skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for that thoughtful response. While I suspect we disagree on many points, I too think that dealing directly with the disenfranchisement would have been a more important lesson/exploration.
On a completely tangential note, I would like to state for the record that CakePie is one of the greatest things I have seen.
* Allow unlimited editing within X minutes after posting. (Many forums do it this way.)

* Keep history of all edits (as diffs of course). This would be very much in spirit of the board. :)
Title hype much?
I really think that platform limitation is hindering them more than they might think. Everyone I describe the product to says "Cool! Where can I get it on my phone?" and then is immediately disappointed when told what carriers it works on. Maybe I am just in an area (Boston) where no one uses these carriers, but it seems odd to ignore such a large segment of the population.

Also, they should really make their SDK freely available. I had a few interesting ideas for location-based services I wanted to toy with, but their submission page for their SDK was broken last time I tried to submit one of my ideas. I even went so far as to email the dev team with a plea for even a basic SDK to play with, but my request was soundly ignored. Why make it so difficult to develop apps if you want your platform to be used?

Just my .02.
You probably left it just ahead of your WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
JRuby and the Permanent Generation
At first glance, It looks like it's using a leaderboard, with teams that people can arbitrarily join.

I'd love to see a text-explanation of what this uniquely brings to the table, or what I'm supposed to focus on. There's a lot going on in the page, but without the context it's hard to see the revolution.

My apologies.

-Colin
Yeah brlittle brought up my misuse of the word 'resources' in a sibling post to yours. My brain really meant to use the word 'wealth' instead. I wish I had noticed it while I still had the edit link handy, as it is quite a distracting gaffe.
Should that be 150000?
StrawPoll -- Tiny daily polls in 140 characters or less.
A Twitter app.
Wikileaks judge gets Pirate Bay treatment
Man, did this actually happen? I take it Reg is the "New Guy"?
Case study in how *not* to conduct a GDC demo
This actually happened. But, unh, I was like, unh, there but not there, ifyaknowwhatimean, kinda-sorta.
Getting Dugg and Going Viral
See http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board....
But it doesn't work better than the Safari or Preview.

I understand how slow and clunky Adobe Reader is, but I'm on a Mac: Safari handles PDFs fast and renders text much nicer than iPaper.

No doubt Scribd will make iPaper even more awesome, but right now I'm gonna be annoyed if sites lose their PDF links and only offer iPaper viewing.
Can anyone say mini-poison-pill?
"I have decided to stop personally participating in the system of extracting money from MIT kids and their families. On Thursday, March 12, 1998, I guest-lectured an MIT class (on designing database-backed Web services). I calculated that the students were paying about $80 in tuition/lecture-hour. I withdrew a stack of $100 bills from my BankBoston account and I handed one out to each undergraduate in the course. I then proceeded to give my talk, telling the students that I was happy to teach them but I was not going to take their money."

Phil Greenspun owes me about $1000.
Google Health Pilot Goes Live Today?
"would you trust google with your medical records?"
32% yes, 68% no[0]

the follow-up questions should be:
-do doctors trust information patients write up themselves?
-how much of that patient-provided info is clinically relevant (signal to noise ratio)?

[0] http://www.ask500people.com/questions/would-you-trust-google...
Gates explains why Microsoft needs Yahoo
It's hard to believe that I ever worked with something so bad. And that people still do.
I think you're closer than Alaska is. A million dollars a year is nothing when you've got nine high-profile employees in Chicago. Jason Fried is good enough of a business person that he's not going to run a firm with dangerously low margins.
hey, great job on that funding round.
Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?
Social Helix(all 4 of us) will be there. We will be demoing and talking hopefully with all of you. Then tomorrow Jon and I fly out to SF for the google hackethon.
The real WTF was letting a Business Analyst do anything that could directly affect the code without it going through a programmer first.

Would you let some guy build you a car if he had changed his oil once, years ago?

A+ story. Can't believe how much this stuff happens.
Little Known 'Boring' Websites That Make Incredible Money With AdSense
"Just a few weeks ago, 50-pound bags of flour cost about $15. Today, they're $40." -- The Problem With Ethanol
"Quite simply, the students established their own meritocracy, which the teachers replaced with a form of socialism."

That is emphatically not what happened. What the kids discovered was that the fastest and most aggressive kids (i.e. the ones who got to the bins first) got the most desirable bricks/pieces. The spin you (and to be fair, most of us, me included) are putting on it implies that children are miniature adults, which isn't the case.

The role of the teachers (and recall that this is an after-school program) was to create a place where all children had the opportunity to play and enjoy themselves...not to allow the creation of an environment where some kids were specifically excluded. Yes, they proposed a framework -- one entirely appropriate to the setting. But in the end, most of the rules were created by the kids themselves.

The end result was a more satisfying experience for _everyone_, not just the fastest, biggest or smartest. In short, everybody does better when everybody does better.

"We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity."

I'm hard-pressed to see how people find fault with this. Who doesn't want their children to learn how to negotiate decisions and collaborate with others?

"There were many better solutions to the problems developing in that game, but the teachers chose instead to teach the kids that regardless of your skills, interest, passion, or ability to barter, at the end of the day, everybody gets the same thing."

But at the end of the day, everyone _didn't_ get the same thing. The only thing everyone got was a chance to be a part of the play. Where they went with that was up to them.

"I probably would have been one of the central kids in the story, one of the ones establishing rules and hoarding (and bartering for) pieces."

Except you wouldn't have had to. By getting all the "cool pieces (windows and such) you would have set yourself in possession of what everyone wanted. Plain building bricks were not valued, simply because there were so many of them. You wouldn't have needed to barter except in a very limited way. In short, you'd be the one with all the marbles. That's not appropriate to the setting, regardless of what spin adults might put on it.
Comrades,

The Lego bricks belong to the People! You are a friend of the Lego Revolution, are you not? I suspect you do not like our Cherished Leaders! Western ideas have poisoned you! Do not sit with us during the Snack Time Celebration! Our Great Teachers are watching you!

Also the clear Lego bricks are being collected by the People's Ministry of Security. Only Authorized Friends of the Revolution are allowed to use the clear Legos. To become an Authorized Friend you must donate cookies the People's Party Headquarters next to book shelf. DO NOT donate cookies to Headquarters of the People's Party, they are traitors, spies, and enemies of the Revolution! They must not be allowed to go play during Recess! This is the New Fairness.

Hail to our Great Teachers for teaching us the New Fairness!

- Comrade Jimmy
Do these stories sound realistic? Maybe it is easier for a site targeted towards truly "non-geeks" to make money using AdSense?
Six Great Free BlackBerry Downloads
thanks for the link, surprised there is not more options, but this looks good.
I've found programmable templating frameworks to be more powerful and maintainable than 100% css.

Looking at what a lot of those zengarden designs do behind the scenes shows you just how ugly css can be.
As article correctly points out, firefox has managed to become successful browser. It is perplexing to me, because I find Opera just as good if not better browser.
It sounds more like Google PR at work.
Yes, sort of. I've been using Gears for a side project of mine (Django on the server side) and it's been pretty fun.

You'll have to decide whether to do modal or modeless syncing and modeless takes a lot more time to implement. It's probably a good idea to step back from coding and architecting how the syncing process will work.

Also, I feel like I'm writing PHP again because I'm not using an ORM. I'm just using a CRUD wrapper around Gears' database support.

The app I'm writing is a one-page application though, it loads once and uses AJAX for the rest of the user's session. I put all AJAX calls into a module and have an online/offline check to see whether to update the database locally or remotely.

At work, we sync between handhelds/desktop apps (VB) and a web app (Rails). We just send JSON back and forth. The down side is that we have two code bases and some parts are duplicated.
The best value here comes from not having to startup a Microsoft Office application to view one of those types of documents.

So while iPaper may not be any better than FoxIt, Preview or Adobe Reader, it is a lot better than starting a full fledged viewing/editing application just to browse a document.

I own a Macbook and even it starts up Keynote if I want to look at a PowerPoint presentation. It would be nice to setup QuickLook as the default app for Office documents but I'm not sure if that's possible.
This does come off as a bit of boo-hoo by Opera, but the sadder truth is that the browser should be providing the most advanced ui available right now, but the technology has been dragged down by a company which has a greater interest in seeing a copy of its OS on every desktop.
Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications
... and this was written in 1998.

I got into MIT but eventually decided against it because KU gave me about two full rides, and MIT wanted $30k a year. I got lucky that I essentially got paid to go to college, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't really really want to go to MIT. I think it was any nerds dream for people my age.

Today I think Stanford or UC Berkeley would be my dream schools if I had it to do over again, but I never applied there, so who knows if I'd even have gotten in.

I think the argument for free tuition at such prestigious schools is an easy one. Tuition is a tiny portion of their income, and by charging outrageous tuitions they end up with all the rich kids (which may be smart) instead of all the smart kids (which may be rich, but may not). Like Greenspun points out, if you are going to such a place and plan to come out with a huge debt, then it kind of forces you to chase a high paying job, instead of one you might like better... so yeah, tuition that high just distorts things.
I recall reading something (sorry no link at the moment) which exhorted people to remember that anything which affected the software's ability to meet requirements is code and is to be treated as such.

Which means... some kind of revision control and the full scrutiny of your QA process before deployment.

So if a customer says, "and I want to be able to change the workflow rules without programming," you can say "Sure we can do that!" But you have to educate them to the fact that just because you give them a way to do that with a GUI or a DSL or whatever, the heavy part of the process--specification, testing, whatever--does not magically go away.

I'm rambling a bit, but I guess I am saying that had this project succeeded exactly as they envisioned it, an incredible WTF would have hit them when the customer started changing the rules and breaking everything.
why does the name matter if the product is great? The name is a b2b name, normal web users would hardly have to interact with it.
Geeks vs. Nerds
The 2 Sides Of Open Source Design
Is Safari orders of magnitude better than iPaper? Did you see the cool grid thing iPaper does?.

Safari is kinda the minority too and I guess webmasters would like to control and monetize those documents if possible
I believe it's been tried. They got shut down.
Sigh, me too. Sigh. I applied to BYU and USF and gt 1.5-2x rides to both. Really wanted to go to MIT but didn't apply because tuition was as much as my mom's salary. Sigh.
[On writing] John Gruber, Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, and Judge Judy
Geeks are a niche market, except apparently on the Internet (too many geeks, too many sites (gizmodo, boingboing, techcrunch, etc.).

Take a look at online poker instruction sites - a very good niche market if you have the credentials - people are competitive and will pay $10 or more a month for the edge.

If you truly like doing something obscure, there are other people who probably like doing it. And if you take the lead (important) and build a community/blog, you reap the rewards.

It's nice to know for every ShoeMoney.com, there are hobbyist sites that are making hundreds if not thousands in supplementary cash flow.
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-Febru...

"Ok, best of luck with your future endeavors!"

Sounds like Sun won't miss him.
That list is irrelevant. The people there are not representative of the entire population. They only represent the top .xx1% and are a very poor sample.

What about the people who aren't on the list? There are a lot more of them, and they're still multimillionaires. We have no information about them, nor do we have any information from which we can derive conclusions from.

As far as the top billionaires, it is true that many of them were extremely fortunate in life and had some money from birth. Only around 30 of them made their billions that way, the others worked to turn their millions into billions, which still takes a great deal of work (and pure luck).

I see this argument going nowhere unless we can agree that everyone who has under $X to start and creates $Y over the course of their lives counts as someone who became successful through capitalism. But I doubt we can agree what the X and Y values should be.
I think five years from now we won't be logging into Facebook but we'll be talking to our mobile devices and they'll be scheduling reservations for us (it will all be autonomous agents doing tasks/chores for us on behalf of our openID)
On my machine, with my browser, iPaper seems to be far slower than Foxit.
I will tell the two other startup guys I'm working with about this. We were planning to meet tonight to work on stuff, but this may be a better thing.

Edit: Apparently they ran out of space. One of the guys said he'd been invited. We'll go to the next one.
I'm sure they're real. In addition to the headline stories about big $$$, there's this:

Scott says she posted an unsold novel on Google and earns about $5 a month from the AdSense ads on the site. Al Needham, 74, who runs a site about the care of bees (bees-online.com) from his home near Boston, reaps about $250 a month.

"Forget about getting rich overnight," says Alonzy. "It takes time to learn."

--

There are bajillions of AdSense customers, so some of them are making bank and most are making squat. I don't know that it's easy to make money from an adsense site, but if I were doing it, I would NOT make a geek site. Geeks don't like to click (heck, I use AdBlockPlus so I don't even see them!).
For those of you who are looking to be wealthy, aim to become an accredited investor by IRS standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
You said that 3 hours ago... I guess you have the same problem I do: Nap = Sleep.
But they are going down.
Applying (Math) Theory at Microsoft
Should we go with rrival's elevated platform on the east wall? I would recommend the Social Helix space but I wouldn't want to hog their demo room.

I look like this: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/your-code-is-subop...

except without the sunglasses and hat.
Architecture: Lisp Hacker designs New Zealand Penthouse on the Bay [video]
That...is the COOLEST picture ever! I'll just follow the National Guard to find you guys.
Can i get some sales stats? thinking of getting angel funding? ;)
A disturbing number of startups have code like this too. They start out on a new project all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed thinking they'll change the world. They write lots of code, it may even work, but nobody wants it. That's the most likely outcome for a startup...

Then, being determined sons-of-bitches, they cast around for a new idea that'll build on what they've already built and prevent their old code base from going to waste. They find a potential market that's somewhat related, repurpose the code, add some new third-party libraries to deal with the specifics of the new market, and launch again.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

The solution's really to throw out all your code and start over when you go into a new market, keeping the knowledge you've gained. But since code is visible and knowledge isn't, I've never worked at a startup that encouraged this...
I see them getting forced a lot then giving up, and selling for around $34/share. I don't know how having (2) competitors is making less competition than (3).

Yahoo's new Hadoop system could help get the higher price.
AdSense For Video Comes Out of Private Beta.
"For anyone, no matter what age they are, if they find something they truly love, write about it. You have nothing to lose but time. And it could really pay off."

Best part of story.
I have recently tried the two OpenSolaris Indiana previews and for comparison Solaris 10 to see what Solaris is like. The Indiana project is a step in the right direction. But it seems to me that the complete lack of open development is a major problem of OpenSolaris. The individual Sun developers try hard to make Solaris more open, but Sun as a whole still wants control and keeps making unilateral decisions.

Then there are the old school Solaris admins that resist all substantial change of their favorite OS, even when it could bring in more users. Together with disgruntled community members because of Sun's actions the vibe of the community is not positive. I feel sorry for the Sun developers because they want to succeed and are technically very competent.
I wonder if they picked it because it looks kind of like a gnu.
nsfw (picture).
Quick look does work on Office documents. And keynote documents. Just hit space bar instead of opening the document.
"Dumb enough to make a PDF"?

You mean, dumb enough to make the only completely device independent, 100% consistent document format?
As much as I want to agree with you, I have to challenge you on this -- what makes you say this?

I have a physics Ph.D. friend who is quite brilliant himself, and when I asked him about Einstein he said something like Einstein had a particularly good, intuitive grasp of physics principles in a way most people weren't capable of. Actually I don't remember if this was Feynman or Einstein; I was asking him about the two, and basically he said that each of these people had some uncanny ability.

Daniel Tamment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet
isn't insanely intelligent but due to a different brain structure, has a supernormal memory, which makes him appear abnormally intelligent and creative. When he talks about shapes of numbers you can say he is particularly creative, but I find it impossible to dispute that this comes as a result of a brain anomaly he was born with.
Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes to Increase Openness
Does it bother anyone else that the sample scenarios mention home equity as a factor? Maybe college tuition has risen partly for the same reasons as other items during the last few years: because it can. Cheap credit makes for high prices. It's a good move by Stanford to pull back now before the home equity ATM is completely burnt out.
T-shirts for VCs
The Art and Science of JavaScript Games
Your slice of the web
RightScale Ruby library to access Amazon EC2, S3, SQS, and SDB
Do you remember these Windows Systems? A nostalgic look at Windows
Financial Aid Packages Threaten Ivy League Athletics
DIY: 200 Dollar PC, Part 3 - PaulStamatiou.com
I didn't mean to say that it doesn't work with Office documents. I only wanted to make it the default action for double click. Thank you for the space bar tip.
Weekend Apps - Build Facebook Apps in One Weekend
Interesting, but slightly wrong...
Windows 3.1 came out sometime around 1989ish (I remember using it while still in high school, when I built an IBM AT from spare parts).

Windows 3.11/WFWG Came out around 1992 (the time this site lists Win3.1 as being released). 3.11 added some enhanced/increased network support and other minor additions.
what about print css, phones, etc, etc.? what about using html as a data feed (e.g., for your JS, microformats, etc.)? BluePrint is clearly written by and for designers, rather than IAs.
I love the fact that he included BSOD because "he's seen enough of it to make him think it was an OS".
I'd be curious to see if they really care -that- much - it seemed pretty open last time I was there. Walking in like you know what you're doing might work, and if the last one is any indication, people tend to stay on after the event ends at 9 (we closed it down last time).
Microsoft Sings a New Tune—Wants to Play Nice With Open-Source
Thanks! Going to put these tips into practice with our newly deployed site.
Take two web sites/services that don't suck. Add SEO to one and watch the difference. It's staggering.

But, in a way-- you're right. One of the most important things about SEO is links-- which requires you to be worth linking to.
My standard nap is 15 minutes - it works great to reenergize, especially when I'm not getting enough sleep in general.
We'll be there. Look for the 3 most dashingly handsome guys in the whole bar. That's us.
I read DF and i have found that i have to agree with Gruber as well. He doesn't write nearly as much as he used to and when he does they aren't nearly as philosophical as the used to be. I do enjoy the content still, however, i don't find myself going through the archive re-reading things like i used to.
Asking for Feedback on Our Startup:  Coordinatr.com
PG says to get your site out early and often, so thats what we're trying to do. We're far from finished, but feel its about time to take the ultimate test, and show the news.yc crowd.

Our Site:
http://coordinatr.com is a site designed to give you the necessary tools to quickly and effectively coordinate plans with your friends, without any unnecessary garbage to slow you down. Check out our FAQ for more info: http://coordinatr.com/welcome/faq

Please take a moment if you would to take a look at our site, and let us know what you think. Thanks in advance for your feedback and/or criticism.
Wow, looks awesome... is that something you finished recently?
Universal Job search portal
i want to start a portal where emplyers and seekers across the world can post their requirement free of cost.
I read Hacker News via the RSS feed in Google Reader.

Looks like the comments link disappeared yesterday.

Not sure if Hacker News changed or Google Reader changed, but I think this can be fixed by putting the comments link inside a <description> element in the HN RSS feed.
the plenty of fish of job portals :-)
It costs thousands of dollars to hire one employee so what's the point of free job postings ?

Heard of craigslist jobs ?
Ok, taking airy metaphysical arguments out of the picture, is this true in your experience? Do you do best assuming you have no control over your future, or by assuming you have control over your future? That's what I mean.
Does anyone know if this also applies to the 1000 employees they announced they were laying off a couple of weeks ago?