skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a theory that any industry category will naturally support three competitors, in a certain market-share ratio like 60%, 30%, 10% [1]. This happens free of market manipulation, and mostly depends on marketing strategy rather than the competitors' actual merits. Think Google, MSN and Yahoo right now, for example, or car brands in the past, soft drinks, car rental companies -- there's a market leader, a rival/also-ran, and a something-different. Anyone else has trivial market share.

Following this rule, the market for operating systems is clearly out of whack. Windows' share should be much smaller, but still majority, because that's how it's marketed -- the market leader, the one everybody else uses. Apple should get the Avis spot -- #2, but we try harder. And Linux should still hold onto around 10% share, by adapting to meet the specialized needs that Joe User-oriented OSes have to leave behind.

The rise of cross-platform and platform-independent apps, and mobile devices where the OS shouldn't even be noticeable, break the network effect that supports Windows' considerable lead and allows the market shares to drift back toward the natural ranking.

[1] Closest citation: 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Law of the Ladder. I think Laura Ries has supported the 3-player claim more specifically.
What an impressive de-trolling effort, rw.

The O'Reilly brand is the "good enough" brand. I don't expect to be up at night reading an O'Reilly book in my bed, but I do expect to be up at 7pm referencing an O'Reilly book's index at my desk.

Also, I like the animal pictures. :3
No. He means that the quality of the books published by O'Reilly is essentially unrelated to the value/truthfulness of the advice that he is giving in the linked article.
You can't please everyone all the time, and trying to implement every feature isn't always feasible.

But I think you should at least try hard to solve peoples desires - explain why the feature would be a bad idea, or suggest a better alternative, or offer a custom solution which might cost them more money etc etc
What is exactly is weird with "the mouse tracking, installing applications, setting a background color for your desktop, bringing up a terminal" in OS X?
The Amazon reviews of "XML Schema" agree it's poorly edited - but both are surprised: http://www.amazon.com/XML-Schema-Eric-van-Vlist/dp/059600252...
It's because writing is really hard to fake. You can fake friendliness, you can fake efficiency. Some people are bright but have a hard time speaking quickly. A lot of that stuff isn't really indicative of a person.

You can't fake writing. You've got to have the right skills to write or else it won't work. And a lot of the things that make writing good - empathy, flair, organization - are things that help in any situation.
>> "XML Schema" by van der Vlist is just incomprehensible

XML anything is incomprehensible. Garbage in, garbage out.
My hypothesis is extreme and doesn't necessarily correspond with the real world, but proposing it and modifying it as others come up with criticisms is one pedagogical tool I would like to apply in this situation.

To answer your points:

* yes, Libland could buy Food from alternative sources. To extend the discussion I would need to adjust my hypothesis.

* no, the other states would not come to Libland's aid. If they were libertarian, they would not get involved in other states' disputes, and in any case they would know Libland would never come to their aid, so why should they reciprocate?
Yeah, I moved to poland for four months for basically this reasons.

It seemed kind of bizarre, but it did make my money last a lot longer, even with the travel cost of getting there and back.

However, I had a friend to move in with so I wouldn't get lonely in an environment where I didn't know the language or culture. Without this, it probably would have been impossible. (I would likely have gotten depressed and unable to get any work done.)
Marketwatch.com bug has Ford stock up 879.55%
Looks like someone put the decimal in the wrong place:

Marketwatch price: $26.35
Actual Price: $2.63
Found "(De)-Constructing Computer Guy" from a link in a Mike Robertson article. Thanks for the tip.

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_trai...
I do believe there are minimum wage laws designed to protect foolish people from such situations.
A feature on R a few days ago, and now Ubuntu? What, did Stallman's airship raid the NYT over the holidays?
The article is a revisionist feel-good view of history. He talks about Microsoft's vision of "a computer on every desk", but the reality was that Gates always wanted to make money from the the Traf-o-matic days. I am sure that in the early days O'reilly himself was just as interested in making a buck as he was in publishing Unix books.

Most entrepreneurs have a non-monetary vision of something great that they want to build, but they usually have to keep financial viability right up there in the priorities, otherwise they don't get to play very long.
I admire the desired outcome (and that of Shimrod in a different reply), but I'm skeptical because of the history of inequality that capitalism has manifested, which has only increased with the liberalisation of markets.

It may be possible to successfully argue, as you and Shimrod do, that inequality is, in significant part, because of rather than in spite of the government. I'd rather like to see such an argument. As I understand it the classic libertarian arguments have focused on increasing production and efficiency rather than decreasing inequality.

(NB decreased inequality is a very different thing from decreased poverty)
one could always join a fight club
This is a little bit of an older article and Apple has since been working on MacRuby (http://www.macruby.org/trac/wiki/MacRuby) which is poised to replace RubyCocoa. MacRuby adds a special syntax to Ruby to better deal with the keyed arguments. From the docs:

Objective-C:

NSWindow *window = [[NSWindow alloc]
initWithContentRect:frame
styleMask:NSBorderlessWindowMask
backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered
defer:false];

RubyCocoa:

window = NSWindow.alloc.initWithContentRect_styleMask_backing_defer(
frame,
NSBorderlessWindowMask,
NSBackingStoreBuffered,
false)

MacRuby:

window = NSWindow.alloc.initWithContentRect frame,
styleMask:NSBorderlessWindowMask,
backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered,
defer:false
i don't agree with him
i wrote a flash/actionscript client for streaming mp3 files myself. i'm about 90 percent sure that there is no getting around the fact that every server you connect to must give you explicit permission to connect, either through an .xml file or a little server running on a specific port.

this limitation exists no matter whose code you use. it's a security thing that macromedia/adobe put in there on purpose.
i can stream any shoutcast station without permission using the sound object, my issue is the memory leak.

flash thinks it's dealing with an mp3 song that plays infinitely. it increases by approximately .02mb per second.

i know you can stream any station using minicaster, but you can't import an as2 swf into an as3 swf.
I don't think he's passing judgment, saying that Cocoa is too closely coupled, I think he's just comparing why it works better with Objective-C than with Ruby. Amongst other interesting projects are Nu, a Lisp designed for Cocoa and Objective-C; and MacRuby, a fork of Ruby that uses Objective-C's runtime and garbage collector, and language tweaks for named arguments.

http://programming.nu/

http://www.macruby.org/
One extremely annoying thing that is rarely mentioned is very very slow scroll speed.

I think it may have something to do with background images and/or transparency.

Even some quite prominent sites suffer from this flaw (making them almost unusable for me):

http://ajaxian.com

http://jayisgames.com
i was talking about socket usage, that's the part you need permission for.

and i think you should try a longer test before you assume it's leaking memory. i vaguely recall running into this myself, and i think it hits an eventual plateau, without leaking forever.
Take-away: Build on top of platforms and services so that you can prove your idea quickly and inexpensively and fail while the investment is small. Use Amazon, Google App Engine. Probably these are revolutionary ideas for most of the world, but are pretty well known for HN readers.
The actual problem is a power/fuel source to move mass-produced and well-understood things into space in the first place.

What about this?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429099
you're probably right. i'm fairly certain i'm freeing up the objects properly for garbage collection, and re: sockets, you definitely need permission for that.

which makes me wonder what minicaster is doing...

but i should test for longer periods. i've been testing for 3 minutes at max, maybe should let it sit for 30+. minicaster keeps the memory fixed every 5 minutes though.
If such a hypothetical power source existed, we could literally replace the propulsion systems of nuclear submarines and have an instant space fleet... Complete with torpedoes ;-)
Odd that they didn't use PNG for the tiles. (perhaps a limitation of seadragon).

It would be interesting to see a comparison with AppEngine, S3, and CloudBurst. Obviously AppEngine won this because it was free, but 10GB/day is less than $2/day on both S3 and CloudBurst, so it isn't overly expensive to run AWS.
Yes, but it's not linear. It looks more like a "step function." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function)

If you currently use a heater for 1 hour/day at home, and then you turn it up to 2 hours/day, you do need about twice as much energy to power that heater as before.

However, if I make 100 additional requests today, Google doesn't need a new server. If everyone in the world makes 1% more requests, Google doesn't need a new server. So to try to calculate the cost of me doing one additional search is perhaps slightly misleading.

I'm not saying there is no cost. I'm just saying that the cost is incurred in chunks, and not "per request".
I think that means they will ship for PS and XBox, also, since those controllers are pretty much equivalent to USB.
You mean, it is ok for a publisher to release poor quality books now and again as long as the average stays good enough?

Yes. I doubt there is another way.

Do you know how tech book publishing works? It's not fiction publishing -- publishers aren't deluged with a large pool of manuscripts from which they can pick out the best ones. The financial incentives are very poor: Unless they target a very broad audience (see: David Pogue) tech book authors don't make enough royalty money to reimburse them for their time. So publishers must approach potential authors in advance, woo them, and sign them to book-publishing contracts before the books are written. Since they can't offer enough money, the publishers must approach people who have other incentives -- e.g. existing experts or inventors who want to promote themselves or their tools. Unfortunately, the skills required to become an expert in something like XML are not necessarily correlated with the skills required to write a good book about it. And, of course, it can be hard to identify an expert in advance. And it's often better to hire a lesser writer, or a lesser expert, than to have no book on a particular topic in your product line.

Once a book is delivered (if the book is delivered -- a lot of authors burn out in the process), the publisher can work with the author to edit it, but the option of rejecting the manuscript is probably difficult and expensive and politically nasty. So, once written, I suspect that a tech book tends to be published. Might as well let the reviewers and the public do the dirty work of deciding that it's bad. Particularly since there are many subspecialties where a badly-written book is far better than no book at all.
Remind me of how Moore was opposing the Greenspan monetary policies and Bush fiscal policies? Oh, right, he didn't.

It defies parody that a Rand protege (Greenspan) and Rand supporters like Moore basically created this mess.
I guess I'm not following you. What problem is this hypothetical power source attempting to solve? Before, it sounded like you were talking about a need to launch cargo into orbit. Why are you using the term power source?

By the way, high-thrust, and high Isp (rocket fuel efficiency = propellant speed), goals generally conflict with each other. To launch from Earth requires high thrust. To travel through space requires high Isp.
It's basically just a colloquial term for all Russian-language websites. Just like the English-speaking Internet has various social news and blog sites that almost "glue" it together (Digg, Reddit, Y.C, Facebook, 4chan, etc), Runet has the appropriate equivalents (Livejournal, VKontakte, dirty.ru, 2ch.ru, etc)
Sample bias - you only hear about the ones making loads because they're the only ones with noteworthy income.
I can't believe he used the stock Photoshop blue-brown landscape gradient for his site logo. Ugh.
You ain't seen nothing yet:

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=iso (up 100,067.23%)

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=jdo (up 81,870.14%)
I have mixed opinions about O'Reilly books. I don't think their quality is low but as a rule I do think they don't hold their value as long compared to books from the other publishers you cite partly because they publish many books whose subjects are less mature and often likely to change significantly in just a few years.

These days whenever I'm tempted to buy an O'Reilly book that I don't immediately need, I think about the stack I already have that I never read anymore and then check the discount. In the past two years I haven't bought any book of theirs not discounted by at least 50%.
Bright - a free collection of 148 icons
The Libertarian party is a fringe party that is mostly concerned with hemp legalization. I know libertarians (small l) who vote for each major party some of the time.

The point of discussing libertarianism is to see the philosophical difference between someone who advocates personal freedom and economic freedom vs someone who doesn't.
But the other states don't matter! If Libertarian country A is in trouble (from an aggressor, not of its own doing) and free citizens from Libertarian country B want to get involved, they are free to do so. It's none of B's government's business! It would not even occur to a Libertarian that he or she might require the government's permission.

Tho' given that the Libertarian value is long-term freedom, it's unlikely for a Libertarian nation (not the same thing as s state) to be caught napping. A Libertarian country is likely to have a well-trained and well-armed militia, but not much equipment or experience or inclination for expeditionary warfare.
The only ration lending policy -- on an individual level -- is to discount any systemic risk you create by 100% minus how much of the system you make up. If everyone else does this, systemic risk is ballooned and it doesn't matter if you do it or not, you are still going to fail. If no one does this, it is imperative to you do it--after all, someone else is eating ~90% of the costs and you are getting the benefits.
The article is a counterpoint to http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1509-mr-moore-gets-to-pun..., which argues that you dont need sharding because the ever increasing capacity of servers comes to the rescue. Yoavs argues that 37signals is a special case and there are lots of scenarios where you need to plan to scale beyond what bigger servers can give you. Examples are ratio of database writes to reads is not low, beg iron is not cheap, special high performance drives may be driver hell...

Both articles make good points. The real take-away is that you need to understand the performance profile and growth modes of your application to make a good decision on your scaling strategy. Or maybe you use AWS or something similar to find out, before you commit to a hardware strategy.
As a CS grad student with an undergrad degree in creative writing, I always feel like I have to explain how I got here.

I usually tell people I have an affinity for metaphors, and remind them that their desktop, folders and files are all electronic metaphors.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=mo

52-week high: 79.59

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=mo

Actual: 24.55

...That's not as flagrant, but here's the thing: It's been like that for months, and no one has bothered to correct it yet.
I spent the morning setting up both:
Slinkset: http://news.ryanspoon.com
Pligg: http://www.rankible.com

There are benefits to both - namely, Pligg is more robust... but I actually quite like the layout of Slinkset better.

A couple questions about slinkset though for Brett -

1. Can I remove / edit feeds?
2. I really want to be able to add AdSense and would gladly rotate in a % for you...
3. I want better customization of the header / footer

Thoughts?
I've played keyboards for about 11 years. This summer, I was in a Dream Theater cover band.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfmhWH7BVA4
Advice from a once burnt-out programmer
They have been adding a lot of features and other modifications lately.
If you are talking about single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) submarines, I should tell you that the Sea Dragon is kind of like that. It is 75 feet in diameter, and produced in an ordinary maritime shipyard out of steel. This is larger in diameter than any submarine ever made. The Russian Typhoon submarine class is 75 feet wide, but it is not round (it is shorter high than it is wide; flat top). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_class_submarine

A major difference between the Sea Dragon and an SSTO submarine would be the fact that a Sea Dragon is a staged vehicle. Only part of it would make it to orbit. It does launch from the sea, by the way. It could potentially be scaled up to whatever your preferable size is. Is there a particular reason why you would want a big metal submarine in orbit?
At the end of the article he updates the charts with datapoints to 2008 and says that his original premise is still true.
There's a patch for cairo that greatly improves subpixel antialiasing (http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cairo-lcd/cairo-lcd/lcd-fi...), but it's not included in any official builds due to patent issues.

Ubuntu has their own version of this patch, but it seems like it's disabled default -- there's instructions here on how to edit to appropriate config files: http://johan.kiviniemi.name/blag/ubuntu-fonts/ The available filter types are "lcdfilternone", "lcdfilterdefault", "lcdfilterlight", and "lcdfilterlegacy"
You seem to believe in a weak central government and strong state governments that try new approaches and get shit done. This is nice, except most libertarians believe in weak governments in all levels of government. No, not a government that works as well, not an efficient government, but a minimal government.

To have a minimum, you have to have a set of constraints. There's no reason those constraints could not lead to "weak governments in all levels of government"

I must be misreading you. I keep finding people making these broad over generalizations about libertarianism. Yes, libertarians are for minimal government, but minimal is a term you can drive a truck through. Simply because one libertarian believes that limited government is minimal, tiered, distributed government and another thinks it means single-layer, centralized government doesn't make one person libertarian and another person not.

The terms you mention are not simplistic, they are broad. There's a big difference. It lets a lot of people have libertarian leanings and prompts the individual to continue the definition process at a personal level, which is exactly what you want in a democracy, right?
Toyota Plug In Hybrids Coming Late This Year
I just don't think it would work for a mass-market product. If ASUSTeK can take your design and start cranking it out at a lower price, you won't stay in business long enough to design version 2.
Well, maybe, but really the "law" is two separate laws. The first one says that bandwidth grows by 50% every year on average. That's reasonably timeless, though presumably it will stop applying after a while.

The second one clearly isn't really a "law" in any useful sense, just a back-of-the-envelope calculation: plug in the first "law", and the typical size of web pages, and the constant factor that the first law doesn't state, and a figure of 1s for how fast a page has to load before there's little point making it faster, and out comes the conclusion that it's in ~ 2003 that typical pages load fast enough that you can start making them bigger without crossing the annoyance threshold of 1s.

Of course, that assumes that typical web page sizes stay constant over time, which I bet they didn't between 1998 and 2003. I certainly can't recall any time when typical web pages loaded in under a second for me. It also assumes that latency either doesn't matter or scales the same way as bandwidth, which is also a bit naive.

(The original article was written in 1998.)
The publishers of "Deck" recording software on old MacOS Powermacs used to say "Consume the minimum, produce the maximum."

I think that's good advice for anyone. It's good advice for any nation in times like this.
Nope.

Because istockphoto doesn't have anything resembling "news" photos. Whereas Flickr's got lots of photos with real people in them.

I've used istockphoto extensively. it's all models, references, icons etc.

If I need a decent picture of the Mayor of Chicago at a recent festival, there might be 10 on Flickr.

There won't be any on istockphoto.
I submit the concept of "poor programming habits" does not exist for a 13-year-old.
I see...

no variables defined before use (optional). Pet hate: VB fakehungarian names where objects are called oSomething.

In the oRS.open line, the "2, 2" are magic numbers - I have no idea what they do without looking them up. (Turns out they are CursorType adOpenDynamic and LockType adLockPessimistic). Since they aren't the defaults, presumably they are necessary, but from the snippet given the defaults might be OK.

The presence of database tables Members and Members2 with (in this snippet) no difference between them. If you don't need two, merge them. If you need two, name them more helpfully. If the data will only be in one or the other, could you use a union query? Why might the data be in one or the other and why not use that information directly to decide which to query instead of querying both? What if there are no names in either table?

As you say, selecting * but only using one field, and the repetition within the if branches.

Unhelpfully named array "myarr"

Redimensioning of the array every time through the loop.

But most importantly, all the body of the code does is take the names from the recordset and put them in an array. I expect (hope) there is a shorter, more efficient, more idiomatic way to copy a recordset into an array.

See other HN topic about the fun, easy and addictive nature of criticism. I shouldn't really - at least they have a product with members and money to employ people to code for them and enough success that their code stayed around long enough to become old and maintainable... and there's plenty of people who'll argue that make it work, ship it, then if necessary rewrite it is much prefereable to make it beautiful, perfect it, tweak it, file for bankruptcy.
How to spot a Ponzi scheme
But the two are not mutually exclusive, and many people need more than just money motivating them in order to stay in for the long haul.
Very nice, but in my opinion, nothing beats the cri-cri.

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

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TDmnjwbJrVM

It's genuine - I've seen one fly. It's enough to make me think seriously about losing some weight and learning to fly.