skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're dead on - it should be as simple as an appliance. Turn it on and it works. I think one of the biggest reasons for being paranoid about bugs/virus problems is that when something happens to your phone (or "social appliance" as I think the iPhone is) - you aren't damaging the device you're damaging the social connections.

Customers don't want to buy/own something that will make them look bad or worse, hurt their standing with their friends. If I have a device that gets a virus and makes voice calls to my address book and plays a pre-recorded marketing message, that is going to really suck for me when none of my friends will answer the phone when I really do call.
Thought experiment: would this essay be at the top of HN if Paul Graham wasn't its author?
If you decide to go to emacs from textmate this might help with somewhat similar functionality (regarding completion) http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/
You can't say that.
I generally agree but I think it's really a shame because Microsoft has a great debugger and I love IntelliSense (the damn thing even works with javascript). When working with Windows projects, I generally put up with the bloat because of these two features. If I could get as good a debugger and Intellisense without the bloat, I would. I never use the wizards and all that crap that comes with the IDE.
Self Binding Service (encrypting things to hide them from yourself)
Time to write another book for O'reilly?

"Visual Studio 2010 Annoyances".
Textbook rental start-up - would've been useful in college
What need does he have for an IDE without all those buttons and knobs?
I guess not - it worked when I followed your suggestion. Thanks!

I was naively cranking out a bunch of tabs in Firefox really quickly. :) I guess Firefox doesn't make concurrent requests when it's the same URL...?
See Spreedly, CheddarGetter, or Recurly. All good for subscription billing at least.

http://www.spreedly.com
http://www.cheddargetter.com
http://www.recurly.com
With regard to investing into superstars, I can't help but think I already have two investors: my parents.

And to ruin the sentimentality, I guess I've probably returned 2-3% of my gross in gifts, though I never thought of it that way until now. And $300k is probably in the ball park of what they spent to "raise" me.
Worthless linkbait, and misses the point entirely. Namely: how many iPhone developers are making decent revenue from a web app?

Mobile Safari could be the most powerful web experience in the world, but without a simple, trusted payment mechanism, it'll be largely ignored by "stupid" iPhone developers.
Ad Server: System Design & Architecture
Ha. That's a great point. Never thought of it like that either. I'll started returning 2-3% in gifts as well.
I'm really exited about the new concurrency libraries, things like Parallel LINQ and the Task Parallel Library.

To think that you can write code such as:

void Render(Scene scene, Color[,] rgb)
{
Parallel.For(0, screenHeight, y =>
{
for (int x = 0; x < screenWidth; x++) {
rgb[x,y] = TraceRay(new Ray(scene,x,y));
}
});
}

and

var q = src.AsParallel()
.Where(x => ExpensiveFilter(x));
foreach(var x in q) { ... }

just has to make you grin from ear to ear.
I am not trying to refute the other two points, I just quoted the whole sentence so it would make sense.

I would like to think that the 1700s and 1800s represented a golden age in American religiosity, where our political and cultural leaders were deeply spiritual, yet not biblical literalists. Now, it seems that dialog has broken down and we are in fractious camps. I'm sure I am just romanticizing the period though.
iPhone developers are part of the problem: specifically the ones who create a zillion "shovelware" apps, some so pointless that Apple has got to the point of banning entire developers.

Apple intended the review process to be basic third-party QA--something that the commercial software industry needs in general--but the noisy, trivial slush like "Dial Girlfriend" and apps that show a few P.D. pictures lifted off Google Images are tying up Apple's resources and making it a chore for users to find anything good.
The 5 kinds of iPhone app beta testers, sorted
Sounds like there is an incredible market opportunity here for someone to create the "App Store Platform" for the Web.
25 Tech Gift Ideas: Cool Yule Favorites
My question on Go
Ignoring cultural social media usage differences can create mis-marketing
We could take the circuitous route of pointing out our oil addiction, then pointing out how oil lobbyists strongly influenced our invading Iraq and piling up an estimated hundred thousand deaths. Or we could talk about the sweat shop system that abuses workers outside of state in order to produce cheap good. If you think the clothes on your back came clean out of squeaky-good American virtue, you got another thing coming.

But we could go a step further than that and point out that the reason they need to go to China to produce their goods is because laws exist in America banning them from doing the same here. Those laws weren't created by a third party. That's the U.S. government intervening and preventing abuse. On the scale of government, that's totalitarian rather than anarchic, and that's what we're really talking about. "Capitalism vs socialism" is debating two middlemen on a larger scale.

You need to strike a balance. You can't have a system that doesn't reward hard work, but you also can't have a system that doesn't support people on the bottom. The problem with Paul Graham's thinking is that he cuts out a lot of complexity and focuses on one shallow idea that, taken out of context, is patently absurd. Saying "Socialism doesn't work" says nothing but says it prettily and vapidly.

Fact is, we're not a wholly capitalist system. We probably need to be less capitalistic now, because the way the market works at the moment people are getting hurt. It's a straw man argument that socialism leads to Stalin and Mao and Hitler and genocide. Those weren't socialist governments. They were totalitarian governments that went corrupt. But socialism does exist in the larger part of Europe, and in many cases it's led to happy societies that don't have certain of the major issues America's got right now. A lot of them rank higher on the national happiness index than we do, so I guess they're doing something right.
Man U's Neville blasts millionaire players for wasting money  on agents
This isn't about communism. It's about socialism, which has an impressive track record.
I've found this site useful, http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html
Switzerland won't hand out a citizenship for money, though. Not sure about the others. I guess, betting enough in Monaco's casinos will earn you a passport sooner or later.
Firefox only makes two (by now maybe four) concurrent requests to the same server as mandated by the HTTP protocol.
> I didn't say the factory model was an argument for universal coverage.

Whatever.

> The argument however, that we couldn't take advantage of things like this in this country in part because we didn't have universal coverage, was.

Except that that's not true. As other folks have pointed out, we're starting to develop "heart surgery" factories and the like. Those folks also pointed out that some mandates that approximate universal coverage (a hospital has to take all comers) actually interfere with the development of factories because factories specialize.

Note that requiring that something be open to everyone is an obstacle.
Firefox has a maximum of 2 connections per host - though it's being upped to 6 in Firefox 3.5.
Here are the yields on Japanese Bonds

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates/japan.html

2.2 percent on a 30 year bond, which means that the maximum upside on the principal is roughly 20 percent. So, a 10K investment could theoretically rise to 12K if the 30 year yield drops to 0, which it won't. If it rises to something sensible, like 6 or 8 percent, you take a bath.

People seem to think of bonds like they do savings accounts, but they aren't. There's a huge principal risk. And government debt always seems "off" to me. For instance, Japanese debt is largely held by the Japanese themselves, for patriotic reasons sometimes. This distorts the market.
Using OSSEC (open source).

Seriously, it puts rkhunter, logcheck and all these old tools in their toes..

Check http://www.ossec.net

It monitors your logs, file changes, etc all by default, simple to install, etc.. I love it.
Ask HN: More reliable than shared webhosting, more friendly than a VPS?
I have several past projects and clients on shared web hosts. Basically, a single server, running apache configured to run hundreds of virtual domains.

I've been monitoring these sites and there are frequent service hiccups. At least once a day there is a slow/response time (>8secs), no response, high load (>20), etc. This isn't a problem with one provider, it's simply what happens when one of the sites on the same server is hacked or gets high load, or a script gets stuck in a loop, etc.

I use a VPS for my own projects, and it is clearly superior in term of performance. I'm wondering if there are hosting providers that offer virtual servers solely for web hosting? Basically, a simple setup, a bit less expensive and maybe a cPanel-style control panel. Anything out there like this?
Same restrictions apply: the web view has a limited set of functionality and there is no way to communicate between the native cocoa part of the app and the javascript part running in the web view.
> they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.

...which is how socialism functions, by every definition of socialism.

But you're sidestepping the argument. In a completely nonsocialist environment, the roads wouldn't be government-funded to begin with. There would be private groups each coming up with their own free-market system for roads.
You're shoehorning facts to fit your argument: I would be surprised if any single one of the founders of the companies mentioned above knew what the long term capital gains percentage was while they were innovating. The truth is: money is one of many motivators.
As an aside, here is a post about urban "pathways of desire" with some cool photos:

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/06/streets-with-no-name.ht...

and a mathematical model for trail formation:

http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/trailmode.png
The last criterion is a bit vague. What do you consider 'unpredictable'? I offer Norway, Switzerland, Morocco, Turkey.
I agree the debugger is good, I have found myself using it less and less though.. especially when I write tests.

Intellisense can be useful, I turn it off by default but when I do need to use it I admit it is nice.
How Al Franken won MN by targeting the long tail with 1000+ ads
The investment into superstars looks like a new spin on slavery. Shall we call this equity bondage?

Your bank calls, your credit card is at its limit and you just missed your mortgage payment. But don't worry, they are willing to front you $100,000 now for 15% of your future earnings.
Twitter Data Up For Sale: 1 Billion Connections
> Plan 9, for example, has a fan mailing list, but there is no official mailing list sanctioned by the labs, and never has been. If you asked for a feature in Plan 9, you were usually told to go _ yourself, the blank usually being 'write it' but many other suggestions were also common. XML is the hated enemy, if you don't like the colors, edit the source code, Emacs is the devil, what other platforms, and 9P is the only protocol anyone will ever need.

9fans is the official mailing list Dan, you should know that.
I think you are characterising us as a bit hostile. We are rightly dubious about the merits of XML. Emacs is just a tool on another system. I would say "Go write it yourself" is a usual response from a small group of devs working unpaid on a project. Considering the number of non 9p protocols implemented in plan9 I think you are being rather unfair.
One of the annoyances that we have to deal when building enterprise applications is the requirement that no data shall be lost.

Since when is a business requirement an "annoyance"? We keep data for lots of good reasons. Just a few off the top of my head:

- IRS requirements
- SEC requirements
- SOX requirements
- data warehousing
- data auditing
- delayed undo
- business intelligence
- trend reporting & analysis
- research & development
- cooperative databases
- industry databases & statistics

The usual response to that is to introduce a WasDeleted or an IsActive column in the database and implement deletes as an update that would set that flag.

Wrong. The usual response is archiving to disk using separate tables. This solves all of the requirements above while streamlining active database tables. It's not unusual for 98% of all the enterprise data on disk to be in the archived state.

This sort of cleanup now has to moved up into the application layer.

So what?

One of the biggest mistakes I consistently see is trying to use the facilities of a database management system to replace application logic. Indexes, triggers, and stored procedures are all critical tools in the developer's arsenal, but they do not replace application analysis, design, and programming. Like security and scaling, archiving is a architectural consideration, not a bolt on. Including proper data archiving in the application's design renders the hard vs. soft delete debate pointless.
> Yet the Beatles continued to pump out more than one album a year. I think there are incentives other than money - fame, status, power, creativity, curiosity etc.

While there are other incentives, it's somewhat silly to think that the Beatles were paying the top marginal rate in the US.

Didn't we just find out that U2 has done what the Rolling Stones and others did before them to almost completely avoid tax revenue by carefully picking where their royalties were taxed?

Marginal tax rates rarely affect the super rich. Instead, they hit the merely well off.

That's by design - the "merely well off" collectively have far more money and much less political clout. In fact, you can hit them while claiming to be going after the rich.
I would invest in a sovereign not tied to a physical piece of land, because it would be an interesting sociopolitial experiment. Like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong in Snow Crash.
Thanks for the reply. I didn't think you were trying to refute the other two points, but I was interested in overt clarity.

Whether or not you've romanticized, "Deist" no longer seems to be a position "mainstream" politicians can admit to.
The reason I forbid my children to use words like "fuck" and "shit" is not that I want them to seem innocent, but because these words are ill-mannered and contribute nothing to communication.

For me that's not why. I don't let my seven year old curse for the same reason I don't let her use power tools (yet). They require skill and can be a bit dangerous if you don't use them properly.

I suppose if I sat down and thought about it I could come up with an appropriate occasion for my seven year old to curse. But then to explain that corner case to her and expect her to manage it isn't worth the effort. And for my four year old it's simply not possible.

My kids will figure out these rules on their own, in due time.
The best gymnasts are short people; the best swimmers are not. There are always exceptions (Janet Evans). Short people have certain advantages in gymnastics due to the physics of motion. Years ago tall men and women did compete in Olympic gymnastics but do so rarely today.

In today's increasingly competitive world, we find only short gymnasts in the top tier. Competitors will go so far as to change birthdates to get younger (ergo smaller) gymnasts into competition.

"to paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried?"

I don't think the gymnasts swim times would be nearly as good as the swimmers. Nor do I think the swimmers would perform as well as the gymnasts at gymnastics. Each sport has evolved to the point where body type must be taken into account.

But consider a more realistic hypothetical: Put a swimmer and a gymnast in a room and tell them only one of them can come out. My money's on the swimmer!8-))

Finally, as Randy Newman once sang:

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Short-People-lyrics-R...

"Short people got no reason to live.

They got little hands

Little eyes

They walk around

Tellin' great big lies

They got little noses

And tiny little teeth

They wear platform shoes

On their nasty little feet"
> French Lit is harder.

What definition of "harder" are we using?

In physics, there's at least the illusion that there's a "correct" answer. If your theory predicts that a cubic meter of gold has less mass than a cubic meter of water, you've got a serious problem.

In literature, there is no "gold standard" to use as a referee or to consult in helping to make a decision.
That's got to be the laziest design work I've ever seen.
If they’re trying to leave the ’90s behind, they should have communicated that to the logo designers.
> developers could just use Web technologies and create Web apps instead of native apps

Audio.
QED

(Not to mention the iPod Touch, often used out of wireless range.)
simple and usefull
Imation Wireless Hard Drive
They'll also be the influential trendsetters and first movers in the market niche you're trying to get into, lending credibility to OP's argument.
While the claim that national socialism has killed hundreds of millions is an exaggeration, the actual record isn't that impressive.

Most of the hell-holes on earth are a "people's republic".

Yes, socialism seems to work in Western Europe and Japan. However, that may be more a function of Western Europe and Japan than it is of socialism. It's unclear what wouldn't work in those places.
"So when should you make business decisions? When you have the most information, when you're at your smartest: as late as possible."

I disagree. You should make decisions when you have enough data and enough understanding to draw a conclusion. For example, gather data for 1 week to figure out where the pedestrians walk (instead of waiting 1 year for the conclusion to be apparent). Gathering data is more work, but for a business it can be very valuable to decide quickly and correctly (first mover, customers won't have to wait 1 year etc.)
I was wondering what is the practical norm. Perhaps some places where there is research on the subject.

Trying to figure out what is the average stage Web start ups raise. Before or After product on market ?
He's listed companies that are already growing. it isn't hard to name startups that are already on track to going great places. its far harder to look at a deck or raw product and work out why it'll be awesome without being constrained by why its broken.
> Facism and national socialism killed hundreds of millions

Exaggerate much?

Nazi Germany didn't kill a hundred million, let alone hundreds of millions and Franco's Spain, Chile, and the rest weren't a significant fraction of the German total.
Alright, will send you an email
The iPhone is showing us two things:

- Most of your computer use doesn't require a full-on
Computer Workstation
- A phone form factor isn't comfortable enough generally,
but will do in a pinch or for specialized tasks

Note how many of the most successful apps are specialized interfaces to an existing web app! I can envision something with twice or even 4 times the screen real estate, but which will comfortably fit in a woman's purse. There is still some untapped potential in form factors and mobile computer use!

Why can't this larger screen area device just be an accessory to the phone? There are no technology hurdles to this, that I can see.
Apple sells the phone. It's working 100%. User installs app, breaks phone. Apple takes blame?

The trick here is see that:
1. If Apple is very paranoid and must approve every single app, then it should rightly take the blame.

2. If Apple says it's free for all and users should realize that some apps are not that great, then it would rightly remove any blame thrown its way.

Which is why I think the whole app approval process is absurd: Apple should stop approving apps and remove any associated blame. The path it's on right now is never going to scale or end well for Apple - all it would take is one bad slip and it's pretty much over.

On the flip side is what Google does with Android: they're collecting tons of feedback every time someone uninstalls an app, including an option that says "this is a malicious app". Care to wager that this will be used in some kind of automated way to keep the app store clean?

Not just that, they're empowering the user to make an informed decision. The Android app store tells you how many downloads the app gets, its star rating (out of 5 stars) and user comments. Before installing any app I read all this info and decide "hey, with 10,000 downloads and 4.5 stars, how bad can it be?"

But then one more thing happens: the app store tells you what the application requests permission to do like access your location or full internet access or whatnot. You still can decide not to install if you see something fishy. I've seen many games request access to my contacts and they didn't get installed.

So please tell me, how is Apple's way better in any regard?
I think that would lead to the second design, where there are diagonal paths connecting every building. In the absence of paths people will walk the most convenient (shortest) routes.

Wanting a large green space at the center is an argument against convenient paths. So the decision wasn't about where to which paths are shortest and most convenient for getting from building to building, but about whether or not the paths should be shortest.
Bootstrapping vs. Venture Funding?
Interesting stuff. Where would Canada be if we accounted for things the way the U.S. does? Would we be at half our present debt level?
4 Big Gambles Google Is Taking With Chrome OS
In the case of the school, pouring concrete during session won't work. As for "waiting as late as possible', that darned "possible" is always a tricky business.
Good. Finally. I realised this a long time ago, when I used to walk to school and got told off for taking short-cuts over the grass/plants - the truth is I wasn't taking a short-cut - the plants were just in the wrong place!

People will not be incovenienced by gardeners!

(BTW: the analogy did not allude me! :-)
Web app security - control untrusted processes with Solaris SMF
IMO Try not to mention breasts, it doesn't help your argument:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909015

and woefully still digging the hole:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908944

----

Funny that another breast mentioning thread devolved into a a homophobic and antisemitic troll

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909389

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913155
My god. There are so many basic logo design principles that they just throw out the window with this. for instance:

- A logo should be unique and identifiable. This (or rather these) are neither.

- It should work in black and white, and on a small scale (business cards, etc.) I don't see these doing living up to that.

Besides, they're simply plain old ugly...
At least the correct way to refer to Steve Jobs is "He", not "he".
In fairness, you'd have to be fairly stupid not to know where would be a good place to put paths - People tend to walk in straight lines from A-B (or door-to-door on a campus)
Sun offers Cloud-Based Desktop as a Service
Yeah. That is cool and I was thinking the same thing. I also thought that the more real time it will be the better, so you can get into the discussion while people are still reading it :).

I would love to talk more about it.