skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i have read many papers on einstein, and i'm fascinated by him. he has some of the most interesting philosophies on life, but it's a bit frustrating because he's an easy person to take out of context. lots of people will grab a sentence or two just to try and prove a point.

particularly the atheist crowd will often take einstein quotes and use them to say "you see? even einstein doesn't believe in all that nonsense!" i would probably consider myself pretty far from religion (even though i was raised a nazarene christian from birth), but what einstein is describing as his "religious belief" is pretty nicely summed in that last paragraph. i've read essay-length papers on his views on religion, but overall he is a pretty humble person toward many things in life.

i have only one poster on my wall right now in my apartment, and it's of einstein (there's a difference between idolization and admiration).
The last time I looked at Qt, they had gone mad with the pimpl (private implementation) design pattern, and that made the classes much harder to extend. Needlessly harder to extend in my opinion.

Can anyone tell me if this is still the case?

I suppose it's only an issue if you're really pushing the framework, it shouldn't bother most people.
Paul is clairvoyant and has a crystal ball, so YES, definitely.
IE has had the same box model since 1995. It is, and always has been the standard.

If you recall, Netscape used that same box model until version 6. So if you'd like to look for a point where standards were broken, look to W3C and Mozilla. It's certainly not Microsoft's fault that the "standards" organization decided to change the fundamental way things are rendered in a browser.
The docs say they use the time it takes to do a TCP open between their agents because they "believe that TCP Open times are more representative of Internet users' actual experience".

That is, they think pings could be treated in a different way but with a TCP connection establishment you are measuring what most internet users want to do over the link.

As for different readings from different directions you can get that with both pings and TCP open, it's just maybe more noticable and exacerbated with the longer and multiple-message nature of a TCP open.
Every cloud has a silver lining it seems.
Frankly, they're doing it now. As it is, the cable/satellite box is a computer. IPTV makes the packets conform to what we think of as "internet traffic". And there's OTA television to mobile phones in Japan. Boxee is nothing more than a purpose-specific browser.
I believe the hypothesis (supported by the model) was that the loss of the uptick rule combined with a bubble bursting caused the crisis.

An analogy: I did an experiment. I eliminated the "always back up your data" rule for a week. Nothing bad happened. Are you going to come up with thought experiments telling me this is a bad idea, in contradiction of my real experiment?

I don't actually buy the hypothesis, but it isn't technically a thought experiment contradicting a real one.
We have one internet, but it's made up of many privately owned networks. We have one electric grid, but electricity is generated by a number of companies. Your examples show that having a single standard is good, not necessarily that a single product is good.

A single browser is a bad idea for several reasons. Firstly, there would be an inclination toward being very conservative. If you make a breaking change, you break every site on the web. If you implement a new feature, you'd better be sure it's the right feature, or be stuck with it for a good many years to come. If you have a bug, fixing it could break sites that rely on that bug for rendering.

Conversely, if you have several browsers in the market, each can afford to try out different things. Opera has done a lot with SVG; Safari has added a lot of custom CSS effects; Firefox is doing some interesting work with inline videos and faster Javascript.

Secondly, different browsers fit different niches that aren't necessarily compatible. Do you make your uberbrowser fast and lean? Or plug in a lot of extensions? Add a mail client? A bittorrent client? Should you have a smart address bar? Something that integrates well with a particular OS? Something that can be run on a phone? Or a console? Or a PC? Or a netbook?

Third, I'm not aware of any software product that has been written in a competition-free enviroment and has turned out to be any good.

Fourth, the state of standard support in browsers generally isn't that bad. If your site works in Firefox, it probably works in Safari and Opera as well. I have very little problems when it comes to cross-browser support... except when it comes to IE. I don't presume to speak for everyone here, but 99% of all my browser headaches in the last few years can be laid squarely at the door of Microsoft.

In other words, the root of most browser woes is due to IE, which web developers support because it has a majority market share, a market share maintained by Microsoft's rather anti-competitive practise of bundling it's browser with its OS. We didn't get into this mess by having too much competition; we got into it by having too little.
I am not sure, maybe a lot of TV viewers actually are very passive. What always gets me about TV is the constant overexcited talking, which acts like brainwashing. TV shows (series) are another matter, but I think there might be a market for the constant babbeling brainwash. The primary function of TV is to switch off the brain. The internet can't really replace it, because choosing which shows to watch would be work.

Also lately I had this thought that maybe it is not even so bad. Consider a person who watches TV shows for all their lives. Chances are their lives will be much more exciting than the average person's live, if they really live with the TV show characters. They'll experience every conceivable and inconceivable human condition there is. Not that I recommend it myself, but still...
FWIW, Fortune's take on the marketing decision is "clever thriftiness":

"Here’s a thrifty marketing strategy tailor-made for these troubled times.

"Rather than pay for all the accoutrements of a high-profile product roll-out — promotional media, special events, keynote speeches, etc. — just leak a few spy shots to obscure bloggers and let the Internet rumor mill do the heavy lifting."

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/03/03/apples-new-m...
First, aesthetics are not negligible. The iMac has at least two fewer cables, is more easily shifted around, doesn't require finding space on the floor for a tower, takes up very little desk space, and is very quickly packed up for overnight or weekend trips. For people who need to take their computers with them a few times a year, but don't want to make the sacrifices or pay the higher costs for a laptop, it's useful. Just speaking for my own category.
Well, I think English and Spanish both are Latin derivatives while German and Japanese aren't. So that would explain everything.
He said "Facebook killed TV," but I often check Facebook on my laptop while watching TV. Netbooks and PDAs take it a step further - letting us multi-task our slack time.
SIEMENS SXG75 UNLOCKED
Siemens SXG75 is the breathtaking widget presented by the company for you to generate a new fame among your friend circle with its amazing look and great features. With its cool design, this small, slender phone with integrated antenna will turn heads in any position.
Google's server farm is rumored to be over six digits (and growing fast), which is an astounding number of machines, but how hard would it be to assemble a million people to contribute a fraction of their compute time? - maybe Google can put an optional thingy into Chrome so that users' computers can be part of their server farm?
pg- small typo:

They thought they'd be able to dictate they way shows reached audiences.

-->

They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences.
I think the author is missing the point. You can find people anywhere in the world to fund a website that "shows cat videos" as long as you don't approach investors with that thesis. And really, it's ok to fail anywhere, not just Silicon Valley. It's what you learn from it that counts. Sure, it's probably not ok to fail because you became a heroin addict (even in Silicon Vallye). But if you're a computer scientist in Utah that tried to come up with, for example, new encryption methods for banking software security but failed to get funding, does that make the technology itself irrelevant because your business failed?
Hmm... by computer I was assuming pg meant general purpose devices connected to the Internet, but I see how that line is blurring since the backbone for everything is the Internet as opposed to a proprietary cable network.
It seems like on the new Mac Pros they're making this more difficult. Even if you're comfortable snapping in a few more parts you might have some limits.

If you notice the new RAM/CPU tray, on the quad-core entry level MP they only give you 4 slots for RAM, whereas on the 8 core they give you 8. I'm not sure if there is an extra socket on the tray to pop another CPU in or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was that you can't.

So it seems like you can't just buy the entry level and upgrade it past the top level on the cheap this time around, which is something to be upset about.
Two years later...

WWW-Talk
Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 25 Feb 93 21:09:02 -0800

"I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag's occurrence."

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
Well, we're the ones making all the noise about it, not Apple.
Does this open up room for content-providers in other silos to expand into the TV space? For example, magazines. Wired tried to start a science series on PBS a couple years ago and it flopped. Could it work as an online-only thing?
TV doesn't have to be in decline yet for someone to say it's lost this particular contest. Anything so entrenched is going to take a long time to actually go away.
I love how they sum it up: The media is in love with twitter not because its good, but because its "new" and "hip".

Basically sums up Twitter in 140 characters.

Twittering is what happens while Life is passing you by.
Does "watching more TV" mean "sitting in front of a screen at 8pm every Thursday and watching until the show's completion at 9pm?"

I personally watch more TV than I ever have before, now that my Mac Mini is hooked up to my screen and I have a DVR. But that supports the article's point: the old synchronous TV network business model is losing.
All three of the above lawyers (Rob Hyndman, Suzie Dingwall Williams, and Cognition) are awesome.
How we talk about what we know
[video] Convo With Paul Buchheit Father of Gmail & FriendFeed
There is more than one dinosaur in the room.

I predict that internet enabled computers (of some form - I'll borrow pg's footnote #3) will also be the dominant delivery medium for radio and telephone service.
Marissa Mayer on the design behind Google
And thus was born the beginnings of Internet porn.
That mirroring thing is really weird. I remember having extended desktops on the G5 iMacs and I assume no meaningful features were droppped (perhaps HD playback on external monitors).

As for software RAID vs. hardware, current processors are usually so much faster than spinning disks that I suppose hardware RAID exists currently only on very high-end systems. As for the low-end systems, they make the processor do a lot of work, so, that more or less evens the playfield.

Macs also have a much longer useful life. I still use a G3 iMac that has been serving me flawlessly since it left the factory.
Pirate Bay: a guilty verdict is an attack on the Internet
Old photos and negatives made into
Recently, we seem to be doing lots more old photographs transferred onto canvas. People tend to think that canvas prints can only be made from digital cameras, but they are wrong.
Facebook market place relaunched as more social and private by Oodle
I wonder if you could rephrase it: Transistor density as a function of dollars spent on fabs.
Yes, I think it's clearly true. However, I don't think pg means people will be sitting at their desks to watch shows or movies. In many cases watching TV is a communal activity. People will just start getting media boxes or otherwise hooking their computers to the TV screen, as many geeks do today.

The reason why doing this isn't more common is because regular folk don't know where to get the content from. Bittorrent is far from mainstream.
The Internet will enable metavision, a complete replacement for cable companies and broadcast networks ... where you can watch and interact with multiple live channels simultaneously.
Stimulus Plan Update - Deals in the Works
No one said anything about speed. Moore's Law has nothing to do with transistor speed, only with transistor density.
I read it in the opposite way: it's so obvious that this is just a correlation and not causation that he feels silly explicitly stating it.
Absolutely. However often you reseed the generator you need it to be unguessable.

Server activity would be a good source of entropy with the caveat, as you point out, that you need to be sure that there is more activity on the server than just the person receiving the random number. If server activity is the only source you use though you're vulnerable to some attacks. If an attacker can force your server to reboot or can utilise all available connections, locking anyone else out, then they could control all the server activity you're relying on.

The solution is simply to use multiple sources. Server activity plus any other sources of entropy you have available on the server.
"[2] Copyright owners tend to focus on the aspect they see of piracy, which is the lost revenue. They therefore think what drives users to do it is the desire to get something for free. But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience."

Man, is this ever true. I like to watch tennis a lot - which, being a niche sport, is often not on TV. The memphis finals were televised in some places, but not others. There was a web stream, but dig this - it was not available in the US because of broadcasting rights. And it was limited to PCs (not Mac's)!

So I'm thinking about anti-piracy efforts, including a lot of moralizing about how piracy is the equivalent of stealing (which, in some cases, it may well be). A network bought coverage, declined to air it in my area, but also banned a web feed that I would have gladly paid for, but with DRM that prevents it from working on my Mac.

But I shouldn't watch a rogue feed, because Piracy would be, you know, wrong. I should just be a passive viewer and decide to enjoy what the network decided I should be watching that day.

Keep in mind, I'm more than willing to pay. I'm trying to pay.
Folks - i would rather be roughly right than absolutely wrong and the point was that almost all startups fail to ever deliver any meaningful return to anyone other than investors. The "math" was simply to make a point to get people to think about. Even if its 1% or 2% or even 5% that succeed meaningfully (i.e. founders make a lot and lots of employees become millionaires), that still is a pretty darn small percentage.

And the point is that if you don't enjoy, aka love, the journey and challenges of a startup, then you should not join or start one.
I'm surprised that a startup would even consider following one of these processes. They are responses to the organizational constraints of corporate software development (and its symbiotic relationship with big-name consultants). A startup isn't, or shouldn't be, subject to those constraints in the first place. So a startup that feels the need for such a process seems likely to have more fundamental problems than a process can fix.

I don't mean to criticize anything that's genuinely working, and one can't tell much about a particular situation from a blog post. But all other things being equal, I'd say something is wrong.

Edit: I missed this from the original article and just read it in another comment:

The development team is run by a project manager. His role is to move the top priority user stories from product backlog to the sprint backlog and break them in atomic tasks that are distributed to your developers.

Is this a joke? This is not only ludicrous behavior for a startup, it's the very opposite of the process this startup has supposedly adopted. I take back "one can't tell much about a particular situation from a blog post". This says a great deal.
It can do a dual display setup. Click on "compare" then on "complete specs" (2/3 of the way down) on the page for the Mac Mini here:

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mi...

"Connects to up to two external displays with digital resolution up to 2560 by 1600 via Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter or 1920x1200 via Mini DisplayPort, Mini-DVI to DVI Adapter, or Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter. Analog resolution (VGA) up to 2048 by 1536 using Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter or Mini-DVI to VGA Adapter."
If you are wondering why your country is not at the top of the innovation heap, take a look at these rankings. Of particular importance for software startups are Starting a Business, Employing Workers, Getting Credit, and Enforcing Contracts. High numbers imply to me bureaucracy and/or corruption. There is a thread about getting rich in China. At 151, 111, 59, 18 it's difficult for the average, but bright, Joe.

I remember reading elsewhere about how long and how much it takes to get a business license. In California it took me 2 hours and $124. In Germany it was months and $20k (mostly band deposit requirements). In some African countries it was years.
It would be cool if a video camera manufacturer integrated their device with a web back-end. Automatically compress and upload videos, and tag them from your camera. Basically reduce the friction required to publish and organize your content. It would be killer to integrate this with something like Facebook groups...
Interestingly, another thing TV has done to adapt is create content that expires very quickly. Reality shows like American Idol and Big Brother are unlikely to end up downloaded, because they're not worth watching if you don't watch them right away.

This is probably a huge component in why there are so many more reality shows these days.

Breaking the broadcast model also won't work for those, because their value is precisely in the fact that a lot of people watch them, so that they become gossip points. I know some people who watch reality shows only because they know that's what will be discussed around the water fountain the next day, and so they want to be sure to be "in".

I agree that that's a pretty small niche to fit all of today's TV industry, though.
So, how about those Apple Mac Mini updates? 1GB RAM and 200GB for $200
Next Generation Project Planning Tool: LiquidPlanner 2.0
Your tv may already be a computer, as well. Recent Samsungs run embedded linux, for example.
Radical Transparency: A Roadmap to Financial Recovery
Harvard, Private Equity and the Education Bubble
Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? - Interactive Graphic
"TV" can mean many things:

1. The content, which, as others here have stated, is here to stay for quite some time. And this is what the networks (NBC/Fox/etc.) do best so I think they're going to be around much longer than the RIAA. It's very inexpensive to record quality music using home equipment (hence RIAA is screwed), but home videos are still far from the quality of network produced shows. There is a downward trend in cost to produce TV shows and movies, but it isn't quite as cheap and easy yet.

2. The big screen in the living room. This too is here to stay, though it will evolve from just a medium to watch TV shows and movies to something that'll be more interactive+connected+social.
I'd be impressed if Obama's administration could affect any change in five weeks--positive or negative.
Their assumption, and it's true for most people, is that you're going to watch something. If they don't put tennis on, you'll watch whatever they do show, even if it's arena wrestling. So even by watching something niche that they wouldn't broadcast anyway, you're stealing.
I'm thinking the apparent end of Moore's law as something to do with it, too.

I'm quite content with my Dell Dimension 8300, 2.6Ghz with 512MB RAM bought in 2003. Granted, I don't try to do foolish things like run Vista ;P

Seriously, besides a RAM upgrade and 1 or 2 more monitors I don't see why I'd buy something any more recent because I can already comfortably do everything I want to do.
As happy as I am to see this news, the RIAA is only an organization that represents the labels, therefore layoffs there only represent a tiny fraction of the member workforce (which I'm sure is shrinking too).

"Hypebot.com reports dozens of RIAA workers are being let go."

Not exactly massive.
I can't imagine a better definition of hell.
the tennis part got my attention ... not to digress ... but geebee how do I get in touch with you?
I'm sure that's very frustrating, but I feel the lack of a pre-defined roadmap is actually one of Apple's _strong_ points. I've seen more than my fair share of weak/broken releases from companies trying to keep a schedule.
Since we have a new medium, are there new monetization methods available beyond subscriptions and/or advertising?

The dinosaurs are only scared of their profit disappearing.
I don't see why "founders make a lots and lots of employees become millionaire" is a valid definition of success. I have a friend who ran a web business largely by himself for 4 years and accumulated half a million pounds out of it. I'd certainly call that successful.

Based on more reasonable criteria, e.g. made the founder(s) a tidy sum and/or allowed them to pay themselves a decent salary for a while, many more than 5% are successful, imho.

As for your main point about loving the journey, I agree with that. I enjoy working on my business and to me that's more important than the money I'll make from it.

PS: If you wanted to be roughly right you should have said, simply, "A lot of start-ups fail." No one would have argued with that! :-)
And I thought I was the only one on Grunter.
Verb tense fail.

A guilty verdict WOULD BE an attack on the Internet...
To compete with TV you need to provide the couch potato experience, I don't think TV will ever lose its current position, instead what will happen is the TV will just bring the web based content to the living room.
I don't think you can lump all TV together.
I think a more accurate title would be "Why TV Lost in the US"
And one of the reasons would undoubtedly be the awful quality of most US programming.
SILK, Skype's super wideband audio codec, is now available for free