skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love that they claim they're predicting things from the past, but actually aren't. They claim the future will see a 'polycentric' (see: multipolarity; they got the name wrong) world where we will be ruled by many powers instead of one.

Aside from the fact this has rarely been seen in history, and only during transitional periods (After WW2, briefly we had USA, USSR and the British Empire as superpowers) when it has been seen. When we look back, with hindsight it becomes clear that there is a direct line of superpowers back to the dawn of civilization and, largely, one superpower passed off the power to its successor. The example here would be that the British Empire, instead of fighting to the death stepped aside for the USA. This has been played for thousands of years, during the Classical period it was passed between Greece and Rome, who was the super power. After the Roman Empire was defeated by the Hunnic Empire (Atilla the Hun) the power moved so far to the east no one in Europe had a clue, which led to the Dark Ages, because the people who had spread their technology (the Romans) rarely taught the locals how to build it themselves.

This meant that after the Roman Empire, and the fairly swift collapse of the Hunnic Empire with the death of Atilla, Europe was left without a power and so was the world. It was quite ironic, it would be like if the USSR had beat the USA in 1990, and a year later still collapsed. The effect was profound, especially moving into the medieval period, due to the fact that people relied on these Empires to shift around technology and without them there was no one big enough to move the information.

(Ed: This is also why when moving into the late Medieval Period and the Colonial Era, we had multiple powers all handing the superpower status between them as one got a clear advantage. In hindsight this largely centered between England and France, a play reminiscent of how Greece and Rome passed the superpower title between themselves many times during the classical period, but at no point was there two true superpowers.)

I find that their predictions are based on personal opinions, and they choose to use history to back themselves up whenever it's convenient, but in many of the examples they wholly ignore it. There's no historical basis to assume suicide bombings, it's an exceptionally rare development with the invention of compact explosives and religious brainwashing. Why would a pirate perform a suicide bombing, it's absurd they're in it for personal gain not religious gain.

This article is very stupid merely for trying to predict the future. I'll trust a Sci-Fi writer on the future before I trust an economist, if we could trust economists to predict the future then we wouldn't be in the financial crisis we are.
And Twitter gives you better results than asking The Google? I don't see how unless you have 2 million followers.
How I Got Skype High Quality Video Working
Since English isn't your primary language, I'd suggest dropping "ain't" from your vocabulary. In the US, it's a word generally reserved for the ignorant and uneducated.
Thats because twitter is useless for personal stuff. Its ok for businesses/internet celebrities, since its another way to push their crap, but regular people gain next to nothing from using it.
I'm just going to come right out and say it: No tabs = fucking insane. I haven't tried it but I don't want my browser to navigate like iTunes.

Then again, it's just a mockup. Should be interesting to see where they go in the future though.
It's not only a download concern. Downloading and watching animated gifs on the iPhone is a terrible experience - it's choppy, skips frames, and just doesn't look good. Doing an animated gif wasn't an option for Google.
Open Source the Chevy Volt
I did indeed mean the latter. Didn't even notice the missing "of".

For some things, past experience is of use. For guessing at the general trends of history, past experience should, in fact, teach us that it's completely useless. On a personal, immediate scale, it is useful to try and figure out what's about to happen, but when it comes to large trends, there are too much chaos and wild swings involved for past experience to be of any use.
FTA: "Reichenstein argues that tabs were a good solution for an earlier age of the Internet, when users hardly ever had more than ten tabs open at any given time. Now, however, as browsers are slowly turning into operating systems, a new paradigm for organizing this information has become necessary."

Actually, I prefer the task bar paradigm in my OS as well.
Don't you confuse history as a story with the real thing?

The greeks were only a super-power in their limited sphere. China and Rome/Greece did not even interact that much.
They're different. You've changed the submission title to be more link-baity.
Amazon: A is for arrogant
It's a new form of publishing that could not have existed before the internet. The constraint to 140 characters and the form it will be consumed effect very directly what and how you write. The medium is the message after all.

I agree that 99% of humanity does not need to be on twitter, just like 99% of humanity does not need to have a blog, but there is something more to it than consensual spamming or following celebs.
Man bites snake in epic struggle
PIN Crackers Nab Holy Grail of Bank Card Security
You can write a paper comparing Perl with MySQL, and if you put enough effort into it you may even conclude that MySQL has better performance, but this doesn't make the comparison any more meaningful.
I see Ubiquity as one big UI experiment, which is nice. Windows NT and OS X aren't the last words on GUI.

That said, I'd like to see some data guiding these decisions. Does Firefox report back to the mothership about tab usage?

Their central argument for this UI, in the article at least, appears to be this: "Reichenstein argues that tabs were a good solution for an earlier age of the Internet, when users hardly ever had more than ten tabs open at any given time. Now, however, as browsers are slowly turning into operating systems, a new paradigm for organizing this information has become necessary."

Is this true? Does this jive with data about how people actually use browsers and tabs?

I have no idea, but I want my experiments to be backed by data, you know?
The ~10km/s figure refers to the speed an unpropelled object needs at the Earth's surface in order to escape gravity, so it doesn't apply to rockets and shuttles. Assuming it could keep the engine running, the shuttle could go into orbit at 1km/h.

Sorry to nitpick, but I couldn't resist as I used to have the same misconception.
I discussed this issue at http://softwaresimply.blogspot.com/2008/03/to-template-or-no....

It seems like people tend to prefer templates, however I'm not yet convinced. I think there are good arguments for language-generated code, especially with a language that is powerful enough. HSP in Haskell provides some interesting possibilities here (http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~d00nibro/hsp/thesis.pdf). Text.XHtml is another Haskell library that does this (http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/current/docs/libraries/xhtml...).
Very very helpful, especially as someone who still has to work in ie6 and 7. I've been trying to set this up for some time and have never found a good, straightforward tutorial regarding how to get this working.
> And Twitter gives you better results than asking The Google?

Possibly. He got several direct, trusted answers from people risking social capital to help him out. There are lots of cases where personal recommendations are more valuable than indirect, impersonal discussions or reviews.
I've seen the Tree Tab AddOn and didn't think I would like it but it is much better than having a whole bunch of tabs open, which tend to get squished up when you have a lot open.

Also, with certain themes the active tab can be hard to see, they all look the same, the active tab should be indented or darker but some themes make them all look so similar it's hard to tell, that's not so with Tree Tab.
That's what I'd suggest people do. Ask a question and then show the person you are trying to convince.

I'm not a fan of Twitter and have, under great pressure, resisted joining. The only thing that has really impressed me and made me want to sign up was seeing someone ask a question to their followers and get instant responses.
Consider also the example of a cuckoo's chick. These things obviously have no "training". Genetics is the only thing they have to work with. And they "convince" doting mother birds to feed them extremely well (apparently, so well that other birds, just flying past the nest will sometimes give them food they were carrying back the their young). Is this a "lie" ?
Ask HN: which is the best flash video player?
Hi,

We ve been using flow player (http://flowplayer.org) on our site http://seenreport.com to play videos for quite some time now. The performance has been quite satisfactory, but I just want to make sure we are using the best available option before we buy the license.

Is there any other flash video player available to run online videos or should I just got for the flow player?
I've been using the pro mac laptop line (I still catch myself using the much-better PowerBook name) for dev+2nd screen since late 2001.

The fact that the air can't seem to handle a second framebuffer and edit text at the same time is a little ridiculous.
Ask HN: Effective arguments to convince someone to leave twitter ?
Ugh...great article about the reality of workplace communications, but I think it needs to be underlined.

From what I've seen, remote is a function of the whole team -- not just 'does this guy depend on the Pond' but 'does the rest of the team depend on the Pond for their interactions with him/her' and 'do I, as a manager, depend on the Pond?'

I'll be forthright -- I don't like the Pond. To me it implies a lack of communication discipline; dysfunctional project management; a place where tribal knowledge and unwritten nuance rule behavior; and a place where power is derived from mastery of this subtle channel rather than documented performance and technical prowess. Rands' checklist for 'remoteable' workers is filled with issues of communication discipline -- able to get a point across in IM; cover an entire issue, eloquently, in email. I would add at least a couple more, such as 'reviews, documents, and publishes the [technical] decision process', and 'keeps trustworthy metrics on progress and technical issues'.

Too often groups use colocation as an excuse for undisciplined communication, then run into this uncertainty about remote workers as a side effect of the monster they've built.
Yes, absolutely. Googling for "luggage reviews" or "which luggage is best" yields only trash (try it, you'll see).

On the other hand, tweeting gave me the following links:

http://onebag.com/
http://geekeasy.com/travel/articles/Luggage_2.shtml
http://garry.posterous.com/muji-kicks-ass
http://wherethehellismatt.com/faq.shtml

And a variety of other tidbits of info, including some tweets from someone who runs a blog dedicated to location-independent life ( http://locationindependent.com/blog/ ):

http://skitch.com/swombat/bm4y1/twitter-swombat

That represents immediate, obvious value to me.
> I imagine most of your friends will experience the same problem (and can see it from the outset).

Very definitely they will - I followed swombat on twitter for a bit and had to let him go because he makes up for the 140 character limit by churning out messages at the rate of a zillion a day:-)
> Franklin/Jefferson/Priestley/Watt type science, where the science is pursued for fun and interest

Entire fields are now off-limits to individuals (even wealthy ones) due to bureaucracy.

Even if you can afford to fork over, say, $25K for something as basic as an analytical balance, chemical supply houses are forbidden by US law to ship anything (even table salt) to a private residence. (Actually, the truth is more complicated - it is not prohibited per se, but most of them simply will not deal with a non-corporate/non-academic purchaser due to the required paperwork overhead not paying off.) Hobby electronics is still legal (for now - just wait until the War on Copyright Infringement approaches the scale of the War on Drugs.) But if your science requires professionally-manufactured precision equipment or even the simplest chemical feedstock, all bets are off.
That's not a bad point, but I wonder how stable the situation is? Will people start flooding twitter and trying to game it just like the Google results? Will they be able to?
One thing I miss using Firefox over IE is the ability to move everything in the menu, bookmark, address bar onto one line to maximize screen space. With Firefox you can choose Customize but only drag items to and from its toolbar. Unless I'm misinformed there doesn't seem to be anyway to have everything on one line.

I also miss the ability to double-click on for example "ycombinator" in new.ycombinator.com to highlight just it and then type in whatever I want and still have "new." and ".com/..." still there untouched. I believe the Windows version of FF does that as well as IE.
Tom Brokaw Reports From The Dawn Of The Internet (1995)
I disagree. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=563622 above.
This paper is just a thinly-veiled sales pitch for Vertica. All of the C-Store players are on it. Stonebraker has officially jumped the shark.
Hardly... :-) You just need to follow more noisy people :-)
My first ever computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. It was given to my by my uncle, who won it in a golf tournament. It came with a 16k memory expansion module, that plugged into the back of it, and a couple of cassette games, Frogger, and something else that I can't remember now. It took about 20-30 minutes to load the games by cassette. The membrane keyboard was terrible. Of course there was no modem or printer, so it was pretty limited. The best thing about it was that it was so small. Less than a year after I got it, the keyboard stopped accepting inputs, so I took it into the shop and smashed it to smithereens with a hammer.
what stopped you from using something like http://answers.yahoo.com/ instead?
I thought people don't need mobile phones, before they started to be everywhere. I thought email was for top executives and business people when I first heard about it.

I now think twitter is useless and people just don't need it.
This is exactly why I resisted for so long.

Then when I was at PyCon last month, they put twitterfall with the #pycon keyword up on the projector before the morning sessions started and during lunch and I saw that it could be a lot more than 'eating a burrito' updates.

As far as your friends go, I say tough love. Just drop them and when questioned explain why. Either that or write a Greasemonkey script to drop them from your main stream.
Servers shouldn't have to get involved with this.

Back when Phorm was being installed via spyware and included a rootkit, it was the end-user's job to make sure it didn't get installed. Now that ISPs are installing it, it's the government's job to tell ISPs to knock it off. It's difficult to comprehend why the UK government believes Phorm is legal: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7998009.stm

I understand why Amazon decided to act, but it's only a stopgap solution.
Paklsound1 (currently £1.19) is an even more similar iPhone app:

http://pakl.net/iphone/PaklSound1/
> I haven't done any searching yet except sending my cv to that company division in Canada to be told I have to go through the standard way (sending my cv by their website) to apply for an internship even if I already worked there.

Make your own success.

Find out who approves interns, and reach out to that person. Tell me "You've got six days to make this happen".

I spent far too much of my life following the rules.

The chutes and ramps are for the cattle.

Most people are cattle, so organizations that want to deal with lots of people use chutes and ramps.

However, most organizations also are willing to work with a rock star, a rule breaker, and someone who makes his own luck.

On that note: good luck!
You: Use Twitter

Them: I don't want to, I hate it, it's bullshit just broadcasting stuff in 140 characters!

You: Do you use Facebook?

Them: Yes.

You: Do you use IM/IRC?

Them: Yeah.

You: Do you send out emails?

Them: Of course I do!

You: Use Twitter at least 10 updates+10 follows everyday for 30 days, tell me why it sucks after that.

(( after 30 days ))

crickets
TIME FOR SOME STORIES
What am I, your personal Apple genius? Google it man! (Hint, try looking at the Google announcement of the new Gmail interface for the iPhone)
there's also a whole variety of possible arguments for why someone should get on Twitter, and so far I haven't figured out any clear, universal argument.

I think that's your answer. If you can't make a proper, solid argument for what they gain from being on twitter there is no gain, and whatever reasons are left are purely selfish on your part. Or you have just successfully been brainwashed that there is no real world outside twitter. I don't know.

Let's just say there is a reason I don't try to convert friends, family and colleagues into listening to Jpop. Not their thing.

Why on earth does everyone need to be on twitter? I don't expect everyone I know to be available on cell-phone, email, IRC, MSN and twitter 24/7. Having just one of those is sufficient to stay in touch and I see no reason to force people over to things they don't care about.

Anyway, this sounds like mindless, rabid fanboyism to me.
The workspaces in that list aren't very impressive at all.

Here's a more comprehensive list of artist's, blogger's and programmer's workspaces: http://parkablogs.com/content/creative-workspaces-and-home-o... some of the link will take you to huge flickr pools.

The artist's workspaces are way more interesting.
Actually, the founders of Google initially wanted to sell their product to Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask.com, et all.

Nobody really believed their algorithm would significantly better. They were convinced state of the art was all there was and could ever be.

So they founded Google, and pretty much owned their stagnant competitors. There's a reason Ask.com spends good money marketing itself among rednecks with a NASCAR and Google doesn't.
Nothing, but the point is, it is useful for personal stuff.
A lot of technology is now software based and thanks to the web, it is immediately distributed evenly to all those who have computers with internet access.

The first half is correct, but not the second half. A few examples: the software that runs on spy satellites, the software used to design stealth planes, the software used in sigint, "smart bomb" guidance systems, the software used to design nuclear weapons, etc.
How VCs Control Companies
I apologize for taking sooo long to get back to you on this:
I own a pair of Sphere Halogens. I bought them since I felt at the end of the day(having stared at the screen for hours together, that I had eye-fatigue, related headaches and dryness.) After trying out the Halogens for a few days, instant relief! I would say it is totally worthwhile expenditure if you feel eye fatigue; obviously a whole lotta people seem to do good without them...so good for them. They have really helped me alleviate my eye-fatigue and I can now work longer on my computer and follow-up on other things in life after having worked on computers, without feeling burnt-out. Hope this helps.
Little Boots's cover of Hot Chip's Ready for the Fun is my current favourite example of Tenori-on music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6tLRCDqJ2c
I am starting to come to the conclusion that all the downsides of not supporting IE6 are for the most part mythological (particularly outside of corporate intranet situations like you identify).

I mean, if you "don't support" IE6, what is the worst thing that happens? Some stuff doesn't look right for a portion of your audience? These people already have a seriously degraded internet experience, are they going to notice that the padding on your floats is all messed up?

I am pretty certain that you are leaving revenue on the table if you choose to ignore IE6 as a business, which is a valid objection to my argument. But how much?

And how much costs are you leaving off the table by freeing your designers and developers from supporting IE6, and allowing them to do other amazing things with their precious time?

Give me two almost-identical websites with two similar, business-oriented audiences, then have one site support IE6 and the other basically ignore it (and use the excess development/design time to build other features). I don't know about you, but I'd put my money in #2.
wow, It's surprising how small that actually is in reality
I really hate that old tale about the man telling the doctor "It hurts when I do this!" and the doctor advising him "Don't do that." But here I go (with apologies):

Why are you trying to convince people to get on twitter? Twitter scratches an itch. An itch I have. An itch it would seem you have. But not an itch shared by everyone on the planet. If you had a friend who was complaining "Gosh, I wish I could loosen this bolt without making my fingers all bloody," it would be appropriate to introduce him to wrenches. That doesn't mean you should be hounding him to use it to eat his cereal in the morning or brush his teeth at night.

If a person has a need for twitter, explain how twitter services that need. If he doesn't, well, he shouldn't be on twitter and no argument from you will change that.
You'd think these smart people would have figured out what globalization means by now. Here's a big hint: world government.
Since it's short, I'll repost my comment from his site here, because I'm interested in this for my own purposes (business idea):

> At first they made the salsa in their kitchen and sold jars through their bedroom window

Is that legal?

... and since it probably isn't, I wonder how one would go about doing a canned food business.
Why Java is a better choice than using Python on Google App Engine
Twitter monetization advice: Be the next Microsoft, not AOL. Focus on developers.
It's only one data point, but I have a few popularish (for the niche) sites in the (Ruby) programming niche, and averaged over a few sites, over about a million pageviews over the last several months, about 2.5% of visitors were using IE 6. From others I've spoken to, this is about average for techie / programming sites.

So.. if I didn't want to support it, I wouldn't. Well, I would, but I'd just show bare styling to them. The sort of user who's still on IE 6 doesn't really care about pixel perfect layout anyway, right? (Except for the poor closet geeks "stuck" on IE 6 in the workplace, but that's an even smaller percentage.)
People make the mistake of looking at "internet companies" as a type of business (like clothing store in a mall) rather than any number of types of businesses using a common delivery service. It's no more useful to lump together every company that uses the internet to deliver/sell a service or product to customers than it is to do the same with every company that mails things via UPS.

If you define startup as anyone making money in a scalable fashion over the net, there are tens of thousands of them scattered all over the globe, including dudes who sell stuff on ebay, dudes who buy Adsense links to market affiliate products, etc.
When looking at the "all places" map, it would be nice if I could enter a location and zoom to it. Cool concept, I like it.
the problem is that for it to be useful you need to have a large following. So basically you end up with a chicken and the egg problem as a user.

I mean take you for example...you have 365 followers, and chances are most of them is due to you being a visible internet entrepreneur. But put yourself into a regular user's shoes, how useful do you think twitter would be with 5-10 followers...if that? I mean for Twitter to work, you need to convince other people to use something that they see as being completely useless. And the loop gets reinforced, since you yourself aren't seeing the usefulness of Twitter yet.