skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is only sort of good news.

On the one hand it provides Flash with a big advantage over silverlight, and Flash has _much_ better support for:

- End users not on Windows.

- Programmatic generation without a Windows back end.

But it also makes pure JavaScript less attractive, and that is one of the things that offers /real/ vendor politics free interoperability for rich web apps in the future.
So, not any more confirmed than the last five times an Adobe goon talked to the press on the subject!
Which line are you riding on? I take BART from Dublin/Pleasanton to New Montgomery every day and the only time I lose my signal is through the Lake Merrit tunnel and Transbay Tube.
I have always wondered about applying this to browsing & downloading. Would you be liable if you computer decided to download and share something illegal?
As far as I know they're already working on Chandler v2.0 as a total revamp of Chandler 1.0. http://people.osafoundation.org/~jeffrey/rearch_documentatio...
i don't believe it.

my guess is that adobe thinks that if they can convince everybody that flash on the iphone is a fait accompli, then apple will be forced to allow it.

reading between the lines, i think apple's objection to flash is more philosophical than technical. it's going to take more than this sort of PR stunt to make it happen.
True. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327555/what-vim-features-...
Exactly; The system, left completely unregulated, will find the most efficient/optimal path, but at what cost? The optimal path may involve ruining the lives of 100 million people. The optimal path may bankrupt many countries, causing its citizens to starve to death. There is nothing wrong with reasonable regulation to ensure a certain amount of stability in life.
For me its something I normaly do at the end of my workday. Fiddling with a stopwatch mode throughout the whole day would be somewhat to much effort for me.
Not saying that there aren't some good commands in there but a lot of vim's and emacs beauty comes from being able to string commands together to produce results. Knowing why the patterns do what they do is much more useful.
To make this work, you need frequently-measurable goals, even if the measurement is subjective.

This isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of motivation.

It can be something squishy like, "Let me take a look at what Bob's checked in so far this week", or something more quantifiable, like, "Bob has closed n tickets today".

[Even if you don't have a hard number of how many tickets someone should close in a day or week, you can generally eyeball it and if there's a discrepancy, look at the descriptions to see how hard the problems were].

It's best to make this as transparent as possible to all members of a given team, and provide a system of rapid feedback and especially fast positive feedback for all progress.

Try and keep communication focused on whatever channel everyone actually likes using. If you're using a wiki, trac, and basecamp to keep track of overlapping items, quickly ditch whichever ones nobody actually uses.

If you can keep everybody motivated, communicative, and measurably productive, then you will actually be far better off than large traditional companies that rely on the ass-in-chair visibility metric to determine whether "work" is working.
Not working for me either, clicking on the username just brings up blank white screen
That's my whole point.

It didn't prevent it, but the lack of it sure contributed greatly to it all.

The biggest single example: the exempting of the four largest investment banks from the previous 12-to-1 leverage rules, allowing them to leverage up to 40-to-1, thus greatly exacerbating the fallout and causing further follow-on crises.

That, among many, many other things, would not have occurred without those IBs being exempted from previously-existing regulation.

Do you really believe non-regulation will be the panacea for all these ills?

Somalia is pretty unregulated. Maybe try your luck there.
I don't know why he got downmodded: noise filtering can be quite artful and effective, and this "noise generator" is certainly quite weak in terms of providing anonymity in a cryptographic sense/strength. Actually, the situation just gets worse, because it creates a false sense of security.
Looking back? GM made a bad bet in the 70's/80's. Many annuity companies made the same mistake. That doesn't mean that current workers are making 100K. All of these articles about paying current workers 100K are totally disingenuous.

They also all focus on how American workers at Japanese owned plants make so much less. They never mention that American-auto company executives make orders of magnitude more than their Japanese counterparts.
Absolutely this can be done and in my opinion is the best way to build a great software team. I am the CTO of Openair.com and this is how we have always operated. We have a dozen developers, about half in the Boston area and the other half spread across the US and we all work from home. Using this approach we have built a successful startup that has steadily and profitably grown every year for the last decade and we are now the dominant vendor in our space.

I believe that this approach creates a work environment that allows us to attract and retain great developers. The kind of developer that really likes to write software and has the maturity and discipline to manage their own time and decisions.

Some implementation notes:

1. We release a new version every two months, the continual releases keep everyone on track with constant customer feedback.

2. We all see and read the check-in diff's, absolutely the best way to know what someone is doing and how well they are doing it.

3. There are great developers outside of the traditional Valley/Boston/Austin areas and a telecommuting team lets you find them and hire them.

4. After about 6 months it becomes very clear who can handle the telecommuting setup and who can't.
Yes, it can be but it depends on your circumstances. My shop has done it very successfully for 16 months.

But there are a number of critical issues to consider.

The physical organisation of a workspace is a function of communication. Place those people who communicate a lot physically together because informal conversation is a lot cheaper than formal conversation.

When you are writing software you therefore have to have the specifier and the coder co-located. Open Source projects work very well because (in the vast majority of cases) they are copying existing software. So sitting at home working on a clone of Microsoft Word - the specifier (a copy of Microsoft Word) is sitting next to the coder.

When writing original software where the specification/product development is the core task this will be much harder - it may be impossible unless your specifier is an expert business architect, software architect and designer and can produce build-able specs and your team are capable of reading and implementing them on sight.

You must also choose your toolset correctly to generate a high volume of informal communication, so:
* central SVN
* centralised mailing list (no point-to-point e-mails)
* continuous build with statuses

Essentially on the software development side the complete open source software development stack is optimised for this stuff, so its a doddle - your work has an observable daily heartbeat. For other sorts of work (say sales, order fulfilment, HR, finance, etc, etc) it is much harder because the core stack doesn't exist - you will have to create it.

The final thing you will have to do is be rigorous on formal comms. You will need to have an all hands call every working day. Sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 35 minutes. You will need to organise face-to-face meetings regularly, Xmas dinners, launch parties, drinks and stuff.

It can be very effective at reducing costs but it is a considerable management challenge and you need to think of it as such. If you adopt a "hey we don't need no steenkin management bullshit, we're way tool techies, hey!" you're probably doomed anyway.
just one word: Standards.

Ok, a couple more: If everybody that does their very best to do the stuff they do today in flash would seriously try their hand at JavaScript the need for flash would be relegated to very few sites. And it wouldn't hurt to have browsers support H.263/H.264 natively either.
"only tangentially related" might be a reason not to vote it up. but my interpretation of pg's rules are that downvotes are only for comments that are inflammatory, spam, or some other violation of protocol.
easy in principle, pretty hard in practice.

It's a recursive problem you'd basically be talking to nobody (and you wouldn't be reading this comment on your writing either).

After all what's to stop those 'above' you from setting the clock back even further.

Eventually only those people not using that feature will be able to communicate, which puts you back at square one.
You're probably right.

This is the same bank that would email around escrow account information. These accounts sometimes had $295 million dollars in them, and they emailed this info with complete account information, wire instructions and routing numbers. No encryption. Regular e-mail.

Oh, the temptation.

But anyway, I am not sure what they valued. It certainly wasn't security or productivity.
That's how we're running our start-up (which, admittedly, is still quite small). We (the "active shareholders") meet physically once a week, but have no central office.

As for the development team (3 people), one of us actually lives in the States most of the year, so we don't meet physically very often - instead, we have iteration meetings 3 times a week on Skype. Tasks are broken down so that they fit into 2-day chunks of time to make it easier to measure progress.

There are certainly challenges, but I think if you're in the same geographical location they're not too hard to overcome. Good luck!
This is a nice piece of anti-stereotype reporting (even if they troll by using "nerd" for headline).
And... a little spot of hope for bringing 21st century tech to countries with millennia of cultural history. More power to 'em!
Wait - couldn't Google, et al sue them for distributing a system that potentially prevents Google's servers from serving other customers? I mean, if this became popular and enough people began using it, it's nothing more than a slow-trickle DDOS and Google would have to spend 6 or 7 figures upgrading to new servers/hardware to manage it.
Perhaps that's the solution then: raise the limits for downmodding. Everyone on the leaderboard is now above 2000. Given the long-tail nature of such distributions, that means there's probably 1-2 thousand active users above 500 - more than enough to downmod spam/trolls.

I'd set the flag/downmod limit to 500.
I agree with Joel's position wholeheartedly. I've read Robert Martin's book "Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices". Referring to the book, which demonstrates the SOLID principles, it's not that you can't do it that way and be successful, it's that a pure object oriented approach is not necessarily the best approach to building every kind of application. He says in his book regarding an example implementation of a payroll system, that we are paid to create "behaviors". I disagree. This detailed critique explains it well:

http://objectmix.com/theory-concepts/10776-critique-robert-c...
My wife just got approved to telecommute - after much initial UNenthusiasm from company owner.
Between times the owner had to see how it worked on a small scale with another employee, and my wife did a lot to boost her own credibility as an effective and trustworthy employee.

Innovations, especially those that seem to threaten owner/manager control seem often to evoke paranoid responses. Sometimes they have to be broken down gradually with positive experience over time.
Good luck to the OP!
If Javascript/HTML/CSS had the cross-browser support for scripting, display, formatting, etc that Flash/Flex does, I'm sure more people would consider it a serious option.

There are many things that can be done in Flex that are impossible or extremely hard and fiddly in Javascript (and I'm not talking about animations, but about user workflow tasks like uploading a bunch of files). There are many other things that can easily be done in HTML/CSS/JS but don't quite work across all major browsers. That last 1% really kills you by taking a huge chunk of time to fix.

Flex interfaces, on the other hand, work exactly the same no matter what browser you're using. Many of our clients are still stuck on IE6 because of corporate policies. Trying to reproduce our interface in Javascript would be very hard and wouldn't work properly for most of them.

To paraphrase you, if Javascript had more of the capabilities of Flash maybe Flash wouldn't be needed.
I'm not so sure. How do you know that groupthink is the problem? Perhaps the problem is instead that the new users fit in a different groupthink pattern than the old users. In that case, you want to encourage groupthink when it leads to the correct behaviours.
That's not a reason to give up. Maybe this time it will work. As pg says, this is an experiment.

The problem of retaining the character of a site while not just letting it stagnate (as happens when you start doing things like cutting of new memberships or restricting new user posting) is a very hard, and as yet unsolved I believe, problem. But solving hard problems is what it's all about, right? :p
Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Fedora 10)
I think this is a very good idea, but for a slightly different reason.
The whole points-for-posts thing creates a meta-game of accumulating
points above the normal game of participating in discussion. This
leads to those annoying meta-disucssions where people complain about
being down modded and all that goes with that.

The modding system is useful for ranking comments so that when I read
a massive thread the most interesting ones tend to be around the top.

It may also be useful for users as a feedback mechanism to figure out
when they're doing something that's not cool (like the things we've
been discussing in the guidelines thread today) but I don't think you
need a precise numerical score for that. And I think it's the precise
score that gets people in the karma-game mindset. It certainly does
that for me.
The Future of Organic Design
I agree; I remain unconvinced by TrackMeNot, I think it's the wrong approach.

Although the FAQ in the site says Bruce Schneier's criticism was unfounded, I'm not so sure about that. Here's Schneier's post: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/trackmenot_1.h...
If the economy did not suck I suppose they could find another job or save money and build a startup. Seems a bit too risky in these times though.
Cilk++ 1.0.1: Build Multicore-ready Windows Apps
That would be an ibis you're thinkng of?
Biological diversity is important to the quality of human life. For example many would say that many amphibian species are endangered and nearing extinction. In many areas amphibians are extremely important predators of insects.
It's web based because the main data store is not on your computer but 'out on the web', and you can access any of your data stored in it by logging onto their website.

You can install a program for your convenience, but you can use the core remote-storage of dropbox without it.
Ah. Ok now what are these 3D displays you speak of?
I've added it to favorites, but it's still the case that nothing's happening. I click on the link at the left, and nothing happens.

Am I doing something wrong? What should happen when I click on the link at left?
To me, thin client means Windows and Remote Desktop, and that means a clunky experience with a very problematic remote desktop client that interrupts what I'm doing quite often and a server experience that needs a lot of management and doesn't support a lot of badly written programs.

I wonder how many more people would be happy to work by remote desktop / windows thin client if the technology was still much the same, but the experience was polished a bit more?

I don't know what the Linux-style equivalent is, is there one or is it a mash of X-forwarding-over-SSH and VNC?
I think people are much less in control of what influences them than what we'd like to admit.
- When people with long enough attention spans are invested in the conversation they will read through many of the comments. In many cases if you come into a conversation late you will be posting a reply because it is less likely you are coming in with a new angle. If you are posting a reply it is more likely others will see your comment because it will be visible on their threads page.

-I think the example you gave is a very rare case (I hope.) Unfortunately part of commenting right now is timing, which I do not have a problem with. If you post something informative two days into the conversation it will not have the same exposure, although depending on the conversation it will not appear far below the fold.

-I do see your point and I think it would be great if good comments that come late have more visibility. None or all of the following might help:

1) Delete comments and their replies once they reach a certain negative threshold (-5 for example.) Of course this gives downmodding a whole new meaning but maybe that is a good thing. This would make the comments section more readable and keep the conversation more civil and/or focused.

2) Highlight comments that were posted in the past 8 hours and have reached some karma threshold in yellow. This is a sort of "recent hot shots" feature. This way when an HN reader scans the page they can see what new comments are receiving upvotes more easily.

3) Give recent votes more weight then past votes. This means that a karma point awarded now means more than a karma point awarded an hour ago. Maybe the algorithm HN uses already does this- I am not sure.

I don't think pushing newer comments with fewer points up is a good idea because that changes the power up upvoting too drastically. Perhaps some anchor tags at the top of the comments section leading to the hottest new comments?

p.s. nice blog
I actually started doing this last year with OCaml. I need to get back to it (I've only done the first 4 problems) because it is a great way to get back into math and to learn a new language.
Sistemi Roulette
Oggi abbiamo fatto più di 1000£, di nuovo. Il tuo sistemi roulette funziona davvero, e quelli che non ci credono dovrebbero provare da soli
I find the assumption that the WWII spending helped us. As in "Then, finally, geopolitical events took over, and World War II forced Roosevelt to spend as much money as Keynes wanted. " In fact, our exports ramped up because the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was destroyed. Our economic golden era following the war was driven by exports- first selling military equipment to the UK, and then other industrial goods after the war as we were the one of the only places making anything. The money we gave to other countries to rebuild was spent on a lot of American goods.

It's really the Chinese who are trying that approach, lending us money to buy their exports and then hopefully collecting the interest later (except we keep borrowing more money to pay the interest). At some point (now?) this starts to fall apart. One way is that we have massive inflation so that our future debts aren't worth much.
Good idea, that could be an easy way to prevent the absurd up- or down-voting phenomenon.
yes, one troll can do a lot of damage. but trolls around here never get the chance, because their accounts are killed swiftly. the editors on this site are much more aggressive about curbing bad behavior than anywhere else i've ever seen.
Or blow it when it stops receiving signals.
20 years seems like a long commitment to any particular technology.

In 1989, token ring (a LAN technology backed by IBM) was a viable alternative to Ethernet. If a particularly info-highway-smitten municipality had made a 20-year deal with IBM to have token ring networking installed in all new buildings, they would have been kicking themselves for the past 15 years...
Or, alternatively, the unions made some bad decisions and forced management to accept them. It's not the wages, it's the work rules. [1] The US car companies are "paying people to sit home and watch Oprah".

Completely agree on the executive compensation. Maybe the union should be abolished and management and employees should be given enough dividend producing equity to care about the actual profitability of the company. If management and the union drive these companies out of business, I'm paying their stupid pension.

[1] http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2008/12/its-work-rule...
The problem is the "gate keepers" who let short term thinking infect their decision making process. I don't think it's the fault of the Auto Worker that they learned how to bargain. I don't think the banker messed up by making 500k. I think the people taking a negative amortization zero down payment loan on a house they can't afford could have made a good decision. Live in a house for 3 years at less than the cost of renting what's not to like?

PS: The Japanese Yen just increased 25% so a lot of these US vs Japan comparisons are not as unbalanced as you might think.
Jane Austen fleshed out with zombies?
Incomes of the richest Americans more than doubled in the past eight years. Do you think they got twice as productive?

Well, lots of people are now coding in Ruby/Python/etc instead of Java/PHP/C++/etc.

(Written only mostly tongue in cheek)
Professor Uses Mathematics to Decode Beatles Tunes
The Poetry of Google's Malware Mistake
I showed up here because a real-life acquaintance wrote a nice post about HN on his blog, here: http://www.robsayers.com/programming/HackerNews.html I had visited in the past when it was purely Startup news, but I hadn't created an account.

As I'm more of a tinkerer and explorer than entrepreneur, the bent is more toward my liking, since the revision. I really like the attitude--or rather lack thereof--and look forward to becoming a part of the community.
Addendum:

(5) Different apps want to open files in different places. One app's Open dialog wants to look in the directory you finished off your last Open. Another app wants Open to look in the directory of the file you most recently opened by double clicking on its icon. A third app wants Open to look in the directory where you completed your most recent Save. Etc. As in the Save As problem, no one can remember each app's Open convention.

I know several older people (in their 70s) who sorely miss the days of yore when they worked with their user files on floppies. Each project lived on one or two floppies. Even if the OS allowed subdirectories, they didn't bother creating them. So, on DOS or early Windows, say, the users could always find their work at A:\ (unless there was no hard drive; then their work was at B:\). No getting lost in Open or Save As, no Recent nonsense, no digging down through folder icons, and hardly a need for built-in search.

We've been living with hierarchical file systems for several years now. And the upshot is, the Finder (or whatever it's called) and desktop apps plus newfangled browser apps don't present a consistent interface to the file system.
I'd rather have them charge for the WiFi service in liu of raising, already above national public transit average, prices to give it away for free.
About.com - Answers to your questions.
The asymptotic approach of storage costs to 0 has made some people believe that everything is worth saving.

Like Fred Wilson. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/confessions-of-a-pack-rat-ak...

Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)
I'll believe it when I actually see it - this has been said so many times before its not funny.