skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great companies can overcome Marketing mistakes.

Coca-Cola was one of the world's great marketers. How else can they get you to pay so much for water + sugar + a jolt? (And how do they charge more for water than Exxon charges for gasoline?) They made a huge blunder in the 80s abandoning the classic formula, with a New Coke that was better by all objective measures. Despite all their market research telling them how good it would be (blind tests, etc) their customers revolted. Shortly thereafter, they backed out of the decision. The Chief Marketing Officer (Sergio Zyman) even turned lemons into lemonade, making a career as, "What we learned when we got New Coke wrong."

Netflix made an awful decision. If they were a large static company (or government!) they would have had a hard time backing out of the decision. I'm sure there was plenty of research and consulting powerpoints explaining why it was a good idea, so everyone was covered. Unfortunately, it was a decision that could have destroyed the company. Bravo for Netflix acting decisively and correcting it's course! They likely saved the company.
Irish postgrad named as creator of bitcoin. Denies.
I'm not sure if this is pedantic in context but actually Apple have been selling 3 or 4 phones for the last year. (The 3G was still available in some markets after the 4 was introduced just as the 3GS remains now in the US. Whether you count the Verizon iPhone seperately is debatable, but Samsung's American network exclusives seem to be counted that way, even if they share 99% of their make-up, though Apple has unified those now to some degree).
I’m not really sure whether that’s Apple’s goal in the first place. Realistically the vast majority of people is not going to buy a new phone every year. Apple is not selling the iPhone to a handful crazy devotees, those are (at least by now) clearly a tiny minority. Consequently it doesn’t seem wise to optimize everything for one-year upgrade cycles.
You misunderstand. The streaming-only and DVD-only plans still exist. They're just offered on the same webpage.
I grew up with a bi-polar dad. Netflix's actions lately reminded me of that for some reason. I expect we'll find Reed Hastings sleeping naked on the front porch soon.
On Steve Jobs’s passing
The MIT effect: geniuses, innovators gravitate to New England's Silicon Valley
It has the same numeric semantics as Javascript. Javascript does not have a 64-bit integer.
Well, now you have 3 distinct models out there, with significantly different hardware, so it's not really one phone.
Having a deep understanding of the environment in which your program runs (be it the language runtime, or the machine itself) is always an advantage.

It doesn't necessarily follow that you will use that knowledge to be "clever". It helps you avoid pitfalls and debug strange behavior more easily. It helps you know when to use them, and when NOT to use them.

Someone who only knows how to program in practice is ignorant, and someone who only knows the "deep stuff" and can't program effectively and cleanly is just a "language lawyer".
Can we get more technical detail? How closely is this attached to OS X? Heavy integration with Cocoa and other OS X APIs? Is there much portability to other OSes? Do you have any plans to release the source (or has the source been released already)? What license? What rendering engine do you use (presumably WebKit)? Is this a serious effort or more of an exploratory or proof-of-concept thing?
Thank you for the response! Some general comments: this book does not try to explain all of computer science. There's already a guy working on that book, and it's taken him 50 years so far. Laurie does learn some programming in the book. Mostly she learns the little things that programmers take for granted, like how to put yourself in the state of mind for debugging.
I agree that this approach has accessibility implications. Depending on how its implemented and the user intent it can make things either harder or easier. Perhaps, we need a standard key to enable a user to toggle off a page overriding the browser shortcuts. This could either be built into browsers, defined as a standard by the W3C or incorporated into JQuery and other common libraries. The first approach would probably be the best , but also the most unlikely. Maybe the WHATWG would like to take this up, though they may consider it independent of HTML standards.
Here is my perspective, as a product manager at a large (Fortune 500) corporation for the past two years...

I don't know how to code (well, anyway...), but I try to take care of the dirty work so that the development team can focus on doing, you know, development. This means figuring out the flow of transactions (we work with web services, and expose our own web services to clients), field level details, managing the intake of feature requests, figuring out why certain things are broken or behaving in unexpected ways...

Basically, I move all around to make sure the developers are able to focus on they are able to do, and protect them from the headaches that upper management and business sponsors produce. I try and manage the goals of business asks and user experience with the abilities of our development team. If there is a major change in design or scope, I make sure to consult with the development lead before I commit to anything.

I don't assume to be more important than any developer, or that I know more than them. I understand what my role in the organization, and my relationship to the development team, and I know who is doing the work that makes us all look good.

I don't know if this satisfies any developers who read this, but this is what I come into work trying to accomplish.
i didn't know about this, i'll look into it!
That is essentially a summary of the entire industry. Now I am depressed... (OK, I have been depressed before, but still)
Most of the US isn't like that. I live in Seattle now, and the winter days are quite short. Even when I lived in Mississippi, I didn't wake up to sunlight in the winter unless I got up late. It'd be light when I left the house, but not when the alarm went off.
great stuff, thanks for the link
Netflix made a bad decision, listened to the complaints of their customer base and reversed course on said bad decision. Not sure why that's such a huge ordeal.
"Standards are all well and good, but if your code compiles with no warnings and runs without errors according to the spec you were given, nobody of any consequence is going to give a damn."

Wait, what?! The whole point of this slideshow is that without a deeper understanding of your language you can end up with errors that you don't anticipate or understand.

Your code compiles and runs today. But then you rebuild on a different machine, or with different compiler optimization level, add a seemingly innocuous piece of code here or there and then it starts acting differently.

Or you deploy it to your customer and they start seeing intermittent problems with it because you failed to understand when to initialize auto variables.

You can never have too much knowledge about the language (and tools) that you are using to build your code. I would even go further and say the same thing about the hardware you or your users are running your code on.
The points you're using to substantiate your argument are not really in line with the facts. Many browsers broadly share a single implementation for huge chunks of the web. Examples off the top of my head include NSS, WebGL, LibPNG, LibJPEG, and WebM. And it's inaccurate to claim WebM is "licensed" from Google; that's no more true than claiming that NSS is "licensed" from Mozilla. Both are open source projects accepting third-party contributions. People can happily use the code as is, contribute to changing it, or simply fork it off.

Finally, you seem to have missed the fact that Mozilla is already working on an experimentatl implementation of SPDY in Firefox: http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-yo...
I think this is a stretch. This is the absolute best product launch in the history of Apple in terms of pre-order. We still have all the people that are actually going to go in and buy the thing on Friday in real life! Not to mention it has been more than 24 hours so who knows how big the total number of pre-orders is.

So you got a Blackberry 9000 despite it not being everything you wanted? But did you get it in the first 24 hours? Did you do it first thing in the morning as many people must have since at least 200,000 were sold in the first 12 hours by ATT? These are not the actions of disappointed people.

And sure, I guess technically no matter how well it performs the product could still be "disappointing" under some definition, but then the word starts to lack meaning.
centralized place to find web-based solutions and reduce the friction of signing up for them

So this is a lead-generating and advertising business model? I agree with the other posters that the value proposition based on your website is still a little vague.

All that said, changing the BROWSER of a user causes a whole bunch of other problems that you will run into.

First, you want to reduce friction of web-service adoption, but require that users change their browsers first? This creates friction where there was none before. A vast majority of internet users still use IE because they think its the internet - not because they made a conscious decision. Its clear you will miss these users (not just because its Mac only).

Other segments could be blocked by IT departments, internal web-app support (I only assume you mask webkit somehow?), or the choice of browsers already installed by other users (kiosk, family computer). Most of the consumer market is covered web-service wise with GMail, Dropbox, and Facebook. Most of this market uses the services their friends use, not something an esoteric browser will suggest to them.

There are other businesses out there that help you 'discover and sign up' for web-based services, including but not limited to getapp.com, appdirect.com, and more integrated solutions with identity management and SSO for organizations.

Now that you have your beta - don't be too inclined to start building complex discovery features that no one will see. Adoption of your browser as the top of the funnel is your primary goal. You first have to overcome reasons to use Safari, Chrome, or Firefox with a unique value proposition they could only get through your browser. Right now a user can use Chrome and go to one of those sites I mentioned and they never had to download and install your product to do it.

I understand the 'lets flip it on its head and get them at the browser level' but thats a war usually fought for different reasons, requires a level of investment probably not worth what you are trying to do with it, and all during an era where desktop browsing is declining in favor of mobile-web and native app experiences are taking over.

Still, I could have completely missed the reason for Raven and what it is trying to accomplish and my response is only based on my experience so YMMV.
we finance ourselves with consulting, which is why it's important for us to track time
The web needs a standard API for displaying content. 95% of the client-side headaches out there are due to browser DOM rendering and event model quirks and incompatibilities.
Brace yourself - Three ton telescope hurtling towards Earth
CloudFront may be serving stale responses
I actually believe the &:symbol syntax was added in 1.8.7 since I am 100% positive we use that in our codebase which still has not been ported to 1.9.

$ ruby -e 'puts VERSION; p ["10", "2", "3"].sort_by(&:to_i)'
1.8.7
["2", "3", "10"]
I don't think it's super-important to know eg. what value an uninitialized static variable will have. If you use it, you should initialize it explicitly, end of story. If you write code that counts on such detailed minutiae of the standard, you make your code harder to read for no good reason.
There is a difference between taking a calculated risk and acting stupidly.

I don't think it was rocket science to predict that their customers were going to walk.
I honestly have not a single clue about Puppet or Chef, but the company I work for uses bcfg2. All of the SAs hate it with a passion. We have written so much code around it to make it usable that it could probably compare with amount of code in bcfg2 (well not really, but it's a lot).
Scott McNealy's new "social gaming" platform wants your personal data
I only create folders for my emails when I am forced to use Outlook - like on-site at my current main customer. The search functionality of outlook simply sucks, I can't find anything using it. At my own computers, where I use decent email clients, I never create folders.
I don't think ARM can displace AVR, mainly because ARM is expensive and weekend projects often doesn't require that much power for computation. ARM fits in neither the simple projects category (AVR would do it more cheaply) nor complicated projects category (x86 would do it faster and more cheaply) for independent hackers. Plus, AVR now has a very friendly Arduino kit which is an important factor because of the sheer amount of support and community around it. Also, ARM is not standardlized, and is not very well supported with free software, which is another limitation which AVR doesn't have.

I often follow hackaday.com -- it has tons of links to amazing projects and resources for the curious.

I'm not doing AVR programming that much other than the microtouch kit, but I'm doing a little bit more on the TI's msp430 platform, mainly because I'm a student and thus, I'm cheap. Plus, TI's msp430 is insanely efficient, you can go very very low power and its language is C which is 'nicer' than the popular arduino pseudo-C code.

For msp430 I often visit 43oh and refer to TI datasheet, they are often very very good.
I'm one of the 114 RSS subscribers, and I've been checking the feed every day - congratulations on your rapid success.

I really like the idea of full comment threads attached to each product - at best, other sites have heavily-edited reviews pages.

But please consider using something other than Facebook for commenting. I didn't even see the comment threads when I visited with my main browser, because I have Facebook's domains blocked for non-Facebook sites. Considering your target audience, I doubt I'm alone in this.
Thanks, the slideshare was starting to go really slow once I hit slide 300.
Ayende posts a job applicant's crappy code
I think you're overanalyzing it. Why should Verizon have to deal with bricked phones because some user wanted to root it? How do they train their tech support to be familiar with every ROM variation to even provide support? The simple solution is to "void warranty" - or force the user to switch back to stock ROM before support will be provided.
Yes, but it should also be said that Blockbuster is offering its $10/month streaming service only to Dish Network customers.

I don't think there are many people who are going to make the switch to Dish Network because of the ability to pay to stream a very limited library. If Blockbuster offered the streaming package to the general public (like Netflix), then we may have some real competition.
You are right - he could have been a bit more polite and gracious. As it stands, he sounds like a petulant child who has been deined his favorite toy.

All in all, its probably a good move for everyone (shareholders, customers) and even for Hastings, assuming his Steve Jobs delusion has ended.
It seems like a linear argument isn't valid here. It shouldn't be X years for Y dollars. Once you rob enough to steal away someone's retirement (As cypherpunks2 alludes elsewhere) it is hard to justify leniency. That said, taken to extremes, it's easy to argue that someone who stole 10 billion deserves worse than someone who stole a million.

Dealbreaker looks at the sparse empirical evidence, and their chart suggests a logarithmic function exists. http://dealbreaker.com/2011/09/how-much-time-in-jail-will-a-...

The one problem with it being so clear, is criminals take a cost-benefit analysis, and I'd really like all the white collar criminals to think, "Even if there isn't an obvious victim, I am likely to go bankrupt and spend the rest of my life in jail."
Scanning Applications Faster - A Chicken vs. Egg Problem
Demi Moore
Have things gone a step further in the Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher possible break up saga?
I cancelled Netflix outright, after being a member for 11 years.
Do you have plans on providing hooks websites can use to access OS level stuff like Camera, Microphone, or Notification System?
Changing the way you think, see, smell, touch, act positively or gratefully is a really hard thing to do. But once you start doing it and see the increase in your happiness and joy, you will never go back to your old perspective.
A culture of fear only works on people that are unable straighten their finances out. No threat of being laid of has any meaning if you have 5 years of salary stashed away in cash (Netflix is located in Silicon Valley where competitive salaries are more than enough to establish this in a short period of time).
Try using compiler optimisations...
20 miles each way is 2 hours total for a very fit cyclist. It's 3 hours or more for most people. And you'll need a shower when you get to work (and home, really). I don't think that's convenient for most people.
I felt the same way. I like Kurtz's blog post on the topic as well, very tasteful.
wow toggl is exactly the kind of software i was looking for. I could only find super expensive software that did way too much stuff and was overcomplicated. In toggl you can just add a project, add a task manually or time it. This is perfect.
The housing phenomenon you describe is absolutely ubiquitous in the US as well.
I read about this, and even tried downloading squeak once, but didn't find it very compelling. I admit that I might not have given it the time it needed, though...
We looked at the value: not-deep-enough streaming catalog plus deep DVD catalog was a great service and a good value.

Either one alone? Incomplete service.

Both? Not enough value at the 2X price.

We kept our subscription open until the day the price hike would hit us (How does Netflix get away with "the moment you cancel, your subscription ends, no refunds for partial months"?!?), then canceled completely.

I tried to send them feedback explaining our decision, but I could not locate a "contact us" via internet vs phone, and I didn't care enough to call them.
static int a;
++a;

I don't care what the standards say, please just type the initialization value you need. It's inconsistent to pick a special case, 0, out of 4,294,967,296 possible values, and type something different in the special case.
That's interesting to hear. Netflix forced you to re-evaluate the value proposition and it makes sense to consider all forms of entertainment while you're at it. I wonder if there are a significant number of people like yourself that also took this opportunity to cut the cord on cable (and satellite).
It sounds like there's a lot of PL innovators† here on HN, who value new technology for its intrinsic value, rather than for its benefits.

I would expect PL theory to deliver great benefits at about the same rate as for other fields, e.g. that pure mathematics does for physics - some of it does; though it's common for it to be reinvented independently by people trying to solve specific problems.

BTW: Notwithstanding the over-general flame-bait title, I think his "types are anti-modular" is really just making the point that, while interfaces reduce your dependence on implementation, now you depend on interfaces.
i.e. The problem with using types to hide decisions that you think will change is if your prediction about what will change is wrong. "On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems Into Modules" http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crite...

Perhaps one solution is to specify all the types you use in a module, internally; and provide a mechanism for converting between equivalent types at the boundary, to remove the dependency while facilitating interoperation. This mechanism acts as a buffer or glue (or middleware) - a kind of interface between interfaces if you will.

† Although the technology adoption lifecycle gives the impression that a new technology with interesting properties is just the beginning of great things, the vast majority of new things do not become massively successful - it's just that the lifecycle is based on those that were. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
Show HN: Use your iPhone/Android to control browser games
AT&T introduces split personality Android devices
Show HN: StrongCoin a Bitcoin e-wallet with the encryption on the client side.
Please let me know your thoughts on StrongCoin.com.

http://strongcoin.com

I built it because storing Bitcoins using the official client is a pain. e.g. Making backups and securing the wallet.

And I didn't trust any of the other e-wallets as they store your private keys on their servers which is open to abuse.

Thanks.
Watch The Thing Online Free
Watch The Thing Online Free
Watch The Thing Online Free I mention the previous incarnations of himself, not to show my proficiency pay Companion of the film, but to suggest several approaches to this material.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I think an indirect counter-example is C. It's not technically a universal intermediate language, but it's widely considered to be a "portable assembly language"; which many vastly more dynamic languages compile down to. I think the web could use it's own version of something like C -- that is, a low level, no-frills language that maps closer to how hardware works.

I imagine for this web version of C -- and it should be a language, not a byte code format -- it would need to satisfy these properties:

- language constructs that map semi obviously to machine instructions (ie, you don't need to spend a lot of time guessing what "switch" or "while" or "struct" get turned into), while avoiding things that might not be so obvious. (What does a closure look like in assembly? Or a generator?)

- types that correspond to machine types

- some sort of predictable and low level memory model (without pointers, but with some sort of way to avoid garbage collection issues. Maybe something with reference counting)
Very amusing! I wonder if there is a similar showcase for well done presentations?
But 180-degree reversals are a potential signal that the company doesn't have a coherent strategy, or that management doesn't really understand their market.

Not really a problem in a highly autonomous firm, but I'm surprised to see this in a publicly-traded company like Netflix. Seems to have have worked for them, though.
It's a pity that the following paragraph was included:

The velvet glove over Jobs’s iron fist was thinner that
second time around; like most people who attract a cult
following, he became increasingly convinced of his own
infallibility. It was an error that eventually killed him;
the kind of pancreatic cancer he had was essentially
curable with early surgical intervention, but Jobs
insisted on treating it with “alternative medicine” that
didn’t work.

No need to bring up the manner of Jobs' death, or speculate on what he did and did not do and its influence on the outcome. Better to stick to the core argument about the closed Apple world and the open source alternative.

A man died, but the core Apple idea (of a closely tied and controlled software/hardware combination) did not. Focus on that.
I'd still like to see an eReader that also allows me to use a stylus to write notes in the margins or open up a notepad like app for full page notes.
We would have just built something else on the JVM. You could be writing Ruby in the browser with JRuby, or Python in the browser with Jython, or Scala. This would be a much better world (tooling and performance-wise) than the current compile to high level JS strategy.