skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd have more belief in Apple software engineering genius if I didn't have to use iTunes on Vista to sync with my (otherwise wonderful) iPhone. What an awful, awful, product. And god help you if you try to do any management of your music files outside of the program.

So sure, OS X is great, I hear. But every time I put a Mac on my desk next to my Windows or Linux machine at work or at home, I get bored of it very quickly. Like Linux, like Windows, it runs multiple graphical applications at once. What else do I need an OS to do except stay out of my way?
Computer programming is what drives the world we live in today. How could you not find that interesting?

I find novel applications more interesting than quality implementations.

Also, as you get older, you will find it easier to come up with novel applications and harder to come up with quality implementations.
The movie has a rave review from Ebert http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/having_wonderful_tim....

The creator is also accepting donations, to help cover the creation costs (especially for the song licensing fees) at http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution.

And a direct link to the downloads: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/wiki/index.php?title=SitaSi...
You can get it in up to 1080P with completely free codecs. I love this women.

I think it would have been wiser for the creator to wait until she had DVDs ready to sell (a few more weeks) before releasing this movie. I'll bet a lot of people (myself included) loved the movie and would be happy to shell out $10-$20 for a DVD to support her, but could forget about it in a few weeks.

I also liked this quote from the home page:

The old business model of coercion and extortion is failing. New models are emerging, and I'm happy to be part of that. But we're still making this up as we go along. You are free to make money with the free content of Sita Sings the Blues, and you are free to share money with me. People have been making money in Free Software for years; it's time for Free Culture to follow.
I used to be quite interested in the bits and bytes of things, but I have to admit that over the years my interest has shifted to what programming lets me and others DO rather than the specific process of implementation and debugging. To use the penmanship example in the OP, I'm less interested in the pen, ink and paper and more interested in what ends up being written.
The point is that if modern computers had been based on that architecture, which was way, way more efficient for execution of high-level languages, today we'd have perhaps the same speed in GHZ but we could do way more because the high-level languages wouldn't need to execute at a level so far removed from machine language.

Worrying about how much those machines costed at the time is like worrying about how much a GB of ram costed at the time.
As the years go on I find programming less interesting. Or maybe it's that I find other things more interesting.

However the tone of your post seems to imply that programming is the boring part of computer science. The only interesting stuff happening in computer science has come out of people actually programming stuff.
Google Releases Jaiku Source Code
Racing the Beam: How Atari 2600's Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design
It could be worse. You could be a Mac user who needs to use one of Microsoft's products. There is no more worthless piece of shit in the world of computing than MS Entourage....
I know that while SxSW is going on, twitter is going to be useless. I plan to spend much of the next few days outside.
gj sharing your referral code.
Here's the highest compliment I can pay iTunes:

I hardly think about it anymore.

Granted, I run iTunes on a Mac, and my main use case is just finding and downloading new podcasts and syncing them to my old iPod. But I can hardly think how iTunes could be improved to take less effort on my part. I put the iPod in the dock, iTunes launches, it syncs all the podcasts, and I just have to click the little eject icon next to the icon of my iPod to take it out and start listening to it.

I think the key difference is you say you WANT to manage your music files. With iTunes, I don't even bother to manage anything, hardly. It just does the obvious thing which is almost always what I want.
When they need to revamp the architecture entirely.

Apple really took a gamble with OS X. They were quagmired with the System 9 line - they could have kept incrementing, but it was obvious they'd hit some limits.

I think one thing people forget is how bad OS X was when it first came out. It was slow, missing key features, and was just plain buggy. It wasn't really until Tiger that they had something ready for the mainstream (imho).

But they took some risks - especially with the rendering approach w/ Aqua - and as hardware caught up it started to pay off. The features they can slip in today are really the result of some brave design decisions a decade ago (the Intel transition is another example).

It was somewhat easier then because Apple's market was still a very hardcore group. Now, it might be harder for them to go through such a revolution - the market might just rebel against them... The downside to brand I guess.

Of course, Apple made a good move with the iPhone - this is a totally different evolutionary path that might be a better bet (i.e. Perhaps there won't be an OS 11, or if there is by the time it comes it might not be as big a deal as other things).
Start Up Idea: Turning the web into a giant design template market
We are taking a risk on talking about our idea but we am convinced the benefits of doing so out way the risk + we have a lot of respect for this community.

As the title says, we want to turn every website into a potential design template that can be sold. To get this to happen we obviously need the site owners to be willing to sell, so our first questions are:

Would you sell your web sites design? If so for how much?
If not, would you sell previous designs? If so how much?
If not the entire design would you sell parts? Such as buttons, images etc?

What are you thoughts on the idea?

My team and I have started work on the idea but different thoughts on how it should be done would be great.

Cheers
The link appears to be a referral link. It's considered bad form to post referal links on public forums, etc.

I'm surprised this hasn't been killed yet. Flagged.
What do you mean by "interesting stuff"? Are you referring to novel apps or quality implementation?

Of course a novel app is more interesting if it is implemented. But the point is that implementation is necessary but not inherently interesting.
Move Beyond the Limits That Are Holding You Back
Programming is extremely interesting to me, and a lot of fun to do. In the same way, grammar is interesting to me as well. What do you think linguists study?

I think there's a certain kind of mind that would rather figure out how to do something than come up with that something in the first place. If you're interested in both, then all the better, but if you're only one, there's nothing wrong with that.
Avoiding Investment Fraud
My mom asked me about Twitter the other day. That's how you know some technology or service is going mainstream.

Unless your parents are really technically savvy or something.
This discussion has cropped up in quite a few places recently. Theres seem to be two camps and very little cross over in those I speak to: Programmers vs Scripters.

The Programmers take pride in the craftsmanship of their code and in the puzzle solving involved. They may do this in dynamic 'scripting' languages but they skew towards strongly typed languages.

The Scripters see it as a means to an end. They want to build some awesome stuff and the software is a means to an end. Any language or framework that makes it quick and straightforward to build with is preferred, preferring dynamic languages and frameworks with good documentation/examples code.
Perhaps the programmers are employees while the scripters are entrepreneurs?

BTW, my favorite language is actually Scala even though I'm more into novel apps than quality implementation.
Traditional CS is important but you only need a small percentage of people with such skills. They would be the ones writing difficult libraries/frameworks to make implementation easy for everyone else.
Seems a good place to start understanding the code is the design fundamentals doc: http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/source/browse/trunk/doc...

The images they refer to are all in the /doc/ folder
Intellectuals as a group don't have a lot of common beliefs, so my comment was referring to the fact that you can (almost) always find something that each one believes on faith.

However, a large fraction of intellectuals do seem to believe that they should be in charge or at least have more control. Do you want to argue that that is "reason" based?

I've previously pointed out that intellectuals (1) will "oversell" their expertise, claiming that fact A implies policy B when it actually doesn't and (2) seem to believe that their expertise in one area implies expertise in other areas.

Would you blame either of those on faith?
how do you compare yourself against echosign.com?
I predict that in a few decades people will look back in bewilderment at today's computer science with its focus on implementation.

Today's Computer Science doesn't have a focus on implementation. Programmers have a focus on implementation, but computer scientists don't.
By "implementation", I'm including clever algorithm design, software engineering principles, etc.

There are a few people who don't focus on implementation (e.g., the MIT Media Lab), but their work is not taken as seriously as traditional implementation-oriented CS.
It's always been a "means to an end" for me, as the real reason for me to program was always to be able to design video games down to the last detail. So it was a reluctant process at first, especially when it seemed like the only options(as a PC user in the early 90s) were between languages like QBasic(not powerful enough) and those like C(too many implementation details).

But when felt like I hit that goal I didn't stop learning, I actually got more into it because I wanted to learn ways of getting a better result in less time, and the obvious answer to that was to keep studying and soaking up knowledge.
Considering the number of CS grads I've interviewed who can't seem to program anything at all, I thought it was very strange that he thought the field had a focus on implementation.
Facebook is winning where FriendFeed lost: bringing "life stream" to the non-geeks.

Also intersting: with the new design, the "applications" are more and more hidden... (Too bad for the dev. who invested time and money)...
Do they only want application who connect to facebook but not application "running in Facebook" (From the user point of view)?
That's almost totally wrong, the Media Lab pretty much only implements stuff.
Why would anyone pay for a design template, when they can just go to any website they want, download it for free, change it to their liking, and use it?

Most people are pretty liberal about taking CSS/HTML code from websites to use as a model for their own websites. As long as you don't rip off people's images, exact color schemes, etc., the underlying code tends to be pretty generic and fairly immune from any sort of copyright prosecution. And who would want a website that looks a lot like someone else's?

Can you tell me about a use case or two you imagine? Who buys someone else's templates? What sort of person or business? What do they do with the template afterwards... do they change it, or do you imagine the web will be like Blogger where 4 templates rule millions of sites?

I imagine that it will be hard to make this market, when people already expect to get this for free. You're asking the wrong questions... everyone would be willing to sell their templates, but you should be asking who would be willing to buy.
I'm using implementation in a general way to not only include programming but also clever algorithm design, better software engineering practices, etc.
Yes, but the implementation isn't the point. What's implemented has to be novel.
How about some evidence that either of you actually knows the relevant law and evidence showing that his actions actually qualify? You need both. His statements aren't either.
The Quest for the Unique ID
> I sort of expect people who admit to crimes in interviews to at least be investigated, if not prosecuted.

Why?
Looking for a new way to invest? Make a game of it
If you use Twitterific:

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific tweetTextFilter -string "[sS][xX][sS][wW]|Austin"

On second thought, outside does sound nice. Nice weather here in the valley; not so much in Austin, I hear ;)
Tired of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own
Nah, the novel thing actually has to be implemented.

Most of the projects at the Media Lab are not as novel as they seem. They just take some existing idea or product and tweak it a little bit to seem more novel. SOME stuff is very novel but really not that much.

But it's all implemented. It wouldn't be very interesting to say that you're going to make an animatronic teddy bear or a robot DJ and then not make it.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at anymore.
Umm, that's not how Cramer makes a living.

Never confuse the label with the product.
Really? With the old feed it was only updated every N minutes. Say the feed refreshes every hour or two, for the sake of argument.

Users who are more engaged than that see a stale homepage.

Facebook is pretty data-driven, so I'm sure that have a whole suite of metrics that tell them this is a good move. At least I hope so.
In traditional CS, you typically wait for others outside of CS to come up with a novel app (e.g., social networking) and then you try to make it better in some way.

Entrepreneurs come up with the big ideas. Computer scientists tweak those ideas and try to come up with faster, more memory efficient, secure, better structured, etc. implementations.

In fact, if a computer scientist is working on a novel app, then his/her work would not be considered important as he/she is not working on the solution to a well established problem.
A Tiny Computer
I agree with your statement in principle, the problem arises when there may be warranted negative publicity involving one of their paid advertisers. Obviously as a business owner you don't want to jeopardize your source of income, but as a "journalist" are you really staying true to mission to be objective? And thus...a conflict of interest is born.

Cheers!
For an interesting article on Jim Cramer and how he ran his hedge fund, read this: http://www.deepcapture.com/jim-cramer-is-a-complicated-man/
Jim Cramer is a Complicated Man
In fact, if a computer scientist is working on a novel app, then his/her work would not be considered important as he/she is not working on the solution to a well established problem.

Not at all. Computer scientists invent new problems all the time.
seriously -- right now users have to confirm any short story posted to their stream by an app. As a developer I'd prefer auto publish with a throttle.

You can also prompt user to auto publish short stories but defaults are what matter.
thanks!

Kevin

lacker@gmail.com

for interests let's try:

python, math, algorithms
And their peers generally don't care.

Also, consider the criteria for having a paper accepted at a prestigious conference. Generally, there must be a non-trivial proof of some sort or strong empirical evaluation. This is a great way to discourage people from submitting novel ideas that are hard to evaluate.
Anyone who does a game in Javascript rocks...so does this one. Amazing...I didn't even know you could do this...
My point was you get (comparatively) a heck of a lot of storage plus pretty decent performance with a SSD. You better /really/ care about IO to be paying that much per GB - and some people do.
I agree with your underlying point, I just think that it's a little deceptive to compare a modern, $750 computer's processor to a $100,000+ mainframe's without acknowledging that they were also designed with a very different budget.

I was wondering about how much the processor itself influences things a few days ago while reading an interview with Charles Moore in which he described Forth-native processors, but I've done very little with any assembly languages directly, so it's kind of beyond my ken. (Most of what I know about different architectures has to do with porting C programs.)
This is precisely what is going on at Microsoft right now.
Thanks!
thepanister

thepanister2000-mazika@yahoo.com

for interests:

Artifical intelligence, Data mining, and algorithms!
I find both programming and grammar to be inherently interesting. Computational linguistics has some fascinating puzzles in it, and it's exciting to ponder how we might be able to make computers communicate in natural language.
I bought an ipod touch and mac mini to develop iphone apps.

I don't find OS X to be better than Win 7. But the ipod touch is pretty cool and hopefully I will have some success selling Numbrosia for the iphone/ipod touch.
It's clearly not a real experiment. The social commentary angle is interesting, although personally I'd tend to lean more toward elaborate hoax. The only thing I don't understand is why it has so many votes. It's not like it's at all insightful or illuminating when viewed as a thought experiment, so people must just be falling for it.
Can I plug my little javascript version of asteroids? http://users.tpg.com.au/_dp//dave_asteroids.html

I've tried to make it not cheesy and nice smooth gameplay
Put another way, with the newsfeed there was an engagement ceiling. Letting your hardcore users be as hardcore as they want keeps them there.
At the size they're doing things, the algorithims, data structures, and application specific optimizations (assumptions you can make about the data) are where the big challenge is. It would be relatively simple to export/offer the data as an ldap service, but the wire protocol is arguably an uninteresting technical anecdote.

To see this in action, slap together a sun or oracle ldap server and fill it with 2-4x physical ram worth of data and benchmark non-trivial queries against it. I believe you'd see better results than a naive sql implementation but it would be quite undesirable compared to their real world transaction rates.
Let's all get into the markets just to stick it to Comedy Central
That's how he used to make his money when he was running his own hedge fund.
Instead of (or in addition to) downvoting me, can you explain why I'm wrong?
Propel ORM for php5
Agreed, Eric writes an excellent blog and is based on real world experience.

Coordinated marketing and product launches make sense in the context of a Product Development model but cut into your ability to learn in the context of a Customer Development model. Instead of allowing your initial customers to teach you about your product, you are skipping that step and going straight to teaching the market about your product.
The two most insightful essays I've read on oil came from a hedge fund that had a giant long position, and a commodity trader with a giant short position. You can fund a lot of research, and a lot of farting around with facts and figures, if you have billions of dollars riding on the outcome.
It seems impossibly hard to find "clean" upper level government employees in Washington. This should really be more of a concern talking point with us citizens.
I wish it worked that well for me. (It evidently works that well for my girlfriend, a Mac user.)

But no, I don't want to manage my own music. I want, for instance, all the duplicates to go away. I want podcasts that failed to download properly and are now missing to be able to be refreshed without a bizare and undocumented shift triangle-click shift-click trick (no menu option to achieve the same!). I want my music to play every time I click on it without having to turn iTunes off and on. I want it to work with Windows Remote Desktop like every other piece of music software I've got. I want a useful search UI, instead of the stateful UI that we've got that can only search either library or store. I want to be able to flag a long audio file as "podcast" so that it can remember my place and resume without having to set up my own feed to make that happen.
Depends on how much your megabyte weighs, I suppose...
You can fix that in application settings.
Business of APIs Conference: NYTimes.com [pdf]
* There are still a few design bugs left over from the old design. Some of the fonts are a bit odd.

* The central stream is great. Filtering is simple and easy.

* The primary right-hand thing I haven't used yet. Not sure if I need that when I have the main stream.

* I like that it's all bigger. Facebook's moving away from compression and towards ultrasimple streaming.

* The new "post things" bar is incredible. I like how they combined wall posting and status updates.

* I love that they added the [X] button to replace the click-menu for stories.

I can't think of much to dislike. This keeps people connected more, and that's what matters. So far I don't notice a feature missing that I was using in the first place.
Are you saying he makes his living hosting a TV show, as a "TV personality"?
I test every major browser, mainly because usually everything works right the first time. I design in a way that doesn't lead to much breakage in any browser but IE 6.
Those essays sound interesting -- any chance you have a link handy?
the problem with the spitzer example is that Spitzer KNEW he was going to get caught ... some might see Spitzers actions as an "escape" for a man who wanted out, and had no way out from the track of success, except a moral failure.

c'mon now, he was the attorney general, do you seriously think he didn't know he was going to get caught?
I'm not a Facebook user but from the pictures I've seen, I expect that this is about getting corporate messages in front of users more easily. They've recognised that the threat from Twitter is that people are engaging well by following business accounts and are more receptive to corporate messages as a result - that's incredibly valuable if you're the conduit. Had they not done this, I think they risked losing a lot of business interest to a growing competitor.
Update: On Building an Efficient Search Indexer
dstat is also quite nice.
Good point and I agree that this move is at the very least a shot across the bow of Twitter and FriendFeed.
This has always been a major complain for me, Itunes is a pretty horrible program, I guess it only gets excruciatingly slow with a lot of music and files to index. I used to think it was my relatively crappy machine at the time, when I tried again on another machine (2.0 GHz core2 duo, 4 GB) same disgustingly slow performance. Completely unusable.

Only way to make it work without grinding to a halt is only indexing certain folder of music... great....
Hey, this is cool. I remember a while back someone posting a comment about how his friend started a business making jellyfish aquariums. Is this the same guy? If so, CONGRATS!
This is an amazing movie. I just watched it in its entirety.

I just watched it with a friend who is a film maker (has done some Radiohead DVD films among other impressive work.) It sparked a discussion about business models from an artist's perspective. Still mulling the implications of our discussion so no conclusions yet, sorry.

Oh, it helps (for me at least) that it is the story of the Ramayana, an ancient Hindu text from the Vedas. Amazing!
Ramayana is not "from" the Vedas. Vedas predate Ramayana.

However, "Bhagavadgeetha", which is popularly* considered to be the holiest of Hindu texts is from Mahabharatha, which takes place after Ramayana.

* I say popular because there is no universal agreement on Bhagavadgeetha to be canonical source of Hindu philosophy and religion. However, it has a very good condensation of the teachings of various hindu philosophical schools which can be understood with comparatively less study than the Vedas, the Vedanta and other bodies of knowledge.
Rumor: iPhone to Get a Premium App Store