skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows is simply the only OS widely available to run on the vast majority of the machines that people own (PCs) and that's compatible with most software than people want to run.

Windows basically has no competitors in the PC OS field. Linux is a fine OS, which I run myself, but it's not widely available in shops/preinstalled and doesn't run the majority of apps that people want MYOB, Quickbooks, iTunes, Microsoft Office etc.
"But my interest remains ... in the quality of the apps, not the quantity. Let’s say ... Android winds up with far fewer total apps than iPhone OS, but they’re of generally higher quality. That would make Android the Mac to the iPhone’s Windows. I would switch to that platform."

This is a poorly thought out sentiment -- or maybe just poorly expressed. He's saying if the quality of Android apps is "generally higher" he'll switch.

Who cares about the average quality? Any healthy app store is going to have a couple dozen iFart variants -- who gives a shit. As long as I can find the good stuff (which, by and large, you can with Apple's app store) and as long as there IS good stuff then I'm happy.

To this point I can see the application ecosystem going the way of consoles and relying on marquee titles to succeed. Halo had a huge role in legitimizing Xbox as a gaming platform and you'd hope MS might learn from this with handsets.

Actually, it's amazing Microsoft doesn't seem to apply the lessons it has learned from its gaming console success more often. Maybe that's just big company politics though.
My older brother taught me to play when I was 8 years old (a long time ago!) - now I can give him a 9 stone handicap :-)

Once, in the late 70s, I got to play the womens world champion when she was in San Diego - awesome experience.

Go is a beautiful game, but not for everyone.
Same issue for me, FWIW
If Apple remains tied to AT&T, then Android might very well become the dominant platform by gobbling up marketshare from WinMo, Symbian, and BlackBerry. Android will probably also gain share by moving down-market into "feature phones". As successful as the iPhone is, it's still a miniscule fraction of overall phone sales.

This battle feels hauntingly familiar. Back in the 1980s, Apple made a boatload of money by pushing an elegant, easy-to-use 'sealed box' platform. They eventually got clobbered by cheaper hardware running more open software.

If Apple isn't careful, that's going to play out all over again.
Give me a laptop battery, my belt, and some duct tape, and we'll be talking about an definition a little further down in the dictionary entry for the term "battery."
http://peace.imvu.com/ is hilarious.
It means it sells better.
I want a robot submarine. That runs Linux. That I can script in Python. Would your day job by any chance involve making/selling those? :)
I live in LA and this is the best use of tax money I've seen in a while =)
His emphasis in that sentence is on quality, not on market-leading. The quality of application design on Windows is dreadful. The best applications are the ones that create an entirely separate interface and run in full screen, and even then you don't have very many that are attractive or appealing. I think the only real stand-out I've seen is Google Chrome, which was better-designed when it came out on Windows than any browser on the Mac, and which still holds a slight edge over Safari 4 in terms of pure elegance. Everything else ranges from mediocre to terrible. Office 2008: Mediocre. And I liked Office 2008 because I had a Mac.

For whatever reason, Apple's hardware attracts brilliant software design. I can name ten Mac-only apps off the top of my head that blow away their Windows/Linux rivals for design superiority. I could name several dozen for the iPhone that are of a similar make. I couldn't name one for any other platform. The difference is staggering.

Windows may be a pain in the ass for some power users or home end users but I bet if the market shares were reversed mac would be heckled as much as windows by average users and certain power users.

I'd take that challenge. Last year I went to a college with computer diversity. This year I'm at a Mac-only college. Last year everybody bitched about their computers; this year, there's literally no comment about computer usage, because everything just works within the sphere of my acquaintances.
What if your tweets became physical?
Intelius, A Huge Toxic Scam, and filing again for IPO
See this is a great example - If I met you I would love to hear your story, but your modesty would make it unlikely that I would.
The only concern that comes to my mind is anger from the previous co-founders. You probably want to make sure they can't claim any ownership of your new attempt, should you succeed. Make sure you don't re-use the name, software, servers, or anything!
a cheap outlet like rackspace.

I've heard rackspace called lots of things, but this is the first time I've heard someone call them "cheap". Have their prices gone down lately?
It's not a competition. The iPhone offers things Android does not and can not offer. It will always have a market. Meanwhile, Android is appearing on dozens of phones, none of which individually will rival the iPhone. They both have a spot in the market.

This isn't the same as the PC market was back then. Apple's in a much more dominant position, it's making more money than any of its competitors, it's got the world's most renowned design team, it's the most trusted brand on the planet in key demographics as of 2009. It's got no competition in its particular field, which isn't necessarily that of "phone".
Does it sell better after all the "I tried Amazon's MySQL and its lack of $FEATURE killed my business" blog posts?
Android Developers Blog: Announcing Android 2.0 support in the SDK
It seems like everything the author likes about vim are simply features he found more easily than he did in emacs. Duplicating a line in emacs is not difficult. emacs certainly has macros as well. A few simple google queries or looking in the emacs help system would reveal this very quickly. Not that there is anything wrong with vim, but the criticisms against emacs and other editors just seem lazy.
I would definitely visit Wine Library if I had the opportunity. And I discovered Gary two years ago through his WLTV videos, which remain my favorite thing he has done online.
On a relative scale they're cheap, what they call 'managed hosting' though is not what I'd call managed hosting. I think they call it managed hosting because they will do backups for you or something like that :)

The Planet/EV1, which was my choice when hosting in the US earlier was quite a bit cheaper, but service there was absolutely terrible.

It got to the point where I reprogrammed the DRAC cards to lock out their sys admins.

After The Planet took over we had all kinds of issues, then finally they had an explosion in a transformer in one of their datacenters taking down all of our stuff for days on end. After that we moved out.

They said it had nothing to do with them and we would be credited for the downtime if we stayed for at least another 6 months, but we had by then already signed up elsewhere and restored from backups. I figure if you're willing to run your operation that close to the red line then we should be taking our business elsewhere. They were lucky nobody got hurt.

Right now we're hosting in three places, leaseweb, mojohost and virtual acccess. VXS is by far the best but expensive, leaseweb is somewhere in the middle and for high volume mojohost is absolutely unbeatable.

btw, you have me curious what else you've heard rackspace called :)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say most people don't really go through the math of it, and instead focus on the specter of scalability instead.

It's tempting to do when you're starting something new, and you think of how painful it is to switch hosts later; and the cloud has the suggestion that scaling is much easier -- "Just add more servers!"

Basically, it's a premature optimization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Vaynerchuk
I still can't believe I can't do substring searches in gmail. I have to remember if the word was plural or not, or misspelled?? I wonder if the city council realized this when they voted. Seems like a major productivity drag to me.
radiolab (part of nyc's public radio) had a great news piece about this very topic. Back during the cold war like 1 in 3 people thought war was inevitable. It says a lot about our culture that 1 in 10 think that we can achieve PEACE. 66% peace lovers to 10% is pretty sad.

Great listen if you have an hour commute: http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/10/19/new-normal/
Yes, that does seem broken. All the state is in the arguments, so it shouldn't matter what function you "recur" to.

I know this is a hack, but in Perl you can "goto" a function to remove the current function from the stack and replace it with the thing you goto. This seems about the same as "recur", but more flexible.
spam filters....
Relax, all the really painful things starts after 35 for a man afrer 25 for a woman =)
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by the reaction to this, but I was. Honestly, I'm disappointed by it.
Restaurant Virginia Beach | Casual Dining Virginia Beach
Burgers in Virginia Beach! For more details, please visit our website.
The author speaks like not going to a "name brand" school will doom somebody or make things exponentially harder. This is simply, empirically not true.

If landing a first job out of college is what worries you, factors which matter a great deal more (for dynamic, high growth, technology companies of any size) are competence, curiosity and credibility.

Speaking from my own experience, somebody from an relatively uknown school but who spent his college and high school years working in the industry (even in small companies people have rarely heard of) and writing code outside of work/school in his spare time, will get noticed, interviewed and hired by top tier employers no worse than somebody coming from a brand-name school.
Ack, better than grep
Are they RFP's in the software industry?
Just curious, because this is one of those great threads about the sw biz where I like to absorb and digest every nuance.
Failed CIA Project "Acoustic Kitty"
What about martial arts? Not the full-contact ones, I guess, but aikido comes to mind when I think of the one where a person could keep practicing till very old age.
User created Starwars: a New Hope
I urge you to watch the trailer. This is most likely the dawn of movies re-made by fanboys.
Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality
Go back to the school and learn what NNTP and Usenet were. =)
Personally, I haven't noticed any downtime today on our linodes in Dallas and Atlanta. I don't know. I get the complaint about lack of communication, on the other hand, though, I'd rather have them working to solve the problem than sitting and updating a blog.

Was it a dumb move to push the update to multiple data centers in the middle of the day? Maybe, but then, without knowing all the details of how and why it as done, that's a big assumption to jump to.

Linode is still, hands-down, the best hosting provider I've ever used (and yes, I had a slicehost account for a long time), so I'll give them a pass on this one. Sometimes problems just happen.
One of my linode servers got affected. It was shown as running but I couldn't ping it. Reboot, and still could not ping.

Then I logged in via the LISH console and found out that eth0 wasn't up. Manually configured the network settings, and it's working again.

Someone of you who are affected might like to try this too.
I've got a mytouch. I think android is going to be huge. Time will tell, but I'm betting that it will become the sole "iphone competition" (though it will be codified in 100s of phones, not just 2)
I had some annoying speed issues with 1.0 and 1.5, but 1.6 is much speedier. I think that ultimately, the hardware put in there is going to be the major determining factor of the device's and software's perceived speed, and luckily the open nature encourages an ecosystem of hardware that hopefully device manufacturers will end up competing and differentiating on.
That's why you should only trust services that let you export your data.

Fortunately, both GMail and Google Docs can do so, as noted recently in another thread.
Here is how to say "NY", according to the wiki article on RDF:

<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/>;
<rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:x-states:New%20York">
<dcterms:alternative>NY</dcterms:alternative>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

hehe. That's funny...
Yes. where can we meet up?
email me at joseph.thibault@gmail.com.
Yup, I interface with it using this plugin: http://github.com/mattapayne/rdefensio

I've done the integration work, but haven't put it into production, so I can't speak to how well the actual service works.
IDon't Care
first class means that there is no priority in which apps can do what. Apps can be written for Android that completely replace core functionality, like the dialer or the contact list, or even the home screen. With the iPhone, there are multiple classes of apps, and anything not sanctioned by Apple takes a backseat to those apps provided or sanctioned by Apple. This is evidenced by the "duplicates functionality" limitation of the Apple vetted App store.
Sure, because if ones business really depends of a some particular feature and cannot survive otherwise, one probably should quit IT and try to choice different field.
I like Vim because:

(1) I've used it more than Emacs and most keybindings are now muscle memory.

(2) Goto (1).
Latent Talent's Artwork Gallery
I am a freelance artist and this is my art blog. This blog is a collection of my artworks, including digital art done with a tablet, on Photoshop and Corel Painter software, including some digital portraits and concept artwork. It also includes traditional artwork done in graphite, color pencils, etc..
The Unix CD Bookshelf
Lucky and Unlucky Numbers - When Figures Get Personal
If the RFP is being issued by a government agency, assume that the answer is always 'yes.'

Personally, the only reason I'd ever recommend responding to [a public-sector] RFP is if it's a hoop you need to jump through in order to formalize a deal that's already been effectively struck.
Mike Bosworth's two books Solution Selling and CustomerCentric Selling talk a bit about RFP/RFQ's.

The authors note that most RF[PQ]'s are prewired and biased towards a preferred vendor. The client gives out the RF[PQ] so the client can say it was properly competed for so it can pass the approval process in upper management. If you are not that preferred vendor who was there from day one, you will most likely not win.

The author cites one anecdote of a big company that has a separate department that only handles RF[PQ]s. One day they decided to take some metrics over a time period. Out of that time period, they submitted 153 bids to unsolicited RF[PQ]s ... only won 3.
Almost nobody practices 8 hours a day, even among world class musicians. (Liszt and his cadre were some notable exceptions.) If you believe Gladwell averaging three a day from ages 10-20 is enough to make a prodigy.
Thank you for this- you make my life sound so much more normal.
That actually says something slightly different, defining NY as an alternative for New York. But yes, the RDF syntax is terrible. Turtle was my favorite.
Wow, I thought you'd be mortified! Instead you don't consider it "unethical in the slightest" because you thought it was the only way you could win.

How much money do you think you made from your review which was written to make it seem like you weren't affiliated with the product? However much that is is what you sold out for.

My opinion: Friends and family is above the line. Reviewing yourself or paying people is below the line.
Federal rules leave gifted kids behind
Try asking "Why aren't robots/computers teachers?" and I think you'll find a nice answer to your question.
Facebook in 40 Years
A hilarious idea: a mockup of how Facebook will look in 40 years, once the younger generation is playing bingo and having hip operations. Take a close look at the mini-feed.
The relationship between a teacher and student is an interpersonal relationship. It's like a friendship. The effect of a good teacher, as I see it, is not that you get more knowledgeable about a field. You can do that from a book or the internet. It's to motivate you, to make you excited about a field, because they showed you what they thought was exciting about it and you agreed.

Bad teachers can make you hate a particular field for the rest of your life.
My 45,000+ messages take 170mb. I've been using Remail for a few months now and find it indispensable. For an idea of how useful it is to me, I sort my apps by frequency of use and reMail is on page 2 of 6, after OmniFocus but before Mint.com.

It's one of those apps I didn't know I needed but use all the time now that I've got it.
I believe the answer comes from an old episode of "Boy Meets World"

There is no answer.
The New Media - The best photographer is the one that's there
Have you never heard of using a personal account 'Doing Business As'? Its not 'fake' in the sense you're thinking about, its done all the time.
hi, this is the tool (author) here ...

regarding the price differential, please note that i am not trying to compare private vs. state schools, where the price differential is staggering! there are plenty of private schools that aren't "name-brand", and attending those costs around the same tuition as attending name-brand private schools. also, there are name-brand public schools (e.g., UC Berkeley) that cost the same as other public schools.
This looks good, but I have not tried installing and running it. Something similar I have spend some time playing with (no real projects with it yet, though):

gem install cassandra

cassandra_helper cassandra

This installs all of the Java libs required to run Cassandra and provides a nice Ruby client.
MonoTouch Debugging
A lot of the commentary on cloud deployments talks about scaling from 1 to n servers easily and dynamically (and from n to n-1, etc.)

In practice, partly due to the pricing model, it seems the primary market is actually for 0 to 1 server, not 1 to n. New hosting products in the Rails space like Heroku and the new cloud pricing at Engine Yard seem to support this observation.

Also, there's the idea that some services don't need to be on 24/7 or that the usage is extremely bursty. Cloud deployment could be very cost effective in those cases if managed correctly.
You guys were the original YC success story.
MSM Swansea
Driving instructor in Swansea, Wales
Yeah nice, how about stats for USA-Afghanistan and USA-Iraq.
Some RFPs are definitely rigged. Spotting them is part of being a good consultant. See upthread for a deeper discussion on this.

"Most" RFPs are not rigged.

A company that submits 153 RFP responses and wins only 3 has a problem, and it isn't with the concept of RFPs. Perhaps their pricing is wildly out of whack. For awhile, there were things we did wrong with our proposals that cost us several RFPs. We figured them out, resolved them, and systematically improved our win rate.

There is no way that 1.9% (or even 5%) of RFPs are bogus.
(this is the tool/author here)

yes i totally agree --- actually i've observed that people who graduated from name-brand schools are often more risk-averse and less likely to start their own companies, since they've been trained at a young age to take the safe and steady route through school and life.

regarding your billionaires comment --- please note that nowhere in my article did i say that going to a name-brand school would make you more likely to strike it rich :) the advantages are most prominent when you want to stay within "the system" rather than venturing off into new territory
Ahh, candy arbitrage. That was a great opportunity when I was a HS freshman. I had resellers and contracts and everything...until the stupid administration called me into the office.
FWIW: An RFP is just a company's formal process for documenting an upcoming project and soliciting proposals from multiple vendors for it. There are as many RFP processes as there are companies running RFPs.
I was joking about Everest. Some day maybe :)
(this is the author/tool here)

> Maybe those points(which glaringly describe benefits) are no substitute for competency & experience.

Agreed, but the title of my article was the ADVANTAGES of attending a name-brand school, so of course it glaringly describes benefits :) i should probably write a follow-up article talking about disadvantages

> Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into their first job with ?

sure, that's also a good topic to write about, but please note that many graduates of non-name-brand private schools also walk into their first job with the same 6-figure debt. i'm not trying to contrast private/public schools here.
Leaving aside whatever "gifted" means, why bring additional challenges to people who are ahead of the curriculum? It frees them up to explore being people. Having the freedom to create your own challenges is much more important than some misguided attempt by control freaks to monopolize your time.
Like a loser? Nonsense! The important part of that sentence is "after a PG mention in an essay." Just get PG to start a radical new kind of investment firm and be the first portfolio company to launch, then make sure he writes an essay where he namedrops you with a link -- easy as pie!

Seriously, though, that had a lot to do with getting reddit off to such a good start. Who wouldn't want a bunch of PG readers to set the tone of their social news website? :)

Hope you keep coming back to our Internet crack. I'd consider any website trying to steal people's attention when they're bored at work competition :) but the Internet is a big place, there's plenty of room.
If you are outside the USA:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-october-26-2009/from-h...
If anything I think you're probably underestimating the extent to which GSA-style RFPs are rigged. I tag-teamed a bunch of times with our FedGov sales guy at the last company I was at, and we closed deals at the Pentagon and elsewhere, and (a) the stories you hear are ridiculous (like the companies that pay, say, an Inuit to be on the board so they can get some obscure diversity credit), and (b) even our company, which had multiple tens of millions of dollars in both funding and topline revenue at the time, had to work through a subcontracting arrangement.
I saw this and was very happy that he was exposing the issue of net neutrality to a large audience. However, I felt at times the explanation got a little too complicated. I could see how a non tech person might just stop caring about the conversation when it gets muddled.

It's not a nuanced political issue. Simple analogies (like the one Stewart uses, the carpool lane for rich assholes) are the way to go. Or just show your non tech friends this image: http://cupojoe.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/images-netneutral...
(this is the tool/author here again)

> Speaking from my own experience, somebody from an relatively uknown school but who spent his college and high school years working in the industry (even in small companies people have rarely heard of) and writing code outside of work/school in his spare time, will get noticed, interviewed and hired by top tier employers no worse than somebody coming from a brand-name school.

I totally agree with you, but one of my points in the article is that (rightly or wrongly, i'm not in a position to judge), somebody from a name-brand school would have a decent chance of getting that same job offer even without putting in nearly as much self-driven dedicated real-world hacking work experience as somebody who didn't have such privileges.
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