skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I were you, I'd just tell him it's not something I want to work on, and leave it at that. If you need an excuse, tell him you don't want to mix business ventures with personal friendships ... even though it's your brother's friend, and not yours. Based on your post, it appears that the relationship is already being strained because of the project, and it will only get worse if you were to assume some level of responsibility.

Your last sentence mentioned that the startup guy is excited about a particular sector. Are you excited by that sector? If not, then it's another reason not to get involved.
I haven't seen this behavior myself, but assuming it's true...

"By emulating this behavior on page-based websites, where the back button now essentially takes you 'out of' the web site, is Google trying to train us not to use the back button"

I certainly hope not. It seems wrong to emulate what's "bad" about no refresh web applications -- that is not conforming to a convention built into the browsers since most people's first experience with a browser.

It's not going to change anyone's behavior, it's going to make them return to a browser that works the way they expect it to.

I remember having a conversation with an internal developer at my company where he was talking about how their team had removed all of the chrome around the page and did some javascript magic to make it very difficult to invoke refresh or back.

He was complaining that users didn't understand that refreshing "broke" the app and continued to find ways to block it. He was fighting a losing battle. You have to find a way to do something logical when the user hits refresh or back or you're going to spend more time adding kludge after kludge when users behave in your app the way they would in any other web based app.
What are the "cloud" options for cpu intensive tasks? What is the billing? I actually have a couple simulation problems.
A nice idea.

However 2 issues. Firstly I would have added in a "see tweets like a ticket system" interface. That would rock (they might have it - I havent seen)
EDIT: no they dont, the site is poor too I see as well :(

Secondly the name. Local Bunny? Huh? It sounds like a dating service for Playboy readers.
I called it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704458 :)

(And I was amused to see the winning solution is also hosted on win.tue.nl, although it doesn't seem to be the same people.)
Well, sort of.

If you do an alloc/init, then you need to release it (or you leak). If you're assigning to self.foo, then you can just release the thing you created after assigning it. If you assigned it to foo, and then release it, then you're in the position I mentioned above.
I would depend on whether adding different units together was an error. 1 dollar + 1 euro should be an error. So raw numbers for pure counting is OK, but raw numbers for counting units of a specific measure are not OK, an abstraction should be introduced. If you just willy nilly add feet and meters you might end up missing your desired orbit and losing a billion dollar satellite.
Small subset, fun for author of article to profile. The one person I know personally who protested was concerned that the lowest paid, most vulnerable workers (janitors, contract security guards, etc.) were the first to feel the bite, ahead of the 'fat cats' who had the power within the institution to fight back to protect their turf.

Most of us just said, "Eh, that's too bad" and went back to work.
Well you are an architect in a way, you may not be building things out of trees, but you should be building things out of thoughts.

Thoughts may not clean our air, but well directed thoughts may do things just as impressive :D
Google vs Microsoft? Forget ChromeOS and keep your eye on Android and Win Mobile
Just because Google's doing it with Google Voice doesn't mean someone else's solution will automatically be "short lived".

Most of the world has still never heard of Google Voice (let alone "the cloud"). If he makes an SMS backup product, and sells it as that, I'm sure there will be plenty of people who would be interested, regardless of what Google is doing.
That would truly be a sad future, worse than the '1984' scenario being played out by Amazon's DRM. What free person would want to rely on a device that required the manufacturers constant consent to allow it to function as that they wanted? Thankfully this seems unlikely. History suggests that there is a significant benefit in choice and freedom and that consumers will eventually follow that path.

> It's easier for the user, the development community is willing and it offers larger returns for the platform creator.

So the lock-in is powerful and effective?

> Besides, most of the guts of personal computing are being done via protocols and services; platform lock-in isn't really done on the device anymore.

So the lock-in doesn't really matter?

Which is it? You can't have it both ways. The answer is that the lock-in acts like friction, wasting value instead of providing returns for participants in the system.
I can't even remember a damn thing from when I was 4. And I'm pretty sure at 4 I wasn't drinking any booze, but then again I can't be 100% sure...
Evolution anyone? Who has heard of an organism adapting to change by cutting their limbs off?

People like stability. In fact, we are predisposed (through evolution) to think that the world is inherently stable. They think that if something has been working for 10, 20, 30 years there is no reason that it should not keep working; thus, a downturn in their business is a temporary abnormality that will correct itself. Sometimes this is true, usually, it is not.

Often, with new technology (internet) and markets (china), costs get demolished. A business that relied on the previous cost-price ratio simply cannot compete.

Things change - usually for the better - and companies who fail to adapt, die. Their failure to recognize genuine change is their own failure and no amount of cost cutting will change an organization for the better.
wow what a crappy product, they still have YC showing up as investing $5K + $5K/founder.
I remember when you asked that question at google i/o.

We're using gwt for a reference implementation of itemscript, an open source json schema project. It does take some time to get it set up right, but when you do...

GWT is reveling against it's next constraint right now, the support of a growing developer base, not all within Google.
I think it's important to look at costs as investments in the business. And if that investment will not yield a good return, why make it?

Buffett famously did this over at Berkshire, where he realized that there would be no future for domestic textile mills. He took the cash flow the company was throwing off and invested it in other companies.

So I think that Godin makes a huge overgeneralization, especially when he mentions newspapers. The economics of that business have drastically changed and allocating capital to keep things the way they are is probably a recipe for failure. They'd be better off using the newspaper's cash flow by cutting current costs and allocating that cash elsewhere (new lines of business)
Yeah, I second this one. He can get it done for $100 on elance using some foreign company who will just give him a template design. He'll likely need to pay $400 for a complete logo + web package though.
Fun idea.

1. If I'm looking for local twitter trends, it might be accurate to show me Michael Jackson...but is it interesting?

2. When I look at this list, I want to DO something with it. Clickable terms would be nice, even if they just dump me to a local Twitter search.

If you want to build one for Chicago that gets use, hit me up.
Context. You could compute the log likelihood ratio of "bye bye" given the previous word versus the log likelihood ratio of "55" given the previous word. If that's not good enough you can generalize this to use the previous N words.

Google should have a large enough corpus of text at it's disposal to be able to approach the problem this way, and they very well may already be doing so.
I think that is greedy. The guy charges $20 a page and now you want him to get equity as well? Why? You are advocating he gets paid his full rate. An equity deal would only work if you were either (a) paying him well below his rate, and/or (b) you knew that you just had to have this one person's work above all others. It doesn't make sense in this case to ask for equity for $100 deal lol
Not as useless as your comment.

Besides the "my code is the worst code" part, I thought he did an excellent job of explaining a software developer's natural aversion to software. I had my wife read it, and it helped her understand more about why I refused to pollute the computer with that CD that came with her new camera.

Aside: I know it's a beloved HN meme to bash Atwood, but don't let that excuse us from being lazy about it.
Now I can't sleep (why did we have to talk about bad code?)

``The Windows 3.1 Guru''

1) That guy who knew too much about Windows 3.1 internals and never thought this newfangled "Windows for Workgroups" or "95" would never take off. Thank you, sir. Treating obaque structures for the unsigned chars they are has never posed a problem for me. All the documentation I needed was in those 4 pages of macros you left me (completely unnecessary, given the clarity of their octal values, btw) Indeed, 10 years later, the low nibble of the AL register held an integer index into your very own "stash area" just below the PSP (task_struct for linux weenies) where you kept all the open file handles. Clever of you, reusing every bit of the process memory, specially the unused parts of the MS DOS header format. (long story about this destructive log-rotate elided)

Your share custody of this award with Mr. EE.

2) Mr. Electrical Engineer, how can I forget you? We all know it's all signals and gates down there, so, yeah, it was refreshing to see them again! I can't believe you rolled your own signal-driven layer on top of the Win32 message system. The ordering system couldn't have been done any other way. Looking at your code put a bar over my head, sir, you have asserted me. And to be honest, Visual C++ needed your linguistic extensions; we all know, code runs faster when it looks more and more like Fortran.
It always makes sense to ask for equity in a scenario like this. If you do not ask for it, you will certainly NOT receive it.

Additionally, I was trying to give him some general purpose practical advice. Charging $20/page is really undervaluing his work. Additionally it seems that the business idea guy does HAVE to have his work, as he doesn't seem to have many options or other people to go to.
You still have to have C in the end. The license agreement forces it upon you. That's disgusting.
The important thing is not the lock-in, and probably not even the pre-screening of applications. The important thing is the streamlining of getting software and updates to the user.

If centralized software distribution scares you, be afraid of Ubuntu.
wonder if they'll make 79 sequels? one for each XP LVL
I can just see the first one, the quest to kill 20 sheep

;)
What weren't you really surprised about? That the team who won had an expert in cryptography on their team?

The guys from the CUDA forum (one of whom got TWO scores of 31, vs. this team's 30) wrote their software in a couple of days, and are not experts in cryptography.

If anything, I was happy to see that CUDA (and a few ATI Stream entries) made such a big impact in this contest. Short of using a massive CPU cluster, no one really had much of a chance without it (expert or not).
Kind of Open Source
My comment does serve a purpose, to point out how useless this article is, since some people obviously don't notice it, and vote it up.
Their page says that Bernstein is currently visiting TU/e. It looks like some people from other universities committed their computing resources for the contest though.
This looks promising. I'm sorry I'm late to the game with the postMessage API (first time I've seen it). But I have a question about that. How does it compare to, say, Cocoa's NSNotificationCenter style of messaging, in which there is a default message center that handles receiving and dispatching? From my really brief look at it, it seems similar with one caveat: you can have multiple NSNotificationCenters. So observers don't have to observe all messages. But here it looks like every observer will be observing all messages sent. Is that correct?

As you point out here (http://ejohn.org/blog/postmessage-api-changes/) this will lead to a potential security issue in which you might be responding to messages posted by an external source. Maybe another property could be added, which I'll refer to as messagingDomains. This could be set to a string like 'http://example.com or an array of strings. Each string corresponds to a domain. If this property is set the onmessage would only be called if the origin was from the domain(s) specified in messagingDomains. It's a subtle addition to the API, yes. But it would more clearly establish the existence of a security risk here, because it would probably be propagated better in documentation than a warning to conditionally check event.origin.

For reference, here is how onmessage works right now:

observer.onmessage = function(e) {

if (e.origin == 'http://example.com') {

// I trust this domain, do something

}

}

Here is what I think would make sense to clearly establish that security matters here, and as a benefit it would not break backward compatibility:

observer.messagingDomains = ['http://one.example.com, 'http://two.example.com];

observer.onmessage = function(e) {

// By default execute accordingly.

// However, if messagingDomains is set, only execute if the domain is mentioned explicitly

}
If you weren't prepared to back up your statement of millions, maybe you shouldn't have said "millions"? It makes it sound as if you're tying to inflate the importance of your argument hoping you wouldn't get called on it.

I agree completely that opportunity cost is very, very, very hard to measure. Which is why I'm more likely to believe someone with resources, incentive, and skin in the game rather than anecdotal armchair talk.
You Shouldn’t Follow me on Twitter
Try Firefox with the AutoPager extension. Just keep scrolling down and the follow-on pages appear. Not perfect, but adequate.

And don't blame the author -- the magazine did the pagination.
Seth Godin has dropped the ball recently (imho), but talking about evolutionary angle there is one his book I highly recommend: "Survival is not enough". Somehow I get an impression that this book is undervalued. Or maybe it just me reading to much into it.
The irony is that I can't imagine any competent programmers not stabbing their eyes out after looking at the Drupal codebase.

Oh, wait, I guess that explains the demand for Drupal coders.
Nice try at some basic reverse psychology. It would be pretty interesting to get some statistics about whether this method actually works any better than more usual calls to action.
I have always enjoyed Jeff's columns and maybe I'm missing a subtle point (or just taking the bait), but this may be the worst "advice" I've ever read on hn.

Huh... I generally don't enjoy Jeff's column, but this is the first one where I was nodding my head the whole time. In fact, I had even copied the above quote from the article just to comment on it, but in affirmative agreement. To give some context, I'm on a team that is about to ship a very, very large project, and I have to say that I honestly believe my team's part to be the worst bit of it, and my own contribution to be the worst part of my team's code.

Well, maybe not really...but I can't shake this feeling every time I go in to work.

Here's why I think Jeff is right: Software, done well, is like magic. You don't see the arrays and pointers, you don't see that it was programed with objects and/or functions. You see an interface, you click some buttons, you type some words, and BAM! You get exactly what you want. At least, that's the user experience. If, however, you're the one writing the code that makes the magic work, then you know what's going on under the covers. You see the arrays and pointers and objects and functions. The magic is dead. The code is just a repulsive, heaping pile of bits with no special properties whatsoever.

If you tell me that your code is not the worst code you've seen recently for X, Y, and Z reasons-that-only-make-sense-to-a-programmer, then you've missed the point entirely.

I imagine the Wizard of Oz might have looked at his contraption and thought to himself "This is the worst hunk-a-junk illusion I've ever seen."
lets note that the graph copied was relative % growth. here's an absolute chart:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal,+joomla,+wordpress&...

edited to add: note the spikes in joomla and wordpress, with subsequent dips. it seems kind of ballsy to say that drupal is definitely not going through or going to go through the same thing.
I'll be happy with a good emacs mode.
I respect Harvard; they do great work. I think the world would significantly miss it if Harvard, it's really hard to respond to such a poor argument, but the medical school alone is a world changing institution.
Amazon has "high-cpu" instances: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
I note the original graph was offered in terms of Absolute job numbers.
Shame he didn't choose to share that.
Suicide Ignites Apple Culture Debate
How breadpig made $30K (for charity) in 2008 selling magnets in our spare time
So I think that Godin makes a huge overgeneralization

You have basically just summed up Seth's entire blogging history.
So what he's saying here is, "surround yourself with people smarter than you."

This is good advice. Whenever you feel like you're not being challenged any more, it's time to move on.
Also let's compare it to the other frameworks (in an absolute fashion)

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=drupal%2C+joomla%2C+wordpr...

If you say there are "plenty of drupal jobs" that is more of an absolute measure than, "huge increase in drupal jobs"
How Ning Plans To Justify Its $750 Million Valuation
Yes, I'm sure the screenplay will be riveting. Uther the Lightbringer and young Arthas Menethil are arguing over what to do about the infected population of Stratholme who will soon join Kel'thuzad's Scourge forces when all of a sudden they decide they should carry out their task by first searching for 5 (not 4, not 6, but 5) infected grain crates, which are conveniently located on the way to Stratholme and are shimmering with particles to indicate their infected status.

Not that I'm bitter about running Heroic Culling of Stratholme for that god damned bronze drake mount or anything.
Bump (YC S09) is Hiring Java / Android / Mobile Developer
Bump Technologies (http://bumptechnologies.com) is looking for a Java hacker to lead mobile application development. Having an existing app on mobile platforms like Android or Blackberry is a big plus (but not a requirement). What is most important is that you fit well into our team, are passionate about coding and design, work hard and learn fast.

Our first app Bump (~1M downloads in 100 days) lets you identify, connect, and share information between two mobile phones by just bumping them together and has been featured on TechCrunch, NBC, CBS, WIRED, and Macworld. We need help taking the Bump technology to new mobile platforms and beyond just contact and photo transfer.

The position will be based out of our Mountain View office, close to Castro St, Caltrain and VTA light rail. To apply, please send your resume, a paragraph introducing yourself, a short explanation of why you want to work at Bump, and links to any of your non-work/non-school projects to: jobs@bumptechnologies.com.
Your comment did not point out anything other than the fact that you personally think Atwood's articles are useless. It did not contribute anything to the discussion, and it garnered knee-jerk upvotes from people who, like you, hate Atwood's articles. I don't often downvote, and I never downvote for disagreement. I downvote comments that either add nothing or take away from the discussion, and your comment was a perfect example of that.

If you have a particular problem with this article, then follow the example of edw519 and elaborate.
You're right on all points, and I believe licensing CLISP under the GPL was a good thing. Still, RMS was basically a bully about it. It's reasonable to think the guy might have GPL'd the code anyway because he did seem to agree with the philosophy behind it, but when there are veiled threats of legal action almost right from the start of the conversation that seems like coercion to me.
How Evolution Can Allow For Large Developmental Leaps
Good to know that Yahoo has 20 million to blow while laying off another 5% of their workforce.
Lisp is crack. Your eyes are rolling in with pleasure and you're the king of the world, but your expressed sense of delight is not commensurate with people's idea of what should be enjoyable and by how much, even your programmer peers (should programming really be that fun?) And to be honest, you're just getting off writing skeletal Idealized software; your toy apps lack the necessary cruft to face a stupid world, so no one ever sees it. As time passes, you're left huddled over your workstation firing dopamines like any other fiend, and the world moves on in its crisply pressed suits, doing hard work and getting social validation and recognition for it. You, on the other hand, are left flailing your arms, feeling the music, offering the Love and the Message to others as they avoid making eye contact.
On the apparent Apple suicide
This also occurs with semi-public services (at least in the US). For example, the MBTA ("T") in Boston serves largely those without cars: college students, tourists, people with low income. Unfortunately, due to extreme mismanagement, the T regularly decides to cut services and increase fares... and things just get worse from there.

If you're a private business, you have to find a way to escape the spiral. If you're a government service, you need a government that isn't incompetent, corrupt, and myopic.
I have no experience of mint, but I used to use egg.com which accesses other bank accounts. That does it by installing an application on your computer that stores the passwords locally. I wouldn't trust anything else and even then there's still a certain amount of trust there that they're not lying to you about how it works.

As for another site storing your passwords, I'd at least hope they'd store it encrypted, but trusting someone else is a matter of, um, trust. Who knows, it could be in a text file called passwords on the root.
Isn't that what I said? :p
Eh, this is better :) (Reason: conditionals + repainting the stage).
The url should be a tip-off that this isn't being passed off as some kind of scientific paper that requires peer review.
"I understand that they're in California and that it's apparently fashionable to imitate Jobs-like megalomaniacal optimism about one's own importance. I understand that self-motivation requires them to believe that what they do is the highest cause, and that it's important for one's career to appear to be a Jihad on behalf of the employer."

I get the feeling that so-called social media is often largely insular media. People get their circle of friends and associates, and that becomes their whole world, which in turn becomes the whole world.

There are people who believe that if they put something on Twitter or FB then they've announced something to the world, and now everybody knows. The idea that vast numbers of people are not only not on one or anther social media tool, but simply do not give a rat's ass, is a completely alien concept.
You weren't long-winded enough.
But it allows other, less competent people to put together great sites without needing the money and time for a rockstar team.
Ideas Ubuntu should steal from Windows 7