skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a serious question: Why would you want to use plain old "grep" instead of "ack"[1]? Of course, other than the fact that it's on all machines. Why would you use it instrad of "ack" on your own machines? That's an honest question, I'm not starting a flamewar... The highlighting and filename/line# by default is the killer feature for me.

Edit: Come on. Downvotes for this? Honestly... It's HN, not StackOverflow. You don't mark questions as "off-topic" unless they're trolling...

[1]: http://betterthangrep.com
The announcement is now streaming live at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZVqPuq81c&feature=play...
For ordinary customers, software that's not on the Mac App Store might as well not even exist. Developers who try to make a living selling serial numbers on the web via Paypal are going to be selling to a tinier and tinier slice of the market. We're headed toward appliance computing for almost everybody and a Linux box for the rest of us.

Apple understands this; hell, even Microsoft is starting to understand this. Does anyone doubt that we're headed in the same general direction on the Windows Store?
Surely most people want to be a successful entrepreneur...
If we reformed the system to force the patent holder to actually market a real product using the patent in order to be able to sue to defend the patent, making them more similar to trademarks, this would solve the pure patent troll problem. Unfortunately it wouldn't stop the mobile patent wars.
How Blogging Changed My Life & Why Everyone Should Start A Blog
It's all about where the mass market is. Just like the low-selling Mac Pro machines, Apple could quite happily keep OS X going for the professional minority that require a POSIX-like experience. The vast majority would use a slightly upgraded iOS, where all of that is hidden away.
I found some in house utilities using -R on their own interfaces. I thought it was weird. Now I know they were right.
Twitter Down Again
The accounting software I develop [1] is a year out of date on the Mac App Store because of the restrictions that Apple have introduced.

And yet I disagree with Marco: This is a one-time problem as Apple tighten requirements for publishing on the Mac App Store. In a few years users will have forgotten this problem (if they ever noticed in the first place) and the benefits of the Mac App Store will make it the dominant distribution platform. Those benefits are: easy to make a purchase, easy to see reviews for a product, easy to find a product, easy to install on multiple machines.

Eventually I'll have to change the software to meet Apple's stricter requirements so it can be published on the Mac App Store again.

[1] http://www.solaraccounts.co.uk
The aim of a founder is not to be the best marketer or developer. It's goal should be knowing just enough to hire the best people in every field and lead the team. This what makes a great founder.
Well with the thinkpads and other business-centric laptops you tend to get the advantage of modularity as well. Keyboards, screens, hard drives, RAM, batteries, and optical drives can all be replaced fairly easily on Dell Latitudes and Lenovo Thinkpads. (The ones I've had at least.) On a Macbook, replacing the RAM and hard drive are the only ones I know to be fairly simple.
Speaking as a developer, I think I can see the analogy between dev and marketing. But from a learning perspective, software development has a big advantage. You can build everything from a hello world app to your own toy OS without being negatively impacted by existing software out there.

As a marketer, it seems like you always have to be on the cutting edge. What worked in the 1980s is unlikely to work in 2012. Even what was cool in 2008 is unlikely to be effective today. The next problem is that marketing is, by its nature, a public activity. Doing it badly is embarrassing and likely limits your ability to even give it a second try.
Modeling A Resume After Google Analytics
Twitter also just went down. Though I don't see how it could be related.
API Status | Twitter Developers
12:11PM EDST:

Twitter is currently down for <%= reason %>.

We expect to be back in <%= deadline %>. For more information, check out Twitter Status. Thanks for your patience!
I could see that being confusing.

If something appears in two tag-folders, is it because it has both tags, or because it is two different versions or copies, with different tags?
The crowdfunding bubble of 2013 part 3
I'm trying to dig into Marketing and really figure out how to hack it. I've found patio11 extremely helpful, and also some of Peldi's posts on the Balsamiq blog: http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketi.... I will definitely check out some of the recommendations here.

Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? I've picked up a few books but I'm looking to really dig in and get better at selling SaaS stuff online.
Actually I believe you're suggesting that the paradigm of tagging files may be inappropriately complex for most users. And I would agree.

The point is that we've had the ability to apply tags since the dawn of unix. It remains an obscure feature because as you say most users are uninterested.
I'd tend to disagree: everything old is new again. Sears Roebuck beat me to A/B testing by, what, eighty years?
"I do also think that Samsung probably did cross the line between taking inspiration and wholesale copying and attempting to look like Apple."

Most people point at the physical design of Samsung phones to make this point, but in all seriousness Samsung just plain didn't copy the iPhones design. Take a look at these two products Samsung made, both of which predate the iPhone and both of which show the exact design language that Samsung has used on the Galaxy * products:

http://imgur.com/a/divSu#0

http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/09/samsung-digital-picture-f...

Not somewhat similar to the design language, exactly the same. From the rounded corners, to the bezel, to the single button on the bottom of the device. This was Samsung's design language before the iPhone ever existed.
One of my favorite sayings: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Getting people to pay for what you executed on is more everything.

If there are 1000 people who are 'idea people', 100 of them can execute on an idea; actually build something. 10 can get that thing sold.

Those 10 are the dangerous ones.

Great post.
I don't think there should be a HN submission every time Twitter/Google Talk/AWS has a short outage and I find this submission in particular to be of low value - that's why I flagged it.
SSTable style databases are very cheap to snapshot, so you could totally handle this MVCC style. I buy the logic could get nutty in some pathological cases, but performance wise it shouldn't be much of a problem.
He was actually being positive about the vendor lock in, and saying that it is damaging to MS that people are using cross-platform stuff. If he were aware of Mono, that would probably make him more negative.
You have no idea how helpful you've been. :)

Thank you for taking the time for this.
It does not have any imapct on Instapaper.

In short, sandboxing is an idea where every app lives in an isolated environment. By default an application can only access its own files, every other system resource is unavailable until the user explicitly allows the app to use it. It has impact on many apps, for instance your favorite git client won't be allowed to open the repositories you've been lately working on, just because they're located in Documents.
All companies, positive or negative, have some honest employees.
This, finally, is the fourth paragraph:

Flock finds the photos you take together with family and friends and magically brings all the photos from each person's phone together into a single shared album.

At least it stands alone, making it somewhat more (quickly) identifiable.

And such formulation (as in this comment, by the way) is what is known as "burying the lede". [1]

I mention it because I'm getting rather tired of not just blog posts but also essays, news articles, and even marketing copy (which the OP could also be considered), that makes me read 200, 300, or 500 words before I learn what they are talking about.

--

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede
An idea for the iPhone home button
Isaac Z. Schlueter (npm, NodeJS) answer to TJ Holowaychuk’s Components
Does anyone know how to make a smaller page sized PDF from this texinfo source? Specifically, I'd like to target the screen size of the popular 7-inch tablets.
I have to say, just skimming through on the Kindle version (on iPad), the book looks beautiful and well laid-out. Can't wait to dig in.
Why wait? It's clear they would love to do this and are just holding off until they think they can get away with it.
First 3D printed gun tested/works
Audiophiles - completely irrational gibberish
I'm just having fun! And dealing with my own PANIC in my own way.

Seriously though, think how dependent a lot of people are on Twitter. I'm not just talking about us nerds who like tweeting links about CSS hacks, or the people who like to take photos of their food.

Here in the UK train companies use it to put out information on service status. News networks use it as their primary means of connecting with the audience. Hell, I have several friends who seem to conduct their entire relationship via Twitter. It's also become the go-to method of communication for people who want to get a message to companies.

Whether or not this is overkill, that's for individuals to decide. But I'm 100% sure that Twitter has outgrown itself.
> architecting enterprise integration contracts

As a soon-to-graduate who knows both Lisp and Haskell, I'm curious what exactly this means.
Yikes http://cl.ly/image/0e390o2i3a38
haliax is right, although I don't cover Csound much.

If you want to compose for instruments, you may want to learn more about what contemporary classical composers are doing (or have done) [1] to address the notational challenges.

On the other hand, if you want to have completely freedom, computer generated music [2] can give you that, specially if you use something like Csound, Supercollider [3], Chuck [4], or PD [5].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_classical_music

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_music#Computer-generat...

[3] http://supercollider.sourceforge.net

[4] http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu

[5] http://puredata.info
We require a quorum over coordination servers to stay up. For example, if you only have two datacenters with actual DB servers, a third coordination server out in the cloud somewhere can act as a tiebreaker (it will be lightly loaded).

These coordination servers do paxos, but are only needed when there are failures or role changes - they don't participate at all in committing individual transactions. Normally, we only need a single geographic ping time to do a durable transaction if it originates in the current 'primary' datacenter.

For further improved latency, we plan to allow each individual transaction to decide whether it needs multi-datacenter durability. The commit process is the same, but we can notify the client of success earlier if it is willing to take the risk that a WAN partition or meteor strike violates its 'D' guarantee. ACI are guaranteed either way.
> Development in India is more ingrained in Microsoft than anywhere else on earth.

Software development in India follows whatever happens to be mainstream. People need jobs, most of the jobs are in software services, the projects service providers get are mostly Java/.net, colleges and people tend to stick with Java/.net to be on the safer side.

> ALL LARGE IT CONSULTING FIRMS have major operations in India, and the majority of them use ASP.NET or WPF.

Most of the consulting firms in India don't get a choice, even for the greenfield projects. Goldman Sachs comes in saying this is what you need to do and use Java, the consultancy plays along.

That said, from what I have seen, Java overshadows .net by a big margin.
> > Windows security issues are everywhere and it did not need to be so.
> Sorry, but that's mostly due to the desktop market size and Windows' share of it.

No, it's not. It's mostly due to Microsoft ignoring security for years because it wasn't important to them. They didn't have to have everyone running as root by default in all versions of Windows before Vista (AFAIK in XP Home you can't actually set up restricted users). They didn't have to have lots of open ports offering things like RPC to the world. They didn't have to have all files executable by default, based solely off the hidden part of the filename in AnnaKournikova.jpg.exe.

There are now supposed to be 300M Android devices worldwide, which is within an order of magnitude of Windows' numbers 10 years ago, and you don't see Android phones being compromised remotely within fifteen minutes of being connected to a network. There's no equivalent of Blaster or Sasser or anything close to that level.

It's partly due to Windows' market share that it got targeted so heavily, but those opportunities wouldn't have been there if they hadn't ignored security for so long.
Feel free to call me a n00b or uncultured, but I don't get your anti-spam measures to subscribe to your posts via email.

Prove humanity by completing the lyric: "Blame..."
huh?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I do want to point out that you're talking about employees of a company that has a shared file server... That people use! I have several family members, that I consider highly intelligent, who work blue colar, manual labor jobs, for which they don't have email addresses, even as they were promoted to more senior and leadership roles. My uncle hates his computer. He loves his iPad. Furthermore, I know several more folks who have business email addresses, some kind of web mail, are not issued company machines, and maybe only check that email once a month. Consider service industries, like restaurants. The number of people that work these sorts of jobs likely outnumber tech savvy office dwellers 10-to-1. You live in a bubble. Most of us here on HN do.
Functional Monitoring with Listerine in Ruby
But they didn't - they made Rosetta and supported it a couple of years just to give the developers and the users time to update their apps/computers to Intel versions.
The ban in Germany took Samsung about 2 weeks to get around, not really very effective
There will always be (perhaps seemingly a majority of) people where being a developer is just a "job" and learning new things isn't necessary.

Absolutely. And I don't begrudge those people- I initially learnt .NET myself and then broadened my horizons, but many of my previous co-workers have families, time consuming hobbies or other such interests. There's not inherently wrong with having "just a job", if you're content with other things in your life. It seems like a specifically (oddly) US-centric view that there should be anything wrong with that.
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Ok, I'm not anywhere close to a linguist. The only linguistics class I've ever taken was, strangely, an automata theory course.

But what I've read around linguistics lead me to believe that the field was mostly Chomskian theory with very little empirical evidence. But then, I've never been a real fan of Chomsky's work---sure, in that automata theory (and in other well-defined formal languages) it's great, but I don't see a good application to natural languages---and so I haven't actually tried to follow up on anything I've heard about it.
Flag Color Eyeballing Game
Only Metro apps work on Windows RT. Developers want the largest audience possible, so it makes sense that most of them will eventually want to target Windows RT, which is clearly what Microsoft is going for.

It's going to get harder and harder to avoid metro apps.
It's bad enough that apps are leaving the App Store because of sandboxing. You don't have to make shit up. The owner of a Mac can enable root access through the Directory Utility, completely legit, and can install and run code from any source without even doing so. Jailbreaking OS X makes no sense; there's no jail.
Anecdotal counterpoint to your counterpoint - I saw the same thing 10 years ago when I was in school (Comp-Sci students gobbling up Visual Studio). It seems the more things change the more they stay the same...

Despite this:

-Qualified .NET developers continue to be difficult to find. Also, they make slightly less money than their Java counter-parts for reasons I don't fully understand.

-The 00's are regarded as Microsoft's "lost decade"

-Microsoft's tools gained little traction among startups... although MS-based ones do exist. The most notable being StackExcahnge however that was created by industry veterans not out-of-college whippersnappers.

Don't count on computer science students to create Microsoft's future. Many will drop the major for something easier.
There are a lot of problems with that idea, but the biggest I can see is that the user experience is horrendous. You're basically describing a world of itemized crippleware, where buying an app that's more than a few years old involves a half hour-long process of adding on feature packs.
The error message doesn't suggest this is a load issue. Also, wouldn't the entire app go down rather than a single link?
On Accepting Cash and Avoiding Segregating the Dining Room at Marcel's
for the "uncultured": Blame Canada! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzG7bBylRo
Since OS X is a better/simpler choice for many people and has WAY more quality supported apps than Linux has. If Linux became the superior choice for most people, a lot of those people would switch.
> I don't think distros should be afraid to break compatibility with main if main is making a change that makes no sense.

Hi, I don't agree. Different versions of a tool showing different behaviour for the same option is enough for me; the same version of the tool showing different behaviour for the same option _depending on the distribution_ ... I feel that's too much!
Right click and choose open. Don't double click the app. It definitely works.
Programming lessons I learned
"People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support."

This is an awesome reply. Not because the views on Google but how reaching financial independence changes the outlook on work. It something I can closely relate. As I have gotten closer to FI, I am more likely to do things that I value even if they ruffle the feathers than just go along with things that I dont value personally but still need to do as part of doing the job.

This reply was so timely for me as just yesterday I told my boss that I quit go find somebody else because I was being asked something that diverged from my value system. Being customer-centric, I value customer satisfaction very high and I am not fond of the hurdles being erected to achieve that goal.
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WFM, I see "Your public IP address is 2620:0:1042:1:...."
This is a funny definition of "verifiable" that the commenter you are replying to is not using.

I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.

This is a bit like saying that the USA should not be credited as the first nation to develop and use a nuclear weapon because Nazi Germany would have done the same thing if it had survived long enough.
I suppose we should all be glad that some VCs were able hit a jackpot so soon, this is just what provides incentives for other VCs to keep investing in tech startups.
Wow, Google Talk and Twitter both go down in the same morning? Crazy!

What's next? EC2 data center power issue?
In 2005 I bought a 5-year-old used Huffy beach cruiser for $18. The new model of the same bike was about $120. For two years, I used that bike as a commuter and averaged about 40 miles per week on it during good weather; I was living in Chicago at the time, so let's call it 20-weeks of biking, or 800 miles.

After that two years, I still used it as a backup and regularly lent it out to friends; easily 400 miles per year for the next four years. I never upgraded a single component, other than change the tires once and inner tubes as needed. I never changed or oiled the chain; I purposefully did not maintain the bike so I could find out when it would self-destruct. For the past three years, I had been storing the bike outside and uncovered (during Chicago winters). Once spring rolled around, I would just hop on and grind through the rust.

The only reason I stopped riding the bike was because last year both wheels were stolen.
The problem can't always be left up to pure market forces, though. VCs do not fund projects that they don't believe will stand a chance of producing a large return. They may fund several ideas with a small chance, but a business that will provide for the greater good, cost a lot of money up front, and only provide small returns simply won't get funded. Sometimes government must be used to provide for the greater good or it won't happen at all.

The greater good is often politically based, it's true. It may not be business-based at all. Fundamentally, a politician can use any issue as a talking point, and certainly, a politician that funds an idea that creates something good will use that for their own gain or another's detriment. But simply because an idea is politically based doesn't mean it is not worth pursuing, or that the business world would do it any better.

In a way, this is what the government is doing in solar. Solar companies need to be funded and researched now before the market makes solar (and alternative energies in general) viable on a large scale. Right now solar is too expensive to produce and the price of oil gives little incentive to change habits. For the greater good, companies must be founded and research performed that will ultimately decimate the entire energy sector of the economy. Few VCs are going to be interested in destroying value, and yet we must do this before it is forced on us by the limits of the natural world.

It is not a perfect vehicle but only the government has the pockets and patience to make that happen. Some will fail. That does not mean we should never try though. That means all those on the sidelines cheering for government failure should instead try to assist with better solutions and better oversight. Most are happier to criticize and make sweeping judgements though.
You implied causation between working for a Murdoch-owned media outlet and writing a column with a light take on the facts.

That's fallacious, and that's why I called it out.
This just feels like blame shifting to anyone but himself.

If they needed generalists, why didn't he hire generalists? My understanding is V4 was a mishmash of numerous technologies and all along, it sounded like there wasn't a vision for how the pieces would work together.. just a vague goal.
Building a RedZone Channel for MLB in 48 Hours
Have you looked at https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pocket ?
Very good article. Very few entrepreneurs have done it successfully more than once.
Pages 14 and 15 of John Siracusa's review of Mountain Lion tell it pretty well:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/14/#gatekeepe...
You could offer consultancy work doing enhancements and integration work ?
Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading?

Not necessarily SaaS specific, but some of the foundational works of recent times are the works by Jack Trout, Al Ries, and various co-authors: Positioning, Re-positioning, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, and Differentiate or Die among others.
I agree with all of that; I should have been more clear in referencing the web stuff. Perhaps I'm being unintentionally disingenuous about Java's role in all of this.