skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
37signals is really not an innovative company. They are a marketing company. They have one product that is not particular ground breaking, and they have several derivatives of that product. They have not invested their income in expanding or in any way becoming more significant than their blog.

Look at google. They started roughly like 37signals (well, not as much self-horn-tooting), but they kept expanding and innovating, and now they are huge. 37signals? They are about the same as when they started!

If they would spend less time talking and more time coming up with new innovative products, then I would start paying attention to them.

It feels to me almost as if it took them 3-4 months to add comments to their todo lists.

Microsoft was fast, agile and they innovated their way to the top. They came up with new products, they copied people and made things better, they released APIs, the offered SDKs. 37signals just writes on their blog.

If the loopt people told me stuff, I'd much rather listen to them than 37signals. 37signals is a slow slow company, they are not a product company, they are all about conferences, talks, books and blogging right now. And as an engineer, I'm sorry, but I don't respect such people, no matter how much money they make.

I want to see products. I want them to hit me with something that makes me say 'wow'. But what do they bring out? Campfire? What the hell is that? It's already there in outlook. There is nothing innovative about painting outlook pretty.

Even twitter is way more innovative than anything 37signals has ever put out.
What languages and tools do you use for cluster computing?
I've recently come into possession of an account on a research computing cluster. This is for bioinformatics work at a university. For the past few years I've been interested in parallelism-friendly functional languages like Haskell, but in my actual work I haven't come across anything that C, Python and Bash can't handle easily. So this seems like a great opportunity to try the
weird stuff.

Most scientists seem to get by using MPI with C, C++ or Fortran. Naturally I'll learn how to do that, too, but I strongly suspect that this traditional route tends to result in sprawling, complex code that's difficult to debug. There must be a better way. Ocaml and Python have MPI interfaces, too; Scala seems to be designed for distributed computing on existing platforms.

And the platform is a limitation, too. The interactive node on this cluster shows a few stable packages to work with: GCC 3.4.6, Java 1.6, Python 2.3 (with a broken numpy), and of course the MPI suite. Nothing exotic; CVS and SVN for version control. I think this means Erlang and Haskell are ruled out, unless they're compiled to C or JVM bytecode first -- any VM must be available on all the nodes if the code's going to run. Right?

So, what do you use? Or, what would you use in this situation?
Just read the slides.

The two comparing s-expressions ("ugly, evil, and an insidious plot hatched by misbegotten academics") and XML ("a hip, cool, great new idea") I found to be particularly brilliant.
Successful companies that use Lisp would fund open source development, and so on.

Companies like these? http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/

Prominent examples being ITA developing a replacement for ASDF and Clozure developing, well, Clozure.
Video of new Mac vs PC ad using two simultaneous ad spots on NY Times
The Success of Kayak.com
people who want something like the iPhone but don't want to switch to AT&T

That's gotta be the first big target. I'm on USCellular + iPod Touch for that very reason.
More the a culture thing, it may be a group thing.

As in, most people here to look to make shiny new stuff. But most profitable businesses do stuff that could be called boring.
ZK 3.5 Released with Comet Support
I hated the Seinfeld commercials, but I like these replacement commercials. They make sense in trying to break the PC's stereotype, as opposed to the garbage they put out before which can be summed up as: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/15/ (language may be nsfw depending on how stuck up your company is)
Google PageRank Has Nothing To Do With Inbound Links | Google
Baghdad nights: evaluating the US military ‘surge’ using nighttime light signatures
Also, a list of related financial and programming books and topics from the site which I found very useful: http://quantlib.org/books.shtml
And Michigan
I haven't yet, but I plan on it. I already have a few small patches I'd love to get rolled back into haxe.
IBM is one of the biggest companies in the world, makes more than double MS' revenue and is even more irrelevant. Clearly money doesn't necessarily buy power.

Microsoft — Revenue: US $44.3 Billion (2006)

IBM — Revenue: $91.4 billion USD +4% FY '05 to '06)
Microsoft ads: are they part of a buzz-building masterplan?
Microsoft's SaaS approach is compelling even if it is late in getting to market.

Want hosted email? They'll host it and it is guaranteed to be 100% compatible with Outlook/Exchange because it is Exchange. Want hosted groupware, etc.? They'll host it. Change your mind and want to host it yourself? Okay, they'll sell you the same software that the hosted solution is running on, to run on your own hardware. I bet they will eventually even help you migrate it onto hardware that you can purchase from them, so that you have nothing to set up.

In contrast, none of their competitors have 100% Exchange compatibility because they are not running Exchange. Very few of their competitors let you change your mind and painlessly switch from cloud-hosted to self-hosted and back as you see fit. And, most of their competitors don't have any solution for hybrid systems where self-hosted applications and data are automatically replicated onto the cloud, or where the cloud can be used to incrementally add capacity for applications you are currently hosting yourself.
I wonder what it is like to steer a bus with a 3 ton spinning disc inside:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession#Torque-induced
Wine might work well but it doesn't matter, because only people who don't have any money will use it. Microsoft traditionally doesn't compete for customers that don't have any money, and I think that is a smart approach. They cash checks while everybody else prays that people will click their tiny classified ads. When they release Internet Explorer 9 with Adblocker their competitors' revenue will go to zero.
Has the cost of firing in France come down recently?
I thought they had one of the highest costs of firing in all of Europe.

Allegedly, it was cheaper to keep people on indefinitely then to fire them. (That might have been government or union workers, not sure.)
You mean "since 2004".
It didn't cost him anything (I met him at iPhoneDevCamp a month or so ago), and he did it part time (I think his first iteration took 2 weeks) while holding down a full time job.
Just finished reading a 2000 Wired article about the state of the art of flywheels at that point: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/flywheel_pr.html.

This makes me wonder: with all the excitement about graphene, what rpms would a flywheel made from shells of graphene be able to achieve?
It's simple to compile because lisp is essentially a parse tree, which eliminates the parsing stage in compilation.
Wolpert is an atheist, but he says he isn't trying to convert anyone to atheism. If so, he may be the only person on the planet who is willing to share his deeply held beliefs without caring whether he can convince anyone to believe the same way.

Atheism is a "deeply held belief" now? Learn something new every day..
As someone who codes in C# during the week, I would much rather play around with other languages on the weekend to gain new insight and motivation. If Ruby was a popular 9-5 language, I would expect to see a similar drop over the weekend.
We HAVE to believe impossible things. Many things have been deemed impossible in the past, but the world changed and they became possible.

Flying used to be impossible, speaking to someone across the world used to be impossible, hell, facebook used to be impossible!

But there were people who thought it was possible, and it's because of them that we can have It's complicated relationships on facebook.

I always encourage people to believe in anything they want, so long they do not try to make others believe in too, and so long they do not insist that their way is the only way.
Don't miss Radiatidon's comments, especially #7
Bruce Schneier came up with a solution for the weak link of security questions. Read it and update your answers for your web accounts.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/the_curse_of_t...
GM Bob Lutz on Colbert: Pulls out 32,000 scientists out of his...
Cisco Picks Up Jabber for Collaboration, IM
Toolbar PR != google internal PR

The story here is that even with very few links this site has been able to secure a pagerank of 2. The suggestion being that PR 2 is impressive. It's not, I would wager that any site with at least some links, any links, and no penalty would have no problem to get a PR2.
i learned on C with MPI. it really isn't that difficult. the trick is just to minimize the complexity and operations within the parallelized area.
Thanks for using the print version of the article. I was dreading having to wade through ads to get to the content
Bill Gates and Code Complete
The Process of Designing a Killer Logo
Oh. Then, why the fuss about Occam, Fortress, Hadoop, et al? Is there another, hairier area of HPC these languages and technologies are meant for, where scientists rarely need to tread? Or are most scientists deliberately avoiding those areas because of the hairiness?
So Android phones are going to outsell iPhones?

The one coming out next week? No.

The hundreds that will come out over the years to come? Yes.
If this is what Lehman, AIG, etc. have been using, I'd stay away!
What does Cisco get by acquiring Jabber Inc?
The chart could do without the stupid graphic. I've heard of workers being sacked by text message, but never by Post-it note. (If it is a Post-it note, why the drawing pin?)
Yes. By kicking this around a bit, I'm a little clearer on my original comment.

My thoughts are: great site and idea! How are you going to bond with customers? Because you gotta get out there and live with your customers, and so far all I see is an idea.

So fix the customer idea -- find and tightly identify a niche. Find the people who are already living with them and become their best friend. Take your problems -- lack of big name, lack of surety, etc, and turn them into assets.
If you know python, google 'ystockquote'

It is a simple and awesome way to get historical stock data programztically from Yahoo. That should get you started. If you want fundamental data ftp.sec.gov is free, but you will need to do a bit more work to extract the data. Let me know if you get anywhere, I'm looking for fundamental data too.
Shorting is generally a bad idea because even if you're right, if your timing is wrong, you can still lose everything. Say that you call "overvalued" and short the market. You're right, but the market gets more overvalued before it corrects. You can get short-squeezed out of your positions because with the new, bubble-inflated prices, you don't meet margin requirements. Then the market corrects, you're vindicated, but you've lost everything already.

Same goes for buying on margin when the market undershoots. You can be right, but if the price continues to drop past rationality (as it often does), you can lose everything.

And I did make a pretty good return, both in 2001 and 2007, simply by holding money in cash when people were greedy and investing when they were fearful. Not a fortune (I was a poor college student in 01/02, and only had 2 years of accumulated work savings in 07), but enough to fund my year-long startup adventure, and to fund a few more years of it if I had a decent idea.
As a Christian, let me just say I have met very ardent atheists...

Atheists can preach just as much as any other religion. Perhaps you are confusing the belief in NO god with simple indifference towards religion?
A web application in 6 weeks: Candlelight
(Long) Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones on Haskell
Thank you SGI, for freeing the GNU/Linux 3D desktop - Free Software Foundation
Jay Leno Talks with Zero X Electric Motorcycle Inventor (vid)
I'm pretty sure toolbar PR is basically the PR that Google uses for ranking, just lagging by a bit. In addition, I have no idea why people care about PR, because there is quite a bit more to ranking than PR (or else all those PR10 sites would be the top result for anything).
Trism is currently the 63rd top selling iPhone game. Granted the "top apps" seem to be heavily weighted towards recently popular applications, but let's do a little "fuzzy" math:

Assuming the price has remained constant and $250k is the figure before Apple takes their cut, $250,000 divided by the $5 unit price is approximately 50,000 units sold. Trism has about 400 reviews, which means about 1 in 120 users actually reviewed it.

Assuming apps with similar price and rating get approximately the same number of reviews per units sold (a big assumption, but this is fuzzy math...) we can extrapolate sales for other apps.

App Cost Rating Reviews Revenue

----------------- ---- ------ ------- -------

Asphalt 4 $10 4 ~1000 ~$1.2 million

Crash Bandicoot $10 4 ~1200 ~$1.4 million

Super Monkey Ball $10 3.5 ~2900 ~$3.5 million

I would guess that apps with lower ratings have a higher ratio of reviews to sales (dissatisfied customers are more likely to voice their opinion), so these estimates are probably on the high side.

Still, I think it's pretty clear that there are iPhone apps that have made millions of dollars.
I'm not a member of the community. I am, however, telling you how the community works. Let me be as clear as I can, from experience: the community does not care what you think about it. It's a Greenland-sized snowball full of human frailties and weaknesses and effort, picking up every piece of information and drama it rolls over, and getting out in front of it to try to steer it is a great way to lose an otherwise enjoyable weekend.
That Was Fun, But Now Ebay’s Selling Off StumbleUpon
After this, they go to key combinations on a Symbolics keyboard: Squirrelfish Super, Squirrelfish Meta, Squirrelfish Hyper, Squirrelfish Super-Meta, Squirrelfish Super-Hyper-Meta, etc.
EDIT: It seems the parent deleted its post ... maybe because it had the facts wrong.

And what is that "CNN article" based on? Random bloggers of course! Read its second sentence:

"Bloggers and online media have suggested that the Redmond, Washington-based company yanked the Seinfeld ads after they were poorly received"

Also, where in that article did "Microsoft admit the ads were a dud"?

"The notion that we're doing some quick thing to cancel (the Seinfeld ads) is actually preposterous," Mathews [MSFT VP] said. "Today was always the day. ... Media buying is something you have to do months in advance."
Web 2.0 Expo reacts to Wall Street crisis
Yes, timing is a problem. The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

Good luck with your ventures!
Just take two and spin them in opposite directions.
Matt's right. A "Vista rocks" ad wouldn't be talked about this much. Case in point: see Mojave experiment a month ago -- all Vista, limited success.

Even more than fixing Vista's problems, Microsoft needs to get back mindshare & brand that it has been losing to "cooler" competitors like Apple & Google. Microsoft wants to be talked about. And that takes a lot more guts than saying "Vista rocks". To their credit, they recognize that.
While I think about it: You could even install the two disks spinning horizontally, and the bus would be even more stable against tilting.
Microsoft ads, phase 2: "I'm a PC" takes on Apple
It was my post, and my facts were wrong, so I deleted it.

However, this seems to back up the thrust of my point:
http://valleywag.com/5051860/microsoft-ad-agency-confirms-ne...
I'm confused, why would you pick US Cellular over AT&T?
Microsoft's new ad:  "I'm a PC" [video]
Cisco Buys Jabber
"People tend to look out for people of like faith, as in churches, and that support can make them stronger, thus improving the chances that they will live long enough to see their genes passed along."

Its kind of a stretch as an argument. Common identity is what brings people together, thus enabling social support structures. If people are brought together by ideas, true or not, its because those ideas are core to identity.

Ideas themselves have their own selection criteria for being passed on - http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMSELC.HTML

If I were to re-phrase the thesis, it would be something like this - 'Humans have the ability to infer cause/effect relationships based on the most relevant information available. Often, the perceived relevancy of ideas is heavily influenced by ideas that are held to be true in present cultural belief system. Over time, as more information is available to the culture, there may be a disparity between observed information (facts) and cultural ideas (beliefs). In this scenario, relevancy of ideas will still be influenced by cultural ideas, sometimes to the point of necessitating the dismissal of observed information.'
No other animal has the mental framework for understanding cause and effect, Wolpert says.

Yeah, um, okay. Dude has obviously never owned a pet. This article is junk science and not really up to the standards that should be required for this forum.

Regardless of his thesis, his evidence is woefully weak.
You don't have to fight malaria or stop making money form ads. If you're going to make an ad supported app at least make it do something useful (GMail is one example of a useful ad supported app).
Web page 'reading' study
Python variable binding oddities
"So even for people whose own circumstances have not much changed, the cost of the credit is going to rise. For an individual or business that falls behind on payments or needs an increase in short-term credit because of the slowing economy, credit will be much harder to obtain than in recent years.

This is going to slow growth."

Bang. And there's the dirty little secret about our economy that the hard-core capitalists never mention. The theory is that in unfettered capitalism, those who take foolhardy risks are punished. What few mention is that the economy is so interdependent that the foolhardy decisions made by a few ripple through the entire system.

Now we all suffer for the greed and incompetence of a few.

This is why regulation is vital. Business people have shown over and over again that they are just as incompetent and inefficient, if not strikingly more so, than government.

Cooperation, rather than competition, is the higher good.
Windows' Life Without Walls: A Review of the Print Ads
Anatomy of the Palin email hack
The Corpus Clock & Chronophage
Why do people click Google ads?
A little more info here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/18/corpus.cl...
Python just went down a notch in my book.
I believe this is what they use in large cruise ships for stability.
It depends on how you define "a bit". The last time I paid any attention to this the toolbar PR was updated every 3 months or so and those updates were already outdated. I can't remember how outdated the updates were or even if google told you that. I suspect they didn't.

Google has also taken to using the toolbar PR as a way of communicating its displeasure over certain practices. Paid links is a recent example.

All told your PR is irrelevant as you say. Especially in comparison to your actual rankings which are also largely irrelevant to tracking what's driving traffic to your site which is itself largely irrelevant to tracking conversions, registrations, return visit or whatever other metric most makes sense to your site/business.
"Most of the people counting them out aren’t the target audience."

Microsoft kept dismissing people switching to Linux and OS X as not being in their target audience. But I think PG said it best in http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

"Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years."

Unfortunately I didn't read that essay back in 2005.

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...
I highly recommend this read. Among the examples, you'll see plenty of (sadly) typical, overcomplicated phrases, that can often be replaced with a single word. The article also goes into presentation, such as the use of tables.

I hope many people take this to heart, because I've seen a lot of despicable writing over the years. I'd love to see more simple, direct language.
http://valleywag.com/5051860/microsoft-ad-agency-confirms-ne...

I tried submitting this, but it was marked "Dead" immediately. Nice, it looks like HN knows when enough is enough!
I wouldn't be so sure. The iPod outsold hundreds of mp3 players.
And I've met some very ardent math professors. Passion doesn't turn you into a believer.

There are layers of irony here.
valleywag links are automatically killed.
You can actually get end of day pricing for stocks pretty reasonably. I think it's $40/mo from Multex (now Reuters) last I checked.

I haven't checked this library out yet, but in a former life I was a quant...
If they're counterspinning with equal angular momentum, there won't be any gyroscopic effects at all. The precession torque from one wheel is exactly opposite to the other. The only gotcha is making sure that torques get applied equally to both wheels to keep them at the same speed, even if the enclosure itself is rotating.

But I'm skeptical. Anything with moving parts has failure modes. Huge stationary flywheels as building or municipal storage devices make a lot more sense to me than putting one in a car.
How would you do this in Haskell? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222189
That's an argument against the entire entertainment industry. This is a debate over aesthetics, and I don't have much more to say about it.
i think the lesson is this: the more tech-oriented your target crowd becomes, the more you need to base your revenue model on sponsorships. the masses will click. the web veteran won't click but will view PPM ads. the tech-savvy will adblock all standard ads.
There's an easy solution: "Your password reset information has been sent to the e-mail account used to register the account. Follow the instructions in the e-mail to restore access."
You can’t simply start making five ads with Jerry Seinfeld, start airing them, decide you don’t like them after a week, film a new ad, and switch the old one out and the new one in within 7 days.

I'm pretty sure you can. Most advertising agencies present multiple options to their clients and variations thereon, so Microsoft likely had half a dozen half-fleshed-out ideas they could have followed in addition to the Seinfeld one. And, yes, producing an ad could take a long time, but it could also take a very short time, depending on what is needed and how much money you are willing to throw at it. Every day, news networks come up with hours of professionally produced graphics, interviews, and reports, with lead times varying from a few days to a matter of minutes.
JWZ - Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War
Big music declares that consumers don't care about DRM after all
In a way, I hate to say it because I'm the kind of person who always thinks that people should do with their time or resources whatever they damn well please. BUT I wonder the same thing all the time: why are all these smart people spending their effort on yet another social/media website when there are so many other profitable or meaningful businesses to start.
And when you can't get to that account any longer ....