skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Desktop Linux evolved on commodity hardware, and the presence of that hardware is a huge reason for its success. The hardware is built to a uniform worldwide standard (established and enforced, during its crucial early years, by a single company: Microsoft) and is developed with money that is recouped by selling millions of units to Windows users.

In the phone market, such a large, self-perpetuating commodity hardware platform has yet to evolve. The market is heavily balkanized. It's under the control of multiple carriers whose rules determine exactly what will be sold and where. It's a rather different universe from that in which Linux evolved.
Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline
My argument is that I really did eat McDonald's food (almost) every day for a month--and lost weight. Anecdotes are anecdotes.
Remind us what's bad about squatting?

Isn't abc.com literally worth more than weqporjewroq.net ???

An apartment in times square costs more than a 5 bedroom house in Iowa.
As opposed to ICANN, an organization propped up entirely by the U.S. government?
The word "natural" doesn't mean "part of nature" when speaking of nutrition, it means "part of our evolutionary history." We ate lard in the past(and survived because of it, and evolved toward making use of it.) We did not eat cyanide.
Web app theme generator for rails
It's not clear that it's better to have more CO2 than more plastic bags.
Minimum wage at a WalMart is not a survival strategy.

What a strange thing to say, since for heads-of-households, survival is the only reason one would work an entry level job at WalMart.
Yup, that's what i (she :D ) was talking about.
Lots of crazy donuts, vegan, bacon, cold cereal (!).
Two locations now, for all you visitors.
(Coming up in Portland: Djangocon, fyi)
Normally, I wouldn't submit something with what I might consider to be an inflammatory title, but I think John Gruber raises some interesting points on Microsoft's current situation. They're a huge company with products which register on my likability meter from "this is awesome" to "what is this crap?"

It will be interesting to see what happens with Windows 7. It's a good chance for them to turn around the bad image that became associated with Vista. This doesn't necessarily need any technical bearing.

Windows Mobile, to me, seems like a pretty dead platform. I've gone through a couple of WM phones and I have no intention of going back, either as a developer or a user.
Loopt has lots of users, especially through the carriers. But Facebook has the most popular free iphone app and a ridiculous number of users already interconnected.

It's stupid to say Latitude is the threat, considering the botched purchase of Dodgeball.

Articles like this are annoying when they are so easy to take apart.
Yeah, there can be a wait. Did you know they have a second location eastside now?
Sure, they pay state income tax, but not property taxes, which are a major part of where the city and county get their funds for transit and public services.

The differences between Portland and Vancouver are particularly stark, as the lack of an urban growth boundary in Clark county (where Vancouver is located) makes real estate (and therefore property taxes) much cheaper on the Vancouver side.

When you get right down to it, my point is simply that people who like a progressive, tax-heavy city like Portland enough to spend a lot of their time there should probably be willing to pay the taxes that go along with that lifestyle. Otherwise, they're just making it that much harder on the full-time residents.
Those of us who know how to conduct ourselves see this as unfair, but like verything else in life you have to consider the lowest common denominatior. The data leaks happen in the places that really shouldn't have the problem

(President, Safehouse, Limewire)
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9136053/Details...
I was going to congratulate you on the biting neologism, but a depressing search revealed 'grantsmanship' to be a whole field of study :(
The Camel's Back Broke: 1984 Days of Bad PR for Apple
So I have to remember what state YCombinator is based in to find the site? I think I'll pass
As a book collector, I love print editions of books,

I hear you, but that doesn't apply to all the books I own. If I could swap at no cost to me all my physical books with idealised e-books (say on a 100% faithful reproduction DRM-free e-reader), I would probably only keep physical copies of 10% of my hoard.
$300-$400 on eBay.
Is it just me who kinda hates formulas. They so counter intuitive.
I know embarassingly little about the heavens. Can anyone recommend a great (not just good) book to start?
" I needed to have a conceptual understanding of why you were doing something in order to understand the 'rules.' "

That's exactly it. I frequently got frustrated in high school Calc class because I couldn't understand why we were doing certain things. THe problem is that so much material needed to be just groked at once, and then and only then can they explain and prove anything....this time around I'm a lot more proactive in spotting when I'm only "faking" understanding, and working it out.

Another poster commented that with Algebra for example it all boils down to applications of axioms. So for that I am doing tonnes of practice.

amazing story =) I too believe that there is life beyond Math, but for now, rumours has it that doing some math will make me a better hacker(at least for bureaucratic reasons). So I shall persist.
I'm picking on you a bit here, but "Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline" is about as gentle a title can be while indicating that the article is about the general decline of Microsoft. Inflammatory would be "Microsoft is Dead", "Microsoft has Jumped the Shark" or "Microsoft Causes Cancer".
Can somebody please tell me why this was downmodded? I think inquiry regarding natural language is pretty normal. I've waited patiently until this was off the front page, so it's definitely not all about attention-seeking. I am truly curious.
The top firms are expensive, but worth it. It's usually not worth trying to economize on lawyers unless you really know what you're doing. Once a startup is established, it can make sense to try cut down one's legal bills by e.g. hiring an in-house counsel, but when you're inexperienced you don't want to be cutting corners in the legal dept. Better to overpay your lawyers than end up with some disastrous term in your funding agreement.
There's a great deal of extra momentum being added through the engine and water pump that you're not accounting for.
This has actually been out a while now, pretty awesome tech. I interviewed at NextEngine a few years ago, and they wouldn't tell me what they were working on -- I had to guess based upon their interview questions (about 3d matrix transformations, etc) -- I did manage to come close and guess it was a 3d scanner in box!
I know more than one person who have eaten virtually nothing but McDonald's for long periods of time, and who are not especially overweight. Mere anecdotes, of course.

I'm not saying that eating lots of fast food isn't correlated with being fat. However, I would say that since it's quite possible to be skinny and eat enormous amounts of fast food, fast food cannot be making people fat. I would expect that the same character traits which lead someone to eat lots of fast food would lead to being fat for people predisposed to that body type.
Proof that children should not be able to bring suit until they are of age. Losing your homework is not reason for a lawsuit, if you get a device like the kindle you should learn how to make backups. And if your chosen device for your homework can not make backups you only have yourself to blame, you should use something else.

Personal responsibility seems to be in short supply, blame somebody else is so much easier. Electronics can fail, the kindle is no exception. If you made your homework on a piece of paper I'm sure it would not be lost so easily, but then again pieces of paper can blow away, burn, get lost and so on. The kindle - and any other piece of complex tech - is not infallible. At that price point it can't be expected to be infallible. The fact that amazon initiated the failure is a systemic issue with the kindle, nothing to be surprised about. If you choose a medium with all kinds of weird DRM then you can't really blame the vendor.

Is it frivolous lawsuit week or did I miss the memo ? First that real estate company over a tweet and now this.

Personally I think amazon deserves a boycott for the kindles DRM but you can't really sue them over a 'feature' that has been well advertised. The kindle is broken by design.
I don't know about respect for the hacker, but I can't believe that anyone who pretends to be a security professional can get away with weak passwords if that's the case here (and presumably for astalavista).

My confidence in their ability to know their stuff drops.
The 91% retail computers number is crazy. My guess is it has to do with several different factors, a few of which might be:

* Circuit City going under

* Best Buy now stocking Apple merchandise

* Wal-mart going almost entirely sub-$1000

* No one wanting a computer that comes with Vista (even my Mom bought a laptop the other day b/c it was $400 and came w/ XP)

* More Apple stores, meaning more free tech support (which is why Microsoft's going down that route soon)
what do you all think of the "empty vessel" concept for naming things - names that mean nothing immediately related to the product, but completely unused and un-liked a concept?

Fandango
Loopt
Amazon
Exxon
Texaco
Google (most people had no clue what a Googol was)
Pepsi
Nike
Coke
Wachovia
Verizon
Xerox
Sunoco
Sysco
Alcoa
Aetna
Tesoro
Exelon
Kroger
Nucor
Pfizer

the list goes on and on

By the way, I know there are many very clever "spins" on these names to help them relate to their products, but upon first look this isn't evident.
I wish. I'm in the "eat well to avoid (huge) medical bills" crowd.
Has OP ever been in one of the 6 million businesses is the U.S. lately? If he had he probably would have noticed that over 90% of the desktops running Windows. Many of them with ie locked down. With the server rooms full of Microsoft products. And those responsible for procurement unaware of much else.

Microsoft may be in a long, slow decline in the consumer marketplace, but you'd never know from those 100 million desktops.

Do you think that maybe Microsoft was smart enough to foresee this so that's why they're so locked in in the enterprise?
microsoft is guilty of hubris. their corporate culture has convinced itself that because it supplies the OS it needs to compete for your attention with every aspect of computing. Microsoft could benefit greatly from shrinking and gaining some focus.
I completely disagree that Apple needs to compete on features. They need to compete on the overall experience.

Also, I'd avoid putting too much stock into: 2009=1991, iPhone=Mac and Android=Wintel. Yeah, there are some similarities, but there are big differences.

For one thing, AppStore scandals aside, Apple's managment seems to be much better suited for competing with a strong rival than it was back then.

Second, the customers are different. Part of the reason for Wintel's success is that they captured a growing # of departmental and institutional buyers. The decision makers weren't, by and large, the end users. They were more focused on up front costs. If they were even thinking of ongoing costs, many probably saw it as a way to grow their empire further. Phones are a consumer item. The buyers are almost always also the end-users, or at least in the same family. They have different priorities than corporate buyers in the early 90s.

Phones are also cheaper now than PCs were then, and people can buy an iPhone in the US for $99.

Fourth, the cost of the phone is just a small par of the total cost of ownership. The majority is the cost of cell service + a data plan. An android phone isn't going to be any cheaper, unless Google subsidizes the cost of the service plan with mobile advertising revenues (something that will likely bring antitrust scrutiny).

Fifth, the hardware ecosystems are different. Apple largely uses the same chips and ODMs for the iPhone as anyone else. That means they get to take advantage of many of the same economies of scale as any other handset maker.
I had a similar complaint when I first learned about the DNS. My favorite ax to grind was movies. There's something on the order of thirty squillion domains out there of the form latesthollywoodturdmovie.com. (Often because latesthollywoodturd.com was already taken, even.) You'd think, then, that it would make better use of the namespace to have them all be latesthollywoodturd.movie.com, or something.

Why doesn't that happen?

Because the world's population has a vanishingly small proportion of people to whom hierarchical naming structures matter, or, for that matter, even exist. For some staggeringly overwhelming percentage of the world's internets-using population, there's not even a reason for .com. It just is, and is as immutable and unquestioned as gravity.

Until you can address that, playing musical chairs with DNS hierarchies is just screaming at the wind.
Your blog, your tweets, your linkedin profile: your personal brand.

I'll take a punt and say nearly everyone here (or at least those involved in a startup) is a marketer in some capacity.

You've contradicted, not refuted, him. And you're wrong.

In each and every external interaction you are the brand. If you're speaking directly to me you might as well be CEO because I couldn't care less if you're the tea lady - your job to delight me. When you fail I'll blame the brand. I might even post a rant about it.
That's not the meaning of the word "natural" in the context of nutrition, from my understanding. Perhaps the word you're looking for is "traditional".

Semantics aside, I'll gladly grant you that lard is a food that has been eaten in the past. But, once again, that doesn't mean it's necessarily better than other foods that haven't been eaten in the past.

An good example is "golden" rice. An argument could be made (and has been made) that golden rice could save millions of people from devastating vitamin deficiency which they would continue suffer from were they to avoid golden rice for their "traditional" foods.

Plenty of traditional foods just aren't very nutritious or healthy.
Especially when you want to change the battery and listen to music. Can you use as USB hub? Haven't tried it myself...
I sincerely hope that's the last time I hear "lolz" on HN, too.
I don't think that this is an issue of not backing up. The student bought what he supposed to be a legit copy of a book, than amazon remotely deleted it, along with his notes. There should be a mechanism to backup notes, separate from the book associated with them, but i don't believe there is one. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Maybe, but a notation arrived at by an accretion of historical accident is not the way to introduce this stuff to beginners, inertia be damned.

Edit: Notation
Am I squatting because I've registered a few tens of domains (and paid for them, faithfully, every year), but haven't yet gotten 'round to the projects I registered them for?

Are you going to take my domains away because my paying work takes up too much of my time?
Yeah, it took this long to get to a bill?? Not that it's a good comparison, but Apple had a billion iphone app downloads in it's first year.
It depends on how you read. I am often reading several books at any one time (obviously not simultaneously) so having the ability to read one book for a while and then effortlessly switch to another at any time/location is a big plus for me. Having had the kindle dx for a while now, I find it pretty much equivalent to reading a paper book and I don't miss the paper versions at all.
When the worst case is really, really bad
That's a broken analogy. All domains start off costing the same. An apartment in times square always costs more than a 5-bedroom in Iowa, and for very tangible reasons. If I buy abc.com for a million dollars, it's not like that domain is intrinsically worth a million dollars more than weqporjewroq.net. If I have no ability to turn that domain into a monetized site, well, it is worth the same $9.95 the talentless schmuck domain squatter bought it for.

If you buy a domain for $9.95 and sell it back to me for $15,000, there's a word for that: extortion.

Maybe my argument truly is illogical and I'm missing something. I've spent my life gaining wealth by providing tangible value and I hate that people exist who profit hugely for providing none whatsoever. Maybe that bias is at play.
I can't resist forwarding Gruber's most recent Twitter:

(The working title was ‘Microsoft Is Fucked’.)

Judiciously edited, I'd say. ;)
Or the working title, per Twitter: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/2940843840

I wish this all weren't the case. Competition benefits everyone, and Apple's had fairly free reign over the improving-your-consumer-OS space for quite a while now.
Three Idols (logic puzzle)
I wish I had some ideas, I honestly do. All I know is that [I feel] the current system is woefully broken. How to fix it can be left up to smarter men than I.
Buffett Loses To Desmarais As Power Exceeds Return
HRSDC: We spent $70M on mainframes last year
Meter hackers find free parking in San Francisco
Whether there is or is not is not really the problem here, if there is he should have used it, if there isn't he shouldn't be using the kindle for any note taking of stuff that he thinks is important enough to sue over.

The kindles DRM is not exactly news, personally I would never ever buy a device that allows some company far away decide whether or not I can read something that I already have, no matter how I got it. It's absolutely horrible. But the fault in this case lies clearly with the student, not with amazon.
Since most companies give offers based on the algorithm "What you were getting before plus some fudge factor" and most raises are calculated as "A few percent times what you were getting before" and happen yearly or close to it, aging increases salary. This continues until one's mid sixties, when most people transition from full time employment to some other arrangement, which causes a salary cut.

I have always privately thought this is gratuitously inefficient and severely unfair to both most twenty-somethings and nearly all highly productive workers, regardless of age.

(My productivity in programming has demonstrably increased 100% in the last two years as I've become much better at web development. In my business, this means I make rather more money than I used to. In my day job, 2.5% raise compounded twice, yippee?)
The point is even if you get everything used and at eBay pricing, you still have to buy the SDK and you still have to be financially involved.
Bypass Voicemail Prompts with One Star Pound
Lawyers and investors aren't particularly tightly linked in Silicon Valley, so I wouldn't consider their investor community in making a decision about using them. Besides, if the investor were tightly linked to the lawyer, you couldn't count on the lawyer to represent your best interests in a financing with that investor.

Larry Sonsini can help you meet investors, but if you can get Sonsini to represent you, you're probably already past the hurdle of meeting investors. Look instead at the quality of their work and what they will cost you.
When I first saw this, it was the beginning of the beginning:

6

28

496

8128

33550336

8589869056

137438691328

2305843008139952128

2658455991569831744654692615953842176

191561942608236107294793378084303638130997321548169216

13164036458569648337239753460458722910223472318386943117783728128

144740111546645244279463731260859884815736774914748358
89066354349131199152128

2356272345726734706578954899670990498847754785839260071014302
7597506337283178622239730365539602600561360255566462503270175
0528925780432155433824984287771524270103944969186640286445341
2803383143979023683862403317143592235664321970310172071316352
7487298747400647801939587165936401087419375649057918549492160555646976

1410537837067120690632079580860631898814867435147156678388386
7599995486774265238011410419332903769025156195056870982932716
4087724366370087116731268159313652487450652439805877296207297
4467232951666582288469268077866528701889208678794514783645693
1392206037069506473607357237869517647305526682625328488638371
5072974324463835300053138429460296575143368065570759537328128

5416252628436584741265446537439131614085649053903169578460392
0818387206994158534859198999921056719921919057390080263646159
2800138276054397462627889030573034455058270283951394752077690
4492443149486172943511312628083790493046274068171796046586734
8720992572190569465545299629919823431031092624244463547789635
4414813917198164416055867880921478866773213987566616247145517
2696430221755428178425481731961195165985555357393778892340514
6222324506715979193757372820860878214322052227584537552897476
2561793951766244263144803134469350852036575847982475360211728
8040378304860287362125931378999490033667394150374722496698402
8240806042108690077670395259231894666273615212775603535764707
9522501738583051710286030212348966478513639499289049732921451
07505979911456221519899345764984291328

Perhaps OP should have studied number theory. No number theorist has ever complained about the quality of his teacher. It's just you and all that ever was and all that ever will be. Now go discover.
You're young, so you might make it; but realistically, to really make it, IT is a full time job. Business clients are where the steady money is at, and you need to be on call basically 24/7 or at least 9-5 every day.
YMMV, but it can't hurt to try.
Scala Migrations (OSS from Sony Pictures Imageworks)
interesting service!
I'm responsible for at least 100 of them.

Family and friends: your welcome... and no I won't fix your computer, again.
I'd like to see you try to get interoperability between Billings by Marketcircle and Peachtree by Sage, or with Quickbooks and Money Dance. Or by one version of Office and another. What you describe plagues all software. No one gives enough of a shit to make everything interoperable and lazy programmers will always make their own lazy file formats which are undocumented because they are lazy. The problem is how much involvement people have with their code.

What is "professional UI"? How is a UI Professional? What qualities make a UI Professional? That's a pretty ambiguous qualifier.
maybe Adobe flex would be useful?
I think it's probably due in large part to near-total destruction of the $1000-plus PC market. It's not that Apple has really gained there as much as the numbers would suggest, it's just that they've managed to hold on and get people to continue shelling out, while other computer manufacturers have been forced into a price war.

I suspect, if you were to go into Best Buy or Walmart, you would find only a handful of non-Apple PCs for $1k+, if any at all.

Apple is doing well in the high end because they've successfully resisted commoditization in a way that none of the other manufacturers have. (Sony has tried hard, but they're not half as cool as they want to be in the eyes of the average buyer.) Toughbooks are probably the only other brand that stick out as demanding a premium and being likely to get it, but they're a specialty product.
cool, man. It is a nice mix.
Windows Mobile becomes Windows Phone
I also see a lot of office furniture when I look inside a business. But nobody cares much about office furniture. For most of the market, it's a boring commodity that is bought by professional office managers who care a lot about the price. It lasts a relatively long time and doesn't change very often.

It's also an intensely cyclical business, which is no doubt a big reason why Microsoft's financials are so screwed.

The moral of this story is that the notion of Apple vs Microsoft is more stale than it has ever been. They aren't even in the same industry anymore. You could imagine investing in both of them at once and calling it diversification.