skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, it depends on the application. You might not have to write them, but there are still plenty of applications where memory and speed are issues, and C gives you some really good tools to deal with them, but you're right -- C is not a high level language and shouldn't be used as one. I would go a step further and say that Objective-C also is not a high level language. Most people here would agree, but lots of Cocoa developers see it as the top of their language stack.

When you get serious with it, the Ruby/Objective-C combination has a lot of problems, mainly because the two languages and cultures simply weren't designed to go together. I have some notes on that here http://programming.nu/rubycocoa-and-rubyobjc and if you have the patience, a talk online that I presented at Jonathan Rentzsch's C4[1] conference: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/13 MacRuby is a step in the right direction, but in my opinion it's better to use a glue language that's specifically designed for the task (and if you don't like mine, write your own :-) ).
"Until someone spends a good bucket of cash on hiring UI talent to clean up the abortion that is the linux desktop, they'll still be lagging way behind OSX and Windows, both of which offer a superior and consistent experience."

I'm not sure it's just a matter of money. As a UI guy myself, I can tell you that participation on OSS is not very conducive to the way I like design. Many/most of the powerful stakeholders in OSS projects tend to be hackers and power users and there's a bit too much of an emphasis on consensus (gotta keep the volunteer army happy). Great article on "the dumbness of crowds" here: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/0...

I don't think they need to HIRE great UI talent. I think they need to put 'em in charge (a la Apple).
I'm currently running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Firefox 3.0.4, but I dual boot and I've never had that problem on Windows Vista and Firefox 3.0.4 either. I don't think it matters, but my processor is an AMD Turion 64-bit dual core.

Maybe it's a difference in some algorithm between FF/Chrome and Explorer/Opera/Safari, though Chrome and Safari share at least most of their rendering code. That leads me to believe that it's probably something to do with Flash or something embedded. I don't know what to tell you, though, I've never had any problems, and my computer isn't even that fast.

What are your computers' specs?
1 million rows??? Who wants to scroll through that mess?
Pastebud: Copy and Paste for the iPhone
Take a look at SQL Server Reporting Services.

It's a charting and reporting tool over SQL Server (and I thinkg any other ODBC/OLEDB source), it works over large datasets, has both Web UI and desktop UI, and comes in the box with SQL Server itself.

FD: I work in SQL Server, athough not on Reporting Services. FWIW, Reporting is a huge success with our customers.
The Newspaper Industry Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes
From the article:

The average entry-level reporter's wages are $25,167 a year, according to Payscale.com. And today's beginning reporters are asked to do more than those starting just a few years before. "In some cases it means being able to go out and report the story, write for online, shoot video, edit from the field, and update for the print edition. And in some cases it means shooting the pictures, creating a slideshow, putting it in Flash, and doing all that in addition to reporting," [...]

These are the low-pay jobs. There are also the no-pay jobs popular with Web site management. Young journalists are encouraged to blog and post on a variety of no-pay Web sites. This is supposed to help them find employment, and it probably does. But it certainly does violence to the old slogan of a day's work for a day's pay.

Or, journalists can hustle grants from foundations or wealthy individuals to pay for their reporting.
the data doesn't necessarily back up that leaders aren't good writers. maybe recent american politicians, but what about Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin (not a President, but on the $5 note), not to mention the writers of the federalist papers and constitution. maybe we're talking about a different kind of "write well".
A good kick in the ass.
Here are some features that would be nice in Excel:

1. Programmability in something other than VBA (Python?).
2. Online spreadsheets like Google.
3. Better search and replace.
4. Ability to reference tables through URLs so they could show up in blogs and in HTML.
Something like this: http://ycspreadsheets.com/joe/doc1.ss?s=1&block=a1:c10. This
should produce HTML that some javascript can replace in my blog with the table pulled
out of the spreadsheet.
5. Ability to pull and reference data dynamically from online sources. For example,
imagine a spreadsheet cell that pulled the current stock price of GOOG every time it
was viewed. And the rest of the spreadsheet would naturally update automatically.
ability to recurse.
Cannabis edibles can easily exceed an effect duration of 4 hours.

Really though, the long interrogation time is probably so because people eventually become uncomfortable, being in the same state for such a long time. They want to see how you react in that situation.
It didn't seem sarcastic to me; he did join a violent organization, after all.
Did you try Sharepoint? It does versioning, version control and a bit of collaboration for Excel.
Bike rides were amazing for me. I decided to bike to and from work (about 10 miles each way). I can't imagine not doing it now, its the best way to start and end my day.
3d plotting.
You can do a lot of stuff that overlaps with queries with just array formulas, and a lot of the rest with pivot tables.

For example, getting the sum bill of every person who lives in England looks like this in one workbook I have:

{SUM(IF($C1:$C$10000 = "England",$E$1:$E10000,0))}

(If I want to see, say, the top 10 outstanding bills in England I have to use a pivot table).

Excels biggest problem is that the workbooks produced with it are really hard to maintain. Looking at the code above, for example... going back to that (which is only a trivial example) in a month is going to be pure pain. Updating data requires cutting and pasting, which can be error prone. Unit testing is only possible with sample known-good data sets, and copying in new data tends to make it less than certain that the version you are using is the same as the one you tested.

Oh, and sharing workbooks between users is really tough. I can usually figure out other people's Java - but I have yet to be able to reverse engineer a non-trivial Excel work flow.
Sharepoint is only really an option if all your users are on Windows.
You're approaching it from the wrong perspective. English is the lingua franca. If your colleague were really nice, he would translate his message into Hindi, but that isn't an effective use of time. Neither is writing in Simple English.

Let the recipient use a dictionary. After a while he won't have to anymore.
Hmmm, I think it's computer speed. I use notebook with just a single core 1.7 GHz Pentium M.

What's interesting is that for me page scrolling speed isn't spread over many values for different sites. It's either fast (majority of sites) or very slow (some sites).

That's why I didn't suspect computer speed. It did look more like rendering engine bug / inefficient code path for particular layout/image/CSS combinations.

It seems like some designs trigger heavy computation, which is not noticeable on faster systems, but is very painful on slower machines.
I think something that google has begun to do, and that is incredibly valuable, is data "sources" that aren't hard coded into any particular spreadsheet, but that come from a URL or API of some kind.

I should be able to make a row of "oil prices by month since 2005" that updates on its own. Or a cell with "current value of the DOW".
If you stop reading in the middle of his blog post, does that answer the question?

I think time has come for me to read less and do more.
This is really good advice, I think it understates the downside risk of deferred compensation.

The investors may balk at applying their funds to deferred compensation, asking the founders to re-spin the employment agreement to convert the deferred compensation to common (or options) prior to the investment, further diluting and deferring it.

Why would the founders do that? They would be faced with a choice of no funding or new funding applied to salaries going forward.
How can there possibly be only 200m searches per day? I must use Google at least a hundred times daily, probably more. There's not even two million people like that already, in the whole Earth?
Interview and get the offer, then you can make a decision about whether to accept.
Decent looking plots.

If I'm going to make a scatter plot style plot for anything besides an internal memo (even an internal presentation) I always plot with something else.
I agree with the general spirit here, but the fact is that most of us vacillate between producer and consumer roles, and fill both to varying degrees.

The perverse irony of modern society is that it's orders of magnitude easier to be a consumer than a producer. I don't mean that producing requires more psychological investment and effort; that's a given, in any case. I mean that society makes it much easier to fill the role of the consumer than the producer. You can consume cheaply and easily, as if the world is begging people to consume.

Producing, in any meaningful, useful, and psychologically sustainable context, is very difficult. Most people don't get to do it. At the very least, you need an audience. Realistically, you also need people to pay you to produce, which means that your odds of getting meaningful work are long (unless you're the only one skilled enough to do the interesting work, the people with the money take the meaningful projects and throw you the scraps). Consequently, 85 percent of people cannot attain work that is more valuable or interesting than watching TV. This is why we're a nation of non-producing consumers.
Look at ASAP Utilities.
To your example I would add the "Tragedy of the Commons":

http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

The tragedy of the commons demonstrates that with certain shared resources, when everyone freely pursues their rational self interest not only is utility not maximized, sometimes the result is catastrophic.

Libertarian solutions to the tragedy of the commons usually involve attempted parcelization and privatization of existing commons, and while that's practical in certain cases, in many others -- fishing grounds, air quality, global warming, etc... -- it is not.
Hype and misconceptions. I've tried it today, after a few hours of working with it, i conclude that it is usable, but nothing that special. It comes with powershell, so i didn't have to install it myself, but other than that, i didn't notice anything "must have". The gui has some nice little things added to it, and some of theme are useful, but noting groundbreaking, just another UI you can get used to. I guess its the sum of the little things that we can judge it. I might be wrong, I've only tested it for two hours, 20 minutes of which i played chess.

the taskbar is pretty cool, some people are going to have trouble with it thou.
It doesn't look like dirt for one. Windows XP has never been pretty.

I'm pretty excited to see what can be done with the jumplists, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081028-first-look-at-...

I've also noticed that boot times are much faster and the UI reacts much faster than Vista.

And of course the Paint ribbon ;)
I'd like to know what argument you would make to claim Objective-C isn't a "high level language". Despite the fuzziness of the term, I think Objective-C would meet most any bar that didn't specifically require the language to be interpreted. The only thing I can imagine being an issue is lack of support for closures, but a) it's coming to the language, and b) it's not radically more expressive than what objective-c already has to offer.
Odd comment in the thread about Ubuntu becoming mainstream. Do you want linux mainstream? It's understandable if not, being mainstream means taking on all those really computer illiterate and all their... special questions.

But if people do want linux to be mainstream that means coming over the users, not the other way around. If you want people to use your product you can't go putting them down because they don't "get" your system. They're using the computer to make their lives easier/better, not to gain your approval.
Funny, that's exactly the article I was thinking about as I read this.

The impersonal auto-response link above pretty badly contradicts the advice given here. I wonder if Seth Godin wrote the current post as "lessons learned" or just didn't feel like following his own best practices. (Physician, heal thyself.)
I am a crank WRT the semantic web. Sure, there will be pockets of success, but I think the whole concept is very 19th century. It is almost the opposite of the network effect; it is not of much use unless a significant portion of the sites on the web are marked up. Its whole search mechanism is logic based, while much out there in non-logical. There is all that W3C navel gazing to learn. Just about anything designed by a committee, in anticipation of a revolution, fails.

I think the semantic web will fail because more revolutionary technologies will pop up out of nowhere and surprise us all.
I'm exactly the opposite of your target audience with this question, but hopefully I can give a useful response anyway :)

I know almost nothing about Excel and it's a deficiency I feel quite keenly. The program is almost completely undiscoverable to me and I don't even know where to start with it. I know that there are powerful uses and features of Excel but the model (or at least the bits of it I've been exposed to) hasn't clicked for me yet.

I suspect I'm not alone in my bafflement; maybe there is the possibility this new spreadsheet could be useful to us Excel-ignorant customers who nonetheless want access to the benefits of this class of software.

As a hacker and programmer who is comfortable with all sorts of paradigms I feel really strange admitting this weakness but I suspect that I'm not the only one who is in this boat.
Bullshit Promises
Its sad.
Given the internet age, the newspaper story comes little late - people have taught themselves to find the news as current as few minutes ago, or even live coverage on internet. So newspaper industry needs a revolutionary shift in order to survive. And with so much available to read these days, who really has time to go through a thick news paper? So may be they need to trim it down.
Advertising is another story altogether - even I believe TV advertising revenue is going down as more and more people switch to DVRs, they skip thru the ads.
Technology is the culprit to make all these obsolete, and by technology, I mean you :-)
Has anyone tried running Windows 7 in VMWare? The boot sector got corrupted when I tried, so it's hard to answer the question. ( I suppose it runs great in Hyper-V, but who actually runs Virtual Server?).
Heh, did you see the kids playing Super Mario Brothers?
You Can Look -- But Don't Touch
The latter seems to undermine the former.

I don't read it that way at all. He's addressing burned-out people. When you're burned out, you find yourself believing with all your heart that your job is the worst job in the world. He's cautioning against that.

He's saying that desk jobs aren't actually all that bad, provided you know the risks. Avoid burnout, and know its warning signs, and you may be able to sustainably appreciate the virtues of your desk job.
The jpegs might be for the lower-resolution chunks.
Yes, your system. Canadian intelligence is intimately intertwined with American. In fact, it's probably dependent on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadpartite_Pact

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA
Ouch. Time for me to get a move on. Time's a-wasting!

In my favor, my stick-it-in-your-ear conversation takes place tomorrow. It's on the docket and everything! :)
I thought number 5 was already possible in excel :/
Mouse tracking - no focus on mouse, and the default track pad speed/sensitivity options are way too low.

Installing application - no app store, basically. Being able to get 99.9% of everything you need for free with a single click is very nice.
High RAM servers - why so expensive?
A few years ago, I could understand why a 16GB server was 800$ per month - RAM was crazy expensive, and the 16GB server would be worth much money; it made financial sense to pay that much per month.

Nowadays, RAM is getting cheaper by the month. If you don't need ECC RAM, 16GB is stupidly cheap. Even if you do, it's not as expensive as it used to be.

So can anyone explain to me why servers with a lot of RAM are still > 800$ per month? At that cost, I could pay for the whole server in ~ 2-3 months.

I understand that there management costs to the 800$ (replace hardware when it fails, data center related costs (power etc), pay for personel, etc) but it doesn't make sense - a 70$/mo 1GB server has the same requirements. Adding RAM to a box doesn't change anything in the equation, except the price of said RAM.

If someone knows of a business leasing dedicated servers with 8-16GB for a reasonable cost, please tell me!
Quite frankly, I don't see this as being too much of a problem. The main purpose of newspapers is to inform people of happenings in the world (duh). With the advent of the internet, this has become less and less necessary because individuals now have a plethora of outlets from which to receive their news. They no longer are constrained to buying a package of papers in order to learn what is going on around them. I'm not saying that newspapers are bad, quite the opposite. I just figure that printed news is no longer as important as it used to be.

The author mentions he is worrying about who will be the "watchdogs" of the politicians, etc. This worry is ungrounded. One only has to observe such things as the blogosphere to know that as long as the internet is not a censored medium, we will have our watchdogs. I'll admit that with user generated news the average quality of news decreases. This is only due to the quantity of "worthless" news that circulates the net. I think that the newspaper industry will never die completely, as people do enjoy reading from paper. Still, it must drastically shrink according to basic economics. It can only be as large as demand allows it to be. There is no reason to consider this a "bad thing".
Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the formula in E5 been wrong?"

Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.
Support videos/images. Edit: as well as audio/video comments.
I would like to have mind mapping (like http://www.mindjet.com/) right inside excel (as well as for other office applications) but it should be tightly integrated. It seems to me such type functionality might be useful for data crunching and modeling with full brain thinking. Spreadsheets enable only logical half of brain so there is room for improvement.
Mouse tracking: the acceleration is different than what I expect; slow moves don't seem to get me anywhere, quick ones make me overshoot. I've played with settings and downloaded third-party fixes, nothing seems to make it work the way it does in Ubuntu or Windows.

Installing applications: they usually come on a disk image, which you mount, open, and then find the program. Natural inclination is to double click the program and run it. That's great until you unmount the disk image. What you really have to do is drag it to the applications folder. This is never explained, nor do average users know what a disk image is. Windows install wizards are pretty nice; Debian/Ubuntu's package manager is also super nice.

Background color: try setting your OSX background to black. When I tried it, I found that I couldn't. I had to get a purely black image, and then stretch it. Not a problem with Ubuntu or with Windows.

Terminal: by default, the terminal program is not part of the dock, it's buried in the Applications folder. Given that "it's BSD! you have a terminal!" was part of the hype around OSX, I was terribly confused the first time I went on an OSX machine to actually run it. Not a problem with Ubuntu. Moot in Windows, you download Cygwin if you have to.
I got the 32-bit version running in VirtualBox OSE on an x86_64 Linux host without too much trouble. (network driver needs to be installed, the one from Win2003 works; guest additions complain so you need to "troubleshoot" them) The Installer for the x64 Version didn't start. Might work with the non-OSS 2.1 Version, which supposedly has better 64-bit support.
Here's more data. I think this is just for the U.S.:

http://news.cnet.com/8300-1023_3-93.html

Google's searches rose 21.7 percent, for 64.1 percent market share, and Yahoo's searches dropped 1.4 percent from November 2007, for 16.1 percent share.

Total searches for the month exceeded 8 billion, up 9.6 percent from a year earlier.

[...]

Correction at 5:50 a.m. Monday: This story had an incorrect total for U.S. searches in November. The total was 12.3 billion.

[...]

Google grabbed a chunk of market share from rival search engines in the United States in November, new figures from ComScore show. [...] The total searches performed dropped 3 percent to 12.3 billion, though, so even Google lost out in absolute terms even as it gained share.

-

Dividing by 30 days, that would be 410 million searches per day, in the U.S. For ~200 million internet users, that would be 2 searches per user per day.
Yeah I tried it on Fusion. It installed pretty good actually. Once I got it running tried to open a PDF document and obviously had to start downloading a bunch of stuff to make it usable. IE 8 runs renders faster than IE 6 did. Overall it has much cleaner interface and doesn't run slow like Vista did. Hopefully they got the drivers thing figured out this time around if not too bad for them.
I think it is great that he is working on this. It will be interesting too see what kind of ideas come out of it.
You should be careful switching between absolute and relative statements.
Hey now... I happen to work for a company that was very recently funded, whose founders are not in YC, or best buddies with any VCs, and they didn't have previous exits. There's actually quite a few out there... if you create good value and get noticed, then you'll likely be funded too. Let me add that the funding was in the multi-millions, not a small amount of change. However, I'm not able to say which company yet because they don't want to announce it yet, it's very recent...
Ask HN: Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox?
I really like Dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com) and use it on a daily basis. However, I already have readily accessible capacity on my web server and would rather have the option to run the system on my own. In addition I have occasional clients who require verified encryption of their data. Are there any projects out there that create a similar solution or is this uncharted territory?
Or more to the point: Just creating the goodies out of thin air.
It seems to me his comment was a tongue-in-cheek nod especially meant for people like you, who evidently can't see the military as being anything other than a 'violent organisation' whose enlistees must be violence-seekers themselves. I'm not surprised you missed the humour.
MS Windows 7 (beta) First Impressions: Will MS be able to get back its market share?
That's it.

Now I realized I have seen a naturally occurring test case: Twitter user pages with and without static background images. Everything else is the same, yet the ones with the static background image (CSS => background-attachment:fixed) are much slower.
In general I would say no, but you can always get lucky and hit on a "progressive" Java project.

I totally feel with you, but seriously, Java is not so bad that I would rather starve or freeze to death than code in Java.