skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but you just described Apple in 1985.

Thanks to the Mac and the Apple II, they were making money hand-over-fist. They also had the best designers, and were an incredibly trusted brand with both professionals and the education market. To top it all off, they had a giant technology lead over any of their competitors (except Commodore). The Mac was considered far more than a "computer" at the time.

The IBM PC never matched the Macintosh for sales. However, the combined fleet of clones reached such a high volume that the PC clone market became the primary target for developers. Android has similar potential.

You're probably right that the iPhone will stick around indefinitely. The Macintosh, in a similar position, has increased its total unit sales, year over year, every year since the initial release. However, it would be hard to argue that Apple was competitive during the 1990s for mindshare or developers.

The real risk to Apple is not that they'll crash and burn and go out of business. The risk is that they'll lose their current lead in developer mindshare, and that's a real risk indeed.

*For historical marketshare context, check out http://www.jeremyreimer.com/total_share.html .
Access to the Internet is not a right – it's a commercial business
Excellent article. This is a very real problem.

I taught for a while in a private school, so I had more control over my curriculum and methods. Even so, one of my regrets is that I didn't work with my gifted students enough. My lesson plans were aimed at the middle--and also were exceptionally well-suited for those with learning disabilities. However, my gifted students were left unchallenged. (The irony is that I was a gifted student in school.)

In my case, the cause was not enough time. I've never worked so hard in my entire life as when I was a teacher (it doesn't even come close to programming). There was never enough time to get everything done, so some things slipped through the cracks. What would've helped me is fewer preps and sticking around longer (I left teaching after three years).
Link doesn't work in Canada -- includes link to the Comedy Network but not to the specific video. While we're working on Net Neutrality, how about working on this too!
Because these students may be learning qualitatively differently, meaning that leaving them in middle-road classes will not teach them as effectively.

And more importantly, because leaving gifted kids in unchallenging classes often causes them to burn out and get turned off on school and learning entirely. I've seen it happen, and it's so sad.
It's not unreasonable to be shocked at a upgrade in the middle of the business day for the majority of their customers.

Every significant online business I've worked with does deployments and upgrades off-peak, without exception. In fact one prefers to do production changes on Friday evenings so that the technical staff has the entire weekend to come in and resolve any problems that arise before the following Monday morning peak.
(this is the tool/author here)

Right on for being debt-free out of college :) The financial argument you make is convincing, but please note that I am not trying to pit private schools against public schools! There are plenty of people who are $150k in debt out of college who went to private universities that are not known as so-called 'name-brand' schools.
Neo Technology Raise $2.4M To Commercialize neo4j Graph Database
I would agree with you if the children who were ahead of the curriculum could spend the time in class reading or doing other useful activities. As it is, most of the time, they just have to sit and pretend to be interested while following a lesson about things that they already know...
The ideal situation is to be faced with a challenge that is slightly harder than your current skill level. Not only is this great for learning, it is a very enjoyable experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29
(this is the maniacally egotistical author here)

> Clearly the article is only a celebration of the author's ego since he fails to cite the number one professional advantage from attending a name-brand school: receiving a world-class education, and becoming more intelligent than coworkers.

yep i agree with the OP ... please note that nowhere in my article did i claim that you receive a higher-quality education or become more intelligent than your co-workers by attending a name-brand school. on the contrary, many people i know (from all sorts of colleges) would disagree with those claims. the course syllabuses from most US universities are now online, so you can make the comparisons for yourself; you can see what people in different schools learn, and it's pretty similar ;)
> It frees them up to explore being people.

This was not my experience. Granted, it was a while ago, and I'm not sure I'd call myself "gifted," but being ahead of the rest of the class certainly didn't get you any time to do interesting things -- it got you a pile of busywork and angry glances from the teacher for being such a pain in the ass.

I doubt things have changed much; if anything, due to increased student:teacher ratios, I suspect they've gotten worse. I don't have any kids but if I did, I'd be far more concerned about a particularly bright one being wrecked by public school than I would a special-needs one who lagged the rest of the class.
An easy way for Google to fix the problem:

Lemma: most users are subscribed to Google Groups with their Gmail addresses.

Algorithm: GG should broadcast a new message to the Gmail accounts first and wait. If Gmail flags it as spam for p% of the receiving accounts, it should notify GG. GG should then send the message to spam (e.g. hold it for moderation), and not broadcast it to the rest of the subscribers. If Gmail gives it a green light, let it through.
Between 1988 and 1991 Lutus sailed solo around the world in a 31-foot sailboat. WOW!!
The land below is the expensive part of housing in a city. Here in Bloomington, land just outside the city limits goes for around $10k/acre. Your traditional 2-3 bedroom family home will easily cost $100k.

As for a bike ride away being in town, that was my point. "You don't need to go to the middle of nowhere to live cheap." If you were referring to when I said a short ride into town, I meant going through the suburbs and into the downtown where people go and have fun here. Sorry for the confusion. Its interesting how different the definition of town/city change from place to place.
Ah, Stewart. I'm always happy when he tackles an issue - and much unlike regular TV news, I usually end up learning something too. Kudos to both him and his writing staff.
Average matters in the sense that I don't know which new application I might be using in six months.

Usually my computing experience is dictated by the worse interaction that day. If I have to deal with a text editor that uses tabs when I want spaces, or a note application that won't sync, it doesn't matter how nice the web browser is.

My experience on the mac has been that, generally, the developers of third party software focus on the UI. It sounds like an odd version of the "broken windows" theory, but it seems to be true. Because the average quality is so high, applications with bad user experience just don't survive. This means I can pickup the most popular task management app, and expect a certain level of polish. That is why average matters.
Selling games at retail = Glacially slow
Hi Doctor... Incorporated? Doctor iFart Incorporated?
Ask HN: WTF Is The Value of Real-time Search?
It seems the only people who care about finding out who said “hotdog” 50 seconds ago are bloggers.

Will someone please explain the value with real-time search? And, cut the bullshit. It’s annoying.

Seriously, if I wanted tweets in my search results, I’d go to search.twitter.com

If I had to explain to my grandpa that he’d need to install a “Webmynd” plugin, which incorporates OneRiot, which contains real-time tweets, he’d literally shit his pants.

On serious note, I've not heard one person explain the value of real-time search. Is it the future, or just hype?
It's definitely not new. And my question didn't deserve all the down-votes. (Only now at least it got back to 0. Way to answer.)
It's not the people saying "hotdog", it's the people saying "Oscar Mayer hotdog". Brands are excited about real-time search because it's the first time that nonsensical chatter has actually propagated beyond people's lips on to the Internet where they can monitor it on an ongoing basis. ... Just sayin'
Great news for Neo. Most of the comments I see about neo4j are along the lines of "great technology, but doesn't quite cut it from a performance perspective".
4Base Technology |  VMware Lab Manager | VMware SRM | VMware Capacity IQ
4Base Technology is an infrastructure consulting firm that specializes in Virtual Infrastructure deployments that commonly include product sets like: VMware Lab Manager, VMware SRM, VMware View (VDI) and VMware Capacity IQ. Notable successful projects include complex architecture and implementation where 4Base was responsible for engagements ranging from Disaster Recovery (DR) planning to Backups automation and advanced NetApp integration with tools like SnapManager VI (SMVI) and SnapManager Exchange (SME).
I think he did an excellent job of this, especially since his target demo are liberal 18-35 year olds who are generally in tune with modern technology.

If I was explaining to my Grandma what net neutrality is, I'm not going to point her to this clip.
> The author seems like a tool. That's the thing about name-brand graduates (particularly Harvard), within 5 minutes of meeting someone you will hear about where they went to college, even 10+ years after they graduated. Clearly this is an exaggeration, but definitely has some truth to it.

hi, while you are right in surmising that i'm a complete and utter tool, i don't understand how your point relates to my article. i don't think i mentioned anything about people name-dropping their alma maters when making introductions (if i did, please let me know, and i'll remove the offending sentences). i certainly don't remember meeting people and having them name-drop their alma maters within 5-10 minutes, and i don't remember ever doing that either. but i guess it does happen, or else people wouldn't keep mentioning it so much on threads like this one :)
TheFunded creator brings The Founder Institute to Seattle
idgi? Why fix something that is currently working well?
You make a reasonable case for showing up with a review, to match competitive practice. And you didn't use a fake name.

But as CEO/Founder of a 4-person company -- and perhaps a code contributor as well? -- you really "haven't used the driving directions yet"? Even if that's true, it sounds like an embellishment to make the review sound like it's coming from a casual user.

Does Apple have a policy on self-reviews?
It seems to be public...this could be one of those hidden features of youtube, sort of like the high quality video was for a while. I like it.
So wait, how does that work with the first "hacker" then. Does it mean it tails out. I mean the first "hacker" had to term himself a hacker, but by that logic only a "hacker" can be deemed a "hacker" by another true "hacker".
Thusly every current "hacker" isn't a hacker then. <head-implode>AAHHHH</head-implode>
Among other things, it is the fastest source of news. And in news (as the name suggests), fast is everything.
I can!

::evil laugh::
Yea, definitely brands may benefit; however, if we're saying the people who benefit from this is primarily the Oscar Mayer PR chic, and a couple middle-men ad networks spying on all our conversations, as the lick their lips on what shit they can monetize, wouldn't people catch on after a while?

Relevant search is a long-term value because it solves problems (e.g. you query "how to fix [insert nature of problem]")

Real-time search is basically a voyeuristic tool for brands?
That's not how things work out in practice. More common is that gifted students get annoyed at having to do unchallenging busywork and become annoyed at the whole system. When school no longer becomes worthwhile or engaging (at either the top or the bottom of the spectrum) then it becomes little more than a prison.

Being ahead of the curve in public schools doesn't mean that you get to skip out on classes, you have no greater free time than any of the kids struggling with the material (except perhaps it takes you less time to do homework).

Best case scenario is that unchallenged gifted students take advantage of the most advanced classes available and learn on their own at home. Worst case scenario is that they become jaded and disenchanted with school and learning, stop doing school work because it's beneath their capability, and act out in worse ways.

Lucky for me, some time around the 8th grade or so I turned from the second type of student (falling behind, increasingly disengaged) to the first type (being recognized as one of a handful of top students in my senior class). I was lucky enough to attend an excellent public high-school with good teachers and lots of advanced classes, if those classes and teachers would not have been available to me I don't know for sure what I would have done.
The assumption here is that peace between nations can somehow be resolved by just communication among private citizens and individual friendships; that conflicts are just misunderstandings or that we are too prejudiced or don't have enough sympathy. I can see how that is sometimes the case, but I don't see how that is always or even commonly the case. In many conflicts, there are very real underlying issues that need to be resolved and unless those fundamental imbalances are addressed, then there will not be peace.

For example, it looks like China is on a possible collision course with India and Southeast Asian nations over water rights. China's north is heavily populated, rapidly growing, and severely short of water. Tibet on the other hand is very rich in water resources that are upstream of major rivers in India, Laos, Vietnam, etc. As we speak there are gigantic projects diverting water from China's south to the north. It's likely not to be enough, and if China moves on to divert and dam rivers that cross international borders, there will likely be war.

This is just one example, but my guess would be that a resource-driven conflict that incites national pride on both sides will break those friendships rather than the other way around. If the fundamental reasons driving a conflict are not resolved, it's hard to see why friendships will be able to prevent war.
Sounds pretty similar to the Milgram Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment).
As a busy-busy-busy parent, I find Facebook to be pretty easy & fast way to share photos with family. I had my own script a while back, but Facebook just completely took over that: it's easy to do, almost everyone who may want to see the photos is there (and it's easy to add an email of the few who aren't on FB), you can add captions or you can skip it, it looks reasonably well... And mind you, free.

Ditto on dpcan's comment: it's the sorting & tagging that are much higher portion of the hassle. Especially since with kids, you take tooooooooooons of photos, even of the same moment, in which case you really-really need to sort if you want anyone to ever look at the photos.

I can't see on the site how you've solved those problems, it certainly doesn't look that way.
I have the same question, but for Vim. Also, for find-and-replace.

I think it requires a plugin, but I'm baffled why it isn't there out-of-the-box. (Unless it is there, and I haven't found it yet.)
In terms of speed, wouldn't it be:

(i) TMZ (heh)
(ii) Twitter
(iii) After about 30 minutes, google/google news

So Twitter is essentially good for the 30 minute gap.

Obviously there's value with getting news fast. Twitter helps with this. But is there any room left in the real-time market? Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo index real-time conversations, the only thing left is building widgets and features onto Twitter. In otherwords, the oneriot's, webmynds, crowdeye's and kikin's are becoming basically worthless. The once ripe market of Real-time search is now filled by Google(relevancy) and Twitter(real-time).
Nokia 3120c Themes - 3120c Theme Downloads
West Valley. I'd be willing to drive out. Shoot me an email at my username @ gmail
You're comparing Apples and Oranges a bit. OWL is formal framework that can be used to describe ontologies. Cyc is an attempt to create an ontology that describes the world.

You are right that a lot of these "glob everything together" ontologies inevitably get too unwieldy to actually use. And wouldn't be so far off saying that OWL itself is a bit hard to grok. But it is important to see what the difference is. What is important about something like OWL, OWL-DL, or OWL Light is that they specify the types of axioms you are allowed to use. For example, the following statements are very different:

- Humans have exactly two biological parents

- Humans must have biological parents

- Humans must have biological parent(s)

- Humans can have parent(s)

OWL, and its subsets, are attempts to carve out logical axioms that allow you to specify the nature of conceptual classes and their properties. You need a framework such as OWL to spell out what you are allowed to state about concepts like this because different types of logical relationships have algorithmic complexity implications. What you are allowed to state is incredibly important to people who want to perform logical inference, for example, because certain types of axioms will take a dataset on which inference would otherwise be O(P) time, and turn it to O(NP) time.
I think the thing here is that in, say, Scheme, the performance and actual execution semantics of your function vary wildly depending on how much you mangle your algorithm.

Precisely the same thing is true with recur in Clojure. The only difference is that once you've mangled your algorithm, you get to proudly signpost it by wrapping it in a recur. It doesn't help the machine at all, it just helps the user. Sounds like a job for... comments!

(More specifically, recur only works in situations where TCO would have happened automatically in Scheme---and not even all of those, as other commentors have pointed out. So what you get is a weakened form of TCO that only kind of works and makes your code more verbose for no reason: as I said above, a comment would suffice in these circumstances.)
I think the value out there right now is significantly higher for businesses and brands. That's okay and usually how the cycle goes. "computers" were first for corporations with mainframes, then the "personal computer" came along.

Anything that makes information flow at a significantly faster rate is valuable. For the average every day person, it needs to be presented in a way that's simple and makes sense. Twitter describing itself as the pulse of the internet/world is something I find very powerful.
I'm excited about this app. It's barely usable (doesn't respect textmate's file ignore patterns, no replace, and it doesn't report progress very well). But, it's fast, and hopefully it continues progress to make things a bit cleaner.

However... god damn, is Textmate ever the saddest project I've ever seen. Why the fuck are we still using this abandoned app? Seriously...
I've seen some of the same comments, but I tend to take them with a grain of salt...in part because none of the commenters seem to have asked Neo or the community for help/advice when they've experienced performance issues. (The fact that the Neo demos I've seen have been pretty decent performance-wise leads me to believe at least some of the performance issues could have been solved if the people trying Neo out would have simply asked for help. It's usually difficult to wring the best performance out of a database of any kind without some hard-earned experience. The fact that many of the experimenters probably have little graphDB experience in general couldn't have helped the situation any.)
Put in 10,000 Hrs if you want to shine at something
Alexis, Shalen here. I just wore that green Reddit shirt you sent me today at Microsoft. Oh btw, one time I'd Reddit shirt on and the bouncer at a bar waiver my cover. He said, "Reddit alien, you go free!" :)
Bump Technologies uses Linode and I can't access their site. http://www.bumptechnologies.com/

That's rough. I'm sure some heads are gonna roll come tomorrow morning.

EDIT: I just recently signed up for Linode and love their service. Mine is still up. The only thing I was a little freaked out by is that their main site uses Cold Fusion. Poor judgement?
What an awesome problem to have, someday I hope to deal with your troubles :)
HN: Launched my first Facebook application today - "Too Many Secrets" 
So I began playing with the Facebook API and wrote a novel application that I thought would be interesting. One can post anonymous secrets/thoughts and see other anonymous secrets from their friends.

For the nerds in the audience -- backend was written in Grails and hosted by Linode

have a gander -- http://apps.facebook.com/toomanysecrets/
They also described themselves as being like a flock of birds. Biz and the gang can get a room and flock all over themselves for all I care, as long as they're providing clear value and making money.

With Google Wave coming out, that will clearly be providing information at the fastest rate. Will that be the next ahem wave?
That's true for 99% of jobs/people.

On the jobs front, there are some jobs that (I suspect) have a much higher "cold intro-ing" success rate. "CEO", "Senator", even "Board of Directors" are all probably going to get people interested in you, regardless of who they are. Except these people generally aren't hanging out in bars trying to met people.

Secondly, any time you can get some sort of name recognition in there, I think you will greatly increase your rate of success. A tangential example is that my friends don't give a <expletive of choice> about what "Steve Jobs" has to say, but they're all very interested if I say "CEO of Apple" instead.
The situation is so at odds with Microsoft’s view of the computing universe that Steve Ballmer came up with this cockamamie explanation: “The Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.” Pound the table, indeed.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure that he's wrong. I personally use apps on the iPhone not because I want a dedicated app for that thing, but because it's less usable or not available in the browser.

On my computer, 95% of the apps I use live in the browser. On the iPhone, it's the opposite. Maybe Ballmer is on to something...
Speaking of net neutrality, the posted video is only available for those who are in the US. Priceless irony.
btw, you have me curious what else you've heard rackspace called :)

Most of what I've heard about rackspace is that they had a good reputation once, but have been resting on their laurels and now have higher prices and worse service than other hosts -- but this is all 2nd hand and I have no direct experience with them, so I was curious to hear other perspectives.
Listhings - the easiest web-based note-taking app, like, ever
Listhings is a web app for storing virutal Post-it notes. Chris Pirillo dubbed it "the easiest web-based note-taking app, like, ever."
We keep getting told TM2 is around the corner and we keep believing him. As for the lack of features, I thought I'd release early and iterate :)
One good thing however is that there is less clutter in apps than their corresponding websites. In some cases, I find using the app more convenient than going to the site in computer browser. Lack of screen space maybe forced them to include just the important part and skip the clutter and made the whole thing better, in my opinion.