skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can already do that thought not with a "Video tag." You can put videos on your server and have a Flash/Silverlight/Whatever player embedded in your web pages, It just happens that YouTube made this process very easy and became popular, in the beginning many people didn't even know you could watch videos on the web.

Anyway, I am waiting for the focus to get off of YouTube and for people to start realizing videos can be posted to many places, not just those that only allow 10 minutes and so forth.
New virus-built battery could power cars, electronic devices
Ooookay. Those might have been present in Nazi Germany, but I wouldn't say that they're either sufficient or necessary for Nazism.
Tech Review of Fairpoint Migration, Status
Cable is building apps for your TV
Can a Videogame Make You Cry?
This guy is an idiot. Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who says google has done nothing is clearly delusional. Frankly I'm surprised that this even hit the presses.
I don't understand economics well enough to have a valid opinion either way on these issues. But "revisionism" seems like an inappropriate (and loaded?) word for something that very much seems to be interpretation-based. It can't really be a documented fact that certain policies caused a given outcome, especially in a field as complex as economics.
From the site guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. "
From the book:

"Sadly for Micropro, the one thing they could not do very easily was update their product. After their luck at getting the CP/M version of WordStar running on the PC, they could not seem to get an updated version out the door. They decided instead that they would produce an entirely new product, one which was easier to maintain and improve than the original version.

Luckily for us, the new WordStar, introduced at COMDEX as WordStar 2000, was entirely different from the old product. Micropro intentionally attempted to replace their market leader with a product that was bigger and slower and used a different interface. Although it was not obvious at COMDEX, the product was doomed from the start. In spite of all the product hype and the size and beauty of the Micropro booth and presentation, the new product did not stand a chance.

Micropro did more for us at that show than we could ever have done for ourselves. They convinced their customers that the old WordStar was not very good and that they needed to look for something better. Not only would these customers take a look at WordStar 2000, but they would also look at WordPerfect 4.0."
Um. Nexuiz is based on quake.
Are you working for a startup and don’t know when to quit?
Licenses only matter if both sides understand what the license means and trust each other to abide by it in good faith.

Ext is not trustworthy in this regard.
Bad Crazy in Internet Space
Smart Polling, Using Conditional GET XHRs
Well, since others are doing it: William Gibson.
If you mean by mastering that you never have to look at the API documentation, then more languages can have a negative impact. I'd concede that.

But that is comfortably offset by the advantages you gain from seeing through the syntax to the language concepts. It is not even the correct question to ask really. Because mastering of a language might be a secondary goal.

A more interesting question might be: do I know at all which language I should strive to master? And that will require you to look at a few.
There haven't been enough defaults in North Dakota for that to be a serious issue. Some places are able to have lots of state involvement without getting into lots of trouble, e.g. the Scandinavian socialist states, Singapore, etc. Most of the defaults were concentrated in the 'sand states' -- California, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada.
That's right. You can also dive forward to catch the ball if you moved too far back.
From personal experience, I would say he is entirely right.

The first iteration of an app will be used by very few people, and most probably require a lot of changes in scope as users tend to have a way of 'abusing' (in a good way) a system in ways you could never conceive. Optimising for something that won't be used can be a terrible waste of time.

For example, I recall a niche site that dealt with antiques - People could list their antiques for sale in a nice searchable 'craigslist' style site. They also included a separate url that showed only the antiques for sale by a single user, it was more of an afterthought than a core feature.

The 'abuse' came when users, especially antique shops, starting using these as their actual sites. In a time when getting a presence on the internet was an arduous deal (hire a developer, hosting, domain name etc.) It turned out that the real interest of the site wasn't searchable antiques, but rather as a very simple method of creating an antiques focused minisite.

Unfortunatey I don't recall the url.
Over a laptop, it's smaller (pocket-sized) and has better battery life. (A netbook is also smaller than a laptop, but the iPhone is dramatically smaller). It's also easier to start using (you just take it out of your pocker). This convenience means you can use it when you couldn't be bothered using a laptop. I don't know the reasons people prefer the iPhone over similar class of devices (blackberry, other phones), but they do.

It reminds me of Alan Kay's "Of course, you can do all those things on the mainframe, but [the minicomputer/microcomputer] is for all the extra things you can do that you wouldn't think of doing on the mainframe." http://ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm
I just got 24 Mbps down here in Finland, it costs $66 / month though. I didn't do much price comparison though, I think the same can be had for much less if I switched providers.
It is not that the field of economics is complex but rather there is a bunch of competing school of economics. In other word, economic is still in its infancy.

However, I have to say that the interpretation of the new deals actually goes all the way before the great depression.

You have economicsts like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek warning of a major economic crisis before the stock market crash of 1929.

If there is any economic school I am willing to bet on, it is the Austrian School of Economics. After all, those who are of the Austrian tradition correctly predicted the current housing crisis, now. Their preceddesors predicted the Great depression.
This and its parent are ad hominem attacks (DH1 -- see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) -- it may be in the writer's interest to complain about the Internet, but that does not mean that the writer's points are incorrect.
Recently I've been playing some games on PlayStation and Wii to help myself brainstorming ideas for my ui. It's a source for inspiration especially for visualization.
And by that you mean the antenna's aren't as exposed/well placed as a user would wish. Antenna placement in cell phones is a high art, and when you consider a modern phone supports a huge number of frequencies and protocols in which it has to be efficient, well, it's an incredibly hard problem to solve.

Motorola, for all their recent problems, likely understands this better than Apple, with some 2 basic phone models under their belts.

Modern pcs have this problem too. I have an absurdly long range for the bluetooth on one of laptops, and absurdly short on the other. So there you go....
I don't understand you. Do you mean that music ought to be free because the paying music is wrong ?
Ask HN: Hacker News for musicians?
Hi,

Do you know an hacker news clone devoted to music ?
(there are some subreddits about music and instruments, but nothing is centralized)

Would somebody be interested in running one ?
which one of his books do you particularly recommend?
This is how Social Media really works
Chinese Social Networks ‘Virtually’ Out-Earn Facebook And MySpace: A Market Analysis
That was an amazing almost-submarine promo for scribd. They probably just reached a whole new audience.
"the gold standard" -- Amen.
WordPerfect 5.1 fulfilled every one of my (modest) document needs. If I buggered something up, the View Codes mode allowed me to find and fix the embuggerance. I bought Microsoft Office only because response to job postings required resumes in Word .doc format.
No, he is saying that the way people sell music now is not right, not that paying for music is wrong.
Absolutely. Would this be focused on music production or discovery?
> or faster than using document.getElementById

The bit to explain is that Ext.fly (and jQuery() for that matter) don't return actual DOM elements like document.getElementById does. Instead they return a Javascript object which you can use to interact with the DOM element(s) using a different API.

Both are probably slower than document.getElementById, but allow you to program at a higher level of abstraction. For example, jQuery(".foo").someMethod() could act on many DOM elements, but document.getElementById().someMethod() can only act on one.
Among historians, "revisionism" is not a loaded word - it just means a challenge to the common theories about a time period. The term is tarnished outside the field because the most visible revisionists are simply denying well-documented historical facts for political reasons (e.g., the holocaust, the rape of Nanking, etc.)
Your guess is good: Wikipedia says that Heffernan, a NYTimes TV critic, is 39.

But it's sad this is even a topic; shouldn't the piece stand on its own without musing on the age/gender/psyche of the author? I wish I could downvote the grandparent comment more.
Jerf,

You bring up good points. I think you are certainly correct that for it to be more than a novelty this time they will need to have different rule sets that create more interesting matchups. When I was reading the rules of this new version it was basically "No holds barred" it would be cool to see a robot that sprayed acid or could napalm a competitors "sledgebot".

To your point about a lack of technological advancement, there may not have been a major tech breakthrough, but I think the buzz around Arduino and related projects certainly packed the tech in a way that opened up hardware hacking to a much wider audience. There is a tech workshop in Boston called Willoughby and Baltic that is teaching artists to program with Arduino.

I think a rule change coupled with a more diverse group of participants could do a lot for this nascent "sport".
"I have used other people's Macs occasionally and I dislike the desktop."

Same here. I bought a Mac Mini for some dev work, and the UI drives me nuts. It's pretty, but so far requires way too much mousing and clicking.

I'm sure much of my angst is habituation from using a customized Kubuntu install, but as best I can tell those customizations are much easier in KDE than on the Mac.
The Coworking Visa Project
Maybe I'm just a Jobs-hater, but it's always astonished me that someone so much a part of the initial personal computer revolution couldn't program. ( http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... )
I had this thought a few months ago. I decided to read every Nebula / Hugo winner. I would also add, listening to good comedy albums and playing board / video games often.

I worked at a company where the President loved, Loved, LOVED pop business books. He hopped on every trend, told Seth Godin's stories as if they were his own (has a purple cow w\ the company logo, etc), and even tried to create a style of management based on Survivor.

When "seeking" knowledge he looked away from rigorous research and observation to the Amazon top lists.

I've never seen unhappier employees.
This may be the case for natural languages, but is simply not the case with programming languages. A natural language is evolved over thousands of years and contains cultural nuances and hundreds of thousands of words in the vocabulary. A programming language is engineered to be simple and concise, containing a grammar that can fit in a few pages of BNF and at most a few hundred words in the vocabulary.
Peter F. Hamilton. Marc Stiegler. Vernor Vinge obviously, who is he even kidding?
Dubai: How not to build a city
And by that you mean the antenna's aren't as exposed/well placed as a user would wish.

Possibly. I don't know the design details of either phone, but it's also possible that the s/n sensitivity of the iphone receivers isn't as good as for the Razr. Just like some radios will tune in a weak station better than others, or some tvs will display a weaker signal more clearly than other tvs will, I suppose the same is true for cell phones. And blue-tooth hardware, as you mentioned.
> If it has been more than 5 years and the company has not become profitable, quit. Take your losses. Invest your experience and time in another company. Even better, start your own company.

What losses? I've never heard of any equity vesting plan that lasted longer than 5 years.
A language is a tool, not the end in itself. We need to be, or strive to be, masters of computer programming, not of computer languages.

Of course, a master knows its tools. He has many tools in his toolset and chooses the ones that better fit the task he is working at. Sometimes he may need to use a new tool, which he learns and adds to the toolset.

New languages rarely introduce substantially new concepts, mostly new ways to represent those concepts and put them together in a better way. However, if we are talking about new concepts, not just new languages, that is different. Other commenters have mentioned functional versus imperative programming style (enforced, or at least suggested, by the language) and so on. Learning new concepts makes us better programmers in older languages too.
In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach.

This is what the DMCA did, not what Scribd did.
Having a world wide web of information without a search engine does not make sense. How would you discover new nodes?

The same way we did before search engines worked very well: via the network effect, by following hyperlinks from interesting articles, from discussion forums like this one, from human-generated links pages, and so on.

The WWW would not cease to be useful if search engines disappeared tomorrow, it would just adapt as it always has, and not necessarily for the worse.
I agree, the problem is that although they are cheap, they are show randomly and not for people looking for your specific products.

I am spending a little in adsense, doing a lot in the SEO and trying to get a conversation going between users, this last thing I suppose (hope) its the turning point.
Hmm,

Since this is an article in the New York Times that is going to influence behavior rather than just describe it, It seems like the various stages of encouragement should be: A) Encourage parents to get involved with the public schools that they will be sending their kids to. B) Raise enough ruckus to make sure the parents can get involved. This is the New York Times talking (again).

I personally find Americans thinking in terms of "Better Schools" and "Worse Schools" to be rather vile. There are two kinds of schools - schools where, when the child puts into the effort, they can thrive and other schools. Once a school reaches that point, it is up to the child and the parents to make sure their child thrives. But since of this implies some responsibility on the parents' and children's the parts, it appeals not all.
This was posted in
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544996
where it generated some discussion, but then
it was deleted.

Another article covering the same story was
in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544734
where it generated no discussion.

I'm curious as to why the first item was pulled,
but the other remains.
Inman is a great marketer and has all sorts of interesting tactics for driving traffic to his dating site. He's also the former CTO of SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org).

Here's a recent interview with him about marketing: http://blog.mixergy.com/real-marketing/
Ask HN:What would be the skills required for Developers in the next 10 years?
What would be required in the market for the following years for hackers/developers?
freedom is never free
Wonderful question, I have an interest in new languages all the time and I worry weather I'm wasting my time when I should be focusing.
"Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."

This sentence makes it clear (if it wasn't already) how little this guy understands the Internet. The "ordering of information" is not something that can reasonably have "mere" put in front of it. It is a very hard problem to solve, and the importance of solving it is reflected in Google's reach numbers.

Maybe if he thought about the thousands of programmers who work full time on this problem and the server rooms full of millions of computers Google needs to provide this service, he'd realize there is actually something to it.
Then "some" soldiers actually in Iraq. And I cringed there too. The guy seemed to have gathered a decent amount of information, it's too bad he didn't organize it a bit better.
They need to lift the size restriction, and make a fully autonomous category. I want to see the DARPA Grand Challenge entrants try to destroy each other.

Of course, they'd need to increase the size of the purse. They could possibly be solved with bigger venues and more expensive tickets. The marginal cost of a robot car is probably around $175K, depending on the sensors. It would be fun to make active sensor denial weapons, to blind lasers or cameras.
HN on iPhone using mobile mac reader
Click the "rss" link at the bottom of the home page on an iPhone.
Upvoted for "PHP didn't help anything". I'm pretty pragmatic about language selection (I've used Perl, Python, Tcl, C, C++, sh, and probably others over the years, and all have had their nice qualities), but I've been lightly working in PHP now for a couple of years for maintaining our company website, and I've never once thought, "Hey, that's neat! I wonder if I could do that in JavaScript/Perl/Python/Ruby."

It's a subtle but very depressing aspect of working in PHP. I just feel sad working in PHP, in a way that I've perhaps never experienced in any other language. Maybe I'm just getting too old to read more crappy code, and it would improve if I started working on better written code. And maybe I was lucky enough to mostly work with good code in the past in those other languages.

To be fair, there are some things about PHP that are surprisingly good and worth looking to for inspiration: Ease of app deployment, marketing for a "good enough" product, allowing a very large community to contribute without muddying the waters too much (comments on doc pages, for example, rather than a wiki), solving the right problems at the right time (even poorly), etc. None of these are aspects of the language itself, only the resulting full experience that is PHP.
Churches using Twitter - #ldsconf #1 trending Sat / Sun
"Your problem is finding ways to help your best people stay happy and achieve levels you haven't invented yet. That problem is the one that defeated me, but I'd rather have that one than any other."

Wow - I couldn't disagree more. That's the absolute worst problem you can have. Anything that encourages your best programmers to leave is poison.
Neuromancer is the only one that I've read, and it was excellent. (I think it's also his most famous)
And even the most fancy statistical methods are generally about proving that some mild generalization of linear regression is sufficient to solve a particular problem. Non-linear models often result in a great increases in model complexity which leads to issues of overfitting, computational intractability, and instability.
Just wondering why you're confident that the MIT license won't change in the future? They've changed licenses in the past.

Why am I reminded of this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKgPY1adc0A
I really think "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card should have been on that list of Sci-Fi Books.
Nice exposition of the idea, thanks. In the vernacular, isn't it just "attitude" and "tone"? It's also possible to not intend the connotations, at least not consciously.

My language is powerful; yours has dynamic binding; his is slow.
I wonder if the ranking had anything to do with the lack of motivation. Joel system had managers sitting down with people and talking about their work and what level they deserved. So the employees basically knew what they were doing and what they needed to do to improve.

Whereas in this case the ranking was just related to the respect of your peers. Also, once you become extremely competent in something your skill becomes mostly unconscious. So basically these top employees were told that for reasons they did not fully understand, they deserved to be pay more than everyone else. So while the salary was simple, it probably came across as extremely subjective to those people.
I actually have Asperger Syndrome and I'm a programmer. I was diagnosed by a neurologist in 2008 at the age of 34. There are some interesting comments here. I definitely have seen a few comments from other autistic people on forums about preferring a "menial" job if it meant they could work more or less alone. Some would rather be a filing clerk than a manager in the same department. Many of them do well in academics.

Simon Baron-Cohen has said that their research indicates a link between autism and systemizing genes. So people who have the systemizing genes are more likely to enter into professions like math, science and software - which is part of the reason why autism is more common among math majors, and why you often see a history of engineering jobs in the family of a person with autism. http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/research-scientists-mo...

I wrote up some of my thoughts about this in more detail on my blog here: http://ontap.riaforge.org/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/2/AprilAutis...

I myself am working on raising awareness for an effort to improve the employment rate of people with autism called Autelligent Laboratories. The hope is that the business model for this software company can be extended and reused by companies in other industries. http://www.autlabs.com
You can install Linux on a Mac these days too.
Eric Ries: Lean Startup Presentation For Web 2.0 Expo
I am interested to hear your experiences. Ludocraft (one of realXtend developers) hinted a couple of days ago that they are working to get face and expression tracking with web camera to work - and the result is overlayed onto your avatar in real time. (Here's the bit about avatars: http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=1366)
You're right, it would not cease to be useful. But it would cease to be dominant because less people would find it accessible. Search engines allow the average user to orient themselves in the world wide web. It is a large part of why people leave the ordered safety of other mediums for the web. Without organization data is meaningless. And while you and I may be adept at navigating the web without the Google and Yahoos most people would be utterly lost and drown in a vast sea of information.
This is far too simple. Essentially it is only weighing the financial incentive to stay, and it insufficiently weighs the odds of the startup paying out.
When you can upgrade 10 homes in Japan with the same space of 1 home in the US, and there are no sprawling suburbs to lay long runs of cable, it's easy to grasp that per-person price gap.

Actually, I've seen a sprawling suburb of Tokyo, and the one resident I visited there was able to get a 100M connection. With the first six months free or something.