GUI tabs and a package/code/file hierarchy thing but then it might stop being a 'basic' Lisp editor.

Well done Phil Armitage!
Aren't you blowing this out of proportions? As far as I remember, handwriting was a part of the first year of elementary school, along with learning to read. It's not like pupils have to spend endless hours on it, year after year.

Where I went to school (Germany), there was a mark for "good handwriting" throughout grammar school, but it did not have any significance (no bearing on you being eligible to go to a higher school). It was meant to encourage you to be tidy. I always had the worst possible mark in that "subject" - whatever. I also don't think there were any further courses on handwriting. It is useful, though, if teachers try to teach you some good habits for keeping notes (like the girls all using a ruler to underline stuff...).
David Foster Wallace. Dead at 46.
I just found this after trying to post the same link. I know it's not a hacking topic, but I figure more than a few people here are fans of his.
I hope that the next time your doctor writes a prescription for you, he doesn't think that good handwriting is extremely overvalued.
Wow, that's really dissapointing to hear, that you have to get approval for an app before you can even test it on your own phone.

Do you get the impression that this is actually a stage for them to keep out what they consider bad products or is it just a bandwith problem with their approval process?
A genius with the video editing suite, no doubt.
I should have learned Emacs at University, but they stopped teaching it the year before I arrived. And it's too much of a learning curve to learn it on my own.
Sorry, but this is inane. Just because your son sucks at writing doesn't mean that the pen is obsolete.

Paper isn't going anywhere. It's still the simplest, cheapest, and most robust of recording information on the fly, and nothing on the horizon is going to change that; Legible writing will continue to be useful for the forseeable future, even if it isn't used for long manuscripts anymore.

I agree that the emphasis on pretty curisve forms isn't that important -- hell, I've almost forgotten how -- but legible writing is still very important.
AI Related Ruby Extensions