skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're welcome. I use both in work, though a lot more Java than C++, but I agree, when I'm given a choice (or working on my own projects) I, too, prefer to avoid them. I've used a lot of Python in the past and, for the past two months, have been using Clojure. Much much nicer to work in than Java or C++!
You mean 4 right?
Developers choose their dev tools and platforms based on technical merit, experience, cost, and a variety of other factors. I don't believe that any "evangelist" including me, could convince a developer to use a technology just because we say nice things about it.

Xobni, a Y Combinator company, is a good example. They chose to build on Microsoft long before I came along. But, once we connected I was able to help them get access to software, technical support, consulting, and lots of PR and exposure to MSFT, the press, VCs, etc.

I am not a "marketing" or PR guy. I help startups and developers get things done, get them help when they ask, etc.

In my post I highlighted some of the things I noticed about the Google alternatives. I don't think I went al the way to say Google is better in every case and those Microsoft products are bad. If I left that impression I am sorry.

There are lots of choices. No one tool or product will be the best in all possible use cases. Work loads and requirements are different, and the choice of tool or platform can vary. My job as an evangelist is to make people aware or what exists, and make it easy for them to get access to the help they need.

Thanks,

Don Dodge
Georgia bulldogs?
Drop the Pounds Fast
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I don't understand why SCRIPT elements doesn't have a "depends" attribute that list id names to other SCRIPT that must have finished before this script executes.

Isn't that a huge issue if you intend to defer/async a script element for a js-library that other scripts depend on being there?
You'd be surprised.

People using IDEs for a start, code folding, hiding from the cruft.
Apparently Microsoft filed for a patent on this in May of 2008. It's fascinating to me that Edward Tufte isn't mentioned anywhere in the patent application.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0282325.html

Interestingly, that's the same month that someone else started posting mockups for the feature:

http://sparklines-excel.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html

I wonder where that leaves these companies:

http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Products_SparkLiner_Overview...

http://www.bissantz.com/sparkmaker/index_en.asp
My worry is that the leading (most popular) browser is the slowest. On the web you need to work to the lowest common browser.
I'm not so sure skipping compilation is going to give you rapid development.
Nice piece of Work.... cheers.
What you'd build if you had 100 millions?
Imagine that you were approached by a kind person who offered you 100 million dollars to build something of your choice.

This person is very powerful and you cannot possibly cheat, but you don't have to make a profit off your product either.

So, you can take 100 millions and spend your time building something you want. What it would be?
There's a similar plugin for Firefox that accepts a "master password" salts, randomizes, hashes, performs magic, and submits that as the actual password to your service.

The end result is all of your accounts have a different and secure password, whereas you (the end user) only work with the single password.

I've been thinking of giving this a shot but just keep putting it off for various reasons (the long time commitment of resetting all of my passwords to the newer/safer credentials, what if I am on a machine w/o Firefox or the plugin, etc).
Tech Crunch has become garbage.
I only skimmed the article, but it looked as if IE9 is not that much slower than the others. I am sure they'll try to catch up before the final release.

As for IE6, I suppose Microsoft would like to get rid of it, too. I don't know who still uses it anyway - it seems to require extra effort to stick to it. Must be all the Windows 98 users?
I'd build a research institute for mathematics and computer science.

If I had to build something technical, I'd build a secure realtime BSD kernel.
Classic Apple fanboy-ism at best with missing knowledge here and there. If OS does matter that much first Google couldn't be such a success and second Apple couldn't enjoy its current success because first 2 (even 3) Mac OS X releases were horribly slow and have very little app support!
MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?
Map and Reduce, if you count.
It sure does. Followed, in both cases of my experience, by the woman involved insisting that she just slipped, really, because she would never rate anyone 1 star, even if they were really ugly, which isn't even the case here anyway... ;)
It's the same in Europe. My wife is Spanish and when I learned that you could transfer money to anyone's bank account easily and free, my brain exploded.

It's amazing that the U.S. is (was?) considered the leader of technological innovation, but we're still so backward on something like this. It reeks of corruption and lobbyists.
Geek T-Shirts that you can send as a gift
SVG graphics with JavaScript
Sixth Sense a challenge to Microsoft’s Surface
This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.
After reading and watching this post you will definitely think about what future offers to you. This device will give a big competition to Microsoft’s Surface. For me its a Must Have device.
Maybe your intuition about the attractiveness of being a jerk is wrong?
So the rats were more stressed out from cold water than getting killed and getting their brains examined? interesting.
Depends on the photo. If the photo shows him wearing his expensive watch and sitting in his expensive car, she has most of the information she needs.
While JavaScript is getting faster and faster, I still don't think that JavaScript (especially DOM operations) implementations are "fast enough" yet, not even on Google Chrome. I still have to jump though hoops to get complex javascript/ajax heavy sites (approximating the richness of native apps) working reasonable quickly. There was a lot of advancement lately, but I think there's still a lot of space for improvement.
I don't think SunSpider tests DOM operations. I admit I was thinking purely of the JS engine and not of the DOM, and that the DOM is still a bottleneck. (I'd much rather the IE folks focus on DOM stuff rather than try to get raw JS any faster than they have already.)
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How would you do this with an email address?

My single change to the OpenID spec: perform discovery on a "well known url" on the same domain the email address comes from. After that, its the same as OpenID is now.
Online gaming's dirty little secret
Windows boss on building his first laptop
A news organization for long-term thinking, reporting and analysis. Essentially a News of the Long Now.
I thought that PyPy is restricted to only a subset of Python called "RPython" (stands for Restricted Python) so it's not fully compatible at all with CPython. Correct me if I'm wrong though as I'm far from being a Python guru.
Is memcache a substitute for MySQL? I thought memcache was meant to ease off the load on database by caching query results. it's not like comparing apples and oranges, is it?
You do know it's not exactly hard to change the looks of the interface, if the brown tones don't make you happy.

Mine is grey-ish/blue-ish most of the time. I spent a lot of time with it looking like OpenSolaris and Fedora too.
Atractive Diamond: Allnatt Diamond
A University strictly dedicated to IT/CS related studies that was actually in it to teach, innovate, and research rather than turn a profit.

And the distance learning department would not use Blackboard, we'd open source our own platform.
Outsource Your Email…and Finally be Free
Heineken CEO: Decade spent in Africa “worth three times Harvard Business School”
I would establish a huge prize for finding the most efficient way to teach the principles of rational thinking and economics to society. And then I'd spend the rest of the money on establishing that teaching method so that everyone can benefit, regardless of prior education or status. This will lead to a better society.
Wayne Lee On jPolite : Lightweight jQuery Based Portal Framework
OLPC - only better and completely free.
can someone please tell me why it's downvoted? buy it or not these are my arguments against ones in the article and i DO think that OS does not have the same importance as had in 80s. what is wrong with this?
Doctors' Neckties Seen as Flu Risk
really nice house.
Excellent work . . .you could make a really cool short film with this technique.
Maybe this is me being a pompous arrogant arse but I'd venture to say they by virtue of you posting here you are putting you are not part of the statistical average. Especially if you look at the survey that was conducted showing the wide disparity between the percentages of various personality types on Hacker News vs. the population at large...

Truth is: The vast majority of people don't think or behave like the people on this forum(?) do.

Edit: Just for the record nearly all of the software engineers I know scored in the 99th percentile on all of their standardized tests growing up. Obviously the merit of standardized tests can be argued - but I'm guessing you are smarter than msot people and just incredibly humble.
ASP.NET 4.0: Writing custom output cache providers
Publishers are not just marketing machines, they also have editors. One of the dangers of self-publishing is not getting robust feedback from a good editor.
Classic anti-Apple fanboy-ism at best with missing knowledge here and there. The OS mattering != everything else not mattering
"become" garbage , i would like to know a time when it was not.
Pastebin which is able to run your code. Accepts 40 languages.
I read Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" a few years ago and it certainly is a sobering book. I would agree with its thesis that we face a distinct possibility of our high tech "Western" society crashing - and due to the Threads linking us together this crash could be pretty hard.

I would use the 100 million to investigate possible ways of mitigating the effects of such a crash. As the actual causes would be essentially unpredictable I'd pass on that effort and concentrate on what we could do to establish a degree of continuity of core areas of knowledge: maths, medicine, geography etc.

One option would be to build bunkers full of useful books in remote locations (like the gene bank in the Svalbard). However, a better way might be to build a long lasting organisation set apart from our culture - very much like secular versions of medieval monasteries or the mathic concents in Neal Stephenson’s excellent Anathem.
I would build a giant Ark to save us all from 2012 apocalypse, unlike Roland Emmerich who had saved, few of us in his f*ing movie ;)
In some cases why do we use a password at all. There are many times that I register to a site to download something (a pdf in scribd, a sdk in nokia) or to see a post or a link, in any of this cases I dont care if anyone wants to log in with my username and what are the chances that someone will log in with my username just to change my age or my sex... oh no... I'd rather be exposed to that than remembering another password.
Building an Online Bulwark to Fend Off Identity Fraud
Why is this article garbage? It points out a problem that millions have, some proposed solutions, and invites entrepreneurs to solve it.
multitalk: 2-dimensional presentation program (ZUI like Prezi or VUE, GPLed)
maybe downvoters didnt get my point and/or Gruber's point. i'm saying that OS does not matter as it used to be to be developed by other players such as HP or Dell. asking again what is wrong with this???
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I'd build a sustainable commune on a massive scale, using advanced aquaponics, greenhouses, alternative energy sources, and digital information sharing. This would hopefully serve as an example to inspire others to build their own sustainable projects.
Distributed mesh wireless + solar energy.
It's just an empty quote, not even by the guy who worked in Congo himself.
Certainly: it's very much apples to oranges. I suppose it's there by way of comparison so that you can see how much faster these other things are than something that (at least with InnoDB) has transactions, referential integrity, etc...
Also from 1982: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scFykNMqaws

And we can't forget the classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2KIxMQro-w
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Awards honor top 10 Internet moments of the decade
Thanks, that is educational. You are right, at this level of discussion I only have 2nd opinions ...

Yet seemingly there are academics that disagree with you, in plain english - http://www.jstor.org/pss/3291643.

It does raise the question about how well we can know what people meant and felt 2000yrs ago, particularly in this case given the political context.
21 Best CAPTCHAs: Bloggers Boon & Spammers Bane
To be clear: this is not my work. I just pasted the link :)
I made an operating system -- LoseThos. http://www.losethos.com
Only the pypy interpreter is written in RPython, code running in pypy is written in normal python. See http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/coding-guide.html for more info
My understanding is that RPython is used to implement PyPy itself, but PyPy can interpret up to Python 2.5.
Mootools is very nice, not least because of the quality of their documentation. In my experience it's cross browser support is great too.
Besides, isn't a decade "three times" longer than it takes to get an education from Harvard Business School?
Peter Thiel Says Don't Piss Off The Robots
Your safest bet is to simply never use the word "fanboy" except to refer to yourself. It's name-calling, and is therefore both rude and a sign of bad rhetoric. (I would say ad hominem, but that's a cliche phrase on HN, so I do so with reluctance. ;)

As for the rest of your post, here is Gruber's thesis statement:

PC makers who want to succeed should create their own OSes

Your statement that "Google succeeds without an OS" does not belong in this argument. First, because Google's success has nothing to do with PC making: That's not their business. Google is an online advertising business. To the extent that the rest of their amorphous, cash-cow-supported business plan has any coherency, it seems to be about using various web and mobile apps to drive advertising traffic, although they also derive a certain amount of revenue from selling software subscriptions and licenses, and of course there's AppEngine. And probably some stuff I've forgotten.

Second, because where Google does have a strategy to venture into the hardware market -- with mobile PCs, marketed as "phones", and perhaps desktop/laptop PCs as well -- the plan seems to be to start out by building an OS, just as Gruber suggests. Google's phone venture is centered around Android. I'm not sure what Chrome OS is all about, but if Google releases a tablet or a laptop it will presumably run Chrome. To the extent that Android and Chrome are or will be successful, these will be points in favor of Gruber's argument.

Finally... Apple's first couple of OS X releases really weren't that successful. Apple survived that, of course, because they still had enough dedicated users of their previously successful OS -- Mac OS 9 -- to tide the business over. And of course that iPod thing didn't hurt -- that bought a lot of time. [1] The success of Mac OS X was a near thing, though. Mac fanboy that I was, I nevertheless abandoned the Mac myself for dual-boot XP/Ubuntu in the early 2000s, and didn't come back until OS X 10.3 or 10.4, and I don't think I was alone.

---

[1] The iPod, of course, is successful because of iTunes. Which isn't exactly an OS. But is certainly a software ecosystem, common to all Apple hardware, with a circumventable but nonetheless real form of lock-in, built around what was at the time a superior, unified interface for purchasing music, organizing it, and copying it to your devices. The success of the iPod derives mostly from Apple's custom software for the iPod. People have been cloning the hardware forever. Pundits famously didn't see the iPod coming because other companies had beaten Apple to market with apparently equivalent hardware.
The original article makes an excellent point, and expresses it with a great deal of coherency: the reluctance of computer makers to engage in operating system development is based on an outmoded fear that was established in the days where interoperability was hard because we hadn't yet figured out things like open document formats, open network protocols, portable APIs, portable language runtimes, and virtual machines. A lot has changed since then, so why are they still so reluctant?

This is an excellent question.

Your response seems to have a very tenuous grasp on coherency. I'm trying to pull out what you're trying to say. It appears to hinge on the transitive verb "to matter", and I can find only one introductory paragraph where the author uses this verb, and he doesn't say anything objectionable the two times that he uses it:

He says that hardware and software both matter. I find that hard to refute. Then he goes on to say that if you asked him to say which matters more, he'd say software. I'm not surprised that he would say this, since he tends to be a "user experience" guy and I'm willing to grand him this premise for the rest of what he wrote.

Honestly I can't tell what counter-argument you're trying to make. Yes, Google has been successful. It certainly wasn't because of their hardware. Regardless, you're only responding to the setup of the thesis, not the thesis itself.
Man, ain't that the truth. My favorites are the following categories:

- The only good photos I have of myself are with friends in bars.

- My cat/dog has to be in the photo. I love my cat/dog more than I'll love you.

- The only time I look good is with my ex, so I'll crop his side of the picture out. You won't notice, will you?

- 20 self-photos of me in the bathroom mirror. Don't mind the mess in the background.

- I love to travel! Can you see that speck at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower? That's me!
Does anybody know comparable (preferrably free) ways of doing this?
Hmm, those are useful. When can we expect them in OO.o?
I'd hire someone to create a software filter to sort out crap posts like this one.
With tons of cash, China's buying the world
Yammer Continues To Push Features I Want On Twitter
Engadget’s Secret New Redesign Revealed
I'd build a rollercoaster.
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I think there is a fundamental difference between the creative acts of programming and producing artwork. The programmer has a requirement of what the program or piece of it should do, and the creative problem, is how to do express this in code. The problem with reading code, is that the original problem is not present in the code, and the purpose of the code is not to express something to a human viewer, but mainly for a machine to execute. In that way the creativity is a lot more like the mathematicians creativity than the artists. The difference to mathematics, is that in programming the resulting code is usually quite long. What one would need is to condense the code in a way similar to how a mathematician does with his formulas, so that only the most essential ideas remain. Some people are very good at that (Peter Norvig comes to mind), but most codebases for actual software are not at all like that.
I don't see how that is the case, since the main software supplier in the world today that is microsoft, is totally dependent on hardware manufacturers.

I don't see Intel, (ok easy example) or any other hardware manufacturer dying anytime soon. The only one who 'could' die are those whose job is only about assembling hardware components together. And even them have a role in the low end market that will be very hard to meet for a company aiming to handle the whole chain of assembly of a computer, software included.

It's easy to agree on the fact that software has a much more profound impact on people that hardware. It's why there is an UI in GUI. But to me this point is as moot as saying an engine manufacturer is useless because it doesn't do steering wheels.

It seems to be a fact (I dont have enough informations to be sure) that software economy is wealthier than hardware's. But i'd like facts about that first, because i see a whole lot of software companies dying too .
And then even if it is true it doesn't mean we NEED hardware manufacturers to come and release a ton of more or less compatible software and trying to impose that on users the exact same way we are stuck with windows at the moment.

Software building is a field of expertise in itself. A company can convert itself, or invest a new field. But it certainly doesn't mean they should, or they gonna die if they dont ..

My summary : Basic and non credible argumentation from the original article. Takes a visionnary tone , but in my opinion this is everything but where we are headed at the moment.
Top 20 Fictional Gadgets
What do you get for that person who has everything? Or even the person who has nothing?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935884
There is a simpler solution: not worrying about IE.

Make your business model in such a way you don't need users who don't know better than not to use IE.
Maybe it's not "defective" people that post on dating sites, it's outliers who aren't likely to hook up with a random and have it work out. Maybe people with strange hobbies, beliefs, intelligence levels, whatever.
Are you serious? You failed your first start-up, how come do you want someone to give you 100 millions.

"This person is very powerful and you cannot possibly cheat"

When the project is big, cheating become easier

"but you don't have to make a profit off your product either"

What's the benefit of your work then?
Music Dopeness and Bands as Brands (Part 1)
The person has approached YOU :)
Fear of Satan Helps Economies Grow
Don't understand, what do you mean?
Great article, well above the standards of Techcrunch lately. I agree with the seven deadly sins being the best advice on there. VC's want to know why people wont stop using your idea not why they will want too.
I don't agree at all with Gruber on this one.

It seems in fact that software manufacturers, and for good reasons, are taking more and more control into how hardware is designed. And that is a good thing because hardware ought to be designed for the software, not the other way around.

But it doesn't mean that what we need is more monolithic entities like apple. The fact that hardware and software is at least somewhat decoupled is a VERY good thing in my opinion.

What google is doing with android is interresting in this regard, and i wonder if their strategy with Chrome OS is gonna be similar; they release an OS (open-source, and this is quite important in the end), do the usual strategy of partnership with hardware manufacturers, and in the end , also decides to produce their own smartphone. It's an harder path cause your partners are your opponents at the same time (something apple for example, hasn't to deal with concerning OS X). But for the user it's clearly the best path : You have the freedom of using the software as you want (!= Apple) and you can also buy a proprietary solution that supposedly offers a better synergy between software and hardware