skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know I've been reasonably immune to this, being based in Australia (where interest rates are on their way back up!), but doing some global research for a speech I have to give next week gives me mixed views about this article.

-True, much of the 'Great Depression' media was hyperbolic speculation

-But, this recession probably will be the worst since the mid 1970s, and since most businesses weren't operating with their current owners back then many mistakes are being repeated due to lack of specific experience

-Green shoots and 'good times' articles are also premature. The bounce in stock markets is only just starting to be seen in the broader economy, and we're hearing this will be followed by a drag phase and then another significant dip before really taking off again (think a W shape)

Some of my colleagues ran a similar presentation in Washington State last week, so if you search Twitter [1] you'll find plenty more thoughts and observations.

[1] http://twitter.com/search?q=%23shirlaws
You're right, it's a sweeping generalization that I probably shouldn't have made. And obviously this is just my opinion.... But I still think it's true.

Sure, plenty of people are making money, but the biggest piece of the B2B media industry is print magazines. And print magazines stink bad enough to wipe out any modest gains in online ad sales for the many companies unlucky enough to be stuck with legacy print pubs. B2B ad pages are down 30% just in the first half of 2009. And that's after a crappy 2008.

I'd love to be proven wrong though :)
The master has passed away, but here is the real deal (tm) in Unix:

http://www.kohala.com/start/

There is nothing more I can say -- I am so in awe...
This book (http://www.unpbook.com) and this book (http://www.kohala.com/start/apue.html) are both very good. Not to mention keeping abreast of new stuff in the Linux Kernel at http://www.lwn.net or http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges.

As productive as dynamic languages make us, I think we sometimes forget that this is all typically built on Linux/C, and that's not changing anytime soon. A _good_ hacker should at least have a basic knowledge of what's under the hood.
Yes. Re-posting content from another content without additional commentary is blogspam.
This is like comparing apples to oranges. Game development is a more specialized industry. This is like comparing OS developers to VB developers. More people do web development, its easier to get into and therefore a lot more people just plain suck. Anyone who is in game development is probably already an above average developer, while an average web developer is, well average.
Chrome's address bar provides the insanely awesome right-click -> "Paste and go" option.
Just for a bit of background - this game has been around for years, used to be at torncity.com, first registered in 2004 it seems.

I used to play way way way back, and it was pretty addictive (to me, although I was like 16). Most of the people paying are literally paying to win, since you get direct benefit in-game by paying (unless it was changed).

It's been through quite a lot including horrible lag and a month-long server fuck up, but I'm glad to see it turn out well for him.
They could try a popup that say "Hey, we just installed a virus on your computer."

That might get them to upgrade too.
You're quite right. I've corrected the title to reflect this.
Here's a few more vague and Hallmark-esque tips: 1) just be yourself; 2) don't do drugs; 3) it's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.

Not to get too snarky, but I was hoping for a little more given the headline.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=NASDAQ%3AAMZN+market+ca...

$1.6 billion sounds like a lot of money, but to put this in context, Amazon's market capitalization is $38.29 billion. That's really pretty good.
Thanks so much for the direct link, and the interesting discussion. I created the image, and I'm having a great time whizzing around the internets reading feedback.

Edit: If you're interested in some of the images that led up to this final: The process can be found at http://vdm3gd.wordpress.com/author/markofcca/
1. You can install whatever you want on your own phone if you first enable developer mode. It's very easy to do.. See the homebrew app scene here: http://www.precentral.net/homebrew-apps

2. Palm hasn't tried to shut down the homebrew scene at all. Actually they have been reaching out to developers of those apps and offering to let them host their apps in the official app store too.

3. Most people are not going to go through the trouble of hacking their phone just to install homebrew apps. They expect their phone to act like a phone, and they don't want to have to buy a virus scanner just to protect their phone from threats. For those users, I think the kid gloves are reasonable.

4. I believe Apple takes a 30% cut from iPhone app sales too.
Also, I think I'm going to hang around here for a while : )
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=605207
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865853

Old, but still a very good read.
Google fastflip: Blindingly fast overviews of headline pages of top newspapers
AIM does just that, albeit they ping you with badges/notifications when you get a message, which wouldn't quite work with calls. But you could always call back, or be "away". Nothing is stopping Skype from making that happen.
His article is all well and good, and I don't blame him for the case of shaudenfreude - but all this talk means nothing until verizon or google actually do something. It's been all talk and no walk from top to bottom.

Palm Pre? Supposedly it was the top contender ... but I have yet to see anyone walking around with one in the wild. That's a fact.
> But I don't think most consumers care.

They may not care about openness directly, but openness usually leads to more possibilities. Consumers will care about the new features and possibilities that openness welcomes.
Saraskathiresan
You should only create a startup if you've identified a good market to target. I know, its the people that matter, the idea will change. Well, yes, but that's only part of the story. Entrepreneurial endeavors should target a problem you know well and have a passion for doing. This blog post doesn't sound like this guy has any ideas or life experience to build against. Maybe he does and simply left that part out.
I left a "something else" category ;)
Has this gentleman addressed why he's developing for the Pre in the first place? It seems like Android would be a much better fit for him. There are more Android handsets out there, multiple models with many more on the way, and the OS has a very clear future ahead of it. It feels like some self imposed torture on his part. Both Palm and Apple make their terms pretty clear -- there's no bait & switch here from what I can tell.
And who gets blamed every time some dumbass downloads an attachment named britney_spears_naked_pic.exe and runs it? Windows, for being un-secure and virus prone. Palm's trying to avoid that fate, just like Apple is. I can't say I blame either of them. They're simply learning from history.

The only difference is they're letting those of us who know what we're doing install whatever we want via the homebrew route.

If jwz really wanted people to have his tip calculator (because the other 8 that are already there aren't good enough I suppose) he could simply post it at one of the many places that are referenced by WebOs Quickinstall or Filecoaster or Preware and people like myself who can't even spell SSH let alone use it can install the app.
Boy I bet the tyrants are going to love the USA. This comes after Pelosi and Reid are fighting efforts to have the health care bill posted online. Are they worried people are going to read it?
> nginx relies heavily on system calls at the expense of portability.

Nonsense; Unix is quite portable.
Ask HN: Monitization via Job Boards?
I have a niche tech resource site with 115K uniques a month. I've been trying various monitization strategies (ads, affiliate programs) with limited success.

At the moment, I'm looking into job boards (Job-a-matic, JobCoin, JobThread, etc), and wondering if they're worth trying. Have you had any success with these widget-ish job boards? Would I be better off building my own pay-to-post job board, or are these job networks really worth the 30 to 70 percent they take?
I've always wondered if American hygiene standards impact the number of people riding bikes. I suppose there's no nice way of saying it but in certain countries having some hardcore BO from riding your bike a few miles on a warm day is completely acceptable. Not so much so in the US.
I love the "that's just semantics" argument. Semantics have connotations, and his were far from the truth. The "just an implementation detail" is another favorite. The differences between good programs and bad programs that do the same thing are, largely, implementation details.

It's great that people want to discuss the upsides and downsides of this approach, but the dismissive language and outright anger in the original post makes JWZ's argument weaker.
How The President Of Toyota Would Phrase An Apology
Storing IP addresses as integers
Agreed. It's complete ignorance on the author's part to suggest that Rails and Hibernate serialize objects into a single cell. acts_as_nested_set even provides a decent way of dealing with tree structured data in a relational store.

His second part is off base as well, the challenges of serialization in strongly typed languages have little to do with wire protocols. He seems to be suggesting that adding a translation layer would solve the problem. It rather seems that would still fail if deserialization were used, as the translation layer would then become brittle. Rather it would seem to be more wise to step away from a serialization based persistence approach, while it might be a good idea for wire protocols, since the data is more ephemeral.
You have nailed it...

When apple introduced the iPhone, it became a big to-do because it was 10x better (at least?) than anything else on the market. "Me-too-ing" the iPhone (palm?) (android in another year) isn't going to get you there. The trouble is, Apple had a lot of opportunity -- 3.5 years ago, if you looked at a cell phone, it was absolutely clear that a LOT of things needed to be done. Apple simply executed on those things, but did so in an absolutely stunning way -- it just worked. And it worked in a way that most of us didn't realize was possible.

The second idea -- that a low cost version can work, I think is valid. But then, is that the chunk of the market that you want? To be another dell, making $4 per unit? Do carriers even want the smart phone that doesn't come with the data contract?

As for openness, as the other commenters have pointed out, most people don't care. If something ends up happening that causes people to actually care about the openness (or lack there of), than Android will be well positioned. For now, with 75k apps, we certainly haven't seen it (regardless of how many rejection horror stories we hear about on hacker news or techmeme).
I saw this in the NYT today and was reminded of a comment I had once made regarding Japanese corporate culture.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406545

The great thing about Japanese corporate discipline: when GM has a tough year, GM blames the year. No way we could have predicted spiraling gas prices, a down economy, and increased foreign competition. When Toyota has a tough year, Toyota blames Toyota. You can bet that somewhere in the bowels of that megacorp is a team of economists reevaluating their currency hedging strategy, while another team is working 16 hour days coming up with a car that captures the imagination of the American consumer but is priced to move as compared to the Prius.

Quotes from the article:
>>
While it still has plenty of cash, and now outranks General Motors as the world’s biggest carmaker, that is not good enough, Mr. Toyoda told journalists.

The company, hit by a spate of recalls in the middle of the decade, is betraying its roots as a quality automaker, he said.
>>

Disclosure: "I don't work for Toyota" is true only to the extent that anyone in Nagoya can be said not to work for Toyota.
anyone using Heroku? I was so excited about it when I first saw the beta -- but then, never really felt compelled to shift my behavior to developing in a browser. Once I saw the prices, I was completely deterred...
The IBM z9 processor, if I remember correctly, can do the comparison in hardware. When the cores consistently fail to match, the system can probably also call the IBM service technician.
He doesn't trust google & won't create a google account. I'm not an android user, but I believe that this precludes a lot of the functionality on an android phone. Last week he was looking for an RSS reader replacement, but wouldn't consider google reader.
A shot across the bow is fine. The folks who put together the phone still have to execute. Hopefully this will shape AT&T up.
I have a T-Mobile G1. My girlfriend has an iPhone. There is just no comparison. Hands down, the iPhone is a better handset altogether in every imaginable way. Comparing the iPhone to Android is like comparing the Mac experience to Windows. While they both have similar feature sets, the entire end-to-end experience is significantly more polished and user-friendly.
not a big deal to just create your own. there are good things available out there. ex:

http://www.jobberbase.com/
I would be more interested in one if the price was lower or if it included color.
The only connection between rice and math listed in that article is that cultivating rice encouraged a stronger work ethic because it is a year-round task.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that education has long been a cornerstone of Chinese society, going as far back as standardized tests during the Han dynasty.
DIY 0.1 kWh per day Chest fridge
I certainly don't take it as harsh. I see what you are saying now, I think so at least.

I do show what day its on, when a user has a guide they see a daily breakdown of what shows are on that day.

One thing I am counting on is if people know what shows they want to watch at night they can use there on screen guide to determine what time it starts.
I've been looking for something exactly like this. I'm trying to get into the physical side of EECS and this is perfect because it comes with the board, controller, instructions, and everything else you need to make a simple project. All the others cost too much and don't include what this does.
Exactly the first thought I had. I started into MUDs back in '98 (high school) with CarnageMUD and even worked with some of the immorts there on a VB-based MUD. We poured so many hours into that and the project eventually fell apart because we figured, "who's into MUDs these days?" When WoW hit, I felt vindicated. Then, just a few months ago, my brother tells me he's playing this text-based online game called Mob Boss or something.

I gotta think one of the keys here is that our MUDs were fantasy-based and these more successful MUDs are crime-based.
The best amount of polyglotism is that you can manage successfully
I wrote a little libevent-based webserver (bush-league stuff) that embeds V8 to do its request handling over a weekend not too long ago. You could start doing this today with very little effort.
Number 5 is certainly provocative. Do you have any evidence to back this up. I'd like to believe you, but all the evidence I've seen (starting w/ Richard Ballantine's book) indicates it really does pay to protect the bean.

EDIT: FWIW, I think most bike paths are a travesty. You're better off out in the traffic where people can at least see you. Make them choose to run you over.
oh wow i cant believe i am just reading about this now after traveling for work the past 2 weeks. dan was my first yc friend and welcomed me to the community as a young vc looking for cool companies. i am utterly in shock and entirely saddened to learn about this. thoughts go out to his family and other friends.
And I'm sure that nearly everything that's killed manually is justified, but that kind of misses the point, doesn't it? The whole point of transparency is so that we can see those cases where it wasn't automatic and where it wasn't justified. And especially so we can see if a particular user is killing stories that disagree with his political beliefs. I'm betting that just displaying his username next to the items he's killed would curb a lot of that.

Put another way, why wouldn't you be willing to surface this information?
I made this point on the NYT website but it hasn't shown up yet, so I'll make it again here.

What is the problem that these startups are trying to solve? It is explained in the last paragraph:
Still, Mr. Kibbe said, 'part of the problem with the health care system is physicians only have a small amount of time to see patients face-to-face,' and these new tools increase their interaction.

Very clearly, they claim they are trying to fix the fact that physicians only have a small amount of time to see each patient face-to-face.

But that is a problem that patients, not doctors, face. Specifically, patients spend lots of time waiting around for their chance to speak with a doctor. This is because a doctor's time is (seen as) so valuable that people are willing to wait. Basically, time with a doctor is a scarce resource.

Now, take a look at this from the doctor's perspective. Clinicians have optimized schedules. When they are seeing patients, they blaze through many per hour. Time is almost always being used efficiently, because there are several patients waiting for the doctor.

So, this brings us back to the main problem that I have with these startups: they claim that they are trying to increase the amount of time that physicians and patients can spend face-to-face. What they are really doing is cutting down on the amount of time that patients have to waste while waiting for their doctor. Sure, this is a problem for patients, but it is not a problem for doctors - and it is certainly not one of the critical problems in the health care system today that we must resolve now. This does nothing to give doctors more time to see more patients, because most doctors are already using their time fairly optimally (with the exception of having to fill out insurance paperwork, which is not related to any of the issues addressed by these startups anyways).
The more complex your application is, the better off you are in a "scripting language" like Python.
Increase the font size and get rid of the double spacing.

Or at least don't double space larger than the actual font!

I personally don't care which font you choose, I hardly notice the difference.
Anyone who knows the standard libraries could do this in a few minutes, this post is clutter. :(
How often would this actually be worth it? My hunch is that the computational time involved in packing and unpacking IP addresses into integers is more valuable than the space saved by storing them as integers.
Amazon Launches GSM-based International Kindle Device
That's a good sound bite, but I don't agree that a simple law must inherently be unfair. In particular, I think that a simple law is likely to achieve greater fairness in a specific area than a complex one, even if neither is perfectly fair for whatever definition of fair.
I hate to be the one to say it, but biking is extremely inconvenient, especially if you live in the burbs' as I do. I'm very into fitness, but even I don't want to have to jump on my bike just to deposit a check or get some milk.
Alternatively, Milton Friedman suggested that all laws should have an expiration date.
At first I was shy of upvoting the article on HN, but I hope your comment clears up its relevancy for anyone else.
Compatibility with IPv6 is much more important than saving a couple of bytes, IMHO. Better to keep as a string.
So where does C# and Php sit in all this? Do you really need it if you are familiar with python. Isn't phython oo in the same way php is oo?
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When I see disingenuous, I assume that you're saying someone is pretending X, despite the fact that they know that X is false. That is, I more-or-less assume malice.

When I see straw man, it often seems to be the case that the author didn't know any better. That is, I assume ignorance until proven otherwise.
You're right. Most kids would probably know jack squat if it were up to them. I think I was just thinking a little too much about myself because I felt jailed in by education.

But on the other hand even though we force those kids to learn algebra who might not have learned it if it was up to them, how much do they really understand of it when they are initially taught? Do they only truly learn it when they rediscover it later on in life (perhaps at a more natural moment when it becomes practical) only to have the educational system take credit?

I mean even in college some of my friends take the attitude of pass now and learn the stuff for real when they get their jobs later in life.

I'm thinking we could improve efficiency by somehow bypassing the pass now stage. Of course it's much more complicated to do that than it seems.

Instead of focusing on cramming info to give the illusion of education, we could teach children why they should learn, and try to get them interested and self motivated.
Agreed.

We switched to Ringcentral from Vonage and the difference has been fantastic. Vonage was really unreliable, but the Ringcentral hosted service has been great.

I'll add a couple pros:

* no noticable downtime in over a year

* iPhone app (visual voicemail, call out from the app as if you were sitting at your desk, preview faxes, etc)

* you can have various voicemail or auto-attendant messages for different times - after hours, holidays, etc

* 800-number usage counts as normal minutes - not an upcharge

* easy fax usage - incoming/outgoing

Cons:

* Customer support is outsourced so they do the standard process of running through a checklist of questions. (However, I have only needed to call twice and they did answer my question one time. The second time I figured it out before they responded via email.)
Avoid being a victim of an e-mail phishing scam
A recent phishing scam resulting in usernames and passwords of Microsoft's Hotmail, Google's Gmail, and possibly accounts of AOL and Yahoo users being posted online is cause for concern for anyone who uses any of those services. Rather than panic, though, there are simple ways to avoid becoming a victim or being further victimized, if your account has already been compromised.
I think you've mixed up your propositions there. Living in the suburbs is inconvenient, especially if you bike. Cars are a release valve that papers over a very bad idea.
My understanding (note: limited) is that some of the more profitable job boards have been DIY - 37 Signals and Fog Creek [1] come to mind.

It seems that they offer a small number of job ads at any one time - the boutique nature of the offering increases their value. So if you only want to sell, say, 5 - 8 job ads a month at a fair price, DIY might be the way to go.

If, however, you want to ramp up the number of jobs shown and the overall revenue (as opposed to price per ad), then a 3rd party job board which also provides some job ads may be the way to go.

[1] http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...