skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Problems that only manifest once you have a large code base aren't barriers to adoption.

Ye Gods. Of course it is. If your code base is small you can pretty much get away with using anything. It's only when the code base is large enough to make maintenance challenging that differences between code paradigms start to matter.

If scala is only good for the sorts of projects PERL can handle, why would I stop using PERL?
Next to drugs, the strongest predictor of imminent mental illness in a healthy person is a move caused by adverse economic circumstances (such as having to sell one's house, or move to a new city because there are no jobs). Moving scares people, especially after 25.

What the Bay Area and New York have in technology is an environment where (at least for now) people can bounce back from job loss (a likely eventual outcome of a startup) quickly and without having to move halfway across the country. I think this is a big motivator. Startups can thrive in the Bay Area because a person whose startup fails can find a good job shortly afterward, without having to move to another city.

Also, startup generation is a nonlinear function of the desire to launch them, because of the need to find co-founders and investors.
php lowered the bar to web programming to below "moron" level.

so you will need something equally instant-gratificational.

only without the horrible warts

rails was too clever. stupid people are afraid of clever.

I don't see anything to hand.
OS X has free sub-point releases. What's your point?
Whether or not you're right, if Apple is worried about competition from "below," as you put it, it will be the very first time since 1978 that they have done so.
Not to my knowledge. It doesn't make much sense.
I think the identical appearance is calculated. The only way you'll be able to show off your new phone is by actually using Siri.
Well I micromanage in the sense that a button location will be changed if I have a purpose. A font will be changed if I have a purpose. A function will be perfected if it serves a purpose. Like I said, everything I ask will serve a purpose and I will explain that purpose to the programmer and we will discuss what we think is best. Nonetheless, I'll keep that in mind..
I'm on the fence of this one; Xbox/MS has the potential to provide a la carte tv that many people long for and go head to head against cable providers/telcos such as Comcast or Verizon. I want to be able to select 10-15 channels I like and only pay for those. However, I suspect they don't want to be in the media game.
Minus Firefox and Chrome Extension
Looking at the same thing in East Lansing. My personal opinion is that Boulder is a much better model for a second tier city than Silicon Valley. They've come from nowhere in the past fifteen years to become a leading hub.

We've got strong networks of enthusiastic people (http://www.hackersandhustlers.org) started but no clear roadmap how to go to the next level.

Michigan in general imho has two problems to overcome:

1. Lack of angel investors

2. Experienced people willing to take the risk of working for a startup. The economy has been so brutal here for the past eleven years that it can take a long time to land a new position if the startup fails.
Amongst other things, take a pay cut I would imagine.
Sigh, this is just another lost opportunity for a la carte television.

The first company to finally drive that initiative home will become filthy, filthy rich overnight.
Direct Chrome link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kgphklnbopgbelmcam...

Direct Firefox link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minus-share-s...
I suspect the reason why they don't is because of legal concerns. It seems like the vast majority of the videos uploaded to youtube are videos that people recorded themselves, whereas the vast majority of mp3s that people share in almost any context are pirated music. There are probably certain small communities where there are plenty of user created mp3s shared, but it doesn't seem to be the case for a sharing platform of any significant size.

Grooveshark manages to get licenses for all these "gray" mp3s after the fact, but I doubt youtube would be able to do so as easily considering their larger market position would be more threatening to the labels.
That's the way WP7 does it as well for anything other than simple commands.
Scary - Why Canada’s new copyright bill remains flawed
>Missing out on field trips would not make someone 'uneducated', but it would decrease the breadth of their education. //

Absolutely.

We do however always go out and about when we have family time. Thankfully the UK tax payer pays for the upkeep of key national museums - visiting them is one of the few things one can do for free. We do have a bent towards natural history, that's usually free too!

>So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life. //

Oh believe me I'm all for well-rounded. I'm not at all arguing against the enormous value of such things. You say they're necessary things. But my resources don't stretch to paying for them and the society around doesn't value them enough to make them available to all without direct charge.

I'm doing what I can to provide a well rounded education as I see the enormous value a broad education has brought me. For example I studied Art History for only a term before studies for my degree got in the way but I found it immensely valuable as a catalyst to my own enquiry and as a lever in to understanding societal development.

However, I don't think you can really argue that such things are "necessary" for "healthy adult life". Possibly "a doorway to a fulfilling adult life"?
Which do you prefer between wxPython and PyQt btw?
LibreOffice user research – Results vol.4 | OpenSource Usability Labs
Google Earth Tops 1 Billion Downloads Since Launch
Add Email Notifications to Django-Userena and Earn $25
You're ascribing things to me that aren't present in the text.

I had a pretty good idea why that's how it is. I even completely agree with not changing it now. Backwards compatibility is important, no argument there.

That doesn't change that it's the sort of niggling annoyance that drives people to dislike the language.
My question comes down to how they're stored. [Obviously] I'm not an expert on video encoding or containers.

FLV is a container, yes? Usually, I'm guessing, MP3 and H.264. H.264 works out well for youtube because they can then also use this on their HTML5 video players.

So are the H.264 blobs and the mp3 blobs stored as discrete files, then packaged when a video is loaded and sent down the tubes? If so, then yeah, obviously, it would be really easy or youtube to serve "audio only"; probably "a few lines of code".

But if the MP3 and H.264 (again h.264 is an assumption) are stored as one [flv] package, they would have to be unpacked before being able to be sent down as their individual components.

Again, this is a shortcoming in my understanding of video containers, so maybe I'm missing the point on this completely. (As in: maybe "unpacking" an FLV is trivial)
I meant HN as a startup scene.

If you are selling software product and all means of fighting with unauthorized redistribution are taken away from you then you are screwed. That's all I have to say.
I picked up on that too. Just read the first line of every paragraph... "Your design is clean, elegant, tight, and fast... Ever since Napster I've dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify.... You know what's cool, a billion dollars is cool..."
Confab Shoe Lation - MagicWorldUK Youtube Channel
I use Rdio all day, 50/50 web and desktop (and desktop is just an Air wrapper around web), and I like it better than iTunes (which I like a lot). It's very responsive. The browser actually contributes the experience (history, back button). What am I missing here? I'm not convinced that the web isn't already the best place to build a music streaming application.
Sublime Text 2 for Django developer
Not exactly the right place for this, but thank you for pandas.
awesome possum. definitely been waiting for the chrome extension.
Curation usually implies more than bookmarking a bunch of sites. I see no additional data, no opinions, no insight. This is hardly useful to me -- and I would love a well-curated list like this.
Because many of those songs have not been licensed to Spotify or Grooveshark. But Grooveshark is much like Honey Badger.
Here's how to think about Siri: it's a second user interface that's better than touch for many of the most commonly-used, tap-heavy features of iOS.

I need to remember to call my mom when I get home. Perfect use for iOS 5's new Reminders app, right? But to use Reminders for this, here are the steps today:

Press the Home button, swipe to unlock.
Navigate to the Reminders app icon (may take a press of the Home button and/or a few swipes), tap it.
Tap "+" to add a new entry.
Type "call mom <return>". [note that this step practically requires using two hands]
Tap the just-created item.
Tap "Remind Me".
Switch "At a Location" to "On".
Tap location, choose "Home". Tap the back button.
Tap "When I Arrive".
Tap "Done", "Done".
Look back up from my phone that I've been staring at for the last 30 seconds.

Or, with Siri:

Hold down the Home button for a couple of seconds.
Say "Remind me to call my mom when I get home."

The Siri workflow is hugely easier (and safer) when driving, true, but that's almost incidental - it's simpler and "lighter" than touch even when you're sitting on your couch with your feet up.
I have informed the curators/initiators of these comments, so hopefully some of the suggestions will be picked up.
> It's so loose and care-free that it doesn't care what you do or how you do it.

This is precisely why I fell in love with PHP. My first was BASIC, my second was C, my third was Java, but my fourth ... oh god ... like that slutty girl who will let you do absolutely anything. How can you not fall in love with that?
Loud venue? not useful.
Trying to keep secrets? Not useful.
Trying to text your friends in the flyest street slang? Not useful.

Hands dirty from cooking and you need to text someone back? Useful.
this is sweet! nicely done
I wonder how well standard Qt apps do, in particular running the QtWebKit demo browser. Good enough to take the time to make a 10 foot browser UI?
Does anyone know if these prices (and limits) apply to accounts in general or are they per app?
Where them hot startups at? Map of startup venues
No idea why you were downvoted. I am a sprint user, and it is certainly a premium smartphone charge, and now happens with any smartphone activation, regardless of 4g. Hilarious too, considering the fact I can't ever use 4g unless I am sitting in a park outside.
Our old accounting system, Exponent, is on the list, but Exponent has been merged into FaceCash. Even though we're still fighting California about the payment aspects of FaceCash, all of the accounting features for businesses still work. You're welcome to use them for free for your company if you'd like.
per account
If you activate any new smartphone now, even one without 4g, you will be assessed the extra charge. Complete BS, but, pricing is still competitive :\
How much of this is just speculation and how much was baked into Siri prior to Apple's acquisition of it?

They can make anything look wonderful and intuitive in those promotional videos, since they focus on the optimal use cases. I want to know if the product is that smooth for everyday users (ie. people that haven't memorized the specific vocabulary) during everyday use.
Will the iPhone's Siri have its 'Egg freckles' moment?
Scout should also be added to this list, great server monitoring/graphing/alerting platform!

http://www.scoutapp.com/

(Just a customer, don't work there)
Note that python3 still doesn't have widespread adoption, because there are still widely used libraries lacking support for it.
True. I didn't mention radios (or the backlight, for that matter) because I was replying to a specific question regarding the effect of the speed bump.
Exactly, it's not a native part of the language, which reinforces my point that the beginner doesn't need to think as much about data structures with PHP. The built-in array() usually can handle the task well enough. They never are left muttering "this would be perfect for a linked hashmap but where is my drat PHP cookbook?"
Fast animation with iOS WebKit
The Caves of Crystals
The Diet Solution Program by Isabel De Los Rios - Does Fat Make You Fat?
When voice control works with my thick slavic accent, then I'll be impressed.

Until then let me just stick to my lovely dependable keyboards.
Do you know how the availability of content on Rdio compares to Spotify?
They have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Buy one and return it if you don't like it.

http://www.system76.com/home/warrantyandreturns/
Security is for the client. And ditching URIs is often a direct consequence of using AJAX to load the document dynamically, since the current URL doesn't represent the current document anymore.
Virtualization is not evil. It's sarcastic.
"... One key element to debate is randomness ..."

I'm not so sure randomness is the key. Randomness can be also be thought of as "absence of pattern". For me the key question to ask is to ask what role chance plays in formation of startups? Is it really chance or something process we can't yet fathom?

The last paper written by Alan Turing, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," [0] ~ http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing.... attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is called "Morphogenesis" [1] This is an important problem because complex organisms appear to be created by some "random" process that organises what appear to be self similar cells.

A lot of recent work has been done to experiment Turings ideas on "reaction-diffusion" processes describing morphogenesis in biology and other natural systems to see if a) they can be reproduced in the lab and b) mathematically model them. [2] This begs the question, "what is the Morphogenesis of startups?" and can the same maths Turing used to describe the process be applied to startup formation?

There is a pretty good broad outline of Turing and Morphogenesis in a BBC documentary, "The Secret Life of Chaos" [3] by Professor Jim Al-Khalili on Youtube. [4]

[0] Alan Turing, "THE CHEMICAL BASIS OF MORPHOGENESIS",
http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191

[1] Morphogenesis, "the Greek morphe shape and genesis creation, literally, "beginning of the shape", is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape.",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis

[2] Brandon Keim, Wired, "Alan Turing’s Patterns in Nature, and Beyond"
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/turing-patterns/?p...

[3] Jim Al-Khalili, BBC, "The Secret Life of Chaos"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1c3

[4] Jim Al-Khalili, et,al, Yahoo,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF7gdlTrCQY
There seems to be a really heavy bias towards relatively new SF; is this because there are more awards now than there used to be, or because you only have data going so far back?
Grooveshark is the best, and it's completely free, plus no forceful sign-ins into Facebook.
I'm running on Kubuntu 10.10 with no problems what so ever, using the 'backports' repository for the newer KDE packages, and running KDE 4.6.2 at the moment.

I can tell you that it's stable as hell. If it wasn't I was going to be forced to make backup of my PC and install 11.04, but It's running so great that I don't want to waste my time on doing that.

On the other hand, with the release of Kubuntu 11.10 this month, I will, just for the sake of staying up to date with all the packages :) and plus, becaue of KDE 4.7! :)
Not necessarily. This depends on the companies one is leaving and going to. Sure, if you are leaving an engineering position at Facebook or Google, this is probably true. Amongst young but not newborn startups, it could very well be a bump in pay depending on background and experience.
I'm a grad student in City and Regional Planning, and taking a Geographic Information Systems class. I need to submit a proposal for a final project, and was thinking of doing some kind of analysis relating to startup hubs. I'd probably borrow some ideas from this essay -- looking at population and demographic metrics (numbers/density), the historical presence of startups and higher ed in an area (environment), walkability and the presence of something like "cafe culture" (chance). I'd hope that the analysis partly aligns with existing hubs, and perhaps suggest some

If anyone has any ideas for a data source to look at besides census data, Crunchbase, and maybe national chain cafe store locators, give a shout. pg??? I'd obviously share the report...
Thanks, good job on the FF plugin.
A little off topic but why when I go to http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html and try to watch the video am I prompted to download Quicktime. I thought apple was all about HTML5 and killing off browser plugins?
May I add: Usually, scraping is a "one time only job", so feel free to use all the hack you want to get the job faster. For instance, wget/grep into a file, use vim to clean it up a bit, mix some awk, perl or bash. The goal is just to get the data, not to write production quality code that will be maintained for years.

For tricky pages, it can be a good idea to write tests though. Be sure to cache all downloaded pages so the tests can be run uber-fast.. It's a good way to perfect that regex. (Yes, there are programs for that, but sometime HTML have some weird newlines or characters that screw everything).

Also, I think it's important to emphasis not to "code everything". Say you've got 10 links to get on the first page.. and in all of these links you've got hundreds. Obviously, you won't go on each page and manually copy everything; however, for the first 10 links, it's useless to write a script that crawl that. Just copy it and clean it from the source. Jee, use a macro in emacs or your favorite editor if you really cant repeat a task 10 times.
Tangentially:

I've begun to suspect that soon we will see a new era of operating systems due to the wide proliferation of virtual machines. Since so many things are running in VMs these days, and since most VM software provides a standardized/simplified view of peripherals, it is an area that would seem ripe for re-specialization.

Why have an operating system that only runs one app of importance have codepaths and resources dedicated to super-efficient forking? Why not have a network stack optimized for what is essentially routing (think http proxies or queue servers)? Why not an operating system with an FS focused on record storage and record searching (databases of most variety)? Actor model built into a distributed operating system -- sure, seems reasonable, and fairly straight-forward, and more efficient than throwing a runtime on top of the OS to redo a bunch of stuff, or get around it.

One of the big problems of operating systems was always getting enough people to use them on the wildly varying hardware to really justify good portability... VMs seem to help reduce that.
ExtJS was a bear, at least to me, to debug. And modifications required a lot of digging. It was great for the 80%, but the 20% was painful.
Soon a startup called "Wikiblogs". Where everyone can edit the blog posts (but the owner can deny/accept the changes... kind of like push-requests on github)
West coast VCs are aggressively investing three thousand miles away from the valley in NYC. I'm sure being geographically closer to VCs makes it easier to raise money, but I really hope startups don't pick their location based on where VCs are. There are better parameters to optimize for.

I encourage startups to base their businesses where they'll have the best chance at recruiting the best talent. The next search engine would be well-served starting in the valley, especially if it's an ex-Google team. Similarly, storage companies continue to thrive in and around Boston, as they can draw talent from EMC. New media startups with a heavy emphasis on design-as-differentiator do really well recruiting in NYC.

By this reasoning, it might even make sense to base your web startup in Florida, if your network high-quality development talent is in Florida. I've seen this approach work well in unusual startup geographies, especially when it's a leader of an ex-team that is getting his or her band back together for second (or third) time.

Pick a geography that will play to your recruiting strengths.
finalmarkdown.com isn't available, and it would be a bit pretentious (although the reference to Queen is cool); mercimarkdown.com is funny and since it was available I registered it. I'll see if I do a full redesign with it...
I don't want to argue too much about this, because I think Graham is probably right, but this footnote struck me:

[4] As I was writing this, I had a demonstration of the density of startup people in the Valley. Jessica and I bicycled to University Ave in Palo Alto to have lunch at the fabulous Oren's Hummus. As we walked in, we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say hello on her way out. Then Josh Wilson came in to pick up a take out order. After lunch we went to get frozen yogurt. On the way we met Rajat Suri. When we got to the yogurt place, we found Dave Shen there, and as we walked out we ran into Yuri Sagalov. We walked with him for a block or so and we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and then a block later we met Aydin Senkut. This is everyday life in Palo Alto. I wasn't trying to meet people; I was just having lunch. And I'm sure for every startup founder or investor I saw that I knew, there were 5 more I didn't. If Ron Conway had been with us he would have met 30 people he knew.

This sounds a little bit to me about what it must sound like to hear Brad Pitt talk about getting lunch in LA.

I wouldn't make this observation, which I think is superficial, except that I'm surprised to see that Graham didn't mitigate it ("and it's not just because I'm Paul Graham; lots of companies we've funded that haven't even launched have reported the same experience").
House Protection in Georgia
I only care about how they feel. The old MPBs had a keyboard that was soft to the touch (eg. not "clicky"), there were no gaps between the keys and each key was curved to fit your fingers.

In contrast, the newer Macbooks and MBPs have clicky, flat keyboards. It takes much more effort to depress a key and even after a year of getting used to this I'm unable to type as fast as I could on the old one.

About the keyboard layout, I don't care what is printed on the keys. US-style wide enter key is fine, as is European style tall enter key. These things are pretty easy to get used to in my experience. Color, backlight etc. is not important.

What matters is simply how good it is to write on, especially after several hours and especially when typing fast.
I pay $80/mo all told for 500 megs, so this looks downright economical. Canada is not the place to be if you want a decent data plan.
ENTER TO WIN Dropbox Pro For Life FREE
The Fine Art of Ganging Up on Apple
I don't see why not. Firefox runs ok at the moment (with no optimization) and there is at least one Googler working on getting Chrome working.