skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Failure is not an option: why this can be a bad strategy
Mobile industry goes open source
Experts envision that The Future of the Web will be rather a combination of mobile, real-time and service oriented solutions. Mobile is already here as big players stepped into the game and made their bets on technology.
Looks like an excerpt from the Halloween documents, which, as a whole, are much more incriminating.

http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/
"The best designers aren't going to pay for references because they have jobs coming in all of the time while the poorly-established people don't have the money to spend, hence you'll be left with the designers of middling quality."

Great point. I hadn't thought of it quite this way before, and I think you might be right.

If the traffic keeps flowing, big firms that overcharge will stay on with paid spots and decent-to-poor small design shops and individual freelancers will take up the free spots.
"Dead, like rigor mortis, habeas corpus."

"Very impressive."

"Superhero-like, even!"
Joel knew you need developers to make the flat part, but it sounds like he's realizing you need salespeople to claim the steep part.
I've been using Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org) for a while - seems to do a good enough job for me (though I've noticed that transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS seems to get stuck sometimes).

Plus, it means on those rare occasions when I fire up IE, I also see fewer ads.
it isn't my startup, was just noticing they were live. their USP is (AFAIK) that they offer really great scheduling, escalation and delegation.
From the data-is-not-the-plural-of-anecdote department:

My sister co-founded and works full time at a small non-profit retail business with an extremely limited budget. Faced with a slowly-dying ancient Win98 laptop as her only computer and doing all the business's finances on paper, a few months ago I donated a slightly less ancient Dell laptop and a second-hand desktop box, after installing Ubuntu on both (the desktop also included a minimalist PoS system that I wrote over a few weekends, plus stuff like GNUCash already installed).

Talking to her since then, both machines seem to be giving her far fewer headaches than the Windows 98 box did, and despite me fishing for any complaints she seems perfectly happy with Ubuntu. For context, her level of technical sophistication is around the level of "knows the difference between hard drives and RAM, and writes HTML by hand (using table layouts)", so better than the average guy off the street but nowhere near stereotypical bearded Linux users (such as, um, myself).

So, what makes Linux work for her? 1) Support from a family member, though apparently so far everything just works 2) No requirements to use Windows-only software or unusual hardware 3) Extremely limited financial resources, combined with not using the typical means that reduce Windows' TCO to match Linux (bulk/academic discounts, hiding the cost in the price of new hardware, getting pirated copies, etc.).

These three factors are certainly not unique, but the combination is somewhat unusual, and I doubt any amount of aggressive word-of-mouth marketing from Linux geeks is going to get people using it without those factors.
The root of the problem is IT has no incentives or checks in place to maintain a reasonable level of productivity. Their only mission is to make sure that services are online and there aren't breaches. Productivity doesn't factor in at all.

I'm not in a regulated industry (enterprise software). I completely get this if it's healthcare or defense. But we are just talking about middleware here!
Developers stealing from developers: an App Store tale
I haven't lost any money on investments in 3 years, and I'm nowhere near being an educated economist. With a diversified portfolio, I could always find an equity to sell above the buying price when I needed money, and this way I could ride out the bear markets without realizing losses.

Of course I'm nowhere near Goldman Sachs in volume (about 6 trades a month on average), just telling that it is actually possible to achieve a "perfect score".

I know Goldman Sachs is not really popular right now among the people, and I have absolutely no intention to defend them, but this seems a bit like a witch hunt.
Desktop Linux needs people focused on making things work. For the typical case, it does just work, now, but almost everyone is atypical in some way. For example, I want to be able to play WoW without rebooting, and while if I had a different video card that would apparently be fairly easy, I gave up on it after three days and three attempts (wine, cedega, crossover). The average WoW-player probably wouldn't have got that far.

What Linux on the desktop really needs is a reference platform. If people could be sure that the hardware they were buying (or had) would work at least as well as Windows, it would help.
We might be able to help each other. I'm working on a project to help people like you, so you can help me design that, and I can help you with your specific concerns. Check my profile.
complacency and the inevitable slide towards tyranny

Look, I just don't agree with you that we are inevitably sliding towards tyranny.

If you struggled like I do to consider that the Man could organise His way out of a paper bag, let alone subjugate us all with tyranny, you might chill out on some of these issues.

Not every battle is worth fighting to the steps of Capitol Hill for, and well, in my opinion this Copyright stuff will get sorted out okay. There are big players on both sides of the argument. I cannot imagine Google being too happy about this Treaty.
Reasons Why The Sony Ericsson Satio Can Challenge The iPhone
Goldman serves as a "prime broker" to many hedge funds. Not to mention intimate financial relationships with the largest corporations in the world.

It would be naive to think that it did not have any advantage because of its position in the financial industry.

Having only one losing trading day in a quarter could not be accomplished without insider information.
Str0ke isn't dead yet. He's just being trolled.
Feldspar: Ericsson's new EDSL in Haskell for parallel DSP code
It says that the images never "linger" i RAM, that they go direct from SD card to the screen. That sounded like magic, which made made me check out the ILI9325 LCD controller (http://www.ilitek.com/products-txt.asp?ck=17), and I was relieved to learn that the screen controller features a 172800-byte frame buffer. So, the CPU has 4 KB of RAM, and the display has almost 169 KB. :)
Is this his Twitter account? Apparently, not dead as of 22 min ago: http://twitter.com/Str0ke
Yes, I got modded down for daring to suggest a court would decide on a balance between right to privacy and right to protect ones works.

LOL! Court of HN says NO!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=921446
Seriously though, why do all the security examples and scenarios always involve an Alice and a Bob?

And why is Alice always the bad guy (or chick)?
"I have seen so many young entrepreneurs and..."
actually, it's entirely possible. i know of prop trading groups that have been around for ten years with only one or two down months.

in dislocated markets, making markets is actually relatively easy, so it's not that surprising that they usually don't lose money. they also have hundreds of traders. each one of them probably had many losing days, but in aggregate, they have good traders and systems, so they rarely have losing days now.

also, how do you know that it's impossible without insider information? what reason do you have to back up your claim?
Testosterone and Competitive Play
This may be the achilles heel of the freenix world: since almost anything can be worked-around with some scripting, people actively argue against putting facilities like this at the right place in the system's architecture. Add 1 to the Cathedral's score.
That is, indeed, his twitter account. And people wonder why I'm so jaded and skeptical about stuff like this.
One of the ones that prompted me to post this topic was over here, on the topic of CRF statistical models:
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/papers/ifcrf-uai2003.pdf

From reading it I get most of what it's about, and how they work, but the embedded probability stuff is mostly squiggles to me.

I guess my ultimate aim with this is would be able to quickly grok papers on various compsci subjects, and then go around and code implementations to test things out.
Sweet Obesity
What is the big added value? I was prodded into making another attempt to bring coherence to the swirling mass of ideas I call Outer Circle by a recent thread here on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916448 Other people consider the forum problem important.

When Kuro5hin died, I started reading The Edge, http://www.edge.org/. However The Edge is what I call an Inner Circle site. Outsiders get to spectate, but there is no way for outsiders to ask questions or raise objections. The Edge seems introverted to the point of sterility. My dream for Outer Circle is that it should impose a wholesome discipline on outsiders. They are not confined to spectating but can ask questions and raise objection. On the other hand outsiders have to work for access, playing nicely, and earning a place on insider's white lists.

The big win happens when you have people you don't know making unexpected positive contributions. The hard question is how to permit that without suffering the usual forum problem.
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Poll: What is the fuel for Hacker News' success?
increase chances of being accepted into YC
promote own startup
contribute to an interesting forum without ulterior motive
This is an option, however would have to get quite serious about learning this stuff (balance gain / reward against things like tuition fees, learning in my own time outside of long work hours, etc).
I'm not sure about this one:

People rarely buy on the basis of “most features.”

Not most features, but they do compare feature lists and prices to see what the best deal for them is.
That's not really true. The overlap between Firefox users and Netscape users is minuscule due to the massive growth in web usage (and the fact that netscape pretty much died before Fireox took off).

There's a nice graph that shows this (and the fact that IE usage has always been growing, though it has now slowed to a standstill) here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/asadotzler/3421742213/sizes/o/
Thanks for posting this.

I disagree slightly with the point on 5 year projections. With any economic model, garbage in means garbage out. I think everyone knows this. In addition to re-packaging your model to answer more relevant questions as Jason suggests why not also have a conversation on your assumptions/inputs, defending them with the logic used and comparable examples.

I don't have vast experience pitching to angels, but I've helped large enterprises size markets for new products and offerings. I've found that having a good conversation on your inputs helps tremendously in getting past that initial "smell test." Most of the time, people just need to hear the reasoning behind using such and such multiplier, growth rate, etc.

Yes its all crap. But thats the nature with any model. Showing that your crap smells less than others may be a good starting point to consider.
Failed Online Navigation Software Maker Sues Google, Yahoo And More Over Patent
That really is a must read. Thanks for posting this. The nice thing about it is that the author really has seen both sides of the table and is in an excellent position to make these points.
*Just related to the title/ I once registered and might still have...

aHayStack.com and
FindYourNeedle.com

both are a reference to finding your needle in the haystack / the first one is now probably obsolete cause of haystack.com (37signals) and the second one might work better for drug addicts :?/
Picked From a Lineup, on a Whiff of Evidence
40 years ago today...
somewhere in the wilds of Canada was born the baby we now know as Trevor Blackwell. Happy birthday Trevor!
To your point one, I agree. I also fail to see how universal binaries help. The problem isn't with supporting multiple architectures, it's with supporting multiple distributions.

Regarding point two, the developer is stuck with the packaging hassle regardless. The binary goes one place, config files and man pages in others, maybe you want a launcher in the gnome and kde menus... You are stuck with writing an install script anyway.
During the time that I was pitching I flat out refused to do 5 year predictions, and my 1 year predictions came with a fair amount of bandwidth. Initially my partners thought I was crazy but in time we came to the conclusion that it is better to be honest and say that you can't predict further out than that rather than to make stuff up that can be shot down in no time at all.

And it did work, we did find 2 investors, one for 100K and another for 200K.
Pittsburgh Hackers: Want to meet Sat 11/14 8pm at the Church Brew Works?
> it doesn't solve the real problems.

Well, it would sure make running software on a mixed cluster a lot easier.

But in any case - the proliferation of package "managers" is a bigger problem. I really hope a few Linux distributions die so that we can at least have standardization in an evolutionary manner.
I never did it, but my frustration with one IT department was so great that I planned to: buy a wireless router, turn it on, name it "ITDeptPrivate", give it a random password, NOT hook it up to anything and lock it in closet or drawer somewhere. Let them wasted their time hunting down something that in some sense does not exist.
Amazon Video vs. Netflix
NYT has an article about a study conducted by the The Catalyst Group on which service users prefer on a Roku box: the all-you-can-eat approach of Netflix or the $2-$3-a-pop one from Amazon. One key finding: Both of the TV interfaces are clunky.
Usually, when someone puts up that much quantity of commodity for sale, you expect a drop in price. But here the opposite has happened. Shows how weak the dollar is. What makes a government like India's which has its own huge budget deficits buy that much gold when it is trading at over $1,000 in a single transaction?

Peter Schiff's response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aicc3siQiHQ
Really, the only way I know how to make a living is online. This would definitely change things.

But the more I think of it, I believe we'll be alright. Those in the web space have a certain scrappiness to them. I've always disliked rules and bureaucracy. That's why I'm here, and not in a Fortune 500 or jerking off politicians.

I find a way to scoot around bullshit rules now, and I'll scoot around them if this is passed.

Most people I know and work with have one thing in common: their job is to make disruptive technology that people love. Rules or no rules, nothing can stop them, as long as they have the best interest of the user in mind.

Nothing can change that.
Where else am I going to find a pile of articles on math, Erlang, Lisp, etc? I've really expanded my horizons from my usual Enterprise Java experience and have developed a full website from CSS to the database to user management using a lot of what I've learned here.

PG's influence has drawn a lot of really bright people here. Sure there are silly comments, some articles that don't seem important to me, but overall I come here just about every day to see what new gem someone has found.
Almost all large short-term trading desks make a conscious choice to insulate themselves from directional price changes. Either with delta-netural strategies--strategies where reasonable changes in price don't make a difference--or just by having a mix of favorable bets in all different directions, so that the majority of them going sour is unlikely.

I know traders who think that many price moves in the market are due to insider trading they're not privy to. Since every trader, to my knowledge, seems to think this--even the ones at big investment banks--it's hard to say whether it's superstition or not, but it doesn't stop them from being profitable with only "outsider information".
Yes, and NeXT could have asked its ISVs to do the same thing back when they ran on 040, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC.

The motivation, though, was not just to make things easier for the ISVs, but also to make things easy for the ISVs' customers. Simplifying the process of buying and installing software was the real thrust of the endeavor. [1] There is real economic value in making things easy for customers.

Why, for example, would web sites offer 1-Click ordering, when entering a credit card number is just a few more keystrokes? Because simplicity makes money flow, and is good for a market.

The Year of the Linux Desktop will never come until these issues become important to the community. Which is to say that it will never happen, because the community, as a whole, has no economic incentive to lower the bar for customers like this.

Ryan Gordan probably could have figured that out sooner, but I'm glad he was an optimist for a little while, at least.

[1] There was also a secondary benefit for system administrators. You could install a single copy of a 4-way-fat-binary on an NFS share and a workstation running NeXTstep of any architecture could launch it over the network.
True, but not all features have the same value. Not to mention "whats the best deal" is highly variable across user profiles and needs. Veblen Goods are good examples of how twisted definitions of value can be.
I'm not defending 5 year projections. Simply arguing for a different pitch method.

Projections are fine so long as the inputs are reasonable. If people don't buy your assumptions they won't buy your conclusions. 1 year, 5 year, or 10 year.
If you really want to build a valuable web prototyping app, please make it spit out HTML/CSS. That would be the killer feature! Give me a limited, but functional web site/app that I can then modify/refine, instead of a "picture" of it in whatever else format.

THAT would make me use your product in a hearbeat...
they also have hundreds of traders

Most of this is from computers trading >billion shares per day.
Written in C++ (w/classes) and compiled using avr-gcc. Board schematics, code, makefile and specs -- all open-source. A lot to look at and learn from. Very generous. Thank you. Well done.
Try googling "Microsoft" and "theft."
PG's influence has drawn a lot of really bright people here.

Could you be specific about the influence? If there were no funding by PG et al., would this be the same kind of place?
It's the daily Amichail poll. Yikes!

Could we add "provides a forum for talking with people doing what you want to do?"

Because I'm not here for YC, I'm not here to promote my startup, and I'm not here really to contribute. I'm here to bounce ideas off of people who are a few steps ahead of me in the startup game and to listen to the type of things they talk about.
Hope it's not too late to add a few more choices:

- Learn new things.
- Engage in meaningful discussions.
- Meet like minded people.
- Find out what others think.
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... Except why exactly is kernel and libc the right place to put this in?

Remember that stuff in kernel works outside memory protection. Moving complex stuff away from the kernel is a win pretty much always when there are no pressing performance reasons to do otherwise. This code will only run once every time a program is started, so performance is certainly not a good reason to put it in kernel.

What I really want to reiterate here is that using fat_elf:s would in absolutely no way make shipping stuff to multiple different linux platforms easier. The reason it is hard is because when someone says linux, pretty much the only guarantee you have about the system is that it runs a linux kernel, and even that can potentially be so old or be so strange that you can't trust anything about it. All fat_elf gives us is stuffing multiple binaries in a single file, and we can do this already without much fuss. It does not in any way give us true "Universal Binaries", because to do so, we would have to either agree on a common subset of libraries a linux system should always ship (and agree on indefinite binary compability for those libraries), or ship a meaningful portion of the entire platform in every binary.

If you want what fat_elf gives, you can get it with a 20-line shell script you concatenate into a bunch of binaries, and it could be argued that it is the cleaner and better place to put it in, considering it's only an ugly hack anyway. It's just that people look at fat_elf and see something that isn't there.
Cuomo files antitrust suit against Intel
though it sure is unclear what the heck he is demanding. i'm still looking forward to the back story to this mysterious writing. it's a nice page turner.
months, yes this is possible. But only one day, that comes to almost a perfect score. And no one else has a perfect score.

GS has turned into a giant hedge fund. And their numbers are consistently better than any other fund or investor. Better than Warren Buffet or George Soros. They're impossibly good.