skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Making a pretty and usable phone is a lot more difficult than it looks. There's a reason the iPod still has arguably the easiest and least complicated interface for a media player even after its rivals spent millions on design and UI research in order to try and compete.

I have great hopes for the Android platform, but Google faces the same problem Windows Mobile has always had, which is that it's difficult to innovate and produce a seamless user experience when the people doing the hardware and those doing the software are not closely linked. Neither side has enough control over the other's choices to do the things they really want to do.

Apple's big strength with the iPhone is that they build the entire stack. You shouldn't underestimate that.
Actually they apparently use Java for the noise
Do five simple things a day to stay sane
Video: Watch Heroes Season 3 Episode 7(s03e07)
Partially true; because even before the software boom, most techies aimed at working in a foreign country (like the US) where they would be much more well-payed.
Blenders explode FAIL all over the kitchen
Gandi is by far my favorite registrar. I started moving my domains away from GoDaddy to Gandi after CNET did interviews with several registrars to find out which were the most friendly to free speech: http://www.news.com/2100-1025_3-6155614.html
It is available; can be turned on from Settigns | Labs.
Review: Photo Hunter (iPhone/iPod Touch game)
Please review the latest game my partner and I developed for the iPhone.

We’ve also uploaded a video to YouTube with a simple walkthrough of the game located at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0duLzHe9aMM
From my experience, while working on a software development team and replying all the time to questions from testers, business owners, managers, etc., I think I would sum it up like wheels did: as soon as possible, even if you don't know the answer. People will appreciate the consideration.

There are cases when may not have the time to reply immediately to all questions (e.g. small team). In that situation common sense will tell you which ones are more pressing, I guess.

Going a little off topic, one thing I've been noticing that works pretty well (especially in agile environments), if you can afford it time-wise of course, is to have one person exclusively dedicated to support for a week. Then rotate to another person next week. That will both keep the requesters happy to get answers on time, but also the repliers, who can fully focus on other things when they are not "support person of the week".
How Japan learnt how to stop worrying and love the recession
From Wikipedia:

"László Polgár (born 1946) is a Hungarian chess teacher and father of the famous "Polgár sisters": Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsófia (Sofia), and Judit. He authored well-known chess books such as Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games and Reform Chess, a survey of chess variants.

Although he himself is a modest chess player, Polgár is an expert on chess theory, owning over 10,000 books about chess. He is interested in the proper method of rearing children, believing that "geniuses are made, not born". Before he had any children, he wrote a book entitled Bring Up Genius!, and asked for a wife who would help him carry out the experiment. He found one in Klara, a schoolteacher, who lived in a Hungarian speaking enclave in the Ukraine. He married her in the USSR and brought her to Hungary. They have three daughters. He homeschooled his three daughters, primarily in chess, and all three went on to become strong players. An early result was Susan winning the Budapest Chess Championship for girls under 11 at the age of four"
In my business, which involves $600 software, I reply within 30 minutes. Many deals are lost because you delay in replying emails.
I totally disagree. I don't see the point in stopping to write web log entries just because twitter or facebook exist. I do not write on my web log in search of some form of hype. The reason I do write on it, is to serve two purposes: To keep track of stuff that I know I will eventually forget (and it will be extra fun to re-read it later :)), and to communicate some form of information to my friends and family.

Maybe, now that I think of it, it might be more interesting to start storing carrier pigeons or messages inside bottles, hmmmm...
Hi Felix,
Unfortunately, the software we are hosting is not our own. We prefer to use open source solutions, however the software we need to host runs on Windows Only. Its .NET and Delphi I think. So we just need general Windows hosting.
Thanks for your response.
Mark
And many can be gained.

It's amazing how many potential customers use e-mails as a sort of "test" to see whether they'll go with you or not. Striking these while the iron's hot can almost guarantee dollars in the pocket a month later.
The Apple-RIM Wars Officially Begins
In defense of freemium
Another solution I found to the Time/Quality/Cost paradox is to refuse it entirely.

Step out of the world-view that these are interchangeable at all. They are not. The mythical man-month has already shown that extra money won't make your software ship sooner if it's already late.

Time, quality and cost are related, but not directly. They are all functions of your team. A small team of expert hackers working in a smooth, tight process will deliver software quickly, of a high quality, and at a low cost. Take Github for example - 2-3 people who delivered world-class quality software in a few months, while holding down full-time jobs.

Conversely, a "bad" team or bad processes will deliver low quality that's inordinately expensive, and late - all quite consistently.

The solution, as always, is to get good people. Not many of them, and they don't have to be expensive, but they have to be good.
I don't know who Reflexive are, but that's one of the ugliest modern websites I've ever seen.
Where to get canvas prints?
Are you bored of regular photo prints and need something different to make your life a little more exciting? With the advent of digital cameras, it does not require a professional photographer to take high quality pictures. Most of the features come as inbuilt functions allowing anyone to take superior quality photos. With digital photography becoming easier for everyone, photos have taken on a new face in the form of Canvas Printing.
Every Man a Derrida: A nation on the verge of self-deconstructing
Just responding to every email (except form letters) we've ever gotten asap has gotten us countless buyers, blog write ups and press.
A dropout can beat a genius through hard-work and determination. -Naruto
Yes. Once you start emailing with a potential customer, the success rate is about 70%. The effort is certainly worth it.
more reviews here http://app-store.appspot.com/?url=viewSoftware%3Fid%3D293743...
Its first LUNAR PROBE would be a clearer headline. India is far from a manned mission.
Hands-on Hadoop for cluster computing
Analyst sees costly Apple items out of reach
Every Man a Derrida

And we thought the recent headlines about an impending depression were alarming.
I think this is a great step for India. It is great to watch India develop. Maybe this will create greater competition, and enhance every nations space efforts.
Yahoo firing 1,500 workers; 3Q profit falls 64 pct
For your Linux servers you might try SliceHost: http://www.slicehost.com/

Note: I have not used them, but will probably use them in the near future for an enterprise I have in mind. You can probably call them and ask for references, or cull references from their blog: http://www.slicehost.com/blog/
Exactly my feeling while reading this. There's not even the slightest justification or argument for his declarations. Great claims require great evidence. He may be right, but we have no way of even beginning to examine the correctness of his arguments, since he didn't present any arguments.
Ignoring Downturns Is Unhealthy And Dangerous
40 % of Apple's revenue is now coming from the iPhone, and iPod revenue is still increasing but not by leaps and bounds. A short-sighted analysis by someone who makes a decision by price alone.

1) Brand loyalty - Mac users consistently keep buying macs
2) Apple is no longer just a computer company
Does anyone here seriously work like that?

Sure, why not? I create a branch for nearly every series of edits (aside from tyop-fixing bugfixes) that I do, usually to fix a bigger bug or to create a new feature. If it works out, great: I merge it into the master. If it turns out to be a dead end, or is taking too long, I can delete the branch, or just put it aside with the intention of rebasing it later.

...but I don't think branching too much is particularly healthy.

Again, why not? Ignoring for the moment problems which are social at their root and not a dvcs' fault, most likely either you're creating lots of dead ends in those branches, which isn't such a bad thing because it also means that you're also trying out lots of ideas and exploring the problem space; or you're merging those branches, so you're doing good work and getting it integrated into the project.
As my old basketball coach liked to say, "You can't teach tall."

We each have different innate limits that no level of "deliberate practice" can overcome. Yes, the power of sheer will can do amazing things, but our genetics still limit us. Lion DNA differs from human DNA by less than 10%, but no amount of training could ever allow a human to close the gap created by genetics and leap or run as quickly as a lion.
I think their only value is blame shifting. If you can even call that value.
The failure of startup companies is real news, but I wish there were more focus on the reasons behind the failure. Most coverage I read comes across as mockery, as to suggest that the concept or group could never have succeeded in the first place. Perhaps that is often the case, but it teaches others little. Real investigation into the failure would be both entertaining and edifying.
Why Would a Software Geek Make a Physical Product?
A Look at Google's Newest Data Center
Outsourcing - Odesk Experiences vs. Elance
If our team is going to be away for a few hours, we usually do have a laptop on hand. Otherwise, we just do it through our phones (which is slow and painful), or ask another team member to cover for a few hours.

Side note to parent comment -- we do offer the same support to free and paid plans right now.
I agree completely - the concept is powerful. If the task before you is large enough, at some point you let go of self doubt and perfectionism and start generating content. I really enjoy NaNoWriMo and I am looking forward to this years run.
Sounds like par for the course for Techcrunch.

It is still important that people know about it in some capacity, so I have to agree with the article. For every Facebook, there are a hundred failed startups, and not reporting these failures is just going to delude people.
The point here is not whether India is developed or not. Nobody in India realistically expects India to become a "developed nation" for another 30 years. The point here is progress... Going to the moon wasn't even thought of 10 years ago...
As others have mentioned already in this thread, the git-svn bridge works very well. You can adopt git and get a bunch of its features (local repository mirrors and multiple local branches) while still working atop your SVN repository. You give up some things (you can't really do cross-repository merges with git-svn -- when you want to communicate with your peers you have to do it via the SVN repo) but it is still great. It's not worth waiting another five years for the extra features. ;)

I've found that the CVS-to-git workflow is a bit more annoying. You can import CVS repos into git, but you can't really push anything back without using patches.
I would rephrase it as - "geniuses are born and can be made"

http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2007/02/geniuses-are-made-no...
Ok, fine... can I downmod the line in the movie instead of your comment?
I switched from GoDaddy to Namecheap and haven't looked back. Domains under $10/ea (less with their frequent coupon codes) and a clean ad-free admin console. Highly recommend Namecheap.
New for GMail: Canned Responses
Same here... I work on the train during my morning/evening commute to the office. Being able to commit and branch offline is a major win.
I wonder the same. I myself would so much love to be at ISRO/DRDO. They have tons of other facilities to match the high pay at software companies.

I wish they had better ways of recruiting people with merit and passion. They are full of either Brahmins or SC/ST and people who are recruited through references.
10 reasons to grow a giant beard
How long did it take you to program that? Is it in cocoa?
You're right that the UK does need to end the surveillance culture. But to say we need another leader "like Thatcher" is way off the mark, given that the surveillance culture and erosion of civil liberties started under her (and accelerated under Major, Blair, and Brown).
I use joker.com. Have for many many years. No complaints.
Never argue with an idiot. They will only drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Insane "underwater" startup.
I'm a reseller at opensrs. It works out very well for what I need.
Become your own Registrar, and buy the domains wholesale for $10/year.

http://resellers.tucows.com/opensrs/

/I use GoDaddy
Real investigation into the failure would be both entertaining and edifying.

Sure, but as they say: Success has a thousand fathers, failure is a motherless child.

It's very hard to get a good, real-time post-mortem on a startup. One reason is that, oftentimes, failure is a big amorphous mess. If all the employees agreed on what the problem was, they might have been able to do something about it before it killed the company. :)

(By contrast, it's easy to explain a successful company's success: Just look at where the money is coming from.)

Moreover, it's in nobody's best interest to call attention to their own bad decisions, and it's even less wise to poke fun at the bad decisions of your coworkers, who may be a vital part of the personal network that will keep you alive after the startup explodes.

The entire point of this Techcrunch article is that doing post-mortem work on a startup is a thankless task. No matter what you say, you will be treated like an assassin. Look closely at your complaint:

Most coverage I read comes across as mockery, as to suggest that the concept or group could never have succeeded in the first place.

You call that "mockery", but isn't that the polite alternative? What else can the coverage say? That the concept was sound, but that the founders made a bunch of boneheaded mistakes in execution?
I use http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/.

They bill 8.59 for a top level US domain renewal or registration.

Their service is good for anyone that understands DNS - they let you directly edit your DNS records.
Live Mesh - Meets Open Standards, Supports Apple
a good run through of the arguments is here: http://www.no-spec.com/

some of the arguments for and against can be found in the comments of this post on signal vs. noise by crowdspring
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1253-the-nospec-campaign-...
I'm calling it right here and right now.

Within 5 years Apple is going to release a netbook that will be less than $300, they are going to be able to do this because the netbook is going to be powered off the iPhone.
This will be good.

I'm really looking forward to the day that IE6/7 doesn't need to be supported anymore.
About time. Maybe now a lot of people will stop using tables to define the site layout :)

I know it can be a pain to style a website with divs, but putting presentation inside HTML is definitely worse.
Unfortunately it's the combination of new technologies and existing attitudes that are the problem. For example, if you ask the average politician what's an acceptable level of crime, he'll say "none". The average member of the public will say the same. But the only way to achieve this is with omnipresent surveillance. Every electronic conversation will be monitored, there'll be a surveillance camera on every street corner (there's already 1 for every 15 people), people's movements will be tracked using their mobile phone. All cars will have tracker devices, ostensibly for road pricing, but all movements will be logged. Everyone will be forced to carry an RFID-enabled ID card.

All this technology will be sold to the public as protection against terrorists and pedophiles, but will eventually be used against everyone. (For example, local councils have used terrorist legislation to snoop on householders who have allegedly not been putting their rubbish out correctly.)

If it becomes possible to use brain scanners to read people's minds, this will be done too. To start with, to check for terrorists, but later to enforce conformity of thought on the entire population -- for their own good of course. For example, it's illegal not to employ someonre because of their race. Fair enough, you might say. But if a small business owner is a racist they can easily get around this by not employing people they don't want to (they have to be careful not to tell them it's for racial reasons, of course). Now a well-meaning but dim person could suggest that we check that someone wasn't refused employment for racial reasons, by scanning the brain of the employer. So eventually, anyone who thinks for themselves and doesn't just get into the habit of unthinkingly going along with the prevailing intellectual fashions of the day will find themselves in trouble.

All this will happen unless the political climate changes and people accept that tolerating a certain level of crime is better than an omnipresent totalitarian state breathing down their neck all the time.
"with the help of Bain & Co. [Bob and Bob], we initiated a series of steps to determine how we can become more efficient and productive as an organization"

So they brought in outside help to figure out that they needed a 10% layoff?

A grab bag of three cards would've been a whole lot cheaper;

1) Keep all yahoos at 20% reduced salary.
2) Cut 50% of middle management (whatever that means).
3) Announce 10-20% yahoo layoff.
Close behind?!?!

Read a bit more space program history and you'll find the military is actually far ahead as far as applications (and budget!) are concerned.
I think it's considered unhealthy because it's another layer of complexity you have to deal with, and a many-branched environment without any system-enforced meta-structure can result in huge amounts of confusion when things don't go right. You have to train your team and trust everyone to avoid all human error. Example: "whoops, I just merged a bad branch into the master one, but I just left work for the day and I don't find this out until tomorrow morning, let's hope no one checked it out in the interim or we're boned!"

With a centralized VCS (or more specifically a single- or few-branched repo), you just tell people to checkout code, commit their changes, and you're done. There are less places to screw up because you don't have a bunch of branches you have to manage. You are less flexible, but this lack of flexibility only becomes a huge burden in a truly distributed (i.e. open source) environment.

It's sort of like arguing static vs. dynamic typing. There are many cases where dynamic typing resulted in very painful errors because some variable along the line didn't follow the "gentleman's agreement" that it should be a list and not a string. Though dynamic typing is more flexible and powerful, sometimes you just succumb to human error because the computer trusts you.
Now lets see being able to manually set your status as "away" in gmail chat. PLEASE.
"We create content like this to get the word out about our website."

This strikes me as nicely direct explanation. It's under the "So what's this all about?"-link.

And the content was quite funny also. Might work.
Where's Emmett?
John Gruber has way too much time on his hands.
I have a community that grew to 50,000 members in the first year and still growing, but now much more slowly. Please tell me where this friend is that I can sell it to. I've made some attempts at monetizing it, made about 50cents per user. However, just lost day job pay vs. the time put into it blows away any revenue or buyout I could hope to receive.

For a while I thought that it would at least reflect well on my resume. I've had it on my resume for a while now and no one has given a damn. No one person has even clicked the link...

To advertisers it's worth dirt because it's mostly just existing members visiting again and again.

The valuation of online sites really presents a "Winner takes all" effect.

So, why would someone shut their site down? I think there is a Picasso quote to this effect. The idea is that it's an insult to the value of your time, and to your entire field to sell it at 100x less than it cost you to make.
Could you elaborate on this? How does the education system largely account for corruption? Is it not cultural? I remember a when discussion of corruption in China, education was not the largest factor. It was a more historical, societal attitude.

Does the schooling method promote corrupt behavior?
And it'll be six years before IE somewhat supports it. And another five for the majority to upgrade.
An old OS idea is new again: non-installation
I like this, because I always thought that tables for layout were a lot more intuitive than the mind bending stuff I have to do with css to get a layout to look right. Semantic markup is nice for the flexibility, but I have always struggled to understand css.
The point is that IE 8 does support this. But, it will be at least 5 years before a majority of users have IE 8 :(
I am not an economist, but I think this is a lesson in the area of risk/reward. Sure, as a tourist I might have qualms about taking a ride in an unlicensed sub. However as a human being who loves knowledge, I would be intrigued by the chance to see a 14-foot shark close-up. The risk involved is offset by the chance for knowledge. Evolution hard-wires self-preservation into us. But perhaps it also hard-wires a certain risk-tolerance for the sake of a greater good. Put it another way: it is better for the gene to lose a few gene-carriers along the way to aquiring a big new advantage, than to not lose those handful of gene-carriers but also not aquire the big new advantage. So businesses like this that understand the hard-wired tolerance we have for risk when others don't understand that, have a competitive advantage - they can get to work while their competitors are still worrying about paper work. In a word, the selfish gene should be proud of this guy! :-)
And a free ride to a good school is the equivalent of a 50+k a year salary without working the full year.
Off-topic crap.

Flagged.
Distinguishing between concept and execution failures would be a huge start, actually. Don't you think that makes a big difference in your final evaluation of the company - particularly from a startup perspective? Absolutely fair point that it may be difficult to determine where the failure was - but you could start by interviewing the management and go from there. Isn't journalism about investigating things that aren't immediately obvious? Anyone can lampoon a company for failure.

If you think the investigation isn't worth it, either because it is thankless task or because the cause can't be determined (the founders won't admit to their mistakes, etc), then why write a story at all? It is just sensationalism. Publish a report every week with a list of startup failures. Other startups will get the idea - lots of startups fail - and they will have learned just as much as if they had read the types of stories that are being published now.
That one is pretty funny, but I like their 10 stages to dating one better:

http://mingle2.com/dating/phases
11. http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/04/28/...

PS: I think I need to get a pipe.
Goodbye, old 500 page.
Don't listen to analysts.