skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter API Gets Geotagging; Web Geotagging Coming Soon?
I think the Trojan horse here is that Chrome itself will force you to use Google as your "base cloud" (for preferences, files, login, docs, mail, etc.), though then you're also free to use other web services beyond that.

If you want your own base cloud, it looks like you'll have to build your own system and ship it.
I have used RimuHosting for years to host both my and customers JSP ('J2EE lite') web apps. Great service.

I still use Rimuhosting for low volume and testing, but for more capacity it is hard to beat EC2 as a general purpose platform, especially if you need (or can effectively use) SQS, EBS, S3, etc.
I think you're missing the bigger picture.

It's a tectonic shift in computing. We're going back to the dumb terminal/mainframe model. Apple will weather it just fine I'm sure b/c they control a shitload of devices. Microsoft will not. If they were dead before, they're worse than dead now.

Google will control the other half of devices but hopefully in a 'non-evil' way. I sincerely hope owning a device with Chrome OS doesn't force a user into using Google services although I'm sure there will be some tie-in.

It's about to get interesting..
My hunch is that GitHub is resulting in more quality OS projects, developed faster.
Anyone know what the device access story is? I saw the stuff about accessing files on USB sticks, but what about Webcams and Microphones?

There is a W3C working group: http://www.w3.org/2009/05/DeviceAPICharter, but progress appears pretty slow.

Edit: Just saw the Gears Camera API: http://code.google.com/p/gears/wiki/CameraAPI

Edit 2: The Gears Camera API doesn't seem to actually have been implemented, so I don't know what the plan is.
I disagree. Apple understands software extremely well. What they don't understand is 3rd party software. The same mentality that eventually killed DEC.
Making a development environment for ChromeOS that works on ChromeOS would be a first step towards answering PG's clarion call for a woman with a hammer, no?
I think there are several things wrong with this blog post. First, attacking Paul's post as if it were whining. Secondly, failing to address the point that the long approval cycle keeps buggy software out there, reducing the overall quality of the user experience. Thirdly, it has the tone of "if you don't like it, leave"

I think time will tell how this discussion will come out. People have been discounting Android since it was announced, but you get a seriously good user experience from the start, and the idea of fast iteration, which is what really drives software today, is very much a reality.

I think the point about having to rewrite android apps for different devices has been discounted elsewhere.

And are you serious about If Apple is pissing off developers, I personally think this is great.?
I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that Jobs hates third party apps (because he can't control them), and he always has, and always will.

He just realizes he can't build a successful product, long-term, without them.

But his main internal smart software guys know better, and build a great software ecosystem.

Thus Apple is now projecting a seriously schizoid personality.
I agree that there are API deficiencies, but I think that we as developers think far too highly of ourselves. Apple's SMS application is very good. I'm sure that you could add features that you might want, but that doesn't mean that your SMS application will be better on the whole for a majority of iPhone users. The same goes for Opera: a couple of new features won't make it better than Safari.

If you feel that you can make an SMS app better than Apple's, I hear that the Android API lets you do that. If more people did this, and their apps were that good, the open platform would be popular.
"Community is more important than code" - completely agree. That was my problem - I had code to share, but didn't want to work hard on the community around it. I kind of see GitHub as providing that community for me - it can form itself without any extra effort on my behalf.

Obviously the best projects are the ones with proper maintainers actively working on the community side of things - but GitHub enables the community to take up a project even if the original creator just threw it over the wall.

(There's a lot more to GitHub than just enabling me to create irresponsible throw-away projects, but personally I've found that aspect of it to be very liberating)
What they really want is to figure out if there is a way for them to make money off of it. Even if you personally are not getting kickbacks from godaddy, there is a lot of money in selling domains. There is got to be, somebody has to pay for those awful superball ads.
There only seems to be a double standard because you're making an invalid comparison.

On most smartphones, while there's a high bar to pass to get into the official "app store" for that phone or service, nobody is stopping you from selling an app outside that store. As such, Apple's review process is not merely a review process for a store, but also serves as a review process for all applications that a user can install on the phone.

It's the difference between a lengthy review process for selling a game on Steam (reasonable) and a review process for selling a game that a user can install on Windows (not reasonable).
YouTube Blog: Automated caption timing via speech recognition
I disagree. Editors is the type of service that is defined enough in scope to outsource effectively. It is one of the expenses of self-publishing, sure. It shouldn't be skipped. But just like they can pay to have a book printed, you can pay to have it edited.

I don't think that there is really an argument that all the stuff that publishers do is unnecessary. Only that authors might be able to do it themselves. The point that seems to be brought up every time (I've never worked in publishing, so I don't know) is that their ability to promote a book is not replaceable. The reason that comment caught my attention is that it offers a solution to that problem: You don't need to match them, just get within an order of magnitude.

I suspect that one of the hard to replicate aspects is the filtration that publishers offer. They reject books with low chances of success. If they are better then average at selecting, that should increase average ROI. This is where the decade comes in to play. Printing smaller runs is getting cheaper all the time. Distribution is getting easier. ebooks may make getting a book out the door very cheap. If you don't have high up front costs, you don't need filters.
Qualities of a good cofounder
The big appeal of C for me is that it's portable (as long as you know to avoid the non-portable parts, anyway). Sorry, but I won't be using any language extension that will only compile on mac. And anyway, function pointers aren't that hard to groc.
At work - desktop (two screens have their advantages).

Otherwise - laptop... Strangely the best code I've written / I work quickest on a laptop in travel (on a bus / train / plane...) I guess I just get rid of all distractions and working there is actually better than any alternative :)
While I fully understand that good lawyers will try to make most contracts clear and unambiguous, the amount of detail that entails can make it difficult for the average person to read.

As an anecdotal example, when I purchased my house, the purchase agreement, loan documents, and associated paperwork were nearly a hundred pages for a standard purchase. I read all of it, and I had to ask numerous questions of my real estate agent before I thought I understood all that I needed. I think I can say as a simple matter of fact that I am more educated than an average person in the United States (I hold a bachelor's with some graduate level work completed and am currently applying to law school.) If I found it this challenging, then even if the intention was to be clear and unambigious it is likely to be highly confusing to an average purchaser.

On a slight tangent, since you mentioned the importance of rhetoric, would you have any advice on learning the art? You have previously recommended practice and study of the classics and of P.G. Wodehouse in particular as good ways to improve writing skills, but do you have any specific recommendations for rhetoric?
EBay Completes Skype Sale At $2.75 Billion Valuation
"Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum, habemus editorum."

Now that emacs has been anointed by Linus, I hereby announce emacs the winner of the long lasting editor wars. Let us now proceed to purge vi (and other lesser editors) from the face of the Earth, and let none speak of them again.

</joke>
Maybe you guys looking for investment should test posting your response as a comment here instead of emailing privately. He isn't the only investor on hacker news.
Why not? They're certainly going to try, and they're winning so far.

Maybe our generally-accepted notions of what should succeed in the market is wrong.
Some forthcoming posts:

- 13 Ways To Get The Jump On App Store Approval

- My 22 Best App Approval Tips Ever

- Developers Spill: The White Lies They Tell To Get Approved Every Time

- Get Your App Approved Faster: 11 Crazy Ways To Do It

- A Shocking Thing 63% Of iPhone Developers Do To Make More Money

- Your iPhone App's Approval Process: 24 Things Apple Forgot To Tell You

- Write An App Description That Gets Approved Every Time.. In Just 7 Minutes!
The biggest benefit of blocks over function pointers to me, though, is that the code resides exactly where it's being called. Function pointers have a nasty habit of not necessarily doing the same. While the syntax is a bit wonky at first, I think it results in cleaner code overall.
Absolutely. I posted a rant recently on how Scientific American lost me as a subscriber (and an evangelist) when they switched away from the 'journal' format, going so far as to increase the size of the body text to put out the same number of pages with about 10% less content.

I like and admire good graphic design. But not as much as I like and admire good writing. Does anyone think sites like Metafilter or HN would benefit from an orgy of visual style?
for that you want 'http://styleguidance.com/
I'm not sure I would classify Emacs as part of this decade; the first release was in 1976.
- 7 Ways to Make a Living Off AdSense
Yeah, I have terrible experiences with codewarrior as well. I had one programming class in the late 90s that required macs and boy did that make me hate macs with a passion.

But I dont think it was purely a codewarrior issue. The overall apple OS at that time was simply terrible and 10 years behind windows (i wont even count how far behind unix they were) -- they still could not get multitasking to work right. Which meant that any pointer error causes your computer to hang. And when you are coding for a data structures class in C all of your errors are pointer errors.

So I am sure a lot of developers abandoned the mac platform around those times, but maybe many of them are coming back now.
Keep in mind that microemacs (the original spelling) (or uemacs) is not emacs, although it resembles it faintly. It was originally written by David G. Conroy while working on the dec pc that used a z80 as an io controller and an 8086. Daniel Lawrence did a lot of work on it as well.

So it is not quite right to say that emacs has been anointed by Linus.
I think this is very wise and bears repeating:

"Complementary. If you have an idea they expand on that idea. If you’re a bit too liberal they’re a bit too conservative. Complementary should not be confused with diametrically opposed. There is such a thing as too different to get a long. A good example of a complimentary founding team would be the two Steves of Apple fame."
Why was this downvoted? I found it fascinating. Is it because the software is not freely available?
I have doubts about this, do you have any proof?
We programmers are a funny lot. Make us struggle for business or technical reasons and we adapt beautifully. Make us struggle for something stupid and we just get pissed off and do something else.

This is the best YC quote of all time. Thx, edwin!
I was thinking along the same lines (but in a more vim-like sense, naturally). There are a lot of cool projects out there, but not many that affect me to such an extent. Of course it's not the most influential piece of software of the decade, but it has been the one tool that I've never found a replacement for in all my years. I've switched operative systems, browsers, search engines, social networks, graphics editing suites and mail applications more times than I dare count, but vim has always been my editor of choice.

(EDIT: Yes, I do know when both vi and vim were released, I'm just saying)

:)
Gitorious, google code and others allow that too.
Replace Yourself – A Guide to Delegating Your Workload
I'm unclear as to how my comparison is invalid. Verizon's Get-It-Now marketplace is a mobile application store as is Apple's iTunes shop. I'm comparing one market to others.

I'm not, by any means, saying that Apple's review process is reasonable, acceptable, or fair. I am, however, saying that, hands down, it's better than every other mobile application market out there.
I found this OS by opensuse very similar (not sure what to call it, as it is mentioned that it is an OS around the chrome browser and not affliated to Google)

http://www.getchrome.eu/

They have a disclaimer in the download page: Chrome OS is not related to Google. Service provided by SUSE Studio. See the license.
Make it plain you're busy, but be interested anyway. You never know what comes your way, one day you may find the golden opportunity knocking on your door, it would be a waste if you found you nailed it shut.
That's just Aaron's webpy. What's wrong with that?
Google*, definitely.
Current operating systems already support multiple computing paradigms (including the ability to run apps and store data in the "cloud"). Forcing people into a specific paradigm has been historically proven to be disastrous (Network Computers, Javastation, etc).
It's more a threat to Apple.

What google are proposing is to sell a web browser only appliance - for a limited number of users who only use their windows laptop to run ie this is great, they no longer have to worry about viruses or steal ms-office to write a simple letter.

Google can have many more apps for this than apple, because every website is n 'app', developers can write apps simply using javascript/html - there is no need to buy a mac, learn objective C and join apples dev program and learn what secret signs you need to know to get your app approved.

Google don't need to approve the app in the same way that they don't need to approve your website.

To Microsoft, who make their money from business customers running SQLServer and Windows server licenses, this is about as relevent as Nokia shipping a new edition of symbian.
Let me mentor you in not making arbitrary text blue. It looks like a hyperlink when it's not and makes me frustrated.

In fact upon a second glance I notice that _some_ of the blue text is hyperlinked. Impossible to tell because your stylesheet overrides my browser settings which call for underlined links and the above color issue.

You should have a nice small diagram or paragraph explaining what your "smart matching solution" is. (That was the "link" which initially frustrated me.) Seems like I have to fill out a form and wait for a sales person -- wait, "Nuron" -- to call me back. Instead I just close the tab.

Can you provide more to assure us this isn't a data collection scam?

Good luck!
This article misses the point. Sure, developers quitting the iPhone and all moving to Android would probably be the best move for the long-term health of the smart phone industry. However, just like the rest of the technocrat-hipster-elite, PG doesn't actually want to give up his cool Apple stuff. He admonishes Apple because he wants them to get their shit together instead of forcing us to switch to inferior hardware as a political statement.

As a G1 owner I definitely sympathize. I'm secretly relieved that AT&T sucks enough to make my Android purchase palatable.
While that is relevant for you and me, I'm guessing for the vast majority of phone users, this is meaningless. The average phone user does not download apps outside the app store. I would argue the same folks who do download outside the app store would just jailbreak their iPhone.

Either way, I'm all for a more open approval process.
Keyhole (which later became Google Earth) is the only program that really blew me away. I remember staying up way too late just flying around the planet totally amazed.
The only things I still keep local on my drive:

music
my family pictures
my email, contacts and calendar
work files

If you imagine a tablet/netbook with GoogleOS, I'm still scared to death of losing the network. There is some talk of offline storage, but the details are super-fuzzy.

On a plane: where is my music or my videos?
At my grandparents' place, where Interent is still not quite reliable
In the middle of visiting Death Valley
Haven't owned a desktop computer since 2000.
I guess he decided to fix it:

http://marc.info/?l=git&m=122955159617722&w=2
What's funny is that in the beginning, Apple didn't even want to provide an API for native applications. They wanted all developers to use the Web API. When developers balked at that idea Apple reluctantly laid out plans for native applications.

I wouldn't believe that for a minute. The App Store would have been part of the iPhone product plan from day 1. It's too big, too complex, too strategic, and (yes) too well-executed to be a panicked response to developers' demands.

That's how Apple under Jobs has always done things: major features are not "supported" or "planned" or "offered" or "part of the company's philosophy"... at least, not until they appear out of nowhere one day.
I'm tired of this comparison. Smartphone applications have never been behind walled gardens or approval processes. The iPhone is a smartphone.

Yes, if you wanted to J2ME software for mobile phones you had a hell of a time. I'm sure you griped about that too and maybe somebody like Apple actually heard your griping and decided they could do it better.
Then on what type of computers does suspend-resume work properly?
> failing to address the point that the long approval cycle keeps buggy software out there, reducing the overall quality of the user experience.

Your app's user experience, not Apple's. If there were apps critical to the iPhone experience, this would be a problem. At this point, I don't think that anyone is going to switch phones because of the quality of 3rd party apps.

> Thirdly, it has the tone of "if you don't like it, leave"

Well... Apple is going to do whatever they want. You can yell into the wind, or your can do something constructive.

> And are you serious about If Apple is pissing off developers, I personally think this is great.?

Yes, I am. Kind of. We're all quietly building Apple's Empire of Mobile... stirring up the devs might cause them to create a viable alternative.
Ask HN: Learning Ruby on Rails
I am wanting to learn RoR. I don't really know Ruby. I currently use PHP & Python. What sites and/or books should I read/use?
I'm guessing you're the owner of the site. Question - Is 'Clips' supposed to be CLisp? There is an article about a CLIPS programming language on Wikipedia, but I couldn't find anything else for Common Lisp on your site.
Hacker News Age Distribution

http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/age.png
(Huffman told me he found Web 2.0 trendiness to be “tacky,” which might explain why he didn’t embrace one good aspect of Web 2.0: usable, intuitive interfaces.)

If Reddit isn't "usable" or "intuitive," I guess its ~200,000 users must be the cream of the crop when it comes to intelligence..
100+ (and growing) work humor proverbs
Quotes from the article:

> You pounded your fists because Apple didn't have a "real" SDK, so Apple created one.

Success!

> Then you pounded your fists because the approval process is too slow, so Apple hired a bunch of noobs.

Success! (sort of)

> Now you're pounding your fists because the newbies aren't consistent in their execution.

Still waiting.

If you don't ask for anything, you're not going to get it. Why does this author think keeping silent is a virtue? That is just stupid. The griping can't hurt the situation, it can only help it.
Mac apps don’t need to be approved. And Google’s (promising) iPhone competitor is called Android, not Chrome OS.
Virtualization is Real
Pertaining to the editor wars.

There's a great (long) video about Linus and Linux history from 2001. Watch the whole thing if you can—after the 40 minute mark is especially worth it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVTWCPoUt8w

55 minutes in someone asks him, "What editor and mail reader do you﻿ use?" He smirks, "The editor is microemacs, the best editor ever made. And vi and GNU Emacs suck, suck."
You've got it backwards :)

Right now, with the iPhone and iPod Touch, you don't really need to connect them to a computer at all. When I bought my first iPod in 2003, that was absolutely the case, and all the existing PC software for organizing your music sucked ass. I had to use fucking Musicmatch Jukebox to sync my iPod, and the alternative library programs were even worse.

The release iTunes for Windows was a godsend to me -- sure it's pretty resource hungry and has only gotten moreso, but it's pretty fucking fantastic at just getting the basic library management stuff right. Being able to easily rip to AAC was gravy, as it meant that I no longer had to have some of my albums as lossless (MP3's psychoacoustics shit all over gravelly voices). I switched to a Mac a few years later.
Firefox is the coolest software of the decade because they were the fifth browser(1) to use tabs? I like tabs, but, really, tabs?

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(GUI)
It's been working fine for me ever since Windows Vista.
I recently relearned RoR after not using it for a while. I was recommended http://pragprog.com/titles/rails2/agile-web-development-with... and I definitely found it to be a good book.

What helped me the most was to just jump into a project and start coding. I decided to try to do a clone of twitter, just to see if I could get that working. It helped that I had a few friends who were good rails hackers that I could go to with questions.
I "think" HN has something going in the fact that they don't allow certain, cluttery, ASCII text comment spam like other social destinations (like Reddit, Digg, etc). I'm going to test my hypothesis below. Please excuse me. I'll never do this again on this site. I promise ;)

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Visual Thesaurus