skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should probably clarify. I've worked with the Facebook Platform since it was launched at F8 in 2007. I definitely agree with and appreciate the idea. I also understand that the company is pretty inundated with response that they've had.

However, I can personally keep up with the number of bug reports. Most of them go unnoticed. Unfortunately, it seems like only the absolute giants (the entire platform being down, for instance) and a few random ones get attention at all. For example, two major incomplete parts of the platform: support for the Info tab, which was planned, seems like it was just abandoned. How long has the "new" Facebook been out? Another major recent one -- businesses can sign up for accounts without creating a profile. This special business account can manage a business Page, but that's it. Unfortunately, _no_ applications work with these new "business accounts" because the platform basically doesn't validate this type of user. I get messages about this on a daily basis, and I run just one application. I've been in touch with the Senior Platform Manager and the Platform Program Manager, but nothing has changed.

I can also say, more importantly, that there are regularly problems with it in general. Like what has been mentioned here already, things break at random, unannounced times. I've noticed that other, announced changes have been given too little notice for developers to keep up. And most frustratingly, when you start building on a buggy and incomplete platform, you can often spend copious amounts of time trying to find a bug in your code, only to find out that the bug is in fact Facebook's. I'm sure that any of the active developers in the community will tell you the best piece of advice -- when there's a problem with your app, always assume it's Facebook's fault first.

And it's tough dealing with a problem when it's out of your hands. When you get that rush of messages from your users about something breaking, it's embarrassing telling them that it's something you can't fix. It happens regularly. The users assume it's your fault, and your application is penalized for it (users remove it, give it bad reviews).

Anyway, this is enough ranting. I'm not sure if it's a staffing problem or what, but hopefully these APIs will receive more attention one day.
FrontlineSMS: turn your mobile phone and computer into a communications hub
s/digg/twitter
> For example, if this country had a cheap, fast passenger rail system, people would be more mobile.

And if we all had ponies...

We can't have cheap fast passenger rail because the economics don't work out. The US is too big. It doesn't even work in CA (which is why the proponents have stopped putting up revenue and employment projections).

The US doesn't even have all that many places where local mass transit makes economic sense.

> Also, universal healthcare. If the U.S. were to join the First World on this issue, it would be immensely valuable to small businesses, and remove a significant component of the risk inherent in starting a company.

US govt healthcare, which covers half of the covered population, costs about the same as private (which covers the other half). In other words, US govt healthcare is no cheaper than private healthcare.

How will making it universal change that? (If you're going to argue that it will, why not demonstrate that it will with existing US govt healthcare?)

If "universal" isn't cheaper, how will it help small biz?
I got busted by the SEC. Where should I flee to?
At The Zenith, Indecisiveness Brings Lunch & Poetry
To be fair, at 300Gb/month of free stuff they would have killed most web hosting companies out there.

Most web hosting companies to not depend on extraordinarily price-conscious highly technical people for their bread and butter.

Could you have gotten Wordpress working on Google without having an engineering degree? Could you have set up a simple brochureware site without an engineering degree? These are common customer requirements among the cheap, mass market web hosting companies.
Commoditisation of IT and What the Future Holds (video)
I didn't mean to imply it was a good idea, just that this model, like X Windows, has already been tried before (and found wanting?).
Thank you, good point. Looking at the protocol on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonegotiation) it looks very reverse-engineerable with not much work, but yeah, it won't work out of the box.
Weird. The URL is working fine for me.
Language-agnostic...as long as it's .NET
Amazon Kindle 2 reviewed: a more lovable, less frustrating e-reader
I made the app for myself. I wrote the first code a few days before flying to Startup School last year. I wanted to be able to tweet things when I was traveling. Initially, all it did was schedule tweets. That was the feature I wanted most. Over time, as I wanted it to do more, I wrote more code.

There are tons more features we will add - and a lot more that I'm sure we will add that we don't even know about yet. I am trying to constantly keep my ear to the ground and listen to my users and influential folks in the search marketing industry and trying to prioritize what needs to be done based on feedback and my own daily use of the app.

It's kind of the whole premise of what PG says to do - launch early, and listen to your users. Many startups change their whole model after they launch. We now offer many features I would have never guessed when we launched the app last year.
Sorry I was a bit harsh there. I had really hoped to see the full interview and got a little frustrated.

Curious.. do you have the original (full-length) interview video? Would you mind posting it somewhere?
Is Clojure the "New Lisp"?
Improve Your Chances With Foreclosure Listings
That is not correct again. $150B of the reservers were NOT spent on supporting ruble, but were allocated on supporting banking system and restructuring loans Russian companies borrowed from foreign institutions. But you are right, this was bad move, cause banks took rubles from the gov and instantly turned them into dollars thus harming ruble even more. Putin never supported stock market cause it is (and was) close to non-existant. Russian economy so loosely depend on stock market that even if it goes void noone ever notices that. :-)
Actually just curious - but what is a means of separating them?
For what is the phenomenally expensive rail needed? If people are coalescing in hubs already in order to live and work near like-minded people, why do they need a fast, passenger rail system?
I don't think it's a straightforward comparison. App Engine to me is similar to Heroku or EC2 + RightScale. It'll be interesting to see Heroku pricing since they've got to charge more than raw AWS pricing. The cost of raw resources from AWS and Google are similar -- depends on what you are using on the AWS-side for data storage.
You don't need to spin down laptop HDD, you can dropkick a modern laptop without doing any damage to the HDD. Also 6 hours of battery life is fairly normal for non gaming laptops these days.

I think Netbooks are a solid replacement for a PDA if it's with you, but IMO they tend to be a poor compromise between a primary machine a portable one. They don't fit in my pockets and if I have a bag I only really care about weight at that point. I always have a cellphone that works as a PDA, if I am going to get stuff done I want decent keyboard, a high resolution screen, a fair amount of ram, and a HDD large enough that I don't have to care about what I am storing.

PS: Many "normal people" tend to have a web browser (word processor etc) and a IM client open at the same time so Netbooks resolution is still a fairly large sacrifice for most normal people. I use a 15" laptop with a 1920 x 1200 screen and it's great, I could drop down to 1680 x 1050 but that's low IMO.
That's fair, but numbers 2 & 3 are good points that you don't hear from everybody and their mother. And besides, I wouldn't want to bet against Paul.
Well... I love my Aspire One. With a 160 GB hard-disk, 1.5 gigs of RAM and Ubuntu 8.10 it's a remarkably capable workstation that can hide in my bag in a way nobody would guess I am carrying a computer. I have to explain that: I live in Brazil and there is a larger risk of being robbed than I would comfortably live with. Having a nearly "invisible" computer is priceless.

It is not and will never be blindingly fast, but it's good enough for me.
Apple launches New iTunes Pass feature
It still works for me. Are you just referring to keyboard shortcuts, or can you not cycle through using the menu bar either? If you're trying to use cmd-shift-arrows, it won't work when a text field has focus, because they're the keyboard shortcuts used for selecting from the cursor until/from the end/beginning of the line. This changed a while back. Best to use cmd-shift-[ and cmd-shift-] instead, or the crazy new ones described in the menu. I'm not sure what the situation is for Windows.
btw, there are no possible jokes with alcohol related problems in Russia. Do you aware what happened with nordic tribes in Russia? And that this time most of men died before 50 because of ruined health and stresses?
It's not a target for bad jokes, it is a catastophe.
How do I promote my site?
My site: www.financeschool.info

I would like constructive criticism. On the look (I am not much of a web programmer) and how to promote it (and please no generic SEO or paying for AdWords).

I have tried promoting it in finance forums and such. My highest daily page visit was 40. That day most of the traffic came from blogger.com as a referral, to which I am quite suprised since I don't see it posted anywhere on blogger and most likely came from the Navigation Bar when you click on "Next Blog". Typically it is much much lower.
most of it seems to be pretty useless, but there is quiet a bit of good stuff too
Ariba Goes Open Source With AribaWeb RIA Framework
There are videos on www.aribaweb.org.
Writing unit tests is reinventing functional programming in non-functional languages
One of the best talks I've listened to in quite awhile. In fact, the last really good talk I listened to was by Steve Blank. No accident there, I'm sure.

I'm in the B2B space and working on applying these lessons to Enterprise SaaS applications. It has it's own challenges and involves a lot more face time with customers but the key lessons - execute faster than everybody else - seems to be spot on so far.
A case for why Apple’s not going to produce an inexpensive Mac
It will collapse because of several generations were fooled to many times and they gave up everything except alcohol and TV. They're tired, hopeless and simply waiting for death.

Of course, new people, like the internet generation are different, but they are weak and immature.

About this article - it is probably based on authors imagination.
The honeymoon is nearly over. Google is a business that needs to be compensated for its core strengths.
I strongly disagree. Russia made major purchases to support the Ruble. Viz

January '09: Russia spends $30B in a week

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aalw...

$40B sold in Oct, keeping ruble in desired band

http://russiatooat.blogspot.com/2008/11/massive-foreign-rese...

further discussion of selling to support Ruble

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29099569

That's not to say that Russian hasn't spent hundreds of billions also on loans, and even more billions on loss of FDI and declaring financial war on foreign owned companies. But my point holds.

In any case, I wish Russians the best of luck; they were almost uniformly kind to me when I lived there. But I think the probability that Russia avoids another governmental crisis is shrinking.
Penny Arcade sums it up:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
Not just modern.
This really is amazing. But it makes me nervous. I'm open to the idea, but just as I prefer using a text editor to write my HTML code rather than Dreamweaver, I'm concerned that this can take me too far away from my web app code.

Like any other tool, in order to use it effectively you have to master the tool just like you'd master a language. Hopefully what's under the hood here and the code it generates makes it easy to do that.
Joyent claims to beat Google App Engine pricing
That's good to hear! I have no opinion on Russia; I know nothing about it past or present and I'm embarassed to say I at first thought the original article was somewhat accurate.

But VE is pretty bad unless you can navigate around some big and scary forces. Some people are getting rich there but it's tricky. The diversity of the economy (which has always been kind of bad because of the distortion of the oil business) is getting worse as far as I can tell.
I've heard of quite a few Israeli startups. FilesX being bought by IBM comes to mind off the top of my head. Bangalore is also starting to see its share of startups.
Going without comments can be beneficial, I agree. But one issue: If you don't enable comments or trackbacks, how is your audience expected to follow the discussion?
At the cost of ~5% of the US GDP/year for 20 years we could get our net carbon emissions below 10% of where they are today. Granted few people seem to think this is a worthwhile investment (I don't know), but it's not like it's pie in they sky fairyland talk either.

One approach would be:

Solar home / hot water heaters for every home / building in the continental US. (Pointless in Alaska) This would pay for it's self fairly quickly so IMO it's a good idea.

Power the grid with a combination of Wind, Thermal Solar, Hydro, and Nuclear, with large grid connected energy storage systems. This pays off in the long term, but it's expensive.

Electrify the nations highways, so electric cars can cross the country without backup power. Also add charging stations to most parking lots. This is where things get really expensive and there is not an off the shelf solution for this.

So, the real question becomes how far down that path you take before the costs outweigh the benefits. Which is where knowing how much damage you get based on what level of carbon output. While politicians might not like the answers, it's a reasonable scientific debate, with a definitive answer.
Man faces loss of awesome cave home (click on "More Photos" link)
it is cool, but these tools exist for desktop apps too yet no one i know actually uses them.

the problem continues to be generated code...its bloated, has performance issues, and can't be maintained as easily as it can be created
Tokyo Linux Users Group (TLUG) has monthly meetings, and is a great way to meet like-minded people.
They also have an active mailing list which you can subscribe to.
http://www.tlug.jp/

Ninjava has infrequent meetings and is more developer focused than TLUG.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ninjava/
Most of the time, entrepreneurs
think about 2 types of users:
* Visitors ("Johns")
* Contributors ("HOs")

Shouldn't that be "Hoes"?
worthless marketing pap... and they apparently missed the update to the ora post - it's 100M/day not /month.
Cool. I browsed some of the products. Is it possible to browse by sex? When I was looking at shoes, I saw stilettos, even though I'm not shopping for my weekly drag show in Las Vegas.
I know I'm reviving a long ago post, but I was wondering.. was Milton Friedman completely utilitarian? Were there any instances in which he would support freedom, let's say, even though it might make people worse off?
For 10x better usability, pre-cache your images!
This was fixed in p287 right?
Being seen as someone in the know. Or because karma is a number and must be increased.
Very nice, although the demo seems a bit overly-staged. My prediction: the quality of their debugger will make or break this company.
Take in to account people that are at work or school and may not have a choice as to what OS they are using. That probably accounts for a big chunk right there.
Very snazzy!

I don't know how y'all plan to make money, but don't get too caught up in dev tools! They're fun, and might be good marketing, but be sure they're actually saving time against making the thing that people with money actually want.
It's not a scientific debate and there may not be a definitive answer. This is where smart people often go astray. Not everyone has the same preferences or treats risk in the same manner. Anytime you start saying cost-benefit analysis you have to deal with the issue that there isn't one cost-benefit analysis. That makes it not science. 5% of GDP is huge but it doesn't have the same effect on each person in a society. There's also no way to take 5% of GDP without undesirable side-effects and those also have unpredictable distribution.
Everything Buckets.
Supercomputing Gets Social
I am optimistic that universal health care may reduce costs indirectly.

We see stark differences in food quality laws in countries where the government pays for health care. For example, in most of Europe there's real sugar instead of corn syrup in soda. In Canada, Trans Fats are listed to several significant digits in the nutrition facts, whereas in the US the FDA allows rounding down to 0.0g when under 0.5g per serving.

If we look at the FDA food pyramid, and then compare farm subsidies, they are almost inverse. Better food quality alone would reduce costs, but right now there's no incentive.
How To Start A Blog Using Wordpress Blogging Software
I really enjoy blogging now that I have learned the essentials of how to start a blog and keeping it updated regularly. While you can’t learn all there is to know about starting a blog in 15 minutes, that is really all it takes to get one set up on the internet using the steps I’m about to share with you in this article.
They prolly watched whatever real apps they had and determined appropriate balance based on that data.

But then some things look very odd. Like: "data sent to datastore API" capped at 153Mb/min, which is 2.5Mb/sec. Uhm. I don't think this qualifies as a distributed high-scale system, if that's the best they can do...
This is potentially useful, mainly for running different variations of IE. However ...

a) "from the web" is misleading. It is a native windows exe. It is in no sense running "from the web".

b) nor does it really run in a real virtualized sandbox - try downloading something or saving something from within a page. you'll get a file browser to save onto your own real file system.
Obama Assures Nation: ‘We Will Rebuild’
There's a lot here that is the same as WebMynd's history functionality as we launched it last year. But now we're really focused on aggregating search sources on Google, and the history component and cover-flow visualization are only small elements of it.
You mean like this?

http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/
GTalk Phishing Scam Part of a Phishing Network
He makes some good points. But don't let a few bad users spoil it for everyone. Not everybody has a blog or a way to get there opinion heard.
Seems like it wouldv'e been really easy to contact and shut down the scammers pretty quickly before this became a big deal.
It's WebKit...it passes Acid 3...what more do you want? If you write good markup and CSS, you should have no problem.
This is indeed a huge shift back with immense effect. CPM all over again.
Surprisingly, I even upvoted it, because I appreciate a lot very well written comment by old-gregg. This is exactly the case than the folllow-up discussion is so much more richer than the original very poor pitch.
Interesting point, although I would argue that writing unit tests is more like reinventing Design by Contract.
> Then how come startups don't flourish everywhere those services are offered?

I'm not sure how to start tackling the logical fallacies in your response because there are so many.
My G1 is practically a netbook, I can browse, I can use maps, I can download applications, read ebooks, alarm clock, develop for it. Anything I can do for a netbook I can do on the g1. Short of flash and java.

Its getting better every release :)
It's worthwhile if you're a good writer, but if writing comes hard to you I wouldn't bother. If blogging is forced it's painful for both parties.
What makes a "feature" a "feature"? Due to the nature of software, it's nearly impossible to adjust your "scope zoom" to be set on "feature." Example: If my one feature were: "allow users to send e-mail," or let's make it easier... "allow users to write a comment." I'm already at a loss as to what exactly that means. It may or may not be a feature (and may or may not be work to implement) any detail of that, such as allowing comments to be multiple lines, allowing other characters besides a-zA-Z0-9, formatting, storing the date the comment was written, etc.

Give me any 1 feature, and I can zoom into it and force you to accept other features that need to go along with it, otherwise rendering it near useless. Likewise, you can zoom out from any aspect of software and see that the "feature" really only works because it's part of a greater whole. That's where my confusion over "launching 1 feature" arises. There's really no such thing as a "feature" per se, but a some Platonic-esque form of your software that you strive to achieve.

I think it's precisely this kind of mysterious trickery behind software that makes it so hard to make specifications, test, debug, etc... and why something like 80% of all software projects go either over budget or miss their deadline.

This intangibility of software is also why I take advice about it with a grain of salt. It's easy, after the fact, to look at what you've made and point out the "one thing" that made it work.

I like unalone's concept of the "core goal" behind your project. PG and others talks about this as well. Focus on the one core thing your software does, and do that the best. This has problems also... because there's nobody to tell you that your "zoom level" of the goal is just right. What if my software's goal is to "make users happy?" I could encompass nearly anything with that. Conversely, I could set my goal to be: "to allow users to post a 140 character message", which is way too specific in and of itself to create a useful product.

I guess my point is that software, and nearly all other feats of engineering, are extremely organic. I'm skeptic about advice on the topic by "proven successes" for two reasons: hindsight is always 20/20, and selection bias. I think what it really comes down to is using your best judgment.

AndrewWarner, I'd love for you to investigate: "What do you start with?" I think it's one of the biggest blockers for would-be entrepreneurs, and puts off so many people from even starting.
The Future of Touch
In order to build views with Cappuccino today, I'm doing it by hand (i.e. subclassing for example a CPView and constructing child visuals) - this means instancing elements such as CPTextField, CPButton, etc. and adding it to a view.

But being able to do it visually ala Interface Builder with similar semantics around delegates, subclassing, IBAction and Outlet concepts will rock - speeding up development time tremendously.
Somebody should write an equivalent which will create Rails views.
The Omni Group Releases Four Applications as Freeware
Selling for a profit is the new free
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a bit like reinventing the wheel when PLY is around? http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/

There's another popular library that escapes me, too.