skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding the fifth item - Apps are going to break the OS boundary. And they won't do it using emulated APIs, but using Virtual PCs within your PC. That is, an x86 instruction set and whatever OS you want running within this virtual machine, and interacting with other apps through some type of environment. Processors are getting parallel and faster, this is already possible right now (I'm typing this from within a Windows XP layer running on top of Mac OS X), but it will become even easier and less problematic very soon.

The OS layers are merging. The differences in the OSes are becoming more about eye candy and less about functionality. That will be reflected in the apps.

It's silly to invest a million man hours in some huge suite like Office and then all that goes to waste just because another vendor decided to expose the same functionality over different names.

Software is going to have to standardize the way all other user tools have standardized. Cars all have the same usage mechanism with different looks. Our OSes are going to go the same way, it WILL happen.

Look at Linux - back in 99, it used to handle quite different from Windows. Now most things are the same.

The Apps are also going to have to be the same across all the OSes. Some will say that the web is the way to go - but I believe that the iPhone has shown that when people have the choice between native and web, they choose native. Infrastructure does not change that fast, internet speeds are not changing that fast.

We are standing on the verge of a reorganisation of software. The big companies are struggling for dominance at this stage by struggling to control the APIs. Soon, it will be possible to write in whatever language and have it compiled to a base API that will run across all the platforms. This move makes sense, and I believe that the easiest way to do it for now will be using x86 instruction emulation - I really don't see any of the big companies giving up their APIs or platforms anytime soon.
No Credit History Loans- No credit Loans
No Credit Loans arranges no credit history loans. No credit history loans are one such loan which do not scan or discriminate against the credit status of borrowers.
Ewwwww. Remember Jobs' comment about Microsoft having no taste?

Yahoo! has two faces: the open source advocating, hacking, library publishing, data sharing side we love, and the marketing side, which has a lot of engineering behind it, and gives us the Yahoo! look and feel complete with degree programs, male enhancement, and refinancing offers. Talk about a lack of taste.

Cleaning up Yahoo! to Apple's standards would not be easy.

It would be like trying to cut down a Winnebago to make a BMW. Possible maybe, but probably not worth the trouble.
Well his question was "is it crazy to quit" and my answer was (conditionally) "yes" so I think you missed something.
What in the heaven is that?
Noted. I do try to hold back my silly humor somewhat on HN. Thanks for the nudge back on course.
That would be Arabic, an incredibly beautiful language in it's written form. Please don't flag this, I'm sure someone can translate for us what this link is. Until then, I'm going to continue to revel in this beautiful text.
Do ads work?
When your neighbor loses his job, it is a recession; it is a depression when you lose your job
The account was only just created and posted two identical links (to different domains) in quick succession. It's very unlikely that this isn't spam. Flagged.
Further explanation of how the Journalspace 'no backups' happened
Luxury holidays
The Free2 site is great for exotic luxury holidays and honeymoons to some of the most romantic locations on earth. The site features honeymoons to destinations such as Mauritius, Kenya, Maldives islands and Bali. All the luxury holidays and honeymoons offered are fully ATOL protected.
How to Select Your Free Website Hosting?
Today we can find a number of free website hosting companies online. However, the question is, whether the free website hosting that we get is really free or whether we are made to pay the free web hosting company in an indirect way. At times, we may have to compromise on certain factors when we use free website hosting. It is therefore important that we select the right website hosting company. If it says it is free then it should be 100% free without any strings attached.
Tomorrow Headline:
YC.News Is the New Medium to Spread Terrorism.
"A small business is making money."

If you mean generating a profit you're correct. Anything that's not generating its own profits is nothing more than a hobby. Twitter is only a hobby. So is Facebook. Neither are generating their own profits, they exist solely on funds provided by investors -- and that's not a business, it's a privately funded hobby.

When a hobby starts generating more income than expenses then maybe it has earned the right to be called a 'small business' or even a 'large business' depending upon where you draw the line in terms of scale, but until then it is in no way a business.

A startup is anything that's being started. Whether it's still a hobby or a business does not matter in the least. Some people may delude themselves by calling hobby startups 'businesses' but that doesn't make them businesses.
Are You Spyware Free? | TechJaws
با استفاده از این سیستم ؛ مدیران می توانند با استفاده از خلاقیت خود ؛ گزارشهای مورد نیاز خود را طراحی نموده و آنها را برای استفاده های بعدی ذخیره نمایند.در صورتی که اطلاعات آماری خاصی مورد نیاز باشد که در سیستم ارائه نشده باشد کاربران می توانند با استفاده از خروجی اطلاعات به فرمت اکسل ؛ هر گونه نمودار یا محاسباتی را به این اطلاعات اضافه کنند.
I am absolutely certain, having been in a similar situation, that the sysadmins kept saying "we need this" and the accountants kept saying "no". I am also certain that the business will blame the sysadmins for not "selling" it to them.
Only if the Firefox middle-click thing was only about opening JavaScript links too, I guess.

In any case, mouse gestures are a good thing and make your browsing more efficient.
For some people at least, Twitter beats Facebook simply by only doing statuses and not exposing you to all the other crap.

With Twitter, I don't have to waste my time ignoring the latest Knighthood Invitation or the Group Created to Get Enough People in the Group to Advance Cause X w/ No Substantive Effort Invitation.
2% of "millions" cannot be 1400

[citation needed] [No Original Research]
Optimus Aux keyboard - from the folks who brought you the Maximus
> One missing equals symbol and every Zune in the world froze.

Wrong. Completely ignoring all software engineering "best practices" was the problem. They could have reused a working library. They could have written unit tests tests. QA could have tested it. Other developers could have reviewed it, or written test cases without knowledge of how the code worked.

Basically, they ignored every rule for writing good code, and then ended up with a serious bug. Well, yeah. The whole "unit testing" "fad" exists for a reason -- it greatly improves the quality of software.

Many people take software development seriously enough to not let one brain fart cause a piece of software to brick thousands of devices.
I always thought something like this would be a good idea, but it still requires the people you know to actually use it, which tends to be the sticking point.

Also, there's a significant risk that if people are shy enough to use this rather than asking someone out directly, they'll still be too shy to openly talk about it with the other person even after receiving the notice of mutual attraction. I actually had that happen with a similar feature on OKCupid (where you rate people on looks/personality, and if you have a mutually high rating, it notifies you both). I think it might be related to the game theoretical concept of common knowledge (http://www.gametheory.net/dictionary/CommonKnowledge.html) (vs. mere mutual knowledge), or something along those lines.
Trends in IT for 2009:

1. AIR

Many companies are finding that their clients are interacting in a dynamic way with air, including breathing and moving through it, expect this exciting trend to continue through '09.

2. MONITORS

From advertising to socializing, there are many online communities finding ways of analyzing data and experiencing graphic interfaces by using graphics and text displayed on a monitor. With more text and images on the web than ever before, don't expect monitors to be going anywhere in the new year.

TRENDS!
The year in IPv4 addresses: almost 200 million served
One of the hallmarks of Apple, especially since Jobs' return, is that they focus and specialise, and enter new markets very deliberately with a single product (which at most gets a few variations). So I don't see them making an acquisition that would at a stroke have their fingers in so many pies.
The MSFT business scheme all along has been to fuel new PC sales by selling new versions of Windows. Producing a great piece of software was never the intent. The PC manufacturers held up their end of the deal by licensing Windows in large quantities.

That business model is mature, played out, and dying. APPL would be making a mistake if it adopted the same model for OSX. They've got to continue milking the superior product for smarter users angle for both OS and hardware if they want to continue gaining market share.

Nothing wrong with making OSX a little more WSB I guess, but the value of OSX is that it sells APPL hardware and nobody else's.
HN Community is not immune to Recency Bias
Inspired by links provided by users in "Best HN Thread of 2008" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417782 I tested out how recent the "favourite" threads of HN Community are, here are the results:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pN6XUWPVqqcQNQNdmpZtVVg&oid=2&output=image

Apart from the fact that I have got too much time on my hands, it also proves that hackers also not immune to cognitive biases that "normal people" are prone to.

Now some disclaimers:
1) Based on the links in the threads as on 3rd Jan, 13:30 GMT
2) Links by some individual users were uniformly spread over the year but collectively it can be seen that it is not the case.

Some arguments against my hypothesis,
1) The test would be itself biased if not quite a lot of commentators joined HN before Jan 1 2008.
2) Same goes if increasingly more stories are being published per day since the start.

More info on recency bias:
http://knol.google.com/k/hardik-thakkar/recency-bias/2l6p0gc69rsej/1#

If anyone is curious enough, send me a msg with you email address and I will share the spreadsheet (its on googledocs)
rather than criticize this, you should on your ass and start contributing to wikipedia more.
definitely true. meritocracy is the way a free market works; instead of the alarmist notion that the fit survive and thus it's unfair for the unfit, i see a new treatment:

the good will cause the bad to conform, either by peer pressure, economic competition, or simply by social imitation.

the human being is not designed to be wiped out like now-extinct animals, nor were those animals unfit for survival. instead, the human being is pre-programmed to survive. got a sprained ankle? it self-heals. so does the body--and the mind.

the measurement system then will work out just fine. it will be only a matter of time.

Jamal
in Beijing
In New York you'd never get two plates and two beers for $20.
Ask HN: Better Search For Wiki?
I am looking for a better search solution for a wiki-based knowledgebase I manage.

In a nutshell, I am looking for something along the lines of google custom search but I need to be able to restrict access to the search results to my users only (kerebros).

Any suggestions?
And another leapyear bug on line 170? The year 2000 was a leap year, but here they seem to have the 0 and the 1 mixed up:

Leap = (Year%400) ? 0 : 1;
Wait, I'm confused:

a) there are standardized tests

b) students are passing anyway because of the enormous forces on teachers

If the standardized tests from a) determine the grades, then how is b) possible? How can pressure on the teachers cause a student to pass if the teachers are not the ones assigning grades?
Interesting resume. I hate Scribd, but meh.

I can't work out what the letters next to things mean. Also on the world map you haven't included things like your work and education in Canada.

Would it make sense to use the shades of grey in the timeline on the map?

Other than that it's very interesting - The fact that it's on one sheet attracts me more than the layout, but I guess if you were going for a design job you might be more interested in the layout as an example of your work.
compare that to this graph:

http://ycombinator.com/images/traffic-8dec08.png

i think its worthwhile to mention the fact that there are a lot of people who jumped into HN in the middle of 08, so they weren't around to see threads early in the year. or, another possible effect would be that because the community was smaller, there were fewer threads or fewer quality threads.
pg: i agree once again.

the exogenous nature of technological progress has always been independent of GDP growth. When the economy grows and consumption is booming, tech firms and start-up founders benefit yes, but then it's like waiting for a sunny day to go for a walk.

You could go for a walk any day and get the same benefits: exercise and sight-seeing. In fact, too much sun might hurt you but you could always learn to get creative against wind/rain (coat and umbrella).

I guess what I'm saying here in case you're lost is that a recession is bad weather than need not distract tech start-ups from flexing their muscles. If you could make it in bad weather, chances are, you could enjoy more success in the sunny weather!

I don't want to say I agree that one has to launch a start-up during recessions only. Obviously, the most ideal time to start one is to know you can make decent money and a product that solves an important problem, be it in a good or bad economy, because, statistically, recessions are shorter and milder than before and expansions longer.

In the end, it is not a question of when, even. It remains a question of how.
Or just click the status updates tab.
The Soul of The Sims, by Will Wright
Apple and Google are already very cosy. If Apple bought Yahoo that would probably raise a few antitrust issues for Google. Unless it's supposed to be a way to workaround that.
Steve Yegge says something similar about applying for a position at Google.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...

'Resume screeners keep an eye out for non-weasel words, aka Productivity Words. These are words that you can't weasel out of when someone asks you about them. The best are synonyms of "got real stuff done", including "coded", "implemented", "developed", "delivered", and "launched".

It's perfectly OK to use "designed", as long as you follow it up with a Productivity Word. If you design something without implementing it, then it's just a synonym for "Proposed". If you prefer to design things that other people ultimately implement, then you're quite possibly outstanding material for a company full of kneebiters. But a real tech company like Amazon or eBay or Microsoft or whoever isn't going to hire you, because they can find plenty of people who can both design things and implement them.'
A look back at the open source victories of 2008
Web Templates, Flash Templates, Website Templates Design - Incien
Amazon EC2 issue - cannot provision new servers
Orkut had this feature several years back. My girlfriend at the time made me sign up to orkut just to test it out.

Then I added all 6 of my friends who were actually on orkut to see who liked me. The only hit I got was a guy doing the same thing.

Big problem with this app: some girls will add all their friends just for an ego boost. Dating sites have this problem as well, I think.
Is anyone else affected by this? WebMynd is currently running very slowly because we can't provision new EC2 instances. To handle daily variations in load we usually double the number of webservers between midday and 3pm GMT.

Despite a number of messages in their forum, Amazon don't appear to have noticed yet as their status dashboard shows no issue:
http://status.aws.amazon.com/
I shudder thinking what this would look like after a trip through one of those resume upload tools used by corporate websites. It's maddening how much they mangle even a carefully constructed plain text document.
Well there is one easy way to scientificaly prove whether genes or DNA determine a certain behaviour. While I agree with the nice explenation given by the main comentator I do think that he has largly ignored the role that genes play.

Twin studies have shown, as far as intelligence is concerned, that when two identical twins are raised in two different environment their intelligence is quite similar.

Now who plays the greater role? Well who came first the chicken or the egg?

Was it the environment who turned on a certain gene, or was it the gene who went to find a certain environment?

When children start education most are the same. Most watch television, most go to school. Does the child prefer watching television because of his genes or because of the environment?

I personaly can not doubt that both play a role, but also I can not doubt that in most circumstances the environement tends to play a greater role. Nonetheless neither can be discaunted and both are crucial.
I think this depends on if you're hiring someone new primarily to take the coding pressure of the current team / founders or if you're hiring someone that will grow into leading a group later on and have to wear a lot of hats along the way.

But I don't think Joel is really talking about startups, he's talking about Fog Creek. Fog Creek isn't a startup, it's an established, profitable, small business, and for small businesses, he's right.
Google Android is about to kick the iPhone's ass. If Apple don't integrate vertically, they're going to be just a computer manufacturer - a really good one, but just that.

They've had a taste of the vertical with iTunes music and app Stores and both have seriously limited business models. As the music industry opens up, any media player can integrate a music store, and in the long term, the market isn't going to accept a monopolistic distribution channel of software.

Absolutely, there are a few ?'s in business model before the profit. But basically to compete with a Google+hardware business, there's only Yahoo+hardware, and if that hardware is Apple, it looks really attractive.
Do "interesting details" really hurt learning?
It would take more than a day or two.
There are good points that can be made as to how FB could take on Twitter. FB has enough cash to do the job well if it wanted to. FB could also decide to become open in certain aspects and stay closed with other features. Anything could happen. I only want to see Twitter stick around to see more competition. Otherwise I could care less.
Everyone loves to make these arguments of the form 'Apple should buy x, because Apple has the ability to improve x in the following ways.' Nowhere does he address why it would be in Apple's interest to buy Yahoo.

Apple is a hardware company; it makes money by producing objects and selling them to people. Yahoo is an advertising company; it makes money by producing content and selling ads next to it. If you want to argue that Apple should buy Yahoo, you have to explain why Apple should take a major stake in an area way outside its core competence.
At a high level the way to defeat this kind of attack is to require more people to be involved. Large conspiracies most often fail.

In this case that could mean having 3 USB disks, each with their own 'owner'. The owner of each disk would be responsible for making the backups and storing them in a place only they can access.

This is also lesson on how to let someone go. They say it's possible that a former employee may have done the deed. When letting someone go on bad (and even good) terms you need to have IT disable all of their accounts as soon as possible, preferably while they are in-process of being fired.
I can recommend carbonado, http://carbonado.sourceforge.net/ , if you don't want/need a full ORM, and prefer something similar to activerecord. It doesn't hide the relational model, and has just the right level of abstraction with a nice to use API.

http://jdbi.org/ is an even lighter weight wrapper over JDBC.

If you need a full-featured ORM then http://www.hibernate.org/, or another JPA implementation, perhaps http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ or http://www.datanucleus.org/ are worth a look.
Just yanking RAID drives isn't a way to guarantee DB consistency, especially if it's RAID5.

Database backups almost universally have to be made by the database system. This is no excuse for lacking a backup system; backing up databases is a solved problem.
What are some other good design blogs?
God, by definition, is that than which a greater cannot be thought.

Doesn't this assume some kind of total ordering of thoughts and wouldn't that lead to a Cantor-style paradox?
It is utterly interesting how many people do not even bother nor desire to simply think for thoughts sake. I am starting to wonder whether people who value knowledge for its own sake is a counter evolution to the majority. A bit like right-handed people with left-handed people. The left-handed people are a minority hence have some advantages when say playing sports as most people are used to playing against other right handed people.

Maybe same can be said for those people who value knowledge for its own sake as most people (the majority) do not, hence the minority who does has an inherent maybe gentical advantage.
I'm talking about graphs like this one:

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/slides/05.24.htm

Which just show temperatures going up and up and up, with error bars that just go up and up and up even on the low end. Every climate prediction I've seen from global warming alarmists looks like that, that is, I've never seen one that does not have that characteristic, and I'd like to see the one that does. (Which I know we have not had, I'm saying I've never seen a chart that permits it.) Those error bars are the fudge factor you're talking about in your first paragraph.

In order for you to be able to use that argument, it should have been built into the graph, with big fat error bars over the first ten years that inexplicably got narrower as time went on. (Which is obviously gibberish when you actually put it that way.) To account for weather, the error bars should be drawn so it fits in there. It's no good using the argument in English but leaving it out of the actual model being proposed.

Not being able to predict the weather tomorrow may not mean you can't predict the climate 50 years from now, but not being able to predict the climate 5 years from certainly does. 5 or 10 years is not "weather", and if it is, so is 100.

No amount of song and dance from any scientist can change this. No model predicted cooling on any time scale. No model that failed to do (by excluding the possibility) so is correct. Period. That is the scientific answer, regardless of how many "scientists" line up against it.
Spotify, An Alternative to Music Piracy
Tech Pundits Put Their 2009 Predictions On the Line
After I asked you how serious you were, I looked up your recent comments. I see you and I see largely eye-to-eye on educational issues. I could tell you are not a current parent by your mentioning sending parents to jail--being a parent is HARD, and I don't second-guess most decisions by my fellow parents.

Agreeing with you that opportunities for free exploration are important for children, I would simply point out that for some young people in New York City, getting into Hunter High School might allow more of those opportunities than staying in the default high school, and thus some learning English vocabulary by students who (as the article presents the situation) are in many cases first-generation immigrants who speak other languages at home might be time well spent. I'd let each family decide what is a good trade-off for their own children.