skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Think of the potentially cool sites that were ruined by a poor launch day performance. The Google/Monopoly mashup of a few months ago is the best example I can think of recently. They launched, the servers crashed and burned from the load, and by the time they were fully operational (almost a week), no one was interested any more.

You would have to know your competition is going to be launched with a bare-bones setup, or at least that they have a considerably lower estimate of their launch users than you do. At that point, make sure your users know about the competition, and go down right when it launches. No guarantee it will work, and if they manage to weather the beating from increased users you will probably lose quite a few, but there is the potential...
Fair points, I guess I should have said "Personalized" cross sell or upsell. I'd love a borders bar code scanning app so I could see if a book was well rated without having to go to amazon, or to get a "people who like this..." message based on a selection. Those ideas are just the start. I think the startup ethos could be applied pretty heavily to the world of retail, especially as more and more people are carrying around personal computers.
This year’s laptop and PC lines are touch-gasmic… but why?
Everyone freaks the heck out when Github is down. If you're looking for a github-hosted project, I guess that makes sense. But I don't know if most folks realize, if github were to vanish today, you and your friends could quickly and easily continue to work. One of the big value propositions of Git, that GitHub provides as a feature, is flexible configurations for sharing code. Github never locks you in. You just change your remote addresses and continue working like nothing changed.

So many people I talk to seem to believe that Git is kind of like SVN but with better local branching, but it's really not like that at all. Sometimes I joke that GitHub should make people pass a written test on git before being allowed to open private accounts, because so few people seem to know how the system actually works.

Now, I suppose if you depended on the GitHub UI or put files into github's wiki or filestore that you didn't back up somehow, that'd be problematic. But that's also your fault for not having a bit of redundancy.
For context I run pinboard.in, a bookmarking site.

1. Using PHP rather than Rails or Django. It meant having to hand-code simple things like form handling, but resulted in a peppy site that can handle sudden spikes in traffic. The initial investment in writing boilerplate and laying out the code has really paid off now that I need to tune and add features.

2. Sphinx. Made the site searchable with minimal configuration, and allowed me to move certain queries out of MySQL without having to set up caching. It's nice to have caching as a luxury to make the site even snappier, rather than an essential prerequisite for usability.

People have to pay to use our site, and the main thing that sets us apart from our many free competitors is speed, speed, speed. That fact has loomed large over our technical choices.
The article in my opinion does not say much, but the following paragraph caught my attention:

>>"In the end, the best way to test whether you have a ‘must have’ product is to threaten to take the prototype away from your early users," says Rakowski. "If they don’t riot, start again."<<

Is this really doable? How can you threaten to take the prototype away?
This is half answer/half tangent, but I like http://www.google.com/codesearch a lot for browsing and reading code. A fun thing to do is to look at how others implement something you want to implement, or use some library you want to use. You end up finding a lot of different ways of doing the same thing, and if you find something that you want to explore more, it's easy to browse around.
Someone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the technology exists in a touchpad form yet. Because the pad would have to be able to recognize 10 simulatneous touches.

That said, it's not impossible. Look at this demo using Microsoft's WPF: http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2008/01/23/Minority-Report...

If you take what he's doing but mount the Wii remote under a desk with a clear screen above it. I believe that would give you what you'd need to duplicate the 10/GUI interface.
My iPhone stops charging when it's full. (I'm going to buy a killawatt and prove it soon)
The eBay economy for Google Wave invitations has been pretty healthy
I'm sorry, I meant "lower", not "higher" (less chaos).
These are links to the Chromium project, which is the open source version of the Google Chrome Web Browser. These builds run on Linux.

Am I missing something?
Actually Dyson usually rates far higher in consumer tests than bagged vacuums, and it usually rates slightly higher than most bag-less vacuums.

Vacuum ratings are generally low to begin with, yet still get purchased. All portable vacuum cleaners fall flat on their face in terms of convenience compared with central vac, however not many people are stupid enough to pay thousands of dollars for a slight improvement in convenience.
from solidot (Slashdot in Chinese)

http://linux.solidot.org/linux/09/10/13/0921225.shtml

via Chinese Ubuntu forum

http://forum.ubuntu.org.cn/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=231866

Screenshot by a blogger:

http://li2z.cn/2009/10/13/chrome-os/
How about the Nokia N900? It's a fully open Linux phone made by a company with a lot of resources (and the need to push the platform, in light of Symbian's failure to live up to expectations).

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900
It's the same effect, but it's useful to distinguish between the good effects of expectations, and the bad effects of expectations. Your complaint is not one of science, but of semantics.
Obviously there needs to be a clear process to reclaim an incorrectly flagged account... But maybe you also should post barely obfuscated links to malware on Twitter.
Yes, Chrome browser for Linux is:

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/

And Chrome OS's URL is

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux-chromeos/

A screenshot shows the string "Chrome OS" on a tab:

http://forum.ubuntu.org.cn/download/file.php?id=80451&mo...
I saw this yesterday. It certainly seems official. I've got no idea how to get it booted in virtualbox though.
Looks promising. You might want to add a "Loading" splash screen (The first load of your app takes awhile on my old computer). Also, when I try to load an .NET assembly, I click "My Computer" and none of the drives appear.
The Linux kernel: http://miller.cs.wm.edu/
I find public waves to be too much like a message board, but harder to follow.
Any ideas on cost?
The basic idea of having a second touchscreen that matches the first is an obvious one to anyone who has thought about the problem for a few minutes, and presenting it as something innovative is pretty laughable, especially as it doesn't mention nor address the biggest problem with the idea, which is the lack of physical feedback, something a traditional keyboard and mouse combo is extremely good at. If the idea is to solely replace the mouse, then you either have to reduce the size and therefore reduce the accuracy compared to a mouse, and I don't think that's a poor trade-off as it makes many tasks harder (from painting to even using icons), or move the keyboard into an uncomfortable position, which also isn't a good tradeoff as many tasks are much quicker when you're able to use your keyboard and therefore your muscle memory.

I'm also far from convinced by the GUI mock-up.

A taskbar or dock isn't visible at all times, and this is huge step backwards. Having to scroll left/right or use a gesture every time to switch applications will get tedious extremely quickly, and there's no flexibility in how you use your windows which may preclude certain tasks. I also think the author overstates the 'sorting through the pile' problem, especially since you generally know where your window is in the taskbar/dock, and various ways to mitigate the issue already exist (most notably Expose and live thumbnails).

I also think the 'menu' paradigm is something that OSes should be getting away from, let alone touch-based OSes where a Microsoft-style Ribbon would work wonders, so I can't help but splutter about the idea of a mass of menus hidden away. In addition, their implementation makes worse an OS X-ism, which is hiding menu items before the window is active, only in this case hiding it until you've pressed a magic button. We have big screens and plenty of resolution these days, there's no excuse for hiding things away.
Agreed, one of the malls near me has it . . . however they then go and have a push door on the men's lavatory, which is just asinine.

It works amazingly well though, especially compared to a traditional hand dryer, in that you can actually feel it push the water off your hands.
I'm the original author of this. And just to clarify a few points:

1. This really happened.
2. It was done on purpose by the owner.
3. They did normally close one day per year for repaving/repairs...and Wendy's did announce their grand opening well in advance.

Thanks,

Andy Swan
You may be right there....I don't know if you could park a block away and walk into the McD's that day, but I do know no one would lol :)
I highly recommend the Stanford GraphBase, written by Donald Knuth. It's C code written by Knuth using the literate programming tool CWEB. If you don't know about CWEB, it's not hard to learn how to use, and probably is already installed on your system if you have TeX. The Stanford GraphBase is available for free download on Knuth's web-site, and also comes bound in a nice paperback book, that was reprinted in 2009. Knuth also makes available many other programs written using CWEB on his web-site, but I would start with the GraphBase.
Just spray propane into the air intake in the base and light up the air outlet in the fan apparatus . . . I'm sure it would be safe.
He said "optimizing a car to hit a rock wall." Believe me, if your car was optimized for hitting rock walls, it would look very different than it does now.
http://nakedobjects.org/
http://code.google.com/p/piccolo2d/
I suppose I'll have to download and install to be sure, but it really looks like a version of the Chrome Browser, which is designed to run on the new Chrome OS.

That said, looking at the Screenshot, I can see some "OS" like features, such as the clock, or maybe a button in the browser which launches other applications..

I think I see why they're calling the OS Chrome. It's not that they're re-using the name, they're just adding basic windowing and app launching to the Chrome Browser.

If you ran it "Chromeless" (Ie, without the Gnome dock, etc), you could use this as a.. Sort-of OS.

That's very much not what I had imagined for a "Chrome OS", which would be much more like the fake demo video we say on Techcrunch a few weeks ago, but this would be a very Easy project to put together.
Whether it does or not doesn't change the fact that pro-microsoft sites and, apparently, microsoft employees are trying to deflect attention from the sidekick incident by digging up and publicizing an obscure bug in OS X. Crying "b..b..b..but Apple!" when faced with bad press rather than owning what happened might make microsoft fans feel better, but at the price of further alienating developers who see through the transparent charade.
Django's code is well written, and very well documented.
Or see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877535
I agree, thanks for your reply.
Just put propane into the air intake and light the exhaust, instant afterburner . . . possibly instant death too if you sit on the wrong side of it, or if you set your propane tank on fire.
Scrolling alone already had decreased a lot of tension in my arms. 10/GUI would probably have great effect on RSI reduction.

It is amazing how intuitive touch can be. I just love the multi-touch on the touchpad that Ubuntu for example supports. I never knew my old Thinkpad T43 would be able to do it but it does.
Geocities - "Under Construction" gif archive
MercuryMover is another $20 add-on.
I know this isn't news, the news would be that they're taking Geocities offline, but I thought this animated gif "Under Construction" archive was hilarious.
Just because the product is big doesn't mean its a monolithic codebase. Amazon is powered by a lot of different pieces. Decoupling let's you keep the pieces small and yet grow and scale to huge sizes.
Well, do you know the basics? HTML and CSS? Pretty much all the custom buttons, menus, etc you see are just clever HTML and CSS, with some well placed images.

Are you asking how to design a button in, say, a graphics program? Or are you asking how to turn an anchor into a fancy looking button using CSS?
http://httpd.apache.org and http://jboss.org and http://lxr.linux.no
This article embodies what I hate about the Agile / TDD crowd. They have a bunch of good ideas that appear to be helpful in their problem domain(s). But then they make these grand pronouncements as if their problem domain represented all of programming.

It's particularly bad here because in the process of telling every programmer with a different problem domain that they don't know what they're doing, he appears to concede that dynamic languages are not good for handling big projects...
I'm not sure how good this would work. At least, the front of the touch screen would need to be pretty sturdy, if I consider the violence if my mouse movements sometimes. Also, I am not sure how one would want to replicate fully used 8-button-mouses :)
One of the things that made OpenMoko's FreeRunner interesting was that it was also an open hardware platform - all parts used had publicly available documentation, there was a debug port with direct access to all low-level hardware, and effort was made to make it hardware-hacker friendly. The N900 looks nice, but it's not near as open as the FreeRunner.
Thanks for the splash screen suggestion.

The open file dialog bug sounds odd. Does it repeatedly do this? What OS are you running?

Thanks for trying it out
Ah man I wish I'd seen this when you wrote it. I think this is great break down of the personalities of sales people. There are different types, and they have different skills sets as you so eloquently pointed out. I think, if I may interpret a little, what your saying is you need all three, or at least a mixed bag. You can't use the 3rd to steal contracts away from big customers because building trust takes a long time. If it is time sensitive the lion is important. But, remember everybody's got lions. They aren't unique. If you want to keep that business you need one of the other two because customers won't jump ship because they trust the other type of sales person.
I wouldn't plan on saying Goodbye anytime soon. Right now about 20% of users still use a browser that's 8 years old. So if we add that to the roughly 2 or so years it will take for the HTML 5 standard to be finalized and implemented in browsers you're looking at about a decade or more before we have a widespread HTML 5 user base.

There is one potential savior and ironically its a plug in. Namely Chrome Frame. If Google continues to update it and aggresively push it we might see HTML 5 use much earlier. But that still depends on the success of Chrome Frame eclipsing that of Flash.

Otherwise Flash is still the most widespread solution for RIA based pages and will be for a long time to come.
FINRA Proposes Sweeping New Disclosures for Mutual Funds and Broker-Dealers
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but you could take the contrarian approach and spend time learning Cappuccino, which abstracts a lot of the archaic and difficult web UI principles away.

Web UI is difficult to define (there is no standard, but there are a bunch of competing standards) - and from a RAD perspective it's behind where the desktop was 10 years ago.

You may also get some benefit from looking into web frameworks such as Catalyst (if you know Perl), or Django or Rails (for Python and Ruby respectively). Examples for those frameworks really are very good walkthrus of creating a webapp.
about 600$ - phone is available for pre-order on amazon.

Nokia N900 Unlocked Cell Phone/Mobile Computer with 3.5-Inch Touch Screen, QWERTY, 5 MP Camera, Maemo Browser, 32 GB--U.S. Version with Full Warranty by Nokia
This has nothing to do with the cell phone, nut with the charger. Even if the phone stops drawing current, old-style transformer based chargers still draw power from the grid. Newer switching power supplies do not - at all, as the link above [1] showed.

[1] http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/charger/
That's great. But I want it:

A) without the stupid pad. I want to have two wristbands (they would look like a wristwatch band) for each hand that would pick up muscle movement when I press/move my fingers and translate that to the equivalent of the pad, but I can use it with my hands resting on my lap, for example.

B) the left / right margins are great, but make the bottom pull up a keyboard layout so I can type, and the top margin pull up a keychord/movement assistant so that I can type whole words/sentences with combinations of movements.
Another way to test would be to use survey.io:
http://startup-marketing.com/free-customer-development-help-...
You know, I think you've pegged it. Keeping it in my head is probably the main factor.

I write down lots of thoughts and tiny tasks in a notebook as I'm working, and check off the tasks as I go, but that's not really setting up for context-switching. When I'm writing code, I'm following inspiration: playing out the idea in my head, or rather, using the act of writing code to cause the idea to become clarified and completed. While ramping up and while coding, the idea is taking shape.

Maintaining notes designed to enable context-switching sounds like something I could try. This is probably the key. This would enable working in smaller chunks of time, too.

Weird: Right at this moment, the thought terrifies me. I wonder if I'd have to completely change my creative process to make such notes.

Hmm.
Good point, thanks for chiming in.

While they do resemble other forums, the drag and drop connections, and potential utility addins, as well as lightning fast search are drop dead sexy.

I can't normally think up a new tool for a forum I hang out on, and have them host it.

It's a distributal protocol. We can host our own servers which may require search like status propagation. I wrote it up not too long ago, but messages like "hey have you seen this string?" would aid decentralized search.
May I suggest looking at dojo http://www.dojotoolkit.org/.

It provides prestyled controls with some themeing built in. You will still need to know some html and css but you can get calendars, dialogs, tabs, accordions etc very easily.
You've been downvoted, so I thought I'd provide this feedback.

1. So far, this is the best post for this submission. Seriously, what was the point of submitting this? A blog post by someone talking about why it went down, how to avoid it, blah blah blah, I'd understand. But a point of fact?
2. "Everyone freaks out...". Yeah, normally I'd downvote this too. Does everyone? Do most people? Do most people that use github? I doubt that any of those questions can be truthfully answered 'yes'
3. "but that's also your fault..." Really? I'm expected to mirror github's wiki? If I were hosting a f/oss project there, and using the wiki, I doubt I would. I wouldn't 'freak out' but I can easily imagine circumstances where I'd be annoyed or concerned or embarrassed.

TK;DR: the interesting info in your post is hindered by the attempts to score conversational points. Otherwise, good post.
Here's another idea: Instead of getting good at context-switching, are there ways to set up your life so you get to stay focused (and still pay the rent)?
Damn, now I have MDFMK's "Torpedoes" stuck in my head.
if our changing habits were coupled with our buying, lobbying and voting behavior, then it would have a significant effect. furthermore, the culture and ethics we instill today will be in charge of corporations in a few decades.
10 finger Synaptic multi-touch screen announced
July 22nd, 2009
http://wmpoweruser.com/?p=5973
Any recommendations for php? I wrote a php/mysql web application for SaaS customers. I am looking at ways to improve performance/cache/error handling or simply write a better code.
For systems programming, I've learned a lot from reading the source for open solaris: http://src.opensolaris.org/source/

And the LLVM compiler is far more understandable than gcc sources: http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project/llvm/
I agree with you but, what is your point?
Your compiler's source code. That should shake your confidence in the world.
No. It's a build of Chromium for Chrome OS.

(Chromium is the open source version of Google Chrome, Google's web browser.)
I guess they gave up on fighting that uphill battle, eh?

:D

It's no loss... it's just Java. Old... creaky... and why are we still using it again? (Oh, right -- for the progress-averse developers.)
Brk - I'm not commenting as a third person and I'm sorry that you didn't like the video, which most people like. The site is an honest attempt to help entrepreneurs meet real angel investors.
I agree with this, and along the same thought, OpenBSD (or any BSDs really, but OpenBSD tends to favor simpler implementations) source is very clear and concise.
Well, obviously there are. I had that when I was an employee a few times. A friend of mine is studying organ in a master's program. She practices organ 2-4 hours a day, early every morning. She spends a month or two (or more) getting good at a really hard piece, really getting to know it, mastering it. I envy the day-to-day continuity that she has. Other stuff during the day is OK, like easy classes, but not something else that occupies the subconscious "workspace".

Could that day-to-day continuity be achieved in a scientific/mathematical grad program? In a solo business?
this sounds more feasible than any other plan i've seen proposed. having the owner also be an investor/backer or having an available network of angels that prospective hackers can apply to in order to get "rent funding".
I haven't perused it myself, but every time I see this question posed, someone always mentions Lua: http://www.lua.org/ftp/

Similar previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225577

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/26dyh/ask_reddi...
TeXmacs

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/download/sources.en.html
It's also a maintenance nightmare. A LOT of that code is terrible, there's a lot of tight coupling, and a heavy reliance on developers with pagers to keep the mess operating.

There's a reason that they have such insane turnover so few people who stick around after they collect their signing bonuses...
With a headline Like That It's Pretty Easy To Spot Low Quality!

I'd be interested to know if you write letters/emails/IM's with every word capitalised. It's the easiest way to look quite silly.
Oracle OpenWorld - Interview with Andy Oehler
Ask HN: Do you buy related domains early on (.net, .org, similar spellings)?
When you buy a domain do you buy a lot of related domains (.net, .org and other similar sounding names).

I assume there's a chance that a competitor could buy these and take some traffic from mispellings, etc.

But if you don't know how successful your app is going to be, this can be a lot of upfront expense.
He said "from scratch", and Cappuccino will not teach him anything about the web, but about how Cappuccino sees the web or thinks it aught to be.

Catalyst, Django and Rails will only teach you about themselves and how they do things. A cleaner and quicker approach to the web, its protocols and standards, would be by creating a modern app using CGI and struggling with it every step of the way.
Notes from Startup Bootcamp
Tips For Taking Care of Diabetic Feet