skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
don't really agree. RMS has his quirks, sure. but he also has balls, and strong morals. and he's a brilliant hacker. i find him a nice relief from the passive aggressive personalities in the hacker mainstream... not to put myself too much in zed or giles' camp...
Net effect depends on the category. Modern PC games are more advanced than 10 year old Quake 3 (which was state-of-the-art in its time).

If getting to play Quake Live would be as seamless (from regular web surfing) as it is now getting to play Flash games, it would be indeed a major progress.

But if user already has to go through the hassle of installing game-specific plugin, what is the actual difference compared to just installing regular game (downloaded from the web)?

-----

BTW Here is something that is a bit more innovative:

http://www.playce.com

You still need to install a custom plugin (no way around this, at least till there is a hardware accelerated 3D canvas), but at least they try to do something different, taking advantage of the platform: basically you can play games in Google Earth like environment.

-----

And if you want something really crazy, check OTOY:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/otoy-developing-server-...

They are doing server based rendering: instead of movies they stream dynamically rendered images responding to user input (though I must say I have some doubts about practicality of such approach).
I wrote this as well as submitting it.

Any suggestions, thoughts, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
The title is misleading because none of those problems cited (except lack of support for the .0001% of the population using a PPC Mac) have anything to do with Silverlight. I've seen perfectly good video in that format. The Olympics for example.

If they had the same problems with a Flash player, it wouldn't be news, nor would you have given it that linkbait title. I expect better from you nickb.
Wikipedia and YouTube are actually the most popular widgets that users add to the search sidebar when we do not include them by default. That surprised us too since those results are usually surfaced well be Google.

We think that grouping the results by source actually makes it easier to filter through the mass of information - you usually know where you are most likely to find the information you need, it just seems easier to go to Google to do the search.

Flickr and Twitter results are other popular sources to add.
They don't have to charge per user to make money. The customer support aspect is already huge, and each brand would pay to get better tools to reach their customers. That's just one obvious application.
It is significantly easier to go with App Engine, though.

For values of easier which include:

1) Learn to program in Python.

2) Forget everything you know about databases.

3) Lose the accumulated value of all reference work on the Internet on, e.g., "How do I send an email to someone 3 days after they sign up for my free trial?"
Why sentences and not words?
Good points.

We've de-emphasized the history part though have kept it in the product since some of our users really love it. In the latest version you can completely disable the recording elements (you could always turn recording on and off).

Interesting thought on the dark background. I hadn't thought that the color might influence trust in that way, but definitely worth testing.
The hardware that went into ERMA may have been obsolete, but that is only the foundation of the technology. The project was years in the making. I can imagine that trying to sell adoption of emerging transitory technology into a massive financial system would have seemed an unwarranted risk.

Magnetic ink doesn't care who reads it and magnetic ink readers don't care if they're driven by vacuum tubes, transistors, microprocessors, or (we hope) photonic integrated circuits. The vision that went into this project was phenomenal. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the foundation of our modern electronic banking?

Another point on obsolescence: consider microprocessors in satellites and probes. I understand that well proven circuitry is required, which by nature is obsolete because it trails newer system in features and performance.

"Traditionally, space-qualified single board computers (SBCs) have trailed the cutting-edge commercial and military products by factors of performance often times in excess of 10-100x."

See: http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/home/article.php?id=100088

So the technology was obsolete for "new technology" but it still was suitable for the purpose it was intended, whether finance or space exploration, both areas we don't want to make mistakes.
Well it took more than a thousand years for the belief of a spherical Earth to be accepted. It's hard to imagine a new type of geometry when you believe the Earth is flat.
TO DO after the Employee or Vendor Contract is Signed
Since writing this I've moved from wx to qt. I much prefer qt. It's faster, less buggy, and better documented. PyQt is definitely the way to go.

Just a note in case someone finds this via Google or whatever.
Richard Easts Internet Marketing Lessons
I'm curious, do you know when Andreessen said that? Because two years ago I would've believed it, but now I just don't buy it.

Beacon was supposed to be their adsense and look how that turned out. I don't doubt facebook's potential, but I do doubt that there's a switch that they're just waiting for some magic user count to flip.
Sorry, I think I just accidentally down-modded you when I was trying to do the opposite!
> B. Why?

A lot of my friends follow me on Twitter. Three or four of us were hanging out, and someone said something that I thought was really funny. So I tweeted their joke. It's no different than talking to them normally.

> from what I see they're all broken and can't do anything alone without first bouncing the idea of 10 friends for social approval.

You've never asked someone for advice? Also, a lot of people my age (I'm 23) just don't really care about a lot of things. "Where do you want to go to eat?" "I don't know, you pick." "I don't want to pick, I picked last time." "Wendys?" "Sure." Is this what you're talking about? This kind of thing happens a lot, and it's because we just really don't have a strong opinion about a subject at all. It's easier to make someone else pick, when Wendy's and Burger King are basically the same thing. It has nothing to do with approval, and everything to do with laziness. I can see you making an argument that that's just as bad, if not worse, but I don't see a problem with being lazy about where we eat dinner today.

> ... they can't sit still for 2 hours to watch a film and actually pay attention enough to enjoy it.

Have you ever considered that maybe your idea of enjoyment is different than theirs? Maybe they didn't like the film already, and stopped paying attention. One of the things that I find interesting is how much more information I consume on a daily basis than my parents. I spend quite a bit of time on the Internet, and I'm usually listening to music, talking with some friends in person, and texting a friend who isn't there... all at the same time. It's just normal. Multitasking is how things are. Is this good? Is this bad? I'm not here to say one thing or another. I'm just a little biased.
It's neat, but not particularly impressive or interesting. It's an emulator running as a user space application; The iPhone isn't running Mac OS 7 natively (of course, it can't, since they use different CPU architectures, etc).

There have been classic Mac emulators for OS X for awhile now, and porting it to the iPhone was probably quite easy.
MeeVee A Ghost Town, All Employees “Inactive.” LiveUniverse CEO Greenspan Still Nuts.
It's not a fixed place that interests me.

In a world where on-line places are still a failure I'd love to see the rise of "online places" full of people who you can have a useful, short conversation with.

Not hordes of people you "meet" once or twice but small and vibrant and you talk fairly often. People you go out of your way to meet physically, even when they are on the other side of the world.

Places like that can be dispersed over the planet and might incubate some interesting business.
Rackspace is on the very high end of the cost spectrum, and the service really isn't that great. But at least their servers are fast and real, if you/your organization doesn't care about the budget, they're probably as good a choice as any as far as quality of infrastructure goes.

Just make sure the person signing the hosting contract actually reads it, also. You might be surprised to find what they try to bury in there.

It's worth noting that they bought out their lower-priced competition at ServerBeach.
Stay Lean - advice for start-ups
I hope this happens for my childrens' sake. (Thankfully, that is a long way away.) In addition to being too heavy to haul around, textbooks are expensive and constantly outdated, forcing students to sell them for often 10 cents on the dollar. Chegg's textbook rental is great, but this could result in free books with even better and always up to date content.
How to Go from Introvert to Extrovert
hmmm

It might sort of drown you (a 15-word sentence totally changed to a different 15-word sentence would take up 30 lines. My default terminal size holds 36 lines.

But really because I never thought of it. Might give it a try and see if it's better.
Maybe he didn't design this for phonologists? I doubt anyone else has too much use for intra-word diffs.
One of the big frustrations for Linux users is that Netflix supports Linux based appliances, like Roku, but won't support streaming to Linux desktops.

I'm out of luck because I have a couple of Linux machines and a PPC Mac at home...
YouTube - The LEGO Turing Machine
They don't have to charge per user to make money.

They really do, actually. The only thing your proposal changes from my analysis is what pocket the money comes out of.

A Twitter account simply doesn't have $75 of economic value, to anybody -- and they need that to be true of every man, woman, child, and bot on the service. You can dice that $75 into $5 from Tropicana and $10 from BoA and $10 from Slicehost and... if you want. Is keeping a single marginally more happy worth $10 to BoA, when a phone call would only cost them $8, a chat on their website costs them about $1.50, and the average value of the free checking account that the disproportionately young and poor Twitter audience carries is only about $100 a year (mostly in overdraft fees which, haha, guess what they're probably complaining on Twitter about)? [Edit to add: $8 and $1.50 are numbers from a non-bank company who I was a CSR for, circa 2000, for response from a human in North America.]

I actually wrote that jab about the overdraft fees before realizing, hey, why not check to see if my assumptions are accurate.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bank+of+america

[Closing my Bank of America BOA account tomorrow due to being hounded to sign up for a credit card I don't want/need & because of their fees.]

[Watching "Bank of America: Bad for America" VERY compelling http://tinyurl.com/bujr38]

[really hates Bank of America. Probably the sorriest excuse for a banking institution. Ever.]

Can you see the director of marketing just salivating over the opportunity to pay $10 to tweet these people? "I suppose I could be buying a click from AdWords on the keyword [i am a rich man looking for a credit card], but why use a scalable way to reach great customers when I could use a labor-intensive way to reach poor ones!" I'm not seeing it.

I'm also not seeing Twitter users putting up with automated and outsourced tweets, which are an absolute requirement if it is going to be used as anything but a toy for customer service.

@boacustomer: You just mentioned BoA in a tweet. Can we help you with anything?

@boacustomer: Thank you sirs i am truly regretful that you had a disfortunate experience with the bank. Can I be helping you today?
> There is something about a physical book that just can't be replaced in my head just yet.

The $100 you're shelling out every year for the new edition?
http://spacewar.oversigma.com/

Strikingly like real war. The only way to win is to not play.

At any rate, it seems like computer professionals have more nostalgia than those in other fields. We can still look back in recent history to people who made, you know, real advances, rather than fart games for the newest telephone.
How Not to compare dates with PHP/MySQL
The web these days is full of applications that do cool things but don't provide a hint of value to end-users that makes it worthwhile to pay. One suggested option for Twitter to monetize on was charging for premium membership (http://calacanis.com/2008/01/02/the-three-business-models-th...), the one option so far that seems to be in line with traditional business models: provide a service that people are willing to pay for. The blog post suggests 1-5% of users might subscribe to some kind of premium membership...I think more along the lines of 1-5% of active users, which drastically cuts the number of potential subscribers down. Bottom line: advertising might be Twitter's only hope, but I predict limited success (in the long-run) unless Twitter finds a way to produce a service they can put a price tag on.
Does anyone know why they decided to make it so people couldn't switch back to Flash? It seems to me that if they lifted this ridiculous restriction, all these people pissed at Netflix would be happy.
> back to flash?

Flash never was an option.
Simulating Sweden
Facebook's Thiel Explains Failed Twitter Takeover
They have a deal with Microsoft to stream to the XBox. I always assumed Microsoft "evangelized" Silverlight to them.
It is generally acknowledged that e-readers aren't yet as good for technical books where you will flip around somewhat randomly, and want high quality photos, etc. We need somewhat higher resolution, color, and a nice interface for flitting around from place to place.

Novels, on the other hand, are read pretty much linearly, and are great on an e-reader. (Honestly, I've always hated fighting with bindings on physical books.)
Actually in ancient times they knew the world was spherical. It's debatable how many people really thought it was flat even in the darkest of the dark ages.
Any reason why you didn't paste that code directly into your comment and took an image of the text instead?

Als, where can I get this code?
I watch it daily on Mac (mini), never had any issue. Love it. I guess I should pour in my comments-- though they get them indirectly when I beam to people about how much I love Netflix streaming.
Companies tend to avoid things that rely heavily on one "superstar", by stepping out of the limelight, Arrington is making Techcrunch stand on its own
In 1959 the whole computer industry was on the cusp of the conversion from vacuum tubes to transistors, but it was not like jumping off the cliff. The vacuum tube predecessor to the 7090 was the 709. Vacuum tubes were unreliable because they burned out frequently. The transistor machines were a huge step forward in reliability and the 7090 was at least 20 times faster. Once the transistor machines came out the vacuum tube ones were dead. I imagine BofA was faced with the decision of a year's delay to get the new systems and rewrite the software or go ahead with what they had.

Those were the days where every new machine required a rewrite of all your software. OTOH there wasn't very much of it. ERMA had only 4000 bytes of memory and the 7090 had 32K 36 bit words.

Processors for satellites are entirely different animals. They have to be radiation hardened. It's not a matter of waiting for generation x of the x86 to prove itself. Commercial processors flat out wont work in high radiation environments.
Hyperpot
I was hoping to see a compact implementation of diff algorithm. However, the script seems to be relying on using the 'diff' utility already present. Not a bad thing, but I was expecting to see something else.
I have this problem when I use Safari, even the new version of Safari, but it all works fine when I use Firefox.
I went with a don't-reinvent-the-wheel approach. Anything I did would have at least doubled the time to write the script and probably yielded a diff half as good.
Of course nowadays you'd be arrested for being a terrorist.
Top Tech Companies That Pay Engineers The Most
I'm going to argue your point that Twitter users are poor or an undesirable demographic.

According to Aug '08 Hitwise data:
- 63% male
- 57% from California
- 25.9% 35-44 year olds
- 14.7% "stable career" type (young, metro areas)
- 12.3% "young cosmopolitan" (40-somethings, income > $250k)

I'm not an advertising expert, but some of those seem to be desirable demographics.

You're example of searching for BofA also doesn't make sense to me. If I worked for BofA, I wouldn't buy AdWords on my own name–if someone is already searching for me, they know who I am.

For every BofA complaint, you can probably also find someone looking for a new bank (or complaining about WaMu, Citi, Wells Fargo):

http://twitter.com/AliciaSkimbit/statuses/1265772120

http://twitter.com/JoDuxbury/statuses/1252926236

The business model may not look just like AdWords, but I definitely think it's there.
Am I the only one who thought this was a link to something about logo designs for open source projects?
Its relative. The continental US has huge variance in weather and Atlanta's weather is comparatively mild to most places. Our winter lows are between 10-20F, and not on very many days. It snows only once every year or two. Few people wouldn't move to Atlanta because of the weather. Now compare that to... Montana, or Maine. Or Seattle, for that matter. We have lots of New York transplants in Atlanta, and they love our weather :)

A bit off topic but... at least in Florida you can beat the heat in the ocean :)

P.S. It rained a foot, then snowed a foot at my house in Georgia the last 2 days.
Convenient to you and necessary are not synonyms. There is an Internet full of free (beer and/or speech, your call), legal, pretty designs that you can use to your heart's content.

I recommend anything by Styleshout (great web 2.0y designs), MultiFlex (more traditional, a little boring by default but clean and fits just about anything), and several of the designs on oswd.org for projects which don't have the budget for a custom design. I actually ran a profitable business off of an OSWD template for almost two years:

http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/2583

Strip out the giant sunflower, add in a header, and bam, its a B2C software sales site.
I didn't realize how similar Vlad is to Capistrano, even down to the way it is setup (config/deploy.rb) and task names and such. Can someone tell me why it is so much better? (I can read the website myself, but really it seems to be the same product, just rewritten.) Is there any reason to switch from Cap?
Lycos maybe? Excite? Go.com? (hit or miss)
It became obvious to me after glancing at the favico. It's one of those tiny details that ends up being important.
>> "and the service really isn't that great."

Not sure what/who you consider "great" then. Rackspace has been stellar for us–always available on the phone; answering tickets fast; alerting me when there are problems.

I've never had a bad cs experience with Rackspace. (I've got 6 servers with them)
On the other hand, I constantly find myself wishing I could CTRL+F while looking for something in a textbook.
Apple's Safari hits 10% browser market share
Oh wow, Stylish rocks, way easier to use than Greasemonkey (for someone that knows CSS at least). Thanks for the tip, I just stripped out ads and the right column of the nytimes.
...when Andreesen said that?

About 10 days ago, in the Charlie Rose interview. TechCrunch has a transcript:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/andreessen-on-charlie-r...
The $100 you're shelling out every year for the new edition?

Have no fear, the Kindle supports this cherished feature of the paper-book experience.

(Seriously. Publisher removes old book from central location, publisher uploads new book. What are you going to do, buy copies of the old one used from the non-Amazon place you can load your Kindle from?)
"Thiel won't say precisely where he values the company other than to say, 'It's worth more than people think it is.'"

I suppose that most investors desire a greater degree of specificity about a company's valuation before investing, especially in today's market.
I'd like to see the other side of the equation - which schools are losing students? Small liberal arts colleges? Large research universities?

I'm at a medium-sized private research university and I got an email last week saying that undergraduate admissions were up 20% over last year, and set a new record. While I think the financial aid packages here are pretty generous, it's otherwise not cheap to attend...
I'm not sure where you disagreed with me entirely. My point is that I am in support of this kind of very nitpicky writeup. This is in response to "you don't fight marketing with engineering." I am saying you fight it with whatever. Just get different perspectives out there.

I don't know if Opera is arrogant. Maybe they are -- and it's good that you pointed it out. The smiling users bit applies to Apple as well though. It's really not about Opera vs. Apple. It's about knowing that information is veiled, and how to look past that veil, like parsing political speech.

I consider myself a "nerd" but am also exception to ahoyhere's generalization (I also don't think it is a good one, because it is basically describing a psychological defense mechanism, which I doubt is the crux of it). I simply have an obsession with the educational aspect of this.
Very Nice + here is the first serverside app, that let you watch TV on the iPhone without installing an app: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-RLkfBf4cw
Isn't that how streaming to PCs works if you don't opt in to Silverlight?

If not, substitute "flash" with whatever the current option is.
1. Player frame rate has zero impact on flash video playback

2. Established CDNs for flash delivery has been in existence for years(Akami,Influxis..)

3. Flash's video capabilities include playback of H.264,mp4,mov,3gp...(from HD to mobile!)

4. Red 5 is free as beer.

I dont think its a feature based choice. Looks more like a marketing deal with MS for wider adoption of the format.
What is this for and why do you break my browser back button?
In genetics, introducing random changes is one of the worst ways to find useful results. Admittedly, across such a large population, the virus might get worse, but if by worse you mean more deadly, then like ebola, it will restrict its growth by not transferring to as many people. If by worse you mean find another receptor that is hard to attack, then I'm not really sure what to do...
Wikipedia style system for quality control.

Guidelines for comments shown beneath the "reply button."

Guidelines for submissions shown on the submit page.
College Job Network and Corporate Recruiting Solution
Funny that AIG has been advertising for years about their reliability. "AIG: It's in our nature to help things grow."

http://open.salon.com/blog/designanator/2008/11/13/old_aig_a...
Agree. I recently reinstalled AoE on my machine (my gaming never really evolved past 1998), and I can truly spend 2 minutes without issuing a single directive.

In a 90 minute game, the first 15 minutes might involve very little instruction at all - quite different to more modern expectations of game play.
The japanese journalist misquoted in the wired article twitters quite a bit in both japanese and english, and even has an english blog.

He was pretty upset when the article hit, and posted an email to Chen on his blog: http://blog.nobi.cc/2009/02/my-view-of-how-iphone-is-doing-i...

He also twittered about the situation quite a bit, including some back and forth with Chen:
http://twitter.com/nobi?page=5
Caching strategies for Websites