skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Palm Pre is concerned more about its users, whereas apple is obsessed with it's software and hardware. Everyone knows that interoperability is a great thing to have, but nobody wants their competitor(Palm Pre et al) to benefit from the technology that they(Apple) has pioneered and improved for years.
Think of it this way. Imagine a world where Palm Pre is invented before iPhone, and there is PreTunes software which is the most popular music/app store in the world. Then Apple launches iPhone, do you think Apple would try to make iPhone compatible with the hypothetical 'PreTunes'? or more importantly: Would Palm stop iPhone from being used via PreTunes? The answer is probably 'Yes'.
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FWIW, this is exactly why the BBC exists. It doesn't have to 'reap a return'. IMHO it's one of the best things the UK has (Along with the NHS).

It exists to make the widest range of high quality programs available, and I think it does a pretty cool job. Obviously some programs will be deeper than others, with different target audiences.

>> "But with broadcast going away"

Really? have some data on that? I remember hearing the same thing 10 years ago.
I meant the MP3 album, which you cannot buy on iTunes.
Bloomberg link with more detail: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aTb_...

Not sure how that slipped past my radar, since it's my industry.
Hmm, any word on:

(1) The hydrogen fuel system itself -- did it burn it? fuel cell? fuel-cell electric hybrid?

(2) The fuel and measurement -- A liter of compressed* hydrogen doesn't have much energy in it. Are they talking equivalent-gasoline mpg?

* And the higher the compression, the heavier the storage tank.
Also, Password Gorilla, which is java and runs everywhere and is compatiable with passwordsafe's databases. I do what Joel recommended, keeping the db in Dropbox so that newly added passwords are replicated and up to date.
Depends if your Chevy gets the newest (regular) updates from the manufactory. There's nothing to stop you to use the old version of iTunes that as far as I understand still works.
High Frequency Trading Is A Scam
As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won’t Be Heard
I paid for a year's subscription to the FT back when I had time in the mornings to sit and read it. Nice and relaxing but I realized I got most of my news via google reader anyway so knew most of the headlines before I opened it.

Anyway I canceled my subscription. That was about a year and a half ago. I still get a copy, every morning, without fail on my doorstep.
well I was just watching it think I heard that and the reflector on the moon was placed by buzz and Armstrong....
so now tat does mean the apollo 11 did land on the moon
:P
Wow, and written in 1982. Thanks for that.
I agree, Microsoft sometimes deserves the wave of hatred, because it has on more than one occassion tried to stifle competition.
am I the only one who thinks this is pretty stupid? Kids won't watch something like that(horrible acting/irrelevant topic), and adults gain nothing from the cartoon format.

As long as they are getting Buffet, why not create a more concrete series. I dunno, how about each episode he'd take a company to examine for investment, and talk about all the pros and cons that he sees, while teaching the rest of us about what to look for in our own investments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)

I don't think I've ever seen so many warnings on a single Wikipedia article.

To be honest, the ridiculous ways in which you have to implement trivial network applications on the Web sometimes makes me think whether the Web may have severely slowed down technological progress. People are still building IRC, usenet, FTP and e-mail, but this time in the stupid way.
I'd guess the USB Vendor ID switch was to trap Apple into matching vendor IDs, so that they'd have a case with the forum. That's my assumption, as apple's response was obvious from the moment the Pre came out.
> Like any company Apple is obligated to maximize their profits

Not true; fiduciary duty requires you to act in a manner "reasonably believed to be in the best interests of the corporation", which does not mean "reasonably believed to maximize profits".
Joining Kickstarter
Nowhere near as slowly as I'd like.
That's true in the short term, but Dvorak's point is that MS has wasted time and money on diversions that it has not executed well to the determent of Windows and Office. You can also see that the cash cows are in danger because people are moving to new environments that are not desktop/laptop based, like iPods and cellphones. I cant imagine life without my laptop, but others seem to be doing a lot with other devices.

Contrast MS with Apple and Google which have move into new areas with style and excellent execution. MS seems downright frumpy.
I agree that it is quite difficult to scale support; but that is even more true for closed source software. Open-source software, at least, has plenty of 'free help' in the form of searchable web forms and mailing lists.
I've no idea why I'm receiving downvotes either. I guess a few folks are angry about having their business model attacked with reality.

Addressing your post: Software isn't a car and the marginal cost to manufacture more software licenses is zero. When I direct an hour of effort to our commercial software, I'm gaining many dollars of future passive revenue thanks to that created wealth.

Contrast that with services and a 'free' product, where each hour of effort gets a support dollar but generates no wealth at all! Pitted against that means of generating revenue, a service company giving away its product is going to lose in the long-run every time.

To see this, just look at the software marketplace: Aside from the solitary black-swan exception of RedHat (which arguably sells licenses instead of services anyhow), where are the profitable open source support contract companies?

I can spool up 3,000 software licenses sold today without batting an eye (and add in support charges on top of that if needed) making a ton of cash with which to hire employees for product improvement, but 3,000 hours of support is a huge cost requiring a great many employees to manage before even a penny of profit is obtained.

Bringing this back to my original point: Commercial software companies can easily dominate 'free' open source alternatives given that reality, so they can safely ignore their free 'competition'.
Another example is Les Miserables. That book is fantastic. I'm at a loss for adjectives. I haven't really read anything since, but I loved that book, and I loved Jean Valjean, and hated Thenardier.

But the the book takes a little while to start, then just when it does it changes characters, and Hugo takes forever to describe things which have very little to do with the story or characters. So I bored reading when Hugo suddenly began building a new story arc at the height of the last one. Even still the ending was tearful.

Haaah, I wish I loved reading as I did when I was a boy.
The Pure programming language
Here's a good thread over at New Mogul on the subject. This type of trading is not illegal, and it's actually commonplace among the big players on Wall Street.

http://newmogul.com/item?id=14134
It's a matter of market share. If apple really ever took over, they'd face similar problems.
Little Bobby Tables gets me every time...
Emacs wikipedia-mode
I have little hope that Hacker News will not suffer the same fate as reddit and digg. Hopefully there will be a new refuge by then (on the other hand, it could save me quite some time).
The logical reasoning is that - if they don't have to support it, they can actively block it. If it is a standard, they should actively support it. If it is not a standard, they can actively block it.
I bet a lot more people are scared of being killed, than they are of having a few trinkets stolen.
It is part of Palm, Inc.
Or making them onsite...
I'll agree that what Microsoft did to Netscape was wrong, but I don't see how either offering several browsers or requiring Windows to ship without Internet Explorer is needed. If people don't like Internet Explorer they can easily download a variety of other browsers. While it may have been difficult for someone with little computer experience to do such a thing a few years ago, I find it hard to believe that people can't figure this out for themselves these days.
Yeah that was his performance fee when he was managing money through the Buffet partnerships. Now he takes 0 and 0 as Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. His compensation is primordially in the appreciation of his (substantial) share of the company.
> I continue to be amazed at how people are willing to give Apple a pass on cutting off the Pre. Paticularly this guy who says he can "understand" Apple cutting off the Pre but then balks at Apple cutting off his music software.

Apple has every right to block the Pre. If they don't, then people will come to expect the Pre syncing to work (and I'm sure other devices would follow) and Apple would be forced into a situation where they would either have to support this or take a significant portion of the blame if an update to iTunes inadvertently broke 3rd party device syncing. Even so, if they only want you to sync with Apple brand products then they can do that too. Don't like it? Don't buy Apple products, that's always been an option.
Funny you say that.

Vista requires signed drivers because Microsoft was finally sick of shoddy drivers destabilizing Windows, generating support calls and ruining the user experience.

So there's no need for the hypothetical. Microsoft has already done something analogous to Apple's move -- despite years of 'enjoying' what you view as a sales opportunity.
Sure, but almost any profession has that going on. Programming is not excepted.
If they don't block it they will be forced into supporting it if enough users use it.
Considering the amount shares he owns, I'd rather be the Chairman and CEO of Berkshire than running a hedge fund. In addition, the float from the insurance companies under his umbrella is more than most hedge fund managers will ever manage.
Bought by Palm.
My business partner went through the same thing last year. The stated regulations are tough - you can't just start a company and sponsor yourself. The company needs to be already established and capitalized and has to demonstrate that no native people can do the job you want to do. Also, the "soft" regulations are getting tougher. They are not granting as many visas as they used to, and are denying applications without denying them by asking for more and more paperwork until people give up. It's not a fun time to be an immigrant.

That said, if you are coming from Myanmar there might be some refugee visa or other special exception available to you.
Did you actually watch the video? He showed a pretty decent way to analyze a candy business. Omaha Candy may be a fictional company, but it's easy to see he's discussing See's Candies (which Berkshire owns).

In the video he even mentions that the candy business is good because the maintenance capex is relatively low (he didnt phrase it like that, but that's what it is) and that profits really only need to be plunged into advertising (basically an example of a high ROIC business since its not very capital intensive).

He's mentioned all of this before in the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters -- this is kind of the same thing but in cartoon form. So as a teaching tool, it's pretty good. If you really want more, dig up his partnership letters.
Definitely. I said 'chef' and I cook 4-7 nights a week. However, to the extent that I need to eat, perhaps the time is not 'spare'. :)
I'm at a point where I notice how much time waste on the internet but I don't yet have the discipline to resist distractions. Other than turning the router off every second day. But I grew up without the internet. It makes me sad to read about someone who couldn't even imagine his life without internet distractions.

Suddenly the idea of one laptop per child seems much less attractive.
Resale value of luxury items seems very odd to me. If the original purpose of buying it was that it was intentionally luxurious and decadent, where is the market for buying it second hand?

Obviously other people won't know you bought it used, but it seems like the notions of luxury and resale are inherently opposed.
not necessarily. businesses can (and do) target customers who work best with the business model they use. I know I have something of a barrier to entry for customers; if you can't figure out how to use an OpenSSH public key to authenticate your access to a serial console, I refer you to linode or slicehost. I freely admit I am unprepared to support those users, and probably could not do so at my current prices. And my competitors are good; I haven't heard anything bad about either one.

Sure, I could have more customers if I had an easier way to control your VPS than a ssh-based console, but at what cost? People who know Linux are pretty easy to support, once you give them (standard linux) tools. There are enough people who understand (sometimes even prefer) the standard linux tools to a web interface to support my business, so I say, why not offer them a service at a price that reflects the lower cost of supporting those users?

(right now my big problem is provisioning; that is, if you want to add services, you need to wait for an employee of prgmr.com to help. But most everything else, the user can do without my help.)

I think forcing your support people to stay on the line with rude or difficult customers is a good way to burn out your support people. I think having a liberal but well-defined money back guarantee makes doing support quite a bit easier. Keeping good customer support people is hard - I think losing the most difficult 2% of customers is a small price to pay to keep good support people for the rest of your customers. And really, I'm not in the business of tricking people into giving me money. If we aren't what you expected, then yeah, I'm happy to give you a refund.
This is an excellent book, I read it a number of years ago in print form. Is this html version legal?
I thought this was going to be about Ratners:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner#The_speech
I can't recommend this book highly enough. I own multiple copies so that I can lend them out; it highlights fundamental economic fallacies, and introduces holistic/systems thinking to the general population by reminding the reader to focus on all those affected.
Call me jaded, but 'commonplace' and 'not technically illegal' don't strike me as a very compelling defense.
I am using Sun VirtualBox to have a Linux development environment on my Windows PC. Sun offers VirtualBox for Linux and OS/X hosts as well.

I highly recommend it. It makes me a lot more comfortable knowing if I screw something up (as I learn Linux) I am not hosing my main operating system and it can be a closer-to-production environment.

Plus it's free: http://www.virtualbox.org/
It isn't necessarily business-government collusion. Those tourist-hating locals could just as easily have been the ones to 'lobby' local government to limit these things (probably more like 'abolish,' but 'limit' was the compromise). There are lots of localities where people try to get 'community standards' enacted like keeping your lawn trimmed to a standard height or other such nonsense.
When the average investors leave the market because of this, front running (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running), , and the fact that small number of firms (~400) is involved in 70% of the US trading volume (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a5f03366-6d69-11de-8b19-00144feabd...), will they ever come back?
So 'We had to destroy them in order to save them' has finally come home to America?

Who says there's no karma?
I really just wanted the studio version of "Roadrunner", although I like the whole album. I'm a fan of bookish art punk --- Wire works for me too. That LCD Soundsystem album tries so hard to get old and overplayed for me, and constantly fails.
Without discussing whether the Kindle should be open source, it seems like there's something easier Amazon can do to prevent this from happening again.

If Amazon's ebooks were DRM-free, customers could back up their titles on hardware that does not occasionally receive orders from the mothership to delete their books.
yes I watched the video, do you honestly see kids sitting down and watching that? And if the show will be watched almost exclusively by adults, why use the cartoon format?
Can I just point out --- knowing full well that this is not a meaningful or valid argument or constructive comment on the article --- that Karl Denninger is a huge, notorious Internet crank? He's burned a whole through operating system teams, ISP markets, the security community, at least two major world religions, the SCUBA industry, and now this. He has a bias here, and it's towards controversy he can be self-righteous about.

He may actually be right about this --- he is occasionally right --- but man I wish there was a credible source that backed him up.
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What defunct hamburger chain is he speaking of? I assumed all the chains did that, let McD's do the research then open up across the street (Burger King, Hardees, etc)
This sounds like the kind of story Technologists love.

Machines at better are stock market trading, so the humans are being replaced in this industry.
Please don't try to interpret what I meant. What I wrote is exactly what I meant to write. This trading is not illegal. This trading is perfectly acceptable. The only people who seem to have a problem with this are a subset of the people who don't have the resources to do it. Frankly, the arguments I have read against it are mostly penned by ignorant folks who simply come across as jealous.
The average investor accesses the equity market through mutual funds, which are large institutional investors that can compete with high frequency traders. If stuff like this keeps my uncle-in-law out of daytrading, I see that as a feature, not a bug.

There are markets where the entire order book is transparent, and the bulk of investment dollars don't even go to equities. Hard to see this as the end of the world.
"The best programmers are the ones who write the most legacy software. The best programmers are the ones who learned the most from their projects and go on to be better and better."

The second bit is true. The first bit is almost certainly not. DHH makes some good points in this talk, but it sure seems as though most of his experience is on projects that he either started or was with from the early days, and that he's been spared the pleasure of working on codebases where 'svn annotate' shows names of people who have been gone from the project for years.
submarine PR/marketing at its best
The average investor is not going to leave the market. I spent time as a retail broker, and the truth is most have no idea what they were doing to begin with. I don't think this is going to persuade them to stop.
As a SEM professional I usually defer to the catch all "online marketing" response. If the conversation goes much further than that, I usually follow it up with "you know those little ads on Google?", which usually opens up the floodgates for a discussion of how I am ruining the internet for everyone.
A "license" like that would be a good thing, I think. Whenever I hear about some potentially useful-to-me 0.1-version OS project, it'd be nice to know things about it. Things like, "Is the developer ever going to spend more than that first weekend poking at it?" or "Does the developer think of this code as similar to a discarded toilet he's left on a curb?"

I get the point about entitled-feeling users, but there's a flip side: in the comments, he goes on about welcoming bug reports, etc. from those users. He wants users to bug-test for him and help him improve his code, but he's not paying them for the QC work any more than they're paying him for coding.

If you release software, for better or worse, you set up some social expectations. If you don't want people complaining to you and wanting bug-fixes and support, either don't release that software or make it abundantly clear in the license, download site, etc. that the software isn't supported.
Hey! Diamonds aren't worthless! One can make knives/scalpels/drills/… out of them!
The new Catalyst book, published by Apress, is now available
Are Bing Users Twice As Likely To Click On An Ad Than Google Users?
First what well-known mathematical principles are you talking about? Second have you read any of his academic papers? All can be found on SSRN. Two of the big ones are "Errors, Robustness, and the Fourth Quadrant" and "Finiteness of Variance is Irrelevant in the Practice of Quantitative Finance."

Taleb states "My central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare. We need an a priori model representation for that; the rarer the event, the more the dependence on aprorism. Further, we do not care about probability (if an event happens or does not happen); we worry about consequences (how much total wealth or total destruction will come from it). Given that the less frequent the event, the more severe the consequence (just consider that the 100 year flood is more severe, and less frequent, than the 10 year flood), our estimation of the CONTRIBUTION of the rare event is going to be massively faulty (contribution is probability times effect; multiply that by estimation error) ; and nothing can remedy it. So the rarer the event, the less we know about its role --and the more we need to make it up with an extrapolative, generalizing theory. Hence model error is more consequential in the tails and some representations ARE MORE FRAGILE than others..... Nobody before has examined my problem in the history of thought, let alone systematize the idea of decision-making under certain classes of ignorance."

I am sure he would be excited if someone could show him that his idea is not original.
> The only people who seem to have a problem with this are a subset of the people who don't have the resources to do it.

That's likely true, since only a couple of firms can do it, and there are millions of people's interest in the markets. The NYTimes article this article pulls from specifically points out that these few firms are taking money out of the pockets of "slower" firms, like hedge funds. Given that a large number of people in the country have their retirement funds tied up in hedge funds, until someone shows otherwise, this is clearly the rich stealing from the poor.

I understand that those in the industry have a different worldview, but try to see the bigger picture. The only difference between grossly immoral and illegal is a few years and a new law. If this isn't illegal, its because the population hasn't been sufficiently outraged. Yet.
Paul,

Were they accepted the first time they applied?
I'm not putting words in your mouth; my bias goes under my username, which is as clearly visible as your original post.

I don't 'have a problem' with automated trading. I'm just opining that frequency and legality, in and of themselves, are not compelling defenses.

Imagine Party A says 'marijuana's awful' and party B says 'everyone's doing it, and it's technically legal because we all have glaucoma'.

I'm pointing out --separate from whether I (dis)agree with A-- that party B isn't going to sway anyone with that approach.
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He doesn't seem to extend very far past the facts as presented in the NYTimes article.