skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Vision" isn't an easily defined quantity. What MS lacks is incentive to make a browser with fast JavaScript performance, as they make most of their money off desktop apps, many of which web-based apps are looking to replace.

So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to slow down JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling desktop softare. One way to do this is to release new versions of IE which have slow JS interpreters, and use marketing to convince enterprise customers that the new browsers are super-duper top-of-the-line shiny things, with features like security and easy maintainability.
Hilarious...and a nice poke at how things seem to work sometimes. :)
moonwater.com and moonjuice.com already taken.
please, please have a Eastern Economy Edition.
Your attempt to look knowledgeable would be much more effective if your conversation had any sort of coherence to it. Does that link address how a bank going out of business forces you to lose your home if you have a mortgage with that bank? (Presumably not, since it's not true.) You may have forgotten the beginning here, but it looks like the rest of us haven't.
Canopy sounds like Canopus, which did something with video or something. Might be confusing. Plus it sucks.

probably some of these are taken but...

ideas: ladderboard, tugboat, spryboard, scrycam, scrysat, canoworms, pandabox, unlift, topknot, teachr, learnr, smartr, trainr, dumdum, bighead, fathead

my favorite is pandabox, it's an oblique allusion to pandora's box (knowledge), it's a "negative" or "dangerous" connotation (which helps stickiness, see the Igor article) but yet still cute and cuddly, and also has obvious ideas for branding and mascot, etc..

This is a good link about naming.
http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-produc...
Lisp and Sex
It also ensures that sites that only work in IE continue to work. Google Frame simply lets someone visit sites that only work in IE and sites that need HTML5 without having to know which browser to use for which site.

Having the site control when GF is used is essential for this to work.
Keynes is self contradictory, he's not the most unambiguous of writers, a particularly bad case of the two armed economist.

And as the parent pointed out, there are both anti-Keynesian theories, and there are also many post or neo-Keynesian theories. There's lots of things, and this doesn't concern itself with any of them. Which is fine, you can write what ever you like, I just don't like seeing it on HN.

I don't like seeing on HN because there can not be good discussion from it.

Economics is just complex and interesting enough that geeks easily get into it, have that great light bulb moment of understanding, and immediately start opining about it, long before they've reached a deeper understanding.

It's akin to someone understanding Newtonian physic, being elated about getting it, and getting into internet arguments with people who understand the theory of relativity.

And you can't explain the differences between Newtonian and relativistic physics in a short post And the time required to explain it to random Joe on the internets, is just not worth it.

Thus good discussion is impossible.
One giant step for free software womankind
Loved it! I had to double check that I wasn't reading the Onion!
Ok, I get the point, but it comes off as a bit spiteful. If they are making profits (and they are), that seems to be a better situation than not.
What you're saying is that this is a good deal for people who are already locked into Microsoft technologies. Sorry, but that's still a bit like saying being punched in the face twice is better than being punched in the face four times - and I write this as someone with a background in web development using Microsoft technologies.
Yes, it was tried. The attempt was followed by the Great Depression.

It is understandable that some are reticent to repeat the experiment.
Indeed, they wouldn't even have to read the source. They could just read the blog and the papers it references:

http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/
MS makes money off desktop software, so putting a fast JS interpreter in IE would only benefit their competitors making web apps. It would border on negligence to their shareholders. Google, on the other hand, has economic incentive to promote faster browsers, as they're looking to make money off of web-based services.
I don't think the technical aspect of what they've done is flexing muscle. It's interesting for sure, but in the end, it's a plugin (a very cool one, yes).

The muscle flexing is that they're willing to subvert a competitors product instead of just promoting their own product as a superior offering.

Can you imagine the outrage if Microsoft had done this and offered a plugin to Chrome or Firefox that would make them render things just like IE does? If you're having trouble imagining such a scenario, think back to the outcry when people discovered the .Net plugin for Firefox, and that wasn't nearly as invasive.

Google is drawing a line in the sand that essentially says "You can do things your way or our way, but if you don't like our way we'll find a way to make your users do it our way."

To me that seems like a pretty serious escalation.
Sure, it's useful to be able to talk to people on their terms and to have the credibility of a degree. Beyond that, software development is still software development, so the actual "work" still ends up being the same, no matter what domain you work in. That said, I think both the legal and medical fields have an enormous IT future that I highly recommend pursuing- There's still a lot of innovation possible.
Pretty much no new content here. Just rehashing a lot of other articles we've all seen before. I don't really understand why more iPhone developers aren't writing web apps. Safari on the iPhone is a fast, modern, standards compliant web browser which is quickly becoming the defacto mobile browser engine of choice.
Great post. I never thought about the direction of people's faces but I wonder if this had anything to do with the fact that it was a (cute) baby. What happens if your website does not deal in babies? But I bet the same thing applies if you have a mascot. Have their face point in the direction of where you want attention. And even if you don't have a mascot, just insert random cute puppy or kitten and have it face your text/product.
Got to love an president who really wants to solve healthcare, the economy and global peace.
If you want to use an epithet for the leading operating systems vendor, use Micros~1
Actually, if I remember correctly Bell was not own by the government, Telus was. Over time Bell as sold and bought different telephone services from or to the provincial governments.

It was however granted a monopoly by the government on long distance, and by some provinces on local service. The monopoly was granted to allow them to create the infrastructure, even to places where it would probably not pay off.

They still are a terrible company to deal with and the internet service offering is really not that good in Canada.
37Signals valuation tops $100 Billion after bold VC investment [parody/satire]
Share Files Online Without Signing Up
Dear Moderators
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment

Thanks for killing an interesting piece of satire. I'm curious as to your reasoning.
Are Magnetically Levitating 'Sky Pods' the Future of Travel?
37 Signals Valuation tops $100 Billion (Farce)
"Nah, I already use spotlight. It does all that." STFU and download this! It's better. You'll see. I promise.
As for Joel’s consistent dismissal of unit testing, he’s just wrong about that. Unit testing (done TDD style) does not slow you down, it speeds you up.

This seems logically impossible. Maybe I'm misunderstanding TDD, but at the heart of it, TDD seems to suggest you:

1) Give instructions that describe how to check the instructions you're about to give are correct

2) Give instructions

This is not the right solution to the problem "I'm unable to give the computer the instructions I intend". At the very fundamental level, it clashes with DRY, and is only effective if you're very uncertain in your ability to do (2). The right solution is improving your ability to do (2) - by creating better abstractions and metaphors, not by repeating yourself.
It's better to ship shit than not at all, but it's better to ship late than to ship shit. The problem is that if you ship too late, you don't ship at all.
Ask YC (EC2 Users): how do you actually manage your EC2 platform?
Who is using EC2 for his startup? And how are you actually manage your platform? Is the EC2-Console sufficient? Do you use RightScale or CloudClick? Any other open-source tool? What are the shortcoming of those tools?
heyprudhvi, seems like you are new here please read the guidelines. I had to flag this. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Joel,

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions, you've got our brains working!
Full list, and what they should be used for, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain#Reserved_domai...

For testing, I usually use test{n}@testname.test. I've so far managed to avoid no-reply. If someone tries to reply to one of our message emails, I want to know what problem they're having, and the context to go with it from what message we sent them. "noreply" emails are anti-user-friendly.
Andreessen: Why Entrepreneurs Must Be Able To Make Plans, And Break Them
Yahoo Brands Flickr; Users Retaliate
37signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold vc investment
You know, as much as I like 37signals' general message, this is starting to go too far. Everyone is allowed to have their own business model. If you want to make tools for business, then a pay model probably works well. But if you're working on the next Twitter where adoption is what increases the value of the product I don't think one should exclude the use of alternative potentially free business models.
37signals Valuation Tops $100B After Bold VC Investment
I've been a Quicksilver user for a couple of years, but after upgrading to Snow Leopard I've been trying out Launchbar. I must say that I like it much, much better. It is far more stable and responsive. Also, it is much easier to configure than QS.
Well, for the record, I clicked on your link because it has Lisp AND Sex in the title. I just had to see how you were going to relate the two.

Unfortunately your entire post was meta and as such I'm afraid I can't send you to the front page.
I think the problem is that you're trying to analyze a work in isolation but then draw from it broad conclusions.

It would be kind of like taking Newton's Principia and using it alone to point out flaws in string theory, without taking into account all the objections and clarifications that have come to Newtonian mechanics in-between.
I see I pissed off the HN whores.

Look people, I hate twitter as much as the next holier-than-thou hacker, but you've got to admit that, even if you can't comprehend it, twitter is here to stay and apparently actually has some real value for real people.

Yeah, I know you could implement it better in one weekend. Big fucking deal. Here's a news flash for you:

They got lucky.

Yeah, that's right. Lucky. Just like every other successful startup genius who now makes more money off of his masterblogtion than you'll ever make with your startup.

After you get over your hate/jealousy, you'll realize that this giant rolling shit-ball called twitter just got started and it's picking up a lot of shit on the way down. And by shit, of course, I'm referring to money and people.

I, for one, have chosen to stand directly in front of this massive shit-ball with arms wide open, eyes to the heavens, hoping I get swallowed up and smeared in massive amounts of shit (money and people). Well, just money really, unless by people we're talking about hot women.

I'm proud to be a twitter whore. Embrace the dark side.
This is just speculation, but I think it's possible somebody just did this in their free time without much strategic planning, like so many projects at Google (you know, that 20% free time at Google).
And here is the Google incarnation where Nicholas Jitkoff (original creator of Quicksilver) works on nowadays: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-quick-search...
Joel's point wasn't that some programmers aren't smart enough to use C++ plus COM plus multithreading.

He just said that humans aren't smart enough.
They, however, might think that they are.
Which is sad.
I'm not sure. Uncle Bob's post came off as so reasonable and moderate that I have trouble applying it to any practical situation. Joel's post drew conclusions I don't agree with (redesigning to add multithreading after the first release seems like classic 'second system syndrome'), but at least I had a fairly good idea of the personality he was describing.
Selling with Sports Scores
To be perfectly honest, Canada has is a worst case scenario for providing broadband to everyone. With that in mind, they are actually doing a pretty amazing job. I got 16mbit internet downtown and even my cottage on an island in the middle of a lake in rural ontario has a 4mbit wireless link. It could be a lot worse.
Same here. Quicksilver will always have a special place in my heart, but it's become somewhat buggy, and the development has slowed to a crawl. LaunchBar doesn't have as much cool factor, but it Just Works.
37Signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion After Bold VC Investment (of $1)
Great news! Just a month to go...
With So Many Startups, Where Does One Get Customers?
Django ranks much higher here in non-English languages and non-English speaking countries. The two search terms are ranking very close in SF and in English.

Regardless of how interesting the trends could be, there is still too much noise to draw any meaningful conclusion. (And yes, I also search "rails" not "ruby on rails" when left on my own.
According their findings having an unavailable website is seriously damaging their credibility.
Personally, I think the key is in understanding that hacks are fine as long as they're localized. Generally, it's ok to fudge in places. But hacks shouldn't compromise the "big picture".
Twitter finds Ruby faster with gcc optimizing for size than speed
37signals steals HN moderator's wife; France surrenders
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment

Submitted many times by many users, all submissions killed instantly. It's a good thing nothing is there to clog up the TechCrunch/Seth Godin feed.
I believe that Joel knows that "C++ and multithreading do have benefits" -- the problem is that most people do not know how to properly code C++ and multithreading. So, even if you do use them appropriately, someone will edit the code at some point and not quite understand how to use them correctly.
You mention a few strategic mistakes that Netscape made. Those were poor decisions. Netscape certainly went downhill when it moved from the quick and lightweight Navigator to the slow, bloated, and buggy Communicator. Shying away from standards like CSS in favor of doing their own thing was a bad idea. However, don't forget that the early versions of Netscape, which is where jwz played a much larger role, were great.

The biggest reason (by far) that Netscape faded into obscurity, though, is that Microsoft bundled IE with Windows.

More importantly, these strategic decisions about the product were not made by guys like jwz. jwz is a hacker. Like many hackers, his opinion was often at odds with the strategies of the Business People in charge.

I don't think it's fair to use these strategic missteps to discredit jwz or Joel's point about the balance between purity and pragmatism in writing code.
> ...but after having written several programs in Perl until they became unmaintainable (despite my good coding style), and then rewritten them in Ruby in something like 1/10th to 1/20th the lines... I've got no particular interest in spending time reading about how Perl is wonderful.

I agree with another poster. I'd love to see the data that you gathered.

I've worked fairly extensively with both Perl and Ruby, and I have a hard time imagining anything which is 10-20x shorter in Ruby than in Perl. I also have to question the maintainability assertion. Ruby and Perl are similar enough that I'm pretty sure I can take a "maintainable" program in either one and port it to the other with minimal changes and no noticable change in maintainability.
As a former MSFT engineer, you hit it spot on.

When people are united behind a clear vision, amazing things can happen. When they're not...

I wrote more about my experience: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
Seven habits of all the annoying people you work with
Well, some of their examples suggested they aim for fully color blind people.
Their numbers are tiny.

Most color blind people can recognise colours, they just have this ability restricted.
So they should be actually be offering safe color schemes instead of pecking everyone who just happened to use colors.
I'm a bit amazed at how much these URL shorteners have caught on.

I've started to see them used in email sent internally by Corporate folks at my company, as links to press releases on our own website.
Microsoft has economic incentive to stay competitive on many fronts. I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, to make their browser more standards compliant, and to substantially improve security. It makes no strategic or tactical sense for them to do otherwise -- to improve the browser is not to make the desktop less attractive.
Unit tests are indeed productivity tools. You'd be surprised at how many stupid little errors you can catch by running tests. In fact, I would argue that unit tests improve code quality more because they give you more time to focus on the big picture without having to worry about stupid things breaking all the time.
Sure, but we already had the phrase "raises the question", and now we've lost a useful phrase to describe a logical fallacy.
Think carefully about how much work this was to implement (well) and reconsider whether you think it could have been one person's 20% project.
I say that people still care about 'quality' and know what high-quality products are (from a designer's POV). But consumers care about products which produce high quality FOR THEIR USES. Flip phones produce good YouTube videos for instance with great form factor - if that's what a consumer cares about, they should go for it!
I was in Death Valley a few weeks ago and I was surprised to find it wasn't all that big, or all that isolated. Heck, most of it is within 100 miles of Las Vegas (and more importantly, it's all within about 70 miles of the McDonald's in Pahrump NV on one side and Lone Pine CA on the other).

(I guess coming from Australia I might have different standards of "big" and "isolated" though.)
Thank you to whomever submitted

http://codoba.net/subpixel/d7310672eaf7b31ad711df9b83510c00....

I think you might have found a bug.
Out of curiosity, is there a specific reason why people still recommend QuickSilver over Google Quick Search Box?
OK, so I guess the slight differences are exaggerated by the font hinting. But the printer, being much higher resolution, can show the similar font shapes more clearly. Cool.
There is more info about that here
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/stories/2003/02/17/aPrescript...
37Signals pokes fun at ridiculous valuations
Although I already use Quicksilver, this article does absolutely nothing to convince me I should use Quicksilver instead of Spotlight. The one benefit it mentions — quicker access to applications — is something that Spotlight does very well.
Direct link to Blacktree's Quicksilver download page:

http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver

Two versions are listed. Does anyone know the difference between them, other than that one is updated for Snow Leopard?
Unix Holidays
Do not forget to post here when the book is released. I will be sure to buy it by then.
But if that's the case, isn't that likely because they have internal applications that are IE only? It seems more like a marketing thing--Overcome people's inhibitions by letting them feel like they "only" installed a plugin and are still running IE.
Despite Rumors, Twitter Is Not Moving To New York
Add drupal.org on there to get a different idea. I would say that there is less money in custom web development so there is less interest in the tools all together.
If I were hosting a SaaS offering that was Javascript-heavy, I might deploy the site in such a way that IE users were prompted to download the Chrome plugin, thereby allowing my app to run at a tolerable speed.

We recently gave up on GWT at work for precisely the reason that IE6 and friends are waaaay too slow to do anything meaningful in GWT. Had we had this option we might have stuck with GWT instead of rewriting in Flex.
The original article is from a Russian on-line IT site. You would not expect an indepth coverage on all the feeds and speeds in an article like that. Typically you would see a statement of benefit just like they said going from 4-6 hours to do financial month close to 10-11 minutes. If you are running this company or you got paid to install this system, this is a big deal; joins as nested loops no so much.
Most 1C installations of any size run on Microsoft SQL Server so it is not unreasonable to assume that that is what this customer migrated from but there is no guarantee.
One of the things I like about the TDD experience is it assumes you're not a 'strong enough programmer' and works with your failings. If you're the perfect OO programmer who has memorized all APIs, TDD is worthless, because you can just bang out code the first time correctly. If you write perfect code, why bother exercising your code first in tests when you write it correctly the first time, every time?

For me, it helps. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it will help you too.

If you haven't tried TDD, I'd recommend attempting it at least once, maybe try running through a simple problem with a partner or at a coding dojo.
"As for Joel’s consistent dismissal of unit testing, he’s just wrong about that. Unit testing (done TDD style) does not slow you down, it speeds you up."

One assertion counters another. Joel is wrong because "Uncle" Bob says so. Why do TDD zealots sound like religious preachers?

No harm writing unit tests. They serve well for (a certain amount of) regression testing. The whole Test Driven approach to designing software is more dubious (but wildly endorsed by the Agile consultant crowd).

More sober developers seem to disagree.

From Coders at Work

"Seibel: What about the idea of using tests to drive design?

Norvig: I see tests more as a way of correcting errors rather than as a way of design. This extreme approach of saying, “Well, the first thing you do is write a test that says I get the right answer at the end,” and then you run it
and see that it fails, and then you say, “What do I need next?”—that doesn’t seem like the right way to design something to me."
Ah, yes, the "I don't have to write tests because I'm perfect" school of programming.

1) You aren't perfect.

2) Your coworkers aren't perfect.

3) Your "abstractions" are still code that can have errors in it

Also, you are misunderstanding the argument that TDD speeds you up. Yes, at the micro level it may take a bit more time. But, as the system grows, your ability to add or change functionality without breaking things increases when you have tests to verify that it is still correct. (Also, automated testing is much, much faster than manual testing.)
What does your taste in music say about your personality?