shmichael

Microsoft has some amazing enterprise products. Excel is absolutely amazing. Access is a great development tool for paperwork personnel. SQL Server is so so simple to get up and running, and scale up to tremendous volume.

Actually, this makes perfect sense. The sales data at any given point of time is given as a percentage of the baseline, which is set at Q1 '03.

Fixed; Sorry.

You can get comments pushed into the page you are currently reading using this small greasemonkey script:

http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

It shows a small tab on the right side of the page that expands to display the relevant HN page.

Here's a screenshot of the comment panel, once you open it: http://shmichael.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/hne.png

And for chrome, ported by a friend:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hhedbplnihmkekhg...

I'm not happy by Google's dominance of search & email, and yet it is there.

Here the matter is even worse due to the network effect: if most of your friends are using facebook's social tagging service, you'd have to be connected to it one way or the other.

Foursquare opens a whole spectrum of indirect interaction between business owners and their clientèle. The game mechanics are little more than a usability technique.

It's easy to call the shots from the audience. TechCrunch is judging this by Disney over-romanticized standards - self fulfillment et al.

TechCrunch does not have access to the founders' cockpit view. What if the founders decide the company is about to become stagnated, overrun or just boring? If they can get a good price it's not worth the stay.

I'm probably clueless, but can't find any edit handle for this. Little help?

It took about 5 minutes to load. MINUTES. I suspect they don't have any cache servers near Israel.

Am I the only one who can't get Hacker News to show on it?

Javascript is always a nice topic to discuss. Depending on the technical level, you could take it in different directions:

* "good" paradigms in Javascript (using concepts of functional programming). I always recommend Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts - http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748

* Demonstrate some interesting JS libraries such as mootools or Raphaël - http://raphaeljs.com/

* For less technical folks, you could demonstrate new JS graphical capabilities, such as the porting of Quake and the chrome experiments gallery - http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

As far as I can tell, the "stats monitor" feature is not advertised on the front page. In fact, I tried navigating the site for a while but couldn't hit the Firefox welcome/upgrade pages that contain the disclaimer.

Most people upgrade their plugin via Firefox's addon manager, and skip the "what's new" page that opens up. This is because we trust whoever made the plugin to not introduce any malicious behavior in future updates.

Judging by the intrusive nature of this feature, I believe it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

This has been referenced in XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/721/

There is nothing much on the page though. The game has not yet been released, and there isn't any video preview.

The title is misleading. Flash advertisments are being converted to an iPad-compatible form (probably Canvas). It's not even clear if the process is fully automatic.

Several advantages of the ribbon:

Allows a more "organic" grouping of functions, e.g. All the design-related items are grouped together, then there is a subgrouping of font, paragraph, etc. Similar items are closer, either horizontally or vertically.

Multiple methods of communications: icons alongside text and color

Allows manipulation of attributes in-place (no popups)

Easy-to-find keyboard shortcuts (hold Alt for a whole second)

And Ken is renamed Paul?

I've been out of the loop for the last year and a half. If you reference me to a succinct overview of what I'm missing, I'll definitely read it.

I think it is kind of nice that you can suddenly revive a submission or dive into old commentary.

Perhaps you shouldn't display anything older than 3 months, as after 3 months one can re-submit the page.

There's already a CNC printer that can replicate itself. You just have to buy the raw material. For example, see this

http://blog.reprap.org/2008/06/reprap-achieves-replication.h...

Waze are doing something similar to that.

Rumba is doing a pretty good job at that.

The greasemonkey script and chrome extension parse HN's newest items page in addition to searchYC. You could just disable the call to searchYC in the script.

If you use the greasemonkey script you have an option to disable sites (HN itself is disabled by default). Won't work for chrome, though.

http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

So any ad-based company is b2b? I don't think so. In nature of service, number of users, any aspect actually, they are b2c. You just charge them for their attention instead of money, and the cost is fractional.

I've worked in .NET for 3 years.

ASP.NET is extremely heavyweight, late to implement asynchronous calls, hardly as agile as web platforms such as RoR.

The article is extremely long and overly articulate, considering it discusses the consumer's preference of the short, the sweet, and the bitty.

and my friend didn't even wait up for me.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175223

It has been just today that I discussed the prospects of analyzing HN front page posts with a friend.

Promise to come up with interesting results. Thank you.

I am somewhat acquainted with heavy-weight entrepreneurs in Israel. In addition, several of my friends are involved in start-ups, myself included. Drop me a line (shmichael at gmail) if that seems interesting.

It is a pitty the author did not mention Israel, currently the second largest high-tech industry after silicon valley.