skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fairly frequently, stories come up of a software vendor whose product was doing well until, one day, (Apple/Microsoft, depending on which OS it was for) comes out with their own bundled or free/cheap software which does the same thing. People often get upset at this potentially business-destroying transformation from "they provide my platform" to "they're my competition". Often there's a round of followup posts which mention the word "sharecropping" over and over, and explain that it's always a bad idea to be a sharecropper since this is how it often ends.

Google has essentially done the same thing -- gone from being "platform" to being "competitor" -- and phone manufacturers are, unsurprisingly, just as unhappy about it as software developers usually are.

The question I'm getting at, then, is why in the software case we often denounce the OS vendors and go on about "sharecropping" and how terrible it is to get caught in this situation, but here we're joyously celebrating Google for doing what is, basically, the same thing (and remember that as much as you may dislike the company which provides your phone service, they are not the company which designs and manufactures your phone handset, so "they deserved it because I hate Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/etc." is misplaced here).
you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).

on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.
Or a stack of HR Sexual Harassment Report forms.
There are lots of places where you can make a stable income without flushing your health, your psyque and your social life down the toilet. Hell, if you don't care about that and are already working 80+ hrs per week, you could probably make more money by working 2 regular jobs! Or you could have your cheese and eat it too, by working one 9-5'er + moonlighting...

I guess you feel all excited about your current job, and it must be an amazing professional experience... but you will grow older some day. Just be aware of that fact and be ready to jump boats before you burn out the fire inside you.
Rise of the Part-Time Smoker
What language and server stack does the site use? I presume you want it off your servers.

Anyone here looking for some interesting, unique and promising consulting work that stretches well beyond Twitter? Please make contact with me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_G...
In addition to being a troll, Mr. Orlowski has a long-standing and irrational dislike of Google in particular, and while this is the most credible piece I've ever seen from him, everything he says about the company should be taken with huge heaping spoonfuls of salt.

In his typical M.O., he takes an initially rational argument (Google is competing with mobile operators it was previously partnering with, which is going to accelerate their transformation into dumb pipes) and then extrapolates to ridiculous conclusions (Google is secretly attempting to build its own private Internet and become the only ISP in the world).

Google is definitely a threat to mobile operators, but then the writing has been on the wall for their business model for a long time -- a disruptively cheap VoIP operator with a data-only handset is going to be the end of the archaic concept of "voice minutes" and thus their profits. It might be Google, or it might not, but it's going to be somebody.
Your point? You said that someone should look to these systems as cases of "metaprogramming". Now you say that they are "metaprogrammable". You seem to have a very specific notion of metaprogramming, what exactly would you consider to be a prototypical use of it?
"While old media produces sequel after unoriginal sequel of movies, and clone musicians to push on us, the information age has spawned a new age of creativity."

A common rationalization, but I believe, it's a straw men argument. For who's really interested in "creativity"? Maybe you and a few more others, but hardly the majority.

For example: Let's assume, there's been a law ten years ago that allowded anybody to redistribute a published movie. Is it conceivable to think anybody would have invested money to make a movie since then? Only a small minority, maybe.

The majority of movies, however, would have never been produced. We wouldn't have seen neither the Spiderman series, nor Lord of the rings, nor most other movies that were popular on the file sharing networks.

In reality, these movies were made and millions of people worldwide spend money to see them. That looks like proof, millions of people wanted to see them! The majority of people don't care whether a work is "creative".

It's not the job of the media industries to foster "truely creative" works. The industry's job is financing, filtering, and informing about creative works. Therefore, the "creative" argument is a straw men argument.
Visualizing logfiles with MongoDB, MapReduce, Ruby and Google Charts Part 1
That's mysql "replication" for you. Sure it'll send data back and forth, but it does not guarantee your database replica pairs have the same data.
And that guy has a new book to promote.
Interesting. I ADMINISTER computers, but I used to BE a SYS ADMIN. Administer is a verb to me, and admin a noun. Either way, your suggestion doesn't offend me 1 millionth as much as administrate does, in either usage.
The Mystery of the Miniature Stealth Fighter Jet
DynDNS is my registrar of choice, and they do a very good job of making management easy. However, their DNS services are most definitely NOT free as is EveryDNS. It'll be interesting to see if that changes or not.
One of the tests is whether he's diluting North Face's trademark. The other is whether he's damaging it. Freedom to satirize is not the same thing as freedom to create a satirical product.

There is a long history of such products, but that does not guarantee a defense.
Old Thread for review of 'Publicitweet' on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856450
I wouldn't even consider a third Google Android handset in the future. HTC (and others) are burning too many bridges not getting updates out the door fast enough. I can't even run most of Google's new Android first party apps on my phone because I'm stuck with Android 1.5 and Sprint/HTC won't commit to any time table on an update. "2010" is as specific as they want to get. Android 3.x may be out before I even get 2.x. Good work guys. Great end user experience. Maybe Google did some shady stuff here but the third party handset makers screwed themselves too.
I'll be unpopular for saying this, but I really hate this web 2.0 marketing speak.

Starting sentences with "Hi" or "Hey", sentences like "Drop me an email", using unneccessary hyper words like "love", "excited", "we can't wait", "sneak peak".

Then this fake chuminess like "I'm nursing a hangover", "my cat typed this", "love to hear from you", smileys.

And then this self-deprecation: "it's really tough to know if we are on track", "our little app".

Guys, get this : this type of language no longer has the effect it had when it was used for the first time. This has become business speak - and real people don't talk that way.

I'm not a guy that likes referencing other people on this site, but take a look at the language that patio11 uses on his website. This is a normal way to talk to people.

Stop talking to people like they are a bit stupider than you, but to get to their level, you need to self-deprecate. It's not effective. That would be the gripe I have about your website. And apologies for being harsh, but my asthma is acting up.
Surely not always a joke. If, for example, a couple is kissing in public then recording them against their will seems wrong to me. Whether it ought to be illegal is another question.

I don't see why it seems wrong. They may not want you to record it, but if they are doing it in a public place they expect (or at least should expect) to be seen. Having it recorded is little different from having it seen except you now have a near-perfect copy to show others instead of having only the ability to discuss it.

It might to a degree be rude to record it, just as it would be rude to stare at them for prolonged periods as they did it, but that is very different than either morally or legally wrong.

Now if they are in somewhere that should be at least partially private (they're own home, a hotel room, etc), then recording is a very different story.
That was the point of the original artists 'art' - he made the sign old and dirty, so people would assume it had always been there and they had never noticed. It was about what people notice in their surroundings.

If you passed an old broken down house on a lot you had never noticed before, would you assume you had somehow missed it - or that somebody had created a mock broken down house?

It doesn't help that in LA the signs are put up by different state, city, county and municipal authorities that don't seem to ever work together.
I've heard people use "post-greh-sequel".
This project is pretty awesome: http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/ - Ruby-style JavaScript
there to importantate

Clearly you meant "importantize". Sheesh.
No, you misunderstood the law.

A startup funded by YC would never ever be seen as a subsidiary.

Google NL BV can be held to the law with respects to google.com, but some start up that google funds will never be used to hold google.com to NL law.
Is Vision compulsory for an entrepreneur?
I would suggest not buying headphones which, apparently, cost $175 a pair. I use a pair of very high-quality $99 bose in-ear buds; the point where the wire meets the phone in my pocket is a frequent point of failure, so I use a $14 headphone extension cable, which I replace every 4 months or so. I guess this is still pretty expensive but seems to be less than half the cost of what you're doing right now.
Inklet turns multitouch Mac trackpad into a pen tablet
No, he's rejecting that thinking.

It's not what you can find out, Frost and James and Poirier told us; it's what you know.
I can help get it set up but it uses a standard LAMP stack. Requires Apache, PHP (5.2+) and MySQL (5+). Optionally uses Memcache and falls back to APC.
I pronounce char like car. Now that I think about it, that seems weird.
So who is an official journalist?

Do you have to work for a newspaper? As fulltime staff

Does the paper have to be a public company, listed on the NYSE or can you be a journalist for a local free paper?

Perhaps it would be easier to just make FOX the official state broadcaster
>You've missed a trick when you decided to be a programmer

Not necessarily: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045758
How to Protect Directors on Your Startup’s Board
Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield
They tazer you and then charge you with assaulting a police officer. If you have below the recommended skin albedo they also charge you possession of drugs.
Imma let you finish...http://bit.ly/8J0yxb
If you think about it, these two complaints are exactly the same.
Euler Angles and Gimbal Lock
Social Networking Gives Rise to the Decades Old Apology
Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country. Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.

For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
In Canada the RCMP are refusing to release video to the family of a suspect that died of accidental internal injuries while being helped into a police car - on the grounds that the victim's right to privacy extends for 20years after his death.
Finder alternative reuses tabs from Chrome
How I met the Co-Founder of Google and why we didn't talk business
Yep, and here's a better article from Dr. Dobb's with a bunch of good ones:
http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&sho...
Great idea, this reminds me of the guy who reverse graffiti-ed cities, by pressure washing them. Though a sign is more useful.

http://reversegraffitiproject.com/
The tiniest C sort function?
Building on Facebook's Commitment to Open Source Software
App.itize.us iPhone app curation
"In Europe, anyone from a different culture is a "guest" until proven otherwise."

This much better explains why the U.S. better assimilates immigrants (Muslim or otherwise) than Europe, than anything I said. We have our immigration issues, but I have never heard anyone refer to a legal U.S. citizen as a "guest." It also helps me understand some of the frustration European Muslim immigrants must feel, being pressured to give up their own heritage, culture, and beliefs or be ostracized.
David,

Am I supposed to move my 15 domains now? What's gonna happen?
Google Docs to allow storage of any type of file
Here is a list of the 12 states that require 2-party consent for recording phone conversations

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United...
California
Connecticut
Florida
Illinois
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Montana
Nevada
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Washington

11 blue states and 1 red state

The Boston cases clearly seem like police abuse of wiretapping laws which were originally intended to protect citizens talking on the phone (not hide evidence of physical violence against them)
You can buy kits for post and beam houses. They start at $17,000.

http://www.shelter-kit.com/cabinsandhouses.php
Best Web Coding Tutorials From Scratch
C++ templates are clearly metaprogramming in every way. I cannot think of a case in which they are not metaprogramming. If you brought up C++ metaprogramming with the assumption that I would argue it's not metaprogramming, you were mistaken.
From http://www.everydns.com/acquisition.php:

1) Will my DNS service be interrupted?

Absolutely not. While we're working to transition services over to the
Dyn infrastructure, we will do everything possible to ensure it's a
seamless and painless transition for you.

2) Do I have to do anything or make any changes?

Nope. You will be given plenty of notice if you have to do anything. But
in the short term, nothing is changing.

3) Will the service remain free?

While we don't 100% have the answer to that yet, we will not be making any
changes to the service you are currently receiving for the foreseeable
future. We will be discontinuing signups in the near future but existing
accounts will remain active and fully functional.
I remember a TV program that showed the woodshop of a Mennonite farmer. He had a windmill running an air compressor, and a full set of modern air-powered woodworking tools.
"...Google looked... the way they were being sold (exclusive to specific carriers, and used to lock consumers in, just like all prior phones) and felt that it just wasn't doing the job the way they'd planned. Android had a reason for existing, and it was to break the logjam in the mobile industry".

If that was their intention, they failed at it. The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be. That means their are getting Apple like obscene margins.

No non-technical user in his sane mind would pay $330 more for an unlocked phone.

What they must do, if it is not obvious enough, is to get Amazon like margins and monetize the rest with a wave of new consumers hungry to look at ads.
Google Chromium Bug: Huge amount of goats teleported
Samba 4 HOWTO ("not for production")
Why You Really Aren't that Great at "Social Media"
Ask HN: A/B testing with only 1-2 sign-ups per month
I would like to employ A/B testing for my web service homepage and sign-up. My site only gets 1-2 sign-ups per month.

How long would I need to run the experiment to get a reasonably decent idea of which version is statistically better? (I have no statistical background/training.)

The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_Testing) is very light on details.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
"It also helps me understand some of the frustration European Muslim immigrants must feel, being pressured to give up their own heritage, culture, and beliefs or be ostracized."

Oh, come on. Do you think that Muslims moving to the U.S. don't have to give up anything? All immigrants have to be give up something, but they don't have to give up all: their own heritage, culture, and beliefs. That sounds melodramatic.

It's as simple as this: when you move to a new country, you must adopt the local culture. That does not mean that you must give up your original culture entirely. No one said that they have to be incompatible. If you fail to adopt the culture of your new country, you are, essentially, insulting your hosts... and you will be ostracized in return, which is the natural human response in this situation.
It's not manipulating the program as data. It is simply the program itself. If the program runs with its output being another program which runs, then that is a form of metaprogramming. In this case, the program is simply running. A collection of functions which accept arguments and return values directly is not what most people would consider metaprogramming. It's just a program.

JavaScript is entirely capable of doing metaprogramming, but in the article posted here, it does not.
I do not know why this was downmodded. The last line was somewhat snarky (I like Fox personally), but these are valid questions and form a genuine and important debate in many circles.
Looks interesting but has it made money?
I like this: "Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and favor boring and faded technologies where possible."
Massachusetts law prohibits SECRETLY recording oral or telephone conversations. It's pretty clear that whipping out a camera phone, pointing it at the officers, and pressing "record" is in no way a SECRET recording.
Why You Should Start a Company in... Boulder
That's toughie. Is a success counted when the first company does well, or if the entrepreneur goes on to make a ton of amazing companies, giving some stock to the accelerator and/or having them involved in the process?
Based on your current traffic? About 55 years.
Thanks, Patrick. I just met with my board of directors and we voted 1-0 to adopt this as our company song.
Where did you see $0.02/GB/month? The post says $0.25/GB/month.
In what way can anyone expect privacy whilst eating in a public restaurant? How would a recording be libel?
Seeking the next creator of "Sesame Street" for a Digital Age
In any case first doesn't mean the only, or the only one deserving.
That's per year
Thanks for the list.

I am curious, granted the source is Wikipedia, but the article says that those states require notification, not consent. Even if these laws did apply to this kind of in-person interaction, instead of just the phone conversations they were intended for, would it be valid to argue that clearly and openly beginning the recording is notification?
How Do You Turn Something Interesting Into Something Challenging?
Wow, who would have thought this article would have started such a contentious thread. An interesting point is that more powerful languages blur the distinction between programming and meta-programming, weaker languages make the distinction more clear.
On Stanford Campus we used to have an intersection called "The Intersection of Death" which was a 4 way mostly blind bike-only intersection of two major bike routes. In the middle of the night the trumpet section of the marching band erected a roundabout in the center of it complete with signs explaining which way to go. amazingly a week later it was still there and someone replaced the half-assed trumpet player statue they had erected with a cool abstract pvc sculpture. A few weeks later someone else added to it. The roundabout was guerrilla installed in fall and the university left it standing until the next summer when they tore it out and put a permanent cement one in.
Oh, you mean that shocking-thing going on in my ears isn't supposed to be happening?
I suspect that the motivation for an official 'Google Phone' is to provide at least one model that's guaranteed to get firmware updates in a timely fashion. With luck, it will pressure the other handset manufacturers to provide the same service.
That storage space purchase page you linked is for Gmail and Picasa only, not GDocs as far as I can tell.
The quote: "A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production." was what hit me.
Brittny Gastineau Meets 20-Year-Old Half-Brother for nonpareil Time
Thanks for this list. I had no idea about the Providence RI one. Although new, it's still interesting.
Go put it to some dope beat homey!

http://www.beatslocker.com/download.php

http://www.worldwidebeats.net/
Dropbox was mentioned 3 times so far in the comments but it does not seem that Google is going to release a windows client that would offer the same functionality..

Still it's an interesting development. Maybe dropbox could respond with adding support for google docs syncing if the API allows?
So you're telling me there's a chance... :-)
How very LA.

Boston needs about a thousand artists like that guy.
"A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production."

That has to be incredibly difficult to adhere to, but doing so probably saves a ton of headaches.
Woz' retelling in Triumph of the Nerds (pbs.org/nerds) was that he had little-to-no self-confidence while working on the Apple I. The Apple I itself was a wooden box full of parts, barely suitable for a hobbyist, used to play simple games. The Apple II had a proper stylish case (with fancy logo), documentation, advertising, and a vision of a platform for personal computing to compete with the mainframe. It was a salable product, and extremely successful.

Mac was almost stolen outright from Xerox PARC

Also incorrect. The Xerox Star was an expensive prototype used for research. Many ideas were taken from the Star, but while the first Macintosh looks a lot like a modern computer, the Star was quite different, even having windows that couldn't overlap and other things we would now consider silly.

But, Jobs didn't create the Macintosh - he just hired the engineers who worked on the Star to join his great engineering team to polish and productize it. His contribution has always been to set the bar and only allow things that are great into the final product. This is possibly the most important thing an executive can do, but rarely properly executed.

Cringely did a good job with Triumph of the Nerds (based on his book "Accidental Empires") - if you haven't seen it, I'm pretty sure that you can find it on YouTube.
effffinnn awesome!!!
http://www.paypal.com/ is good, everything else is bad. Adjust per region and you're set. I don't get the confusion. There's no reason to say paypal.co.uk is also good. American users should use the American version. End of story. Look for the exact phrase http://www.paypal.com/ on the left side of the URL bar. If you don't see it, run.

Or rather, I get the confusion, but I think the solution is to simplify the explanation. The set of good paypal URL's contains exactly 1 item. Teach someone to look for that item.
(throwing down my vi sign and representing my set)
So Apple gets attacked for not allowing their OS to run on non-Apple hw and Google gets attacked for allowing their OS to run on non-Google hardware?
(I realize they're actually being criticized for now having their own device here, but just another perspective). I guess you could just not have your own hardware, since that's working so well for WinMo.
Wow. Taking white and nerdy to a level even Weird Al can't step to. Well done, Patrick!