skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not "a virtual number that works with any carrier." I can assure you that the number is (1) natively homed or (2) ported - to a particular physical, facilities-based carrier (generally a CLEC) at any time. In a lot of places, Google Voice is using bandwidth.com's new CLEC license holdings (after they stopped being a pure Level3 reseller), and probably the usual national-level multibillion dollar folks that are interconnected to everyone, everywhere and have a lot of direct end-office trunking: Global Crossing, XO, Level3, etc.
For example, here in Atlanta, my friend has a Google Voice number out of 404-939. If you take a look at the pooling and/or NANPA assignment information for that block, you'll find it's pooled and held by bandwidth.com's new CLEC:

http://www.localcallingguide.com/lca_prefix.php?npa=404&...

You can do an NPAC dip on it and find that it's not ported, so it really is being originated by bandwidth.com's facilities.

There's nothing "virtual" about any of this.
I was always suspicious of this 'no browser' thing.
How did they expect people to select and then download a browser without a browser already installed?

Sure you could have installed files which connect to ftp or something like that, but is it really worth making new users go through that? I think the solution they are going with is great, as it lets average users know other browsers exist. But i suspect most will still stick with IE.

I am caught wondering if the placement of Google, and the big google logo might be a boon to Chrome, as lots of people I'm sure will start and think 'oh, i want to go to google', clicking the link and thinking that is what it does.
Be that as it may, that seems like an awfully artificial cop-out.

"Oracle's the best database ever!"

"It costs half a million dollars!"

"I made a specific point of distinguishing its technological merits as a relational database backend, not the dollars involved in purchasing it."
Regardless of whether Mr. Gruber is right or not, I think there is a very slight bit of irony if he is indeed correct.

Microsoft has been pushing the xbox to game studios like crazy. In effect, that move alone might help in their decline; if individuals who would otherwise play games on Windows have no real need to play games on Windows (they have a console), they have no need for Windows, either!

So, perhaps MS' game division is culling the OS division.
I honestly believe there's a massive social revolution sitting squarely between China's present and its much touted Glorious Future. They have some painful lessons to learn about the explosive force of information confined. Careful now, China: the whole world's watching.
r.e. the Google logo. That was my initial thought too - a great place to have your brand.
I've been been an active developer for over 35 years, and I can say paying attention to ergonomics is one of the key aspects to longevity. When any part of your body starts to hurt, please pay attention, and take immediate action to adjust, shim, change keyboards, etc in order to stop the aching or pain before it gets any worse, and shut the pain down. It's your body's way of telling you that a change needs to be made. A single gig just isn't worth slamming your potential.

Better chairs, desks, keyboards, and VERY IMPORTANT arm supports to keep your wrists straight while you type. Also, don't pound your keyboard. A gentle touch is always best. If a mouse is a problem, try a trackball (Kensington), or even a "foot mouse".

There are lots of sites on minimizing eye fatigue. Looking away from the screen every 10 to 15 minutes to refocus on something far away is helpful. Also, don't scrimp on your monitor. Use a large display that is crisp and has good contrast.

Being cheap on the hardware you are "bound" to make seem wise in the short-term, but the long-term consequences are disabling.

Please, don't compromise with pain or discomfort.. It only gets worse.
While I agree somewhat with your sentiment, I don't think your reference to the Romans would really stand up to analysis. The problems we face today don't have much to do with being overrun by visigoths.

I also don't like your dichotomy between "those who adapt and those who take". We are all of us taking, every second of our lives. Everything we possess or covet on our silly little planet is the gift of our great benefactor the Sun, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Peter: "This sounds familiar."

Michael: "Yeah, they did it in Superman 3."
Crashes on Windows 7 as well at startup. Compatibility modes and running under admin privileges didn't help either.
RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers: Which Are Worth More?
This reminds me of Karel, another beginner language that lets you move a robot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%28programming_language%2...
Dup! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310818
Yep, they had one of those at my primary school.
This article has just been slashdotted:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/0211232/A-Short-...
Seth Godin's Thoughts on Social Networking
I am intrigued though as to why flame-resistance was tested... one imagines that if a fire breaks out the last thing on their minds will be "at least my underwear wont catch"
"It’s worthless to have lots and lots of friends on Facebook ’cause they’re not really your friends. They’re just people who didn’t want to offend you by pressing the ignore button"
Don't you mean "revolutionary"?
Startup advice: iPhone developers should stop relying on handshake deals only
A few years ago, I attended a talk about the Mars rovers, where the speaker (Steve Squyres) mentioned that there was a time when one of the rovers had accumulated so much dust on its solar panels that it was in danger of dying. When hopes were fading away for a solution, the rover experienced a few days of strong wind, which cleared off most of the dust, increasing power output 9 fold!
Rawr: Packaging for JRuby Applications.
I don't think $400 is that bad actually.
Can you trust TechCrunch enough to share their stories?
PAUSE
GOTO http://j3-fortran.org/

It is my premise that every CS course should re-introduce Fortran!

It is the oldest surviving computer language. Shouldn't evolutionary forces have wiped it out by now? Fortran and Cobol made America a place of successful big Science and Cobol made it great in Finance.

Compare this with to-day's computer languages used for trading on the Stock Exchange, not only they messed trading but they also messed the World's Economic flora and fauna!
I realize its not an original thought, but didn't know who to quote so I did what any self-aggrandizing blogger would do: I quoted myself!
History, especially recent Chinese history, suggests that the world is willing to watch pretty much anything without lifting a finger.

As for massive social revolution, what do you think is happening in China right now? The better part of a billion people are moving out of rural poverty and into the cities in about as big a social revolution as there has ever been.
When the gloom is setting in, what better time to start a holiday business?
feature creep?
This is an OK article, I liked the bit about short term focus and would be interested to see some data on that. However, as far as innovation goes, Clayton Christiansen summarizes this problem much better in "The Innovators Dilemma"

His studies showed that its not that big companies don't have the resources to form teams to do spin-off projects, they do try. The problem is that they miss ever identifying the opportunities that are very successful because they don't initially serve the same customer base that the company currently has (although they often grow into it).
This will probably be shot down, but I stay focused - and yes get the flow too - by living on coffee, pizza and cigarettes when working on crushing deadlines. Alternate the pizza with your favourite junk food every other day.
Saying goodbye (Mark Tarver on Qi)
No, fork is a lot faster than disk I/O:

[ron@mickey:~]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do echo foo>/dev/null; done
real	0m0.064s
user	0m0.039s
sys	0m0.025s
Design Patterns - Using the Adapter Pattern in C#
Because you are comparing apples to apples when in fact you should stop eating apples and eat spinach instead. In relative terms, the Prius vs. Hummer comparison is easy. Prius is considerably better than the Hummer. The problem is that in absolute terms, other than different amount of fuel, both of them require almost the same materials and resources for construction, maintenance, and lifetime operation. Prius drives on the same roads as the Hummer and hence needs the entire highway infrastructure to function properly. Prius uses plastic, metal, and synthetic materials and so does Hummer. Sure, it uses a lot less of each but the factories that produce these compounds still need to be built, serviced, and fueled. The spinach to this apples problem? Better trains and transportation across the entire US such that Walmart no longer needs a fleet of 10,000 trucks.

The big picture is not the comparison between using Prius and Hummer. It is whether automobiles should be the primary mode of long-distance transportation across a nation of 300+ million citizens. The author's point is that the pride from driving a Prius is overshadowing the anger and fury that we all should have at the lack of real, efficient solutions. Prius is a wonderful band-aid but it is not a cure and will never be a cure.

On a personal basis, it is in the best interest for everyone to use fuel-efficient cars, and reduce energy usage. However, this does not mean that doing wonderful "green" things will make more than a minor dent to the real problem of what is actually going on. It is very comforting to use textile bags instead of plastic at the grocery store but it's really not such a big deal in absolute terms. Not having to import every single item from China across the ocean is. The externalities of cheaply manufactured products are borne by China and the world as a whole. The benefit goes only to the shareholders and consumers of Dollar stores. What's the easy fix? There isn't. But using textile bag makes you feel wonderful and proud enough that you no longer think about the big picture and thus have no real voice when it comes to changing the big things.
You mean the kind of revolution, well, attempts at revolution, that we have seen in Iran recently?

I'm not so sure about that. I think in most dictatorships most people already know that something is not quite right. Spreading that knowledge further is good - but the other guys still have the guns...
From a previous link on this subject:

Java:
Attribute/Method access: foo.bar
Static method access: Foo.bar
Package access: foo.bar.baz

C#:
Attribute/Method access: foo.bar
Static method access: Foo.bar
Namespace access: foo.bar.baz

Python:
Attribute/Method access: foo.bar
Static method access: Foo.bar
Module access: foo.bar.baz

C++
Attribute/Method access: foo.bar and foo->bar
Static method access: Foo::bar
Namespace access: Foo::bar

Perl:
Attribute/Method access: $foo->bar
Static method access: Foo::bar
Module access: Foo::bar

PHP:
Attribute/Method access: $foo->bar
Static method access: Foo::bar
Namespace access: Foo\bar

Variety is not unambiguously good. Variety is good if you're producing something different. Variety is bad if it's different for no reason. I work in many different languages, and having to learn yet another syntax unnecessarily is not a good thing.

The PHP developers had a chance to add namespaces in a way that didn't make the language worse -- they didn't do that. Sure, maybe it's not a big deal -- just like all the other bad decisions, like magic_quotes, weren't a big deal. It's just disappointing that they couldn't do it right.
My anecdotal evidence definitely agrees with these conclusions. My Twitter click-through rates are pretty low. In fact, the best clickthrough rate I get is from people who subscribe to my blog via email.
How about a gradual social revolution? Do you prefer that your social changes occur in short, violent bursts, or would you rather have them spread out over a long period of time?
Possibly world's most elaborate (good) Pranksters
These guys pull off some incredible stunts, delivering good messages in the process. Can't believe they are able to hack into international conferences so easily.
This is a completely speculative article with no actual information. The author takes an interview with Steve Jobs (interesting in its own right) and reads in whatever happens to validate his preexisting beliefs about product development.
These guys pull off some incredible stunts, delivering good messages in the process. Can't believe they are able to hack into international conferences so easily.
I used pygame a lot back in college and had a lot of fun doing it, but... hasn't someone on the project noticed the god awful website yet? That thing is embarrassing!
Call me old-fashioned, but I think having one's underwear not catch fire is almost always better than the alternative.
I'll get on it.
Further, they hint around it in the article, but the single biggest thing that we can do personally is move away from eating and using animal products. I'm still an omnivore, so I'm certainly not doing my part, but I have started eating meat less than I used to.

Or, don't buy industrially-produced meat. It's quite possible to raise animals in a sustainable manner, but it requires us to not eat meat at every meal.

I think the author is railing on folks who think that by driving a Prius and taking shorter showers, they are saving the world. It's not the practices are wrong; it's that unless they are coupled with a greater awareness of how poorly industry treats our natural resources, they are worthless.
I dunno. What's it do that my turning machine with infinitely long tape doesn't do?
How so? I always assumed Wolfram Alpha was an NLP and data presentation layer on top of a Freebase-like database. Freebase doesn't have that extra layer, but structured data is surely part of the battle.
Fair enough.

I hate them because they bait and switch, and are deceptive about the value they provide.
I'll look at it today and see if I can get it up on the Mac
The truth on the software industry is:
1) Nobody makes software with a plan on when to replace it. They just assume the time will come and they'll know in the future.
2) Rewriting software is usually a bad idea, although there are some success cases of rewritten software.

This might not seem too relevant on people working on the startup scene, but for people working in companies (like I used to too) this has a huge impact. If you don't replace your technology stack in 5 years, it will then have 10, 15, 20 years. What do you do now with 20 years * # programmers effort in code which is stuck in a technology 20 years old?

This is actually a hard problem to solve.
I Hacked My Diet with Science
> Maybe, but what gets measured, gets done.

What gets measured is what got done. It may not be what you wanted to get done.
Social Media Shouldn’t Be Corporate Complicated | Social Media Vision
> Hey it's not popular to say the above, but just look at the last decade and the court cases won in their favor, no matter the country. I was just stating fact!

But it's not a win for copyright, it's a win for onerous laws and senselessly punitive decisions.

It also motivates some people to further skirt copyright laws because they appear so weighted in favor of huge corporations with powerful legal teams.
the most pessimistic of the economic studies shows (IIRC) that cutting emissions 80% would put our economy on track to double in size by June of 2040 instead of January of 2040.

Wow! Can you please provide a citation?
Hoare Logic
Sounded to me that he started on C, bounced around C D E, then toggled over B and C, then back to the dance over C D and E.

And then later dropped down the lower register.

(I'm guessing at the actual pitches; starting with C as a reference for the intervals.)
I've always been of the opinion that you need a very strong auteur at the head of a company driving product to make something awesome. Tivo, Sling, Flip, Apple, and others are clearly true to themselves and not full of compromise. Posterous, Skitch, Balsamiq, and Google are examples of the same.

But that doesn't mean you don't heed feedback. Apple wasn't against cut-and-paste; they just didn't want to have an offering that wasn't up to their standards. Google tests the hell out of everything.

I still think you have to put your first visionary offering out there - IMVU had their client that Eric had to throw away - and see what happens. Too much CD "work" is just an excuse to not build something and is just the same wasted "effort" as premature optimization.
I'm not sure this quite applies to programming as done by programmers. Gladwell is talking about conscious processes interfering with unconscious processes. For us, pretty much the whole thing is conscious.

You could think of the entire organization as the athlete though. Especially in programming, the organization is unaware of exactly how things really get done, it just has certain reflexes. Under crisis it may feel the need to switch modes.

Panic: OMG the project is late! Hire more programmers! Buy someone else's thing and try to make it work!

Choke: What we're doing isn't working -- we need to hire a lot of consultants, we need more metrics before making a decision, we need to carefully plan out our scaling strategy before we make a prototype...
I've increasingly been viewing TechCrunch as the Bill O'Reilly show of the startup scene. The noise-to-signal ratio and tabloidesque sensationalism is too painful for my own personal tastes.

However, I know lots of people who find it most useful, but I avoid it like the plague.
Stuck in debugging means get someone else to help. However, if that is part of your normal pattern and you didn't do that in the ICFP, maybe that was a sort of choke.
Totally. More generally, setting lots of small, tight deadlines really helps force my focus, if you're a deadline-driven type maybe you might feel the same way. I ran into the term "forced efficiency" the other day and it pretty much encompasses this practice:
http://gtd.marvelz.com/blog/2007/06/27/maximize-productivity...
as far as which can be monetized with the ease currently vs in the future ...

I think RSS subscribers are currently worth more; but the potential for new developments which can monetize it better than current models... is low in my thinking...

On the other hand Twitter, hasn't been really monetized at all either by twitter itself or 3rd parties... so the potential should be greater as long as its not 0 :) , Then again - having your message hit 100's of cellphones of your followers is really cool and more connecting then hitting 1000's of rss inbox's ...
This isn't about using force to extort, this is about using force during an end-of-the-world situation.
What really gets me are Schonfeld's replies to those trying to provide additional information with respects to the accuracy of the article. To tell someone to go petition the UN, etc, is really damn ridiculous. It's childish, lazy, and cheap. Sometimes I find TC authors' comments and replies to 'trolls' to be just as trollish.

I'm not a TC bandwaggoner. In fact, I quite like them, and have found the quality of their posts to have increased recently, but little things like this shouldn't happen. Putting in that extra 0.5% of effort to act cordial and double check facts will go a long way.
Agreed, wholeheartedly.

I don't even follow any of the links that pop up around here anymore.
I think the big question for China's future is whether its essentially inevitable further transformation will be as peaceful as Hungary's or as violent as Yugoslavia's.
I was thinking of revolution of a less pleasant sort, for which the urban immigration is a necessary prerequisite. There's a Tank Man streak in the Chinese psyche, which, when multiplied by a few hundred million of the recently enfranchised, well ...

As for lifting fingers (Man the Mice! Man the Keys!), our intense scrutiny may be all that's required to catalyze the reaction.
Well, my preference is irrelevant. I was just airing an acute hunch. :)
Fortran persists because its first compiler has been so influential in compiler optimization research, the language has pretty much first-dips on any new performance improvements, and things that need to be fast are written in Fortran because of that.

The power of convention, it boggles the mind.
Could use a better HN-title. Interesting concept.
The no obnoxious rich people paradox
A class action lawsuit has been brought against Amazon.

This means that they have been "sued".
No, but this sounds like an interesting thing to try so I might just do that. Thank you for sharing.
Well, yeah, it's obvious twitter followers are worth less. I would have liked, even as a WAG, just how many twitter followers is worth one RSS subscriber?

Anyone got any anecdotal evidence?
Ask HN: Risk of libyan .ly domain names?
I bought a short, topical domain name with .ly through libyanspider.com. I'm trying to decide whether to go with this shorter name vs. a longer (5 more letters) .com version.

Anyone know about added risks of using these .ly domain names vs. .com? Obviously, bit.ly is charging forward.

I'm more concerned about potential legal issues (arbitration required in Libya?), stability, and personal feelings toward .ly domains. A google search popped up this article:

http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3503/bitly-builds-business-libya-domain

I could mitigate risk by using .ly as a url shortcut that did permanent redirection to my .com.
To be fair, the same thing used to happen to suspected communists in the U.S., not so long ago. We still do it today, to youths in the Middle East. No trial, no warning - they just vanish, (and if they're lucky, show up in Guantanamo Bay a year later).

Refusing to admit mistakes, assuming that power is right, paying lip service to high-sounding ideals while indiscriminately abrogating freedoms - in this, as in so many other aspects of pride and capitalism, China has learned well from us.

Of course, they have much work to do in strengthening their social institution. But to stand aghast and sling mud at the audacious oppressors across the Pacific - it's a bit rich.
There's more than one way to do it, but most of them are really bad ;)
I guess this is a sign of progress, but honestly this news just serves to remind me how incredibly slow this project is going.
I've used a .ly domain for the past 6 months or so with no issue.

The service is a bit sketchy: not very good instructions and less than user friendly control panel. You also have to provide your own dns servers. After you jump through those hurdles it seems to work fine.
Microsoft drops plan for Windows 7 without browser
Is this anything short of a modern miracle? Its amazing what science is capable of.