skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dont Name Classes Object Manager Handler Or Data
It must be noted that Dropbox solves a problem that Microsoft has been trying to solve for decades. Ever since the MS DOS LAN Manager, MSFT has been working on a file synchronization and sharing solution (and they are only beginning to tackle the synchronization part).

SMB, Microsoft Groove, SharePoint, SkyDrive (aka LiveDrive), LiveMesh, Windows LiveSync (aka Folder Share), SyncToy, and even Briefcase, are different attempts at solving the same problem.

Still, my Mac and my Windows 7 PC sitting on the same desk won't talk to each other and Dropbox is the only thing that works.
To me, it suggests Google's competitive strategy is having exactly the desired effect.

Android and Chrome are not Google's core business. I do not believe they truly expect to take the lion's share of the OS market from Microsoft.

However, Ballmer is obviously spending a lot of time thinking about them. By forcing Microsoft to focus on defending their core product, they are distracting them from attacking in new markets. Resources focused on defending Windows are resources not spent on competing with Google search, for example.

Joel describes the general idea here:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
How is giving consumers more for less an abuse of power?
Has Ballmer lost a finger? For safari+chrome to be a rounding error you have to be using a single digit of precision in a number base lower than 10.
In response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850380
It might be true the best team only has 28% chance of winning the World Cup. Though, we should know that it leaves only 72% chance for the rest of the 31 teams to win, and they are not uniform. So maybe 28% for the best team, 20% for the 2nd best, 12% for the 3rd best, etc., which sounds fair to me.

There are 32 teams playing the World Cup, if one of them is a 1:3.5 dog, they have a pretty DAMN GOOD chance. The betting odd is usually sth like 1:4 or 1:5, I think.

More importantly, the team which wins is the better team, by definition. It is a question whether they can perform consistently in a series of matches with the correct strategy each time, whether they can adapt to changes, whether they are focused at the important moments. Certainly there will be luck and drama, but the team which plays better (for most of the match duration) wins much more often than that number 28% tells you.

Look at professional poker. You can for sure say that there is more luck involved, but times and again the familiar faces show up at the final tables.
The Myth of Crowdsourcing
The Infinite To-do List
A comparison between sIFR, Cufon and @font-face
Not directly related to the article, but still on topic:

Does anyone else have an opinion about this practice of putting a skeleton project inside a packaged app as Simon is doing with most of his apps?

I ask because I've been moving towards making the apps as novice friendly as possible - that is, including some pretty comprehensive views and templates in the app rather than a project. But in the back of my head, I'm always thinking, "who is this novice developer I'm packaging this for anyway?"

Simon's method appeals to me in terms of slim app code, but it's quite a different approach from what I've been doing.
MMS fix for original iPhone
Here's a fix to make MMS receiving better for the original iPhone.
Please tell me this (the first result in Bing) is a different Dorothy Deering :-)

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/directory/Faculty/Deering%...
Explanation, please, with more detail? I've just been reading Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution Is True, and that doesn't sound like a mechanism of natural selection I've seen proposed in any writing by a professional evolutionary scientist. But maybe I'll have a better understanding of what you are saying if you show more steps of your reasoning.
very sensible too. The point is that Sharepoint is designed to colonise the organisation without the IT department knowing. You don't have top bean open source fanatic to see the danger in this. I'm happy to use Microsoft products, but you have to make sure you know where your dependencies are. Google is a super power and I'm wary of it, but as it fights to push Microsoft into second place it can open up some previously closed technology. That is good for us all - even Microsoft and its reluctant embrace of interoperability
The NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball do exactly that. They eliminate with multi-game playoffs.

Or do you mean soccer's intensity is like American Football, in that it is just too physically demanding to play that many games?
There is a separate minimum wage for servers. Last time I saw it (years ago) it was like $2.75USD
also, clicker seems to be getting a lot more publicity. this is obvious considering they have more money, PR people, or whatever, but you should work on some basic attempts to get your name out there. why aren't you on crunchbase? googling "set jam" sends me to a website on proper handling of cherry jam. The way to win against the gorilla is to use your position as a PR move and write to dozens of blogs, forums, and newspapers (even those old things on the tree-based substances are still read, especially when content is placed online).

You are definitely facing unbalanced competition, the way to beat the bogeyman is to enhance your product's value proposition and use every opportunity for free PR

edit: I do understand the company is called "setjam" not "set jam" but, I imagine many others do not
Evolution of MS Windows..
If their market shares are rounding errors, MS's market cap is a dropped decimal. :-)
Silly question. Progress will happen.
This looks interesting, although honestly I have never needed integration between the WM and Emacs. (The WM gets s-, emacs gets C- and M-.)

I do have one rant:

WORKING: Custom CLOS GUI widget toolkit with minimalistic (but themeable) appearance.

Just what CL needs -- another half-completed library that duplicates 15 other libraries. This is why I finally gave up on CL, to write even the simplest program involves ages of unproductive yak shaving.

Edit: I have one more rant:

The "M-" things above are supposed to be <key>-<star>, but it seems impossible to have a literal * in HN comments. (Unless of course it's far away from other <star> characters, like the one above. Sigh!)
So you're saying your mind isn't blown? Hmm, might have to start shaving my head...
Cervical cancer vaccinations postponed
Public health officials struggled to reassure parents and keep the cervical cancer vaccination programme on track today as some NHS authorities and schools took the decision to postpone immunisation sessions for a day or two, following the death of 14-year-old Natalie Morton in Coventry.
Google Issues Cease & Desist to Open Source Android Developer
Hard not to feel a little schadenfreude over how Apple products don't always "just work"
It's not a common perspective on evolution, to my knowledge. That's why I submitted it to the discussion by brighter minds than my own. Don't you think the group as the last in a succession of units of evolution (gene, cell, multi-cellular organism, vertebrate, primate, group of primates?) is a plausible - even if not much debated yet - conjecture? Research has shown the existence of mirror neurons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron) in our brain - which I interpret as humans being hardwired to function as a group. It could explain depression, for example.
No objection to the usability assertions, but there's a huge problem with this idea that Craigslist will now always control the classifieds market no matter what they charge. This meme has caught on recently and it's time for it to die. It's not Craigslist's responsibility to provide journalism or to use their large size to extract profit and solve the world's problems.

If Craigslist charged $1, users would immediately flee to any new competing sites that only charged for job and real estate listings, just like Craigslist does now. Then Seth Godin and Joel Spolsky could complain about those sites' margins instead, and those sites could take those complaints all the way to the bank.
Not being at fault legally does not mean your actions (or lack thereof) were not contributory to the accident occurring. There are a heck of a lot of ways you can increase the risk of being involved in an accident while avoiding legal fault; by contrast "defensive driving" exists as a discipline for doing the opposite.
Dell Claims "Thinnest & Lightest" 16in Crown with Latitude Z600
Dell is all aflutter today in announcing its latest thin and light laptop, the Latitude Z600. Following along similar lines to the company's much sought after Adamo, the Latitude Z range looks to create a very high-end option for business users.
It's amazing how much money rich organizations can waste, and how much time they can spend on the wasting.

They can get tempted to reinvent a better wheel for $$$, rather than reusing existing wheels for cheap; then they get sucked into a time/money sink of epic proportions while the simpler solution grows like a weed.

Not what always happens, but what can happen.
The American Way of Dentistry: Why does it cost so much?
Hence, why I made the original suggestion - anyone else we can coax into a meet up?
$8MM is a lot of money but that doesn't mean it will be spent wisely. During the dot-com days I worked for a company that had $30MM in funding and pissed every cent of it away.
Anyway you can make a page for Startup Bootcamp?
then Squidoo will come out with a 0.25/post model and eat away at the Craigslist model :) nice try, though :P
Ask the court.
Hah! Yeah, I made this for myself to make things a little simpler, and then other people started loving it too. Figured I'd share.
Waterloo students behind new startup boom
I can't wait to try it. But whenever I followed the instructions in those text messages they never worked. I hope this does. Also do I get charged for those?
Also, please offer feedback. Can it get any simpler? :D
I think AT&T charges for MMS text messages the same as any other message.
Though you can do like I did. Call to cancel cable, and they reduce it by half bringing your total package of cable/internet to a more reasonable price. I guess they have a greater fear of showing declining subscribers than sticking to their (outrageous) price.
There's probably not much "reason" behind the Chrome/Android split. It's likely that they were both once someone's 20% project, and simply bubbled up through different portions of the infrastructure.
Well, true... but it's still an incentive that is normally reserved for new customers. My point being that customer retention is something that companies take seriously.

It worked out well for me, since I had watched 4 seasons of a show via Netflix over the summer, and season 5 had just started (and is now over) on Showtime. When it expires, I won't miss it, but I thought it was a nice gesture.
Zune HD features Apple should steal
I think this is at the root of what really bugs (some) U.S. Americans about soccer, but they are unable to express it.

Sports popular in the U.S. almost seem designed to allow for statistical analysis. Baseball is the ultimate game for a statistician, as you have data for every single pitch thrown and the outcome. American Football breaks the game down into series of discrete events (downs) each of which has a numerical outcomes (yards gained or lost). Basketball generates 10s of events every game with a definite outcome that can generally be assigned to a single player (shot made, missed, turnover, free throw, rebound, etc.).

All of this gives fans ways to analyze and rank individual players and teams in a fairly objective way. Thus, the immense popularity of fantasy leagues.

Soccer is inherently more subjective, as there are far fewer events with an objective outcome. With scoring a rare event, and no obvious ways to assign numerical values to all the things that happen between scoring chances, subjective analysis is all that's available.

Which ties back into the original article in that freak occurrences and dumb luck can have a much larger impact in soccer. One team can play much better for most of the game, but a freak goal, controversial call or uncharacteristic error can have an outsize impact in a low scoring affair. This is mitigated in the round robin format rounds with accumulated wins and points, but is very much a factor in one-and-done games.

I believe I read before that at one time even the final round was a multi team affair, with the champion determined by cumulative totals against the other teams, but it was done away with because fans wanted a definitive championship match between just two teams.
I'm the author and submitter of the article, and I'd honestly love to hear what people think about this. I know there's a lot of (understandable) disdain for PHP, but I think you can do some neat things with it. This is one application that I've found particularly useful and wanted to share it.
How do you know this?

I don't know how the participant to whom you are replying knows what his post reported, but concern about suicide is definitely one of the motivations for urging more treatment for depression. An organization for suicide prevention

http://www.save.org/

puts up billboards in my town to remind family members to have their depressed relatives treated for depression, saying that untreated depression is the main risk factor for suicide. That factual statement is correct, as I can verify from having read many books by psychologists or medical doctors about mood disorders. I got into this reading back in the 1990s as part of studying suicide risk in different cultures,

http://learninfreedom.org/suicide.html

and research on this issue continues to be replicated across many studies with different investigators in different places.

You ask about one category of medicines, the SSRI medicines commonly prescribed as antidepressants. They do have a genuine risk of INCREASING rather than decreasing suicidal behavior in some patients, now recognized in their prescriber labeling. The Goodwin and Jamison textbook

http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...

details the research on this issue over many pages with lots of footnotes to primary research papers in peer-reviewed journals. My overall impression of the mechanism for increased suicide risk upon SSRI treatment for depression is that some depressed patients go from thinking that there is nothing they can do to thinking that the one thing they can do is to harm themselves. That's why I follow Goodwin and Jamison in thinking that for most depressed patients whose history of mood variation is poorly known, the best initial treatment is a mood-stabilizing medicine (such as lithium, carbamazepine, divalproex, or lamotrigine) rather than an SSRI medicine. But I am not a physician, and I urge persons who are concerned about their depressed moods to check with a physician who has clinical experience with depressed patients to be evaluated for what might or might not be at issue.
An $8 million gorilla only matters to the extent that you are a monkey.

You're not a monkey, so I don't know what you're doing defining yourself in reference to a gorilla. Probably not "a lot of good".
It's called football not soccer.
Cracking Open the SharePoint Fortress
in the US, yes, many airlines are installing it now.

outside of US picture is much grimmer though :( (by outside I mean both International Airspace as well as other countries).
100 Best iPhone Apps for Business Students
As popular as iPhones are, there are countless applications available for business students and professionals. Some are useless, some are fabulous, but these are the best.
From what I can tell, this is ATT's fault.
I believe it is probably a different one, yes. Try "Dorothy Deering SFWA".

What an unfortunate naming collision for poor Professor Deering.
- "In fact, Skinner and Freeman have carried out an extensive statistical analysis of the scores at the last World Cup. They point out that if the outcomes of games were a true reflection of the teams' abilities, then the situation "Team A beats Team B beats Team C which beats Team A" should never occur. They call this an intransitive triplet."

The outcome of the game is never meant to be a "true reflection" of the teams' abilities, but a reflection of their ability against that side, on that day, in those conditions. A round-robin style tournament is used to have a team playing different opponents, a mix of different styles. Central attacking sides. Defense and counter-attack. Wide open matches. Closed central movement. Teams alter their strategy against specific opponents and try to find holes in their game and exploit an edge.

This seems like a problem with the statistical model, not with the sport, because "A > B > C > A" is possible in a team sport, and not just because of a luck factor. One team may have strengths that exploit certain weaknesses in other teams. That are uncountable examples - Team A lacks fitness and is weaker in the last 20 minutes; but this will only be exploited by a team who have a high fitness level. Team B has as weak left wing, but this will only be exploited by a team with a strong right winger. The list goes on.
But what do rats use the 5HT1A receptor for? Assuming that we humans do in fact use it for rumination, are they doing the rat equivalent?

Do they... ponder?
I think he initially did believe the community would pick up TDD, clearly he changed his mind.
Thank you. I read a PDF of the translation (I think - only 33 pages). I'm going to have to read it several times again but I kind of grasp that the important points are: there is no one set way to approach sword-fighting (and life), practice always practice.

In case you read this, thanks again for spurring me to read this and what does the 'Book of Five Rings' mean to you?
Bit of a straw man. "Crowdsourcing" per se is the idea of capturing and combining the individual contributions of many different people to produce an aggregate result that is far greater than any individual contribution. More specifically, it entails the idea that the barrier to contribution is very low, i.e. if someone only wants to make a very modest contribution - say, changing a misspelled possessive "it's" to "its" in a Wikipedi article - their small contribution can still be captured.

In contrast, a more corporate collaboration model requires that every employee puts in a roughly equivalent level of contribution, which raises the barrier to entry too high for people who only want to make one small change.

Wikipedia would be much smaller without the dedication of page curators; but it would also be much smaller (and more error-ridden) without the myriad small contributions of low-scale, occasional editors.
oh yes it is about cost!

but the point is - how many people will use paid airphone vs how many people will use paid wifi? wifi is much more ubiquitous, yet lesser margin service.

so will there be net neutrality or heavy censorship on airline wireless networks? ;)
Not contradictory at all, many programmers consult in Java because there's lots of work in big business using Java. However, that doesn't mean the attempt to bring the TDD culture to Java will necessarily work. Java consulting might pay the bills but it became clear that jUnitMax couldn't, wrong culture.
The Courier Files - How MS Thinks You'll Use The Courier
What World of Warcraft can teach you about synergy and profits
Probiotics: Looking Underneath the Yogurt Label
I did not know that the founder/inventor of Kodak film committed suicide. “My work is done. Why wait?”
Soccer is a low scoring game. It's not a "statistical problem", it's a feature.

Treating it as "an experiment to determine which of the teams is the best" is not a good approach. There are a thousand contests in 90 minutes, but probably only two or three of them result in a goal, one of which may be from a penalty anyway.

High scoring games are much better at determining the best team on the day.

I believe that one of the major reasons for soccers massive worldwide spectator popularity is the low scoreline. You watch the game even if your team is obviously outclassed, as you can still win, and you can still win with just a few minutes left in most cases.
There is a grain of truth to this! Another company not listed here, which some friends of mine started, is Enflick (http://www.enflick.com/).

EDIT: For typos.
Apparently you have no memories of how ebay was before they started charging for listings. I have. It wasn't pretty.

When ebay started charging, the howls and cries for boycott were loud and numerous, but fact is, the quality of the listings soared, and ebay's competitors did not profit; instead, they disappeared one by one.
Alcatel Boosts Fiber Speed to 100 Petabits in Lab
Is the term "emerging market" really obsolete?
Reminds me of this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/11/21/9131198...
The Pains of iPhone Ad Hoc Beta Testing
StartupToDo.com - Guides on how to build your startup
"Just Some Kid" : Learning, Growth, Humility
Yeah... the fundamental cost of classified ads isn't zero, but is so close to it that anybody who tries to charge $1 will have trouble with the ones who do it for free. That's the way to think about it, really. Running classified ads for even a medium-sized city is something that quite a lot of us could toss together in a weekend, and with the correct choice of framework, we could get it to scale fairly well in another couple of weekends. There's not much challenge.

And per some conversations from a few months ago about how hard it is to replicate a full site like Stack Overflow, replicating Craigslist from a features point of view really does seem to be pretty easy. What you can't replicate overnight is the ubiquity of Craigslist; the fact that they cover the country, and that everyone, even very non-technical friends of mine, know what it is. Both of these could be overcome if Craigslist started charging too much. (Though if they stay the course I'm not sure how they could be defeated in any reasonable period of time.)
Why published MBA average pay is often misleading
Agreed about the "it just comes to mind" aspect of the site.

I think it really helps that they picked such a great name for the service. It's easy to remember and tell others, and the name describes exactly what it does. I'm sure this has been a factor in the speed at which they're signing on new users.

Dropbox is one of the best examples of great product naming that I can think of.
MMS seems like last decades technology to me.
Surely most iPhone users are emailing pics?

It's nice to have backward compatibility, but I don't think lack of MMS was really that big a deal.
Google is doing this: http://www.dataliberation.org/
From the article:
"So what's my problem? Why does it bug me that people think crowdsourcing is something it is not? Why do I care that people think a crowd is capable of individual virtuosity? What bugs me is that misplaced faith in the crowd is a blow to the image of the heroic inventor. We need to nurture and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail. A false idea of the crowd reduces the motivation for this investment, with the supposition that companies can tap the minds of inventors on the cheap."
MSpot Launches Web-Based Mobile Movie Streaming Service
New Public Data Set: Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset