skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate dumb articles like this.

The "analyst" or the "journalist", I am not sure which, is equating stock price with fiscal health of the company.

Sun has 2.7B in cash, 1.26B in debt, meaning that they would have about 1.4B in cash if they paid off all their debt tomorrow. That is not the sign of a company about to drop off the face of the earth.

While expensive, their T1 and T2 multi-core CPUs are innovative and useful for many tasks, tasks that people pay good money to have running quicker than before.

ZFS is hands-done a wonderful thing; and the purchase of StorageTek was to get the patent portfolio, as anyone who has been paying attention, knows.

To contrast Sun's dot-boom year of go-go 2001 to the later dot-bust years is borderline dishonest - it would have made more sense to show the last 10 or 15 years of revenue on a graph, which would show 2001 as a spike.

While Sun has tough challenges, I seem to recall people thinking Apple was going to go under not too long ago...
As an interesting sidenote-- Kaiser Permanente implemented this point-and-click pharmacy ordering a while ago, and supposedly cut their prescription mistakes by 95% and saved almost forty lives lives last year.
In my opinion, the quote perfectly summarized not only the entire article, but the situations each of us often find ourselves in.

"Shit, I watched my Dad do this a million times why can't I do it now?"

"Wasn't I supposed to learn how to do this in college - where the heck was I that day?"

"I thought after learning how to do X, I'd know how to apply it to Y"

"I thought after listening to him, I'd be able to do this"

But, fair enough, I see your point (I should have added the above comment to my original posting); I'll try to elaborate more in the future.
Yeah. Emacs is a massive pain to learn. In my case, I forced myself to stop using other tools so I would have to learn it. Come to think about it, thats pretty much how I learn everything. I learnt about linux after I forcefully removed windows from my laptop and I learned how to use bash after I forced myself to stop using nautilus.
you've been upvoted because despite your sarcasm I actually think a game where you control some of the initial settings and then sit back and watch mutations/evolution happen would be really cool. More like a digital mutant ant farm.
Thanks a lot... That's my favorite part of the site, and the feature that eventually became NewsCred.
Good point. Will do a post on our blog about in the next few days.
If I was still an FB developer I'd be enraged that Facebook would require me to pay a stupid fee just to get this priority placement, especially if my app was high quality.

Facebook should be taking the best apps and highlighting them as a service to their users. Developers of quality apps are adding value to Facebook, and now they have to pay a fee for that? Ridiculous.
But how would you give lessons at school without pupils being able to write?
Please list a few professions which still require a high level of penmanship/calligraphy.

Most professions have long since moved from filling out paperwork, to typing. It would make sense to reflect that when we educate our children.

I have a few kids of my own, so this isn't just me imposing my own personal preference, this is me wanting the best for my own children. Having the best chance of getting a good job etc, and learning skills that will be the most use.
Our policy is quite clear - we respect the copyrights of our content providers and do everything in our power to drive traffic to them.

We currently take whatever is in the feeds. Some feeds (less than 5%) have the full content in the feed. In this case, we have a dilemma - what we've done is reach out to the feed providers to ask them what they want us to do. We offer the option of removing them from our site (no one has opted for that), revenue sharing on ads on that page, or we offer to do a bit of development to manually extract just the first paragraph. Its a bit more work on our part, and we'd rather not tinker with the feeds.

Until we figure out an optimal solution, we're not yet running ads on NewsCred (out of respect more than anything else). I've found that starting a dialogue with content producers is the best way forward, and 100% of those who we've reached out to have respected that.
I think the people that I most respect are the people that inspire me to be better. So in no particular order:

Steve "Woz" Wozniak, Sir James Dyson, Yuri Gagarin & Fred Hollows are the ones that I could name off the top of my head.
I just plowed through the first 113 pages of "Anathem", a great read so far. I think this is a good book to read before programming to understand the downsides to the "syntactic" machines.

I hope this helps
Which is why the correct response is to not support such behavior instead of using the shiny toys and whining online...

I'm curious if, in the spate of recent "OH NO APPLE HAS LOCKIN" articles, if anyone actually decided to stop using their iPhones. Because if not, Apple is going to happily continue counting its money over there and we will continue to have a stream of locked down phones.
Typing. Start with big keys that make phonetic sounds. Shoot, Fisher Price has this:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5716931

at Wal-Mart for two year olds! And it's twenty bucks.

Then by second grade teach touch typing. It's such a fundamental skill, there's no good reason not to start when kids start formal school, if not before. I've done one study with kids as young as four and most clearly knew how to use a mouse and keyboard.
To write good code, practice every day, forever.

Or: Never stop learning.
Pull or push, a good search engine still needs a local copy of the web, and this is expensive. With a spider, search engines control in detail how they get content. With push-via-notification, websites get much of this power. Is this something that Google wants to give up?

Finally, if you're going to turn off your spider, /everyone/ better be pushing to you. So this seems more likely to be next-next-next generation.
"The second catch is that every new thread is very expensive to create. The interpreter is not small, and duplicating it with every thread makes for a lot of overhead."

There have been a lot of misconceptions about threading in perl, most likely because of the two different implementations.

The modern implementation, which has been around literally for years, is seemingly pthread based. According to strace, the clone(2) system call is used on linux to create a thread, and all memory is shared between the threads (CLONE_VM is specified). "Duplicating the interpreter" is roughly the same as for any other thread based program, where what needs to be allocated is a stack for the thread and some other TLS areas.

However, the time it takes to start up a thread is often why a "pre-fork" thread model is used. One should take into account the limits of the platform they are using when they are designing the application, to work around/avoid any perceived weaknesses.
PG uses vi to code in Lisp, used to copy-and-paste to repl but he now drags-and-drops code to repl!!!!! 0_o

(I am not kidding)
Nobosh Stream
This is a good starting point: Learning GNU Emacs http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565921528/

This might ease some pains: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs
Upmod for honesty.
I don't think typing would be as efficient, to be honest. What if there are diagrams that need comments? In general, what if some graphical structure to the text is needed (like bubbles around words pointing to other bubbles, and so on). Getting a text to look right can get complicated fast on a computer. Maybe with pure words per minute, you can do better with a typewriter than with writing, but I remain doubtful concerning typical lecture notes.

Not that I wouldn't have liked to learn typing at school.

Edit: my question was not "what would you teach instead of handwriting", the question was how to teach the other stuff without handwriting, that is, how are pupils supposed to take note. Surely you are not suggesting they take notes with the fisher price toy?
thanks too all advices and comments
How is gnip (as described here anyway) different from the various ping services that appeared in the 2001-2004 timeframe, all of which failed to displace google?
Dean Kamen's High School Robotics competition looking for engineers/mentors
I had a classmate who could with no problem TeX notes in Harvard’s Math 55 (a course with notes which went up on a chalkboard so fast I could barely keep up writing them by hand), including drawing commutative diagrams, etc.

It’s just a matter of experience and a bevy of personally defined macros for common bits. “Almost impossible” is a great overstatement.
Lehman going bankrupt. Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch
Why Gnip Won't Displace Google:

Pinging/Pushing is a feature and if it can generate better results Google is best positioned to implement it by combining that data with their existing index and infrastructure.
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming in Ruby: General Problem Solver
The arguing from authority really bugged me too, and as such I also skipped the same stuff...
Seriously, you're suggesting that kids need to be formally taught how to draw? You don't think they can copy something that's printed on the chalkboard? And you don't think kids would learn to write on their own? Didn't we learn to type that way?

All I'm talking about is inverting the priorities, especially for young kids. Four and five year olds aren't expected to take notes. The stuff you're worrying about mostly comes later. And then, just like now with typing, they will know what they need to even without formal education shoving it down their throats. When did you learn to take notes? I don't think it was expected of me until 6th or 7th grade, if then.
I wasn't saying that Sun's customers were abnormal. I was saying that dtrace and zfs specifically didn't have much appeal to the "normal people" corporate market. That is, RHEL doesn't suffer much in comparison.

And their servers hardware is fine. It's very competitive in features (but, as you point out, not in price) with all nine thousand other server vendors out there. You can't maintain a company of the size of Sun Microsystems selling white box rack hardware without a huge increase in volume (which would make them a Dell clone, and that space is already occupied).

I just don't see anything really good coming out of Sun that is going to save the company. Solaris isn't it. Niagra isn't it. What else do they have?
It's the only poster in my room.
But Google is already a hybrid model. The article even mentions AdSense, but completely ignores the Toolbar, Analytics, Ajax APIs, etc. etc. etc.

Push or pull, Google is absorbing URLs to crawl and index at a rate which no start up could match. Eventually, someone may dethrone Google, but it certainly won't be a tiny startup.

Also, there is a significant portion of the web that could never be educated enough to ping some server. This approach is doomed to failure without a Crawler. That's not to say that there might not be interesting applications of their technology is news analysis or aggregation.
I've tried to combat that somewhat by weighting self-posts (posts with no url) less.
I really think the idea of pushing/pinging search engines to come get content should really be linked to the sitemaps protocol if anything, to me that seems the most logical solution.

Basically, your main sitemap file would consist of a sitemapindex which then links to at least 2 more separate files. The first being your recently updated list that gets flushed when a search engine hits your site, and the rest containing a full index of the content on your site.
They provide a ton of services for free: auth+auth, a data store, etc. They also don't have any obligation to you. You don't NEED to create a Facebook application. Simply because you are providing value to their users, doesn't mean they owe you these services.

In fact, chances are that you are providing significantly more value to your own organization than you'd ever be providing to Facebook. In that light, it seems quite reasonable for them to charge you however they please.
[edit] -- That's it. I think the version in "Consider the Lobster", which is called "Authority and American Usage" is a bit longer, though

It's my second favorite essay of all time -- after DFW's "E Unibus Pluram"[1], which is television and, more broadly, the modern life of spectation.

[1] From "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
That would be Tiny Crawl World, or one of the related designs: http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=29

(Sean Howard's work is about as close as you'll get to "Game Design design patterns.")
This seems more like a competitor to RSS than a replacement for Google. It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with Google at all, really.

Google needs to spider because the websites themselves can't be trusted to give Google accurate listings.

RSS is another animal, though, because users opt-in by subscribing. Apples and oranges, I think.
Google Tech Talk on Mercurial
That in all of the techstars site, there is no mention of YCombinator. In other words, they don't talk about their competition, even though they were copycats in several different ways.
and we'll see a wave of laid off finance guys going early to MBA programs or law school this year.
Gnip: Making Data Portability Suck Less
Not just is it not especially insightful, I'm finding the prose a little hard to get through. Granted, this is presentation and not content, but my complaint are the sort of thing a decent editor ought to clean up: there's all sorts of syntax oddities and typos. It almost doesn't feel like native English
Unpredictable? Yes. So is consumer demand.

It's not just difficult, it's demoralizing.

That's my point. On the rational front, it's not different to 1000 other variables. On the emotional one, it's a lot worse.
I'm sorry but tip #2 ("Use the same attorney as your investors") is horrible, just horrible advice. This attorney is used by this investor(s) all the time and this attorney has never heard of you and will likely never do business with you again after the deal. Theoretically, if something odd is in the paperwork or something unexpected happens, who do you think the attorney is going to look out for - the long-term client who brings in $100,000 in fees a year or you?
Agreed. Any man who can listen to Jobs prattle on about imacs and then tell him that his invention sucks, but simply take it in stride as one guy's opinion...

Much respect to Dean. Wow.
includes Business, Technology, Finance, and Advertising News
Mid-way down the rant, I found this hidden gem, in the form of, you guessed it: bullet points.

1. good programmers write good code.

2. good code is neat and simple.

3. good code is consistent.

Number two, especially, caught my eye. Let me see if I can generalize that.

"Good communication is neat and simple."

Kind of argues against his point, doesn't he?
FAIL: "their" != "they are"
That's a strange argument. Learning to do something is going from seeing it being done, to doing it. Seeing the raw material, seeing the end product (either in you mind or in the world) and being able to use the raw material in the right way to produce something useful. That is the hard bit - knowing how to control things to get the desired result.

All it takes to play the piano is to replicate the sounds of a tune you hear.
All it takes to paint a good observational painting is to smoosh some colours on a paper to match what you see.

It just doesn't work that way.
This is not the core problem of search. The problem with search is that nowadays, google rarely finds what I'm looking for. When I search for the same terms I used to search for earlier, google always shows me 'likely' results. I.e, if I search for example for 'window handle', a few years ago, this would almost certainly show a bunch of programming results. Nowadays, the search result is very different, and a lot less relevant to what I'm looking for.

This is where search has to be fixed. When I type window handle, I want a HWND. When a builder types 'window handle', his first result should be a local store where he can buy window handles or descriptions of window handles.

That's where search has to be fixed, not in crawling.
World Bank rankings by country: Ease of Doing Business, Starting a Business, etc.
To counter with my own anecdote, I went to school in NY and had a required typing class in 7th grade. Then more electives if I wanted to take them in HS.

We had writing in Kindergarden/1st/2nd grade. Which doubled as English lessons (expanding vocabulary, etc). And learning how to read as well. Maybe I was just lucky enough to have good teachers, but I assume that it was done intentionally. Never writing "cat" over and over until the "c" was perfect, but finding different words that have a "c" and writing those instead.
None of the banks wanted to touch Lehman and even if they did, their own balance sheets are almost as bad.
I barely use facebook any more. A select group of my friends moved onto ning.com, but by and large, I don't use much in the way of social networking sites. Facebook seems to have turned me off of it, especially with the creepy News Feed.
How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people
Just thought it would be nice to have something other than "I'm a working-class high school student."
Photons radiate in all directions, but doesn't every photon go in a straight line?
This seems like it could be potentially dangerous. The article doesn't make it clear how you activate this alarm/encrypt feature. Presumably it has some sort of password, and perhaps you send a specially formatted text message, but it seems like your password would be sent in clear text, which ought to be some kind of no-no.
It's mostly hardware/network though. People buy phones for many different reasons, which necessitates many different form factors. For instance, someone who actually used their phone as a phone would be ill-served by an iPhone, but not by some Android units. Same with people who do a lot of emailing/texting.

So I didn't really mean the keypad specifically.
I would say, much respect to Jobs, given that his analysis seems to be correct in retrospect.

E.g.:

"You're sure your market is upscale consumers for transportation?" said Jobs.

Turns out Segways weren't a hit with the target market and they ended up selling to enterprises and mailmen. Bezos had some good analysis too saying the real question is whether it would be legal to ride them - in many places it was illegal to drive Segways on either sidewalks or roads.

Of course, I don't have their initial presentations so it's possible they were already expecting these to be their main problems. I just think it's unfair to call it "prattling on" when in fact they were giving some pretty accurate analysis on why the product wouldn't be a success.
I do wish my school had spent less time teaching me a skill I will never use.

At my school I don't think there was even an option to learn to type. That seems a pretty large oversight given how often the average person in the workforce needs to type something out.
And here's DFW's turn on Charlie Rose 11 years ago: http://www.charlierose.com/guests/david-wallace

And a great commencement speech from Kenyon U. three years ago: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

fwiw: "This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. "
Again, I see exactly zero harm but plenty of benefits by swapping that ordering of typing and handwriting - typing in kindergarten and 1st grade and handwriting in 7th grade. And that wouldn't change the reading or English lessons. Indeed, it would enrich them. (Think of typing 's' and hearing the sound it makes. Then 'sh'. Then 'shi'. etc.)
If they had that kind of knowledge they'd be out there doing it themselves. I don't think anyone knows about entering new markets cos they vary so much. It's down to instinct and dumb luck I believe.
Clever that they picked pencils instead of some tragedy of the commons problem like basic scientific research.
It's confirmed. Lehman to File for Bankruptcy Protection

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/lehman-to-file-...
I find FriendFeed to be a valuable resource. If you don't have actual friends to follow, try following some folks who's blogs you read. You'll often get lots of good stuff to look at and read.

EDIT: oh, and FriendFeed also has "virtual" friends, for people like you who have actual friends that don't seem to keep up with all of these services.
LOVE gnip. Have been testing for some web apps and it does wonders for standardizing data across multiple sources. API is simple to use and the service has been extremely robust.
Start-Up investment fund established to bridge the funding gap.
The respect wasn't about who was right. Jobs is right a lot. That's why I think its cool that Dean pushed on and believed in his invention anyway. The world might just not be "hot, flat and crowded" enough for Segway yet.

I wonder what I might do if I had an invention and Steve Jobs told me it sucked, or if I got Bill Gates' trademark "thats the stupidest f*cking idea I've heard since I've been at Mircosoft." Considering their advice, shrugging my shoulders and then pressing on anyway might not be high on the list.
Huh. The classic tragedy of the commons example I was taught in high school was about lighthouses. In college, I found out that nobody had tested this empirically except Ronald Coase, who found that lighthouses tended to be private and profitable, historically (this, of course, is not taught in standard economics courses; I only found out because I took a course on Coase).

And I don't even know about scientific research. I've talked to people at private research groups (e.g. Microsoft Research), and at major universities; the latter spend a lot less time doing research, and a lot more time delegating to grad students or hustling for grants. It is ironic, I guess, that the public servants spend their time in such bourgeoisie pursuits, while the capitalists are busy doing research.
One-to-Any Messaging, Why it's Here to Stay
What else do they have?

Project Indiana.
Why I Chose Posterous: a Quick Review
Black Rock is going to be able to pick off a ridiculous amount of talent. Their internal "alerts" for a mortgage crisis went off ~2 years ago so their exposure is minimal. At least that's what their employees tell me...

Heard it all before right?
This bring up an interesting question.

Why commit to a specific product? Why not just by up a few boxes of different funnies & see which sells? Condom keychains are funny but hardly revolutionary. It's not going to be a product that sells it self, hires its own consultants & negotiates with Wal Mart while you sip Tequilas. What he did was establish a wholesaling business with only one product, where he had to pay cash & sell on credit.

Not knocking the effort, but designing/sourcing/manufacturing apples is not the same as selling apples. No reason to do both.
Aren't you better off selling apples & pears & not bothering with growing at all?