skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Small firms, however, can use loans and investment to hang on longer, and the longer they hang on, the more likely that the big company will give up. Even when they do go out of business, if the big company raises prices too much, there will be an obvious market opportunity and someone will start up a cigar shop, and then the big company has to sell at a loss for another 6 months, 2 years, or whatever, and then the cycle can repeat. There's almost always going to be someone willing to bet that the big company will give up this time, and that very fact makes them more likely to actually give up, once they understand it.

Of course, in the real world, what they'll do is quietly fund an anti-tobacco zoning ordinance (which they're grandfathered in for, of course), or use some other trick that amounts to keeping out competitors at government-point, because that's what big companies do, if they can. Actual competition isn't nearly as harmful as lobbying.
Entreprenuers fleeing high-tax britain
Lessig: Continuing the Work of Code
I think this is an age thing.

I used to say that I'll probably change most of my opinions in the coming decade, but it is probably not true anymore; less than 50% will be changed in 2019, if I still live.

That is because the (few) opinions I have are quite well tested.

(There is also a distinction between my opinions and my more numerous "working hypotheses".)
Although this is the more hands off approach, if you have a mac, get familiar with RapidWeaver. I actually started learning web design with RapidWeaver and it was great. Since then I moved onto writing my own code and I discovered that using custom code inline with RapidWeaver is a great approach. Rather than rip off other ideas, gain powerful functionality and create your beautiful design.
A fisherman would never sell his rod to buy bread. Are the tax administrators/politicians that short-sighted?
How do people get torrent files? From the web. So, if Apple is going to be consistent, a web browser shouldn't be allowed on the iphone. Silly.

(And of course, you could always get around this by using a bittorrent client that can be controlled with a web browser.)
I just spent 30 minutes with this App - It's a winner. I've subscribed to the $3.45/week subscription.

I've been a NYT reader for the last seven years - it's basically my home page - but for whatever reason, the web edition obscures my sense of what the entire paper is offering. Keep in mind I read the NYT.com web page 3-5 times a day for about two hours, and, seven years later, I _still_ feel like I'm missing out from the "Paper" experience.

The NYT reader has the following features that I love:

o Flawless Article-Map. I've got my sections on the left, the article number on the bottom, and the page number on the bottom right (Though, with a 30" monitor it almost 100% of the time will fit an article onto a single page).

o Great navigation - Cursor Right/Left changes articles. Cursor Up/Down changes Page. Command Up/Down changes Section.

o It's the NYT Paper edition, delivered electronically Sometimes, having that authoritative "We commit this to history" version of the NYT is reassuring, for all its faults.

o Great resizing - Text, Graphics all relocate themselves very well - much better than the nyt.com page. This app works just as cleanly on a 30" monitor as it does a 15" monitor - which is rare for Newspaper readers.

o Much less advertising - I expect that will change, but it's nice to have a pristine page without having to load up your system with ad-blockers - just a single banner at the bottom right now.

o News in Video - All of the video news in a single section. (Great Video Article on West Point Cyber Warfare today, BTW)

o News in Pictures - Nice roundup of all the NYT pictures of the day.

o Latest News - A nice addition - gives you the dynamic element of nyt.com in addition to the authoritative version.

We'll see if I'm as hyper-enthusiastic a couple months from now, but, this is where I'm going for my NYT news. Need to see if WSJ (which has better charts/graphics than the NYT, particularly on the financial side) has a reader as nice as the NYT.

[Added:]
Back in 1999/2000 or thereabouts, there was an earlier version of the NYT reader that I did _not_ like very much. It wasn't as nimble as the existing one, and , incredibly, didn't come out until quite late in the morning. There were several occasions when the -paper- edition was available before the electronic, and the web site was always more complete. Fail.

I'm happy to see the following note when I subscribed:

"Getting it first
So fast, you get delivery while our presses are still running "

We'll see.
Unfortunately for Google, Android is, and will be, crippled at every step by manufacturers and carriers. Apple at least has the luxury of making sure that the iPhone will be crippled in a way that it still remains very useful for most people and that its core functionality is not jeopardized.
Those are actually good ideas, and if you received a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon University, you may have witnessed first hand their actualization in CS 213, Introduction to Computer Systems:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-f01/www/

From the syllabus:

1. Int’s are not integers, Float’s are not
reals. Our ﬁnite representations of numbers
have signiﬁcant limitations, and because of
these limitations we sometimes have to think in
terms of bit-level representations.

2. You’ve got to know assembly language.
Even if you never write programs in assembly,
The behavior of a program cannot be understood
sometimes purely based on the abstraction of a
high-level language. Further, understanding the
effects of bugs requires familiarity with the
machine-level model.

3. Memory matters. Computer memory is not
unbounded. It must be allocated and managed.
Memory referencing errors are especially
pernicious. An erroneous updating of one object
can cause a change in some logically unrelated
object. Also, the combination of caching and
virtual memory provides the functionality of a
uniform unbounded address space, but not the
performance.

4. There is more to performance than
asymptotic complexity. Constant factors also
matter. There are systematic ways to evaluate
and improve program performance

5. Computers do more than execute
instructions. They also need to get data in and
out and they interact with other systems over
networks.
I think if Sony had made MemoryStick and MiniDisk (or whatever it was called) a lot more "open," they would have killed the competition.
Also, the article makes it sound like these guys never communicated at all, but weren't efforts made to settle the dispute privately? It seems like the article went to great lengths to make everyone involved look silly, when in fact the only real silliness would be the hundreds of users and even non-users who developed a passionate interest. So nerds waste time on gossip and politics. So teenagers are idealistic and think every little thing is the end of the world. So public opinion of the silliest kind may influence the opinions of Supposedly Serious People. So what? Doesn't that mean nerds are just like everyone else?
I still listen to War, Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby.

I respect, but do not love, the artistic decisions they made with Zooropa and Pop.

Since Pop, they've reverted to a cookie-cutter mega stadium act. Their albums contribute nothing that they themselves haven't already contributed. Their theme material is superficial, rehashed, or sometimes nonexistent.

Meanwhile, they continue playing shows with $250 top ticket prices under 360 deals with Live Nation, the Gordon Gekko's of the entertainment industry.

I don't think U2 is evil. I just don't think they're anything more authentic or credible than, say, a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
From the little ruby i know i find it a very nice language, but i too am sick of all the drama. Thats why i mostly try to ignore it. I would love to see more articles about cool ruby hacks, but i get useless rhetoric instead.
Irish TV licenses are charged per address, at least for domestic TVs: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/categories/consumer-affair...

Certainly that's how it's done in the UK: one TV licence covers up to 7 (I think) TVs at one domestic address.
And a private equity investor. What's your point? Is Maureen Dowd an artist too? How about Michael Milken?
Possibly. Ignorance of "quantum" is so rampant it's hard to tell. Like trying to satirize alternative medicine; it's hard to come up with something funny that hasn't been seriously claimed.
Google is censoring BitTorrent-related content already. utorrent.com (which belongs to BitTorrent, Inc.) had a Google custom search for torrent files. Google censored it, so now they are using Ask.

http://torrentfreak.com/google-custom-search-cuts-utorrent-o...

http://www.ask.com/web?q=ubuntu&search=search&qsrc=0...
It's a completely separate entity from their main product lines.

Until there is financial incentive to fix it, change will be slow. This includes the emergence of serious alternatives. Serious being defined as platforms that make developers money. So far, Nokia, Palm and BB and even Android don't count (though they may in the future).
How would a company enforce that? Is the NYT going to start suing customers? Cutting off their access?
I assume this means you think U2 is much better than the average indie artist making $300,000 per album, right?
I read an interesting study recently (maybe on HN) about an experiment where they swapped people's groceries (or something to that effect) without them knowing. Afterward they were asked to justify their choices and most of them (or a large proportion of them) had no problem in doing so, even though they didn't even choose the item in the first place.
I'm not so sure. The vast majority of Internet startups do not require significant creativity and exploration. Not for examples the level required to invent the transistor or the telegraph. Most startups over the last 10 years are massively grunt work. I would guess that successful recent startups are ruled by those with great amounts of self-control.
Yep. This is most popular way to watch European cycling events here in the States, short of paying for a subscription to CyclingTv.com or hoping for a legitimate stream from Versus of NBC Universal.
$std_human_interval=45
while true; do
sleep $std_human_interval
curl "http://mechanicalturk/answer?value=`random_gen`"
od
The git commands, etc. are actually pretty straightforward. What usually causes the issues is thinking about branches. That can be a little hard to wrap your head around especially when you throw in remote repositories.

BTW, here's what they should have done:

git checkout -b last_good_version [commit]
git push --force origin last_good_version:master

Preserves the local history but fixes the issue on GitHub.

They probably should also do a few things like:

git branch -m master master_merge_v2
git branch -m last_good_version master

to avoid messing things up with the next push
There are more plugins for this: Pictpress and Lightbox being some of them.
That's the theory. The reality is that it's not more succinct and it's not significantly more powerful in most cases. Yes, there are some neat things you can do with templates (and I do), and some of the syntactic sugar things you get with objects and overloading and namespaces are nice, but there's nothing that you can do in C++ that you can't do equally well in C.

That said, C++ is in no way a "drop-in replacement" for C. What makes C++ "interesting" is that most of the time, you can drop C code into a C++ program and it will just work. Of course, you can do the same thing with Objective C, and the object model behind Objective C is much more sane.
The ActiveX control doesn't lower it's value to me. The ActiveX control makes it impossible to compete with Google. Lowering your product's value to me is not unlawful. Contracts and conspiracies in restraint of trade are.

I like how you use the terms "create", "immense value, and "innovation" to support your argument, and "steal", "force", and "coerce" for mine. Clearly, you want to hash this out. =)
Thank you and you are far from being harsh.

Instrumental, here, means the version of any song without the lyrics. The reason why some songs will come with lyrics is because the filtering is not done properly yet.

For example search for "Coldplay" and click play on one of titles, you will hear the music and not the voice.

It is useful, but just not to everyone.

I will take some time and create a better design.
I have a library of over 1000 Web page screenshots in iPhoto (am transitioning to LittleSnapper though) that I use as an inspiration/swipe file. That said, I've often found just "making it up as I go along" to have the best ultimate results. I tend to throw down something really bare and then iteratively spruce it up with inspiration from a variety of sources.
How is any EULA enforced? I think the goal is not so much to "prevent" as it is to clearly indicate that it isn't "approved."

[EDIT]
I'm guessing they put that "No Tablet" option to ensure they get a licensing chunk from vendors who might want to sell inexpensive tablet that run on the AIR platform.
BIGOmaha: The Little Conference That Could
Last week in the gorgeous Omaha sunshine, about 450 techies, entrepreneurs, and creatives from all over the country gathered in a large but simple room to learn, listen, and make connections.
Another things is that we don't always seek out the things we are interested in on our own because we are ignorant of them and it's not until we've studied them we realize that we enjoy the subject (I find this is very true for math).

The way I see it is that we learn a broad range of subject through our life's but each choose to specialize in what we find the most interesting. The further we get with our education the more we can narrow down what it is we find interesting (or maybe we just exclude the things that aren't).

Even if we simply flush our systems completely (which I don't believe) it's much easier to re-learn something you've once learned than to learn it for the first time. It's not lost it's just not readily available.
Well, another way to look at it, is using OPEN technologies would have helped competing with a that slicker and more stylish interface

Worst but cheaper or greener can win better but more expensive!

But I don't believe he was aiming at worst, I think he meant or should have meant that by using closed technology he was facing Apple alone, but by using OPEN technologies he would have gathered a crowd and faced Apple with plenty of parties on his side

Its the PC versus Apple all over again. Apple is doing great for now, but eventually a PC-ish ecosystem for the handheld market will make it marginal!
What else do you think people do on comment threads? Or do you think every shared opinion must be positive? :-)

BTW, read the comment again -- I'm not that interested in Ruby, why would I bother? It was just a suggestion after all...
The lack of a vendor-documented API guarantee means that any findings are moot, and usage of this feature is unsafe. Open source, for all its developer benefits, would not change this.
Willie Nelson stopped paying taxes altogether and wound up $17MM in debt to the IRS. He's still an artist!
The contentious point will come if/when people start being charged for TV content for using a device that can receive streamed TV - eg businesses being charged a licence fee for each pc/blackberry/ipod. I'll be interested to see how this goes.
The sweet spot is right down the middle, and is extremely rare.

This is a pat phrase that means nothing. If you assume there are extremes on either side of a desired trait you can say it's in the middle, but it's not a useful criteria.

PS: What you really want is someone who is more innovative than 95% of people out there, but still capable of functioning within the context of a company.
EC was chock-full of smart engineers but suffered from the "too many mad scientists, not enough hunchbacks" problem and had a management team grafted on from Creative Labs (which seemed like a smart move at the time since they had brought SoundBlaster to market dominance.) The real tragedy is that the company founders were fixated on the idea that they were creating a mall-like "virtual world" and remainded completely oblivious to the fact that they were sitting on a working scalable, secure MMORPG engine at least five years before anyone else was even close.
Maybe it's a bias but I'm usually underwhelmed by people who call themselves "smart".
Qt publishes new roadmap for eponymous C++ framework
A Consumerist rehash of a story that has already been discussed to death on HN, for instance here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583942
Assembly's too high-level :) In my school's sophomore year, CS majors are required to implement a CPU on an FPGA; the instruction set, CPU architecture, everything are up to the student groups to design and implement. At the end of the class, all the student processors are compared w.r.t. size and speed of execution of various simple programs. Our group had a guy that wrote an assembler for our ISA, but most of the groups just wrote their programs in raw machine code, using a hex editor.

Really, nothing teaches low-level programming better than starting with gates and building your way up to programs. The sequel to that class teaches how to deal with pipelining, CPU caches, and multiple-execution chips like the TI DSPs, so after you design your processor, you get to see how real CPUs work. It's really fun, actually.
This question makes no sense to me. I said, "earned it, rather than inherited it", which I think, is both clear in what I mean (the person made the money in their own lifetime through their own skill, luck, or hard work; rather than receiving the money from previous generations) and generic in how they could have made the money (any way that doesn't involve inheriting it from parents).

Brin and Page did not have billionaire parents. They earned their billions.

The Waltons were born into billions of dollars made by Sam Walton. They inherited it.

Not a complicated distinction, and has nothing to do with whether they work on software or not. It was also not a judgment on the character of the people in question. It was a comment on how plausible it is that someone like you or me could become fantastically wealthy through various means. Software seems as good a means as any. That's the conversation I thought we were all having here.
What happened in March that you saw such a traffic surge?
They already have an iPhone Application: http://www.nytimes.com/services/mobile/iphone.html
You might like the more rational grid approach to web design. Once you familiarize yourself with it, you'll start seeing it everywhere... A good place to start is: http://960.gs/
How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups, and How It Can Do Better
Although the broadcast has now finished bookmark this feed:

http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368163

It's 1200kbps and looks much better than the one on NASA's homepage.
The Millionaire Next Door also reportedly has data problems, but, I think the idea of becoming one of those millionaires next door from software is also sound. I think the risks that have to be taken for those home runs in software are smaller, as well. What's the cost of a major construction project that can net millions in revenue vs. a major software project that can net millions in revenue?

I was just think we're pretty lucky (or clever) to be working in a field that has produced so many billionaires in a short period of time, and now requires less risk and investment than ever before. It's a good time to be a nerd.
Ask HN: Is this the end of geek?
I'm watching language corruption in action...

I remember seeing and hearing an increasing number of people referring to themselves as nerds back during the first .com bubble. Eager to associate themselves with the massive IPO valuations for companies built by genuine nerds, of course they seemed to stop that self labeling when the bubble burst. But now it seems that geek is the new "hotness".

http://geekadvancement.com/ and the twitter tag #iamageek is now making everyone who has seen the new star trek film proudly proclaim "I AM A GEEK". I know i sound like some old geezer but it seems to me like the "social media mavens" are actively using the word to described themselves so some of the facebook,google,twitter magic rubs off on them.

Hacker of course had its definition troubles but it seems to of somewhat come back to its original meaning. My Question is this: Is this the end of geek as we know it?
Kosertech » Would AppStore pre-approval help?
For those of us more interested in the quality of the, you know, sound-producing part of the player, Sony has Apple beat.
Yes.

Read up on copyright and patents: they exist to provide incentive to create, not to allow the creators to profit.

So if the ActiveX control inhibits future creations, that is enough to for we the people (through our govt.) to take stems to prevent that (in order to ensure our future well being).
From the Taipei Times (http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2009/05/10/20...):

"A Crime Investigation Bureau [in Taiwan] official said there was no plan, but the bureau was working on allowing Chinese law enforcers to be stationed in Taiwan."

and the rationale?

"...Taiwanese police officers and China’s People’s Armed Police — be stationed in each country to strengthen cross-strait cooperation on crime prevention."

From my understanding of police enforcement, the practice of inviting representatives of a foreign police department is not unusual. Even the NYPD has units stationed around the world.

On a side note, the headline is slightly link-bait-ish. The usage of a question mark, reminds me of a Jon Stewart critique of television news headlines (http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=117466...).
Professionalism means doing the right thing even if it's personally unpleasant. A vet putting a sick kitten to sleep for example. Or a salesman who tries to sell the product the customer actually needs, not just what has the biggest margin.
Yeah it's like there's no RMS, no Linus, no Alan Cox, everyone in the Ruby world is ESR.
This seems better:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22wish%22+AND+%22had%22+...
Amazon Opens a Kindle Store for the iPhone
> but there's nothing that you can do in C++ that you can't do equally well in C.

I'm shocked you're saying this in seriousness. C is a simple language lacking a large number of constructs and compiler safety features of C++. You might as well argue that BASIC is just as powerful as Python.

Inherently OOP problems like large simulations with huge class hierarchies could not realistically be done in C. The C++ frameworks for writing servers have no parallel in C because the language lacks required abstractions.

I have never seen C code that could not be rewritten more clearly in C++.
The big downside of any sony player I ever looked at was it always had to convert my mp3's into some other format to work on the players. This took forever and was a hassle.
WTF. If they're not supplying the broadband (which they're not) then they don't get to collect for it. This is so irritating - it's this sort of thing which casued me to leave the country. The Irish government figures that since it's an island, they can just use the geography to squeeze people for anything, especially when times are tough.

Be interesting to see how this would stack up against the recent EU decision to make internet access a legal right (not free as in beer). I'm guessing EU law would trump this transparent attempt at a shakedown.
I meant, all employees of customers of the service. :)