skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great research university (UCSD), decent support schools (USD + SDSU), massive biotech/medtech startup scene, some strong big tech & gaming companies (e.g Qualcomm, Sony Online Entertainment), growing startup/web scene (Mindtouch and more), great weather, easy, relaxed lifestyle, relatively cheap housing...
Programmers have only ever programmed on Windows to target the customer base there. I use OSX, Windows and Linux regularly and I'd much rather develop under Linux. OSX isn't a good *nix when it comes to packages and all that open source at your finger tips is what makes Linux so good. I don't find much functional difference in the UIs of those operating systems.
Stupid spam!
Not if you're using that computer to publish security articles that tell people their lives are at risk if they don't buy your product to protect themselves from the "evil hackers".

It's a very specific feud between two specific groups of people.

If you're not in the know, why not lurk in the scene a bit and see what's going on? I did just that; I was curious about security and I saw both sides of the issue. One group publishes exploits and carries out mayhem for fun, while the other group repeats what the former said in legit, paid publications and calls the former names.

Even the train-robbers vs bounty-hunters analogy fails in this case; there are way too many Joe Sixpacks fancying themselves a town sherrif and speaking ill of Jesse James. Very soon, some faces are bound to get smashed at the local Saloon :-P
Every single time I've installed Windows I've spend literally hours downloading and installing updates. Microsoft never seems to get the idea of rolling their myriad updates into a giant bundle update any more often than the annual service packs. So even when I need to install like 20 software updates on Mac OS X, it's all one or two passes rather than installing 200 in five passes.
Young Idols With Cleavers Rule the Stage
I once tried putting my nuts on the table during a pitch to some VCs. It didn't work out so well.
Given that I applied to cap factory and got denied, I suspect the latter. :-)

From what I saw, they appear to be looking for more polished startups, and their application process does not have the same focus on finding talented hackers that YC's appears to have.
I suspect that's specific to your browser, whatever it is, as I'm not seeing it in Firefox or Arora (WebKit+GTK browser). I imagine they'd fix it if they knew the specifics of how to reproduce it. They sometimes show up around here.
Yes, that's the obvious conclusion to draw in this case, but it still doesn't reveal the general rule.

For example, Google Groups has been out of beta for years, yet I find it unusably bad (e.g., no spam filtering or even killfiles so I have to hit "Older>>" about 5 times to see the next actual post), and based on a couple reviews I found just now, I'm not alone. I doubt they removed the "beta" label from GG so they could sell it as a service to companies.
I wonder how cheaply one could acquire these IOUs? It does seem doubtful that they will lose their value before the dollar loses its.
Why Do Students Have To Wait Until 21 To Commence? - John McWhorter
I don't see how this should pose problems to non-materialists. There's no reason the image can't be formed in the brain before or during transmission to the immaterial mind, for instance.

I'm not a dualist by any stretch but to claim this as evidence for materialism is mistaken.
Which, for nearly every graphic arts shop on the planet, is not a problem.
> They are probably using desalinization.

They say that they're not.
I don't find much functional difference in the UIs of those operating systems.

I understand not having a preference, say, but thinking there's no functional difference is ignoring a decade of user studies and reports and a lot of common sense.
Keyword Do's and Don'ts
Speaking from experience, that makes a lot of sense. I go to a university with a very large percentage of Asians and every group seemed to stick to their own group it seems not that there's anything wrong with that.
Oh, I find it really easy to imagine people who could use that. My first reaction is that $8/mo. is a bit pricey but it's actually a really good deal for someone who can't afford/justify the $300, while keeping them engaged rather than driving them away.

The 'no signup' to try is also great.
Adobe Illustrator does this too...but not as well.
I know an engineer who was not only frustrated with the ribbon, but actually attributed it to Vista (i.e. to say she "didn't like Vista" when what she described was clearly a feature of Office).

I suspect she was just too used to the old way (for better or for worse), but that's still valid. Maybe the ribbon isn't bad, but Microsoft should have introduced it more gradually, e.g. alongside a familiar menu bar instead of replacing the menu bar completely.
Certifications (well, depend on the cert) for "soft things" are generally used by companies to get everyone talking the same language.

I'm a code/architect guy, with a make-it-work-now personality, so I'm more used to say "let's get Bob to fix this shit".

But my girlfriend is into IT process, and we're getting an ITIL certification together, because where she works (HP) they do a lot of ITIL. So she and her team talk about how the "Service Desk" should scalate "Change" to a "Problem" or "Incident", which I think are all funny words, but helps everyone to get into the same flow together and makes communication easier.

I like my way (d'uh), but that's because my way of doing things have worked so far for my things that needed to be done (pretty philosofical statement!), while obviously her ways have worked for her. In the end, if it's delivered, and the client pay and he's happy, I could care less what's the terminology.
> Yes, the VC took a beating during the Tet Offensive, but Khe Sahn was close to ending up like Dien Bien Phu. There was combat inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

So? There are always some close calls. The overall result is what counts. Tet destroyed the VC and the NVA wasn't ready.

> The U.S. soldiers were demoralized and did not want to fight in Vietnam because they saw no point in doing so.

That didn't happen/start because of conditions "on the ground". That happened in the US. You remember the US - it's where the troops came from.

> Sure, the U.S. military could have consolidated the Tet gains, but at what political cost?

You're assuming that the politics flowed from Vietnam back to the US. It didn't. Tet was judged a loss in the US while it was happening. Cronkite called it a loss.

Now, if you want to argue that the US would have won except for US politics and that would have been better, fine, but that's a very different argument.

> Last but not least, there's no comparison between WW2 and Vietnam.

Sure there is. Neither one was any of our biz.

> In Vietnam there was no occupation by an external country.

Where do you think that the NVA came from?

It was an invasion just like the North taking back the South during the US Civil War.
I once told a VC (after they intimated that they wanted to replace me as CEO) that it felt like they gave me a nutpunch. The VC didn't understand the phrase, and I actually had to explain it. Years later, it's how they greet me - "hey, nutpuncher!"
.9... = n
9.9... = 10n
9.9... - .9... = 10n - n
9 = 9n
1 = n
Are they using it for anything other than visual studio?

It was a boisterous claim, but there is a movement. Two things I think are causing it...

1) I think though something major happened with the move to intel chips and a nix backend to OSX. Dropping PowerPC and the old Mac OS is something Microsoft couldn't do and now Windows is stuck.

2) Also major market changes that push it that direction.

- iPhone/Touch device and market

- Dynamic languages like python + ruby and rails/django web frameworks associated with them

- XBOX 360 caused people who were windows PC gamers to go console, making the main reason to buy a PC in the past (games) largely moot.

- New multi-platform game engines like Unity3D and now that Mac is Intel you can develop for both easily. (unity3d is what initially made me make the switch)

- The cloud computing paradigm (yes it is buzz but real) is pretty much not windows based, it pushes cheap nix OSes and a nix based OS as your base is much better.

- Distributed source control such as git that weren't and aren't very Windows friendly

- Finally good systems, right click, and killer machines (one dude I know has a 30 inch Mac screen and a 32GB 8 processor Pro, it is a monster). These things look like giant iPods now rather than colored beads.

- OpenGL is resurging with Khronos support (ES for mobile and all associated libraries)

Every developer that I know that has gone that direction has not come back, typically these are talented developers as well and long time windows people (myself included, C++ MFC, MCSD C++, MCSD.NET, .net developer for 8 years, did one of the first public .net sites with Microsoft for a large CPG packaging goods company, game developer on windows)

There are more reasons but I see the change, do you?
The fact that you can run lots of great tools even Windows within parallels or bootcamp also added to the move.

Once you go Mac you never go...

Windows will still be needed for development for some time, but all new, fun and multi-platform development it is not required anymore. That being said I have two monster machines, Vista 64bit PC and an iMac and I need and use them both. I can tell you which one is more fun to work on though...
How do you price the services of a VC? It's hard to know how to price something with as wide a variance in quality as the services of a partner at a VC firm. 10% add value, 70% are neutral, and 20% destroy value. My big complaint is that VCs and other investors tend to practice what I call seagull management: they fly in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything, and leave.
Anyone who doesn't live in a certain environment can't really give an objective view of these things. We may look at it and say "wow that's annoying" but a long time Windows user may look at it and say "Thank you Microsoft! Thank you for the Updates! I feel so much safer now! Oh and you hide those annoying system tray icons for me too! I LOVE YOU" Long time Windows users will probably be quite happy with Windows 7. For everyone else there are several good alternatives these days.
Google Plans to Introduce a PC Operating System (for netbooks)
Chinese Twitter clone Fanfou is blocked, again.
After a surge of discussion on the Xinjiang unrest starting July 7 on the Chinese Twitter clone, Fanfou.com, is shutdown, again.

Its previous outage is noted here:
http://virtualreview.org/china/zoom/1069730/china-twitter-blocked-fanfou-sick-leave
Inkscape does just that. It allows you to run multiple scans with potrace, which gives you a separate path for each colour. Couldn't be more simple.
I'll toot my own horn: http://www.strawpollnow.com
You are ignoring the aesthetic and cultural overlaps between the four genres and their constant crossovers. I wont mention NuMetal, which sucks, but seek out some of the funky punk stuff that, usually, comes out of London -- you might even hear some ska nuggs in the mix :-)
My partner and his sister ran around the city for 10 weeks checking and rechecking! http://exitstrategynyc.com/story.html
So, this company was one of BusinessWeeks's most promising startups, or something along those lines, last week. I laughed loudly the moment I understood the concept, and just shook my head that anyone could possibly be that big of an idiot. When they went on to explain that the founder was nearly out of money, was losing tens of thousands on every printing, and was planning to expand into other cities at a rapid pace, I knew this one was heading for the dead pool. I didn't realize it would be dead before the issue even left the news stands.

I can't believe anyone would believe "the economy" is responsible for this business failure. Failure is responsible for this failure. A perfect storm of failure.
You can only calculate the limit of that, which is: lim (x->1) (1+x)/2 = 1
Fork-join style parallel programming in Java 7
"“Chrome is basically a modern operating system,” Mr. Andreessen said."

This is an odd comment to make coming from an ex coder.
From: http://www.sco.ca.gov/5935.html

"Redeemable by the State Treasury only when the General Fund has sufficient money."

A rational, conservative, cautious Bank that is trying to protect its assets would be well advised to be careful about accepting these warrants. One Bail out is enough.
Stephen was kind enough to tell me that my entry was 'fail' because it 'Killed woodland animals'... When I asked him which ones he replied:

All of them,
Best,
Stephen

Wow! Constructive! I was hoping that the ad was written with humor, but apparently not!

Good luck with that elitism!
Saying Summize was acquired without us knowing how much was paid for it is misleading. It could have been "acquired" for less than the amount of a big signing bonus, in which case it's evidence against your point, not for it.

Generalized real time search is also almost certainly more valuable and difficult technically than counting re-tweets, thus more likely to be acquired at all.
so basically it'll be a custom version of linux, with Google tools like Chrome etc thrown into the mix
I'm in the US, and I don't have any proxies or so. Maybe they just think I'm cool because I'm using Chrome. And of course, they'd be right.
Ask HN: Revision control for non-hackers
I am project manager for a university textbook project. The book is being written collaboratively, with some authors in the US and others in China. How can I manage the various documents and revisions without using Git, Mercurial, or some such hacker-friendly tool which is most certainly beyond the grasp of the authors? Would a service such as Dropbox work? So far, they have written the book in MS Word format, but I intend to migrate to a TeX-based system for typesetting and layout. Ideally, I'd like to use something like LyX, but online and collaborative. Does such a tool exist?
> but the banks took bailout money

"took" suggests that they all wanted it. We know that some of them were "encouraged". The feds basically destroyed BofA with the forced merger.

> People in California helped bail them out

Actually, most of the bail out money came from outside CA. Do you really think that those folks want their "investment" pissed away in CA?

> if they're asking for your help it seems only fair to give it to them.

Actually, "the people of CA" aren't doing any such thing. The state govt is passing out script while it flails around, hoping that the money unicorn will poop some golden bricks.

> I seriously doubt that Obama would allow these IOUs to actually be worthless so what's the risk exactly?

I'm sure that folks outside CA are happy to read that.
dusty?
Perth Small Business Website Design 
Website Development, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, Email Marketing, Graphics. We bring the best practices on the web to your small business at a price you can afford.
Subject to the observation above that many brokers would probably just reconcile your trades with those of other customers before sending the final totals to the exchange, thus destroying your strategy, you're quite right by but you might well be able to experiment with relatively small sums on relatively worthless stocks.
http://2ze.us/Y9
Founder of Netscape. He should know what a browser is, but maybe he knows a bit too much; maybe sees web apps, in that weird out-of-touch way that visionaries tend to "see" things, as a replacement to desktop apps.
That URL leads to here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-ch...
I won't deny the Microsoft ribbon has a really steep learning curve, but it's valuable even if just to learn how not to design/implement a ribbon.

The people that I have met that have difficulty adjusting to the ribbon (my 60 year old father, other 20 year old students etc) have either adjusted to it over time, or simply never made an effort to learn how to use it, and continue to complain about it.
> Boyd School of Law within UNLV continues to climb the charts in spite of the downturn.

And the relevance of this to startups is? (One possible answer is "they do startup law", but only if they actually do.)

> While the cost of living here is unfortunately high, it is less so than Silicon Valley so that is clearly no major barrier.

"barrier" has something to do with the relationship between cost and benefit. If the cost is 10% less but the benefit is 50% less....
This article is chock full of bad grammar. I've generally found NYTimes to be reputable, but this makes me question how hastily this was pushed out. Can anyone find another source corroborating this news?
Announcement of Google Chrome OS: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-ch...
Key Data Point:

> The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.
I feel like this was Schmidt's dream with Sun in the 80s.
Coding is Bad for Your Code
This isn't twitter. You don't need to shorten URLs.
The seven habits of highly anal employees
It's consistent with his statement 15 years ago that "Netscape will soon reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers."

(Except this time Chrome has reduced Linux to a well-debugged set of device drivers.)
A browser is one thing. But an OS? I have my doubts.
x86 Android Live CDs and Chrome OS on the same day? Wow.
So US Govt was so foolish to give money to these banks when some state Govts didn't have enough?
Interesting article. I'm glad that the EFF tries to reasonably present its arguments and provides not only supporting evidence, but also does some work towards decrypting the information added to laser printouts.

Unlike, um, some people.
I can see how this would be true, and hopefully not too optimistic. :) To add some data points...

Part of this is the hardware (MacBooks, etc. are very powerful). Syncing and staying mobile are very easy with Macs. It's becoming more typical to get useful work done in airports, coffee shops, back porches, etc. over wireless.

If a shift to web applications continues, the majority of them will surely be developed on Macs. If you're using Ruby, Python, Apache, etc. anyway, it's sure nice to have them all pre-installed. On Windows, not only do you not have any of this, you don't even have SSH or a decent terminal, or equivalents to the core Unix utilities. (Oh wait, you don't even have a real text editor!) There's always a few hours of work to download enough to make Windows usable. Not to mention doing it all again 6 months later, when the machine is hosed and you reinstall.

I don't use Windows over VM, but I know many do, and it would seem perfect for web development. From anywhere, you can basically run the vast majority of likely browsers and test changes immediately. That is a killer feature.

I prefer it for desktop application development too. While the environment can sometimes be "weird", there are good reasons for most differences. For example, I'm used to passing the same options to GCC on Solaris and Linux; although Mac OS X does its own thing, it's hard to argue with the fact that -F is simpler and loses no real information over -L + -I.

Apple also includes some amazing code analysis tools in Instruments. You could spend a lot of money just acquiring those tools on other platforms, even if the Mac had no other advantages at all.
"The banks" are not a monolithic entity. My credit union, which is my only bank, has not been "bailed out", so you're OK with them not taking IOUs like that, right?
Times hasn't changed much, minority of all kinds always need to assert their equal rights.

Once gays are accepted into the mainstream, there will be other, oppressed, even more niche minority group.

This is the nature of our pyramid-like society. There will always be oppressor and oppressed.
Interesting. The one missing piece--a RAD development environment that's as efficient as Visual Studio is at producing fat clients. The business world will only embrace the webcentric model when it becomes as efficient to code in as .net click-once fat clients. The idea of simple, cheap, rugged hardware is very appealing. But programmer time is the #1 cost--businesses go for easy drag/drop fat client apps. Software written for 5 users has to be thrown together pretty fast or it never pays back...
Isn't blocking internet the first thing they always do? what's new?
How much RAM do you think it'd take to store all the world's source code in a suffix tree, and how would you partition it across multiple machines?
You're going to have some local Cleveland competition this year. Watch yourself!
Let's hope this also means that a Linux version of Chrome is around the corner.
San Diego Tech Founders meeting July 16
I'm organizing a group of San Diego Tech Founders with the purpose of meeting monthly to discuss customer and product development and business strategy. I would also like the group to develop into a great place to meet potential co-founders.

http://sd.techfounders.org/

http://twitter.com/sdtechfounders

If you are a founder of a technology company, or have the desire to start/co-found a technology company, please join us for presentations and networking at our first meeting on Thursday, July 16th at the Hive Haus co-working space in downtown San Diego.

Details and RSVP at http://bit.ly/15qTnn

Mike
The time to do this was 2 years ago, when netbooks were desperately looking for an operating system.

Now they have adapted themselves (slightly higher cost/specs) to Windows XP, and people are fairly comfortable with that. The market is established & shaving an extra $50 off the price is not as much of an issue.

The near future will have Windows 7 netbooks & Ubuntu for netbook to provide some theoretical competition.

That doesn't mean this definitely won't take off, but a Google backed operating system made for small screens & cheap hardware could have been the default choice 2 years ago.
You can set up shared folders using Dropbox, but I'm not sure if version control is set up for that (I don't think it is, but couldn't find any information on getdropbox.com)

How about Google Docs? Super easy to use (Just like MS Word, only better!) and has great version control/sharing/collaboration features baked right in.
The Status of Medical Marijuana in Minnesota
Whatever happened to that medical marijuana bill that was in the news this year? Did it ever get passed? Is marijuana legal now in Minnesota? The short answer is: No, marijuana is NOT legal to possess or use in the state of Minnesota, for any reason, at this time.The Minnesota State Legislature has adjourned for the session now, but before it did, the medical marijuana bill passed in the state Senate as SF 345, and in the House, as HF 655.
Since most media companies is run as for-profit, I would say that selling stories that sells is in their best interest as opposed to reporting things as they are.

Telling stories about black vs white candidates/voters are too profitable to passed up.
This was the eighties, it was probably less obvious (and we were both probably somewhat sheltered). Suffice to say we introduced each other to a different culture, which I think was the point of the article.
There are lots of issues with the site right now, and that's to be expected. I am fairly new to programming, so a few hiccups are to be expected. However, I was able to actually launch something, and that matters. The decision to actually put something out there way too early has already revealed many things about the original idea and how it could be better executed. Thank you for the feedback.
For a minority group, Asian-Americans can be surprisingly racist.

Especially against each other. Nothing like telling your Korean friend how much you enjoy visiting Japan and watching Miyazaki and Juzo Itami's movies to stir up some good old-fashioned hatred. "They raped my grandmother. They're not human. They don't have souls." And then you have to pretend to like Oldboy to calm them down.