skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting a bunch of people with divergent aims to agree on anything is really fucking hard. Introduce cutting-edge technology, vast sums of money and hardheaded geeks into the equation and it's a miracle we've got this far.

Open standards are good for all of us. Proprietary systems only ever benefit those who own and control them. The W3C is a fallible, flawed organisation performing an utterly sisyphean task and I think we should give credit where credit is due.

In an ideal world, the perfect standards for everything would just magic themselves out of thin air. Unfortunately, we live in a world where big organisations have commercial interests in manipulating and controlling technology to their own ends. We should celebrate that we still have a mostly open web and thank the W3C for getting things done against all odds.

I'm all for a freer, more open approach to web standards, but I understand that realpolitik is a necessary evil. I'm just really happy that I can't remember the last time I saw the words "best viewed on browser x". Those of us who remember using early versions of Firefox are well aware of just how much progress has been made in standards-compliance. If the W3C is becoming unfit for purpose then that's a damned shame, but we shouldn't throw the baby out of the bathwater. Web standards matter, they are the essence of what the web is. I shudder at the thought of returning to the bad old days of <multicol>, <marquee> and ActiveX controls.
This is pretty meaningless. I hate seeing flamebait like this on HN. It would be one thing to intelligently argue that the WHATWG should make everything public and explain how this would benefit the community. However, this guy is simply saying "fuck you guys, I'm out." In other words, he is advocating the alternative to web standards, which is proprietary solutions where EVERYTHING is behind the curtain.

No thanks.

Let's advocate for more transparency instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Microsoft cancels Alan Wake on PC
It would depend on how your system is setup.

In Google Analytics you can enable "e-commerce tracking" for the profile that contains your payments.

Then whenever a new payment is made you can make a call to GA and record the transaction.

Check here for more info:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?...
Against Russia or China, this kind of a system is worthless. I believe that the contractor is selling this as deterrent against Iran or North Korea.

... And even then it's worthless, because if either wanted to nuke the US, they wouldn't launch it on a missile, they'd pack it on a ship and sail it to New York.
Brazil.
I mostly agree with you, but with one exception: I'm a bit of a history buff, and I'm not altogether looking forward to a future where all of the history texts are alterable, and nobody owns previous copies.
Chatroulette and the Inevitable P*nis
Ask HN: What are some concrete ways in which VCs help startups?
I'm new to the whole startup world, and from what I've been reading and hearing, in addition to the money that VCs/Angels/Seed funds give, they also provide a lot of help in the form of guidance, getting you in contact with "the right people", etc.

I can roughly see what the above means, but, for those of you who have gone through this experience, can you provide some concrete examples of how a VC/Angel/Seed fund helped your startup (besides giving money)?

For example, a site like Digg, when it gets started, besides having a functional and easy-to-use website, it needs to get the word out that it exists. Do VCs/Angels/Seed funds help more with getting the talent required to get the website up and running, or more with getting the word out (e.g. by having contacts in the media), or by some other way?
Partly answering your question, I neither like nor dislike the style. I have learned to ignore it. I perceive no slowdown in parsing an opinionated piece when compared to purely factual reporting. I notice a lower interesting information density, as part of the content is being used by the opinions of the author and are thus discarded and I would prefer a more concise report.

And I never intended to be snarky.
Same here (OSX and Linux). I had to go and double-check the date of the article when I read that line. Are people really still having this problem with modern operating systems?
the latter can cause the former
well, of course, if they'd have done that, they wouldn't have been able to easily leverage their gmail base into some pseudo facebook competitor. They cannot meet their business needs AND your privacy needs at the same time. So.....

Don't be evil, indeed.
We Live in Public
Meh. It's not semantic enough for me.
Barbie used to think that "Math is hard," now she's a master of recursion and lambdas.
I believe we'll still need designer Barbie to fix the crime that is black text on a hot pink background.
This is one reason large tech companies do spin outs, though I am not sure of any companies that have become overwhelmingly effective at it.
I'm sure there's a great insight in that article somewhere, but I stopped reading as soon as I spotted the words "soul", "katana" and "zen". It's just more cliché than I can bear.
Yeah, I thought it was a bit silly myself, but I realize it's a difficult thing to design for - we don't really have any instantly recognizable uniform they could use. I'm not sure what I could come up with that someone could guess what she is supposed to be just by looking at her and not be somewhat ridiculous.
I disagree as fervently as possible; always use reference counting smart pointers. It is substantially harder to guarantee exception safety if you don't make use of them. You'll also be able to program more quickly without devoting extra mental cycles to make sure everything is cleaned up properly.

Using valgrind IN ADDITION is a good idea, but there is no reason to avoid smart pointer memory management.
Alternate Interface Technologies Emerge
The problem is that his specific technical examples are the reason he's seeing these scammers. He's looking for a fix to to the problem of "using too much memory," which, since it's not a real problem, doesn't have a real solution.

If I went from garage to garage looking for someone to take care of the issue that my car is causing too much downstream turbulence, I'm sure I could find a scammer to fix it for me.
ultimate coaches on HN unite! I coach UMBC :)
Yet another point in support of my new adage, " Live in the Cloud, die by the cloud."

Got Buzzed? Got Blogger DMCA'd? Tired of having targeted ads in your email, tired of worrying about data retention policies?

Then I encourage you to spend a low, low 100 bucks a year on your own hosting and domain, with email and all the website a humble blogger can eat.
I detest the subtle jab at FriendFeed.

Seriously, what are you going to say next? That the world is not fair? Only the 'remarkable' by your standards should see market success? That is wrong to get lucky, to be at the right place and right time?
That's rather like a mechanic saying his mid-80s American rust bucket is as reliable as a Camry. (/obligatory bad car analogy)

It doesn't disprove the experience of the majority. If anything, it reinforces the fact that something's not right when only technical people have a reasonable experience.
Dropping of all packets by major routers.

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/I/Internet-Death-Penalty.htm...
I don't think you can generalise in such a way. I had a proper diagnosis made whilst at school but manage to hold down friendships, family relationships and work in a fairly "social" and communicative field (radio).

It makes a few things like reading social cues a little more difficult than for many people but it really doesn't have a particularly detrimental impact on my life - quite the opposite when it comes to economically useful things like language learning and understanding technical concepts.

Asperger's just isn't something I think about day-to-day and I certainly don't see myself as a "sufferer".
Well that's a shame, had you been able to get past that and finish reading, you'd have seen that his point was people are spending too much time marketing crap products and not enough time building superior ones, which suggests lots of opportunities for the entrepreneurial sort that read Hacker News.
Honestly, Google is still allowing me to opt out at any time. They (as far as we know) use "eventual deletion," but it's still deletion. Facebook on the other hand has so far retained everything that has ever been on it, according to the interview with an employee that was on HN a few weeks ago. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045879 )

That said, the way Buzz was introduced was definitely a leap in the wrong direction by Google.
Khaki cargo pants and a black t-shirt with "Got Root?" written on it.
He'll be back
Another reason you should fetch and merge, not pull!
I pay a small amount yearly for an account at FastMail (http://www.fastmail.fm) They have a very solid IMAP service, and a robust (though not Gmail-fancy) web interface. In the five years or so that I have had an account with them, I think I could total up about a half hour of downtime that I can recall, so they are very stable. I recommend them highly. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer.)
Great. Now I have this to try in addition to the Parents Test
There is a saying about international law:
Half the countries follow half the rules half the time.

I think the same can be said for web standards:
Half of web developers follow half the standards half the time.
First really good iPad discussion I've seen:

"In innovation theory [ Apple currently does ] the fast-follower strategy. But it may not work for Apple this time, because there is nobody to follow. Nobody has gotten tablets – a radical-disruptive problem – even roughly right yet."

He cites two reasons:

"Open Innovation: For anything truly radical-disruptive, it takes many democratically-contending peers with different aesthetic visions to build the first working instance...."

"Metaphor Incoherence: Central conceptual metaphors haven’t yet cohered, and vestiges of inherited metaphors remain..."

And he explains how what Apple is doing with the iPad doesn't match the requirements of the problem at this point.

Followed by quite a bit more. Highly recommended, especially if you're a Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma) fan as I am.
Good info, however CacheFly plans seem to top out at 1,200 GB/month (unless you want to pay overages), this seems really low. If you're running a site where you really need a super fast CDN, it seems like you could burn through 1,200 GB very quickly. At SoftLayer I get 2 TB/mo per server, so I have some sites that have 30+ TB/mo transfer allotted, and most of them push way more than 1,200 GB each month.

Is there really a good use case for a CDN with such low capacity?
Monads are hard, let's go shopping!
I'll spare everyone the Outlook/OneNote and just list the possibly unusual:

- VistaSwitcher (alt-tab replacement)
- FeedDemon (most RSS is actually on iPhone with MobileRSS)
- LastPass (Firefox plugin)
- HandBrake (and complimentary Bulk Rename Utility)
- Paint.Net (free image editor)
- Windows Live Photo Gallery
- Live Mesh
- JungleDisk (backup to S3)
Even those have some merit weight. Many visits to a certain location will imply that said person is a "regular" there, for example.
That's nice of them but will anyone still be using this when the iPad drops??
Makes me glad I didn't go with limelight as a CDN, they're also damn expensive compared to the competition (at least last year when I was getting quotes).
These tables are just begging for a third-column: price. It's cool to know how these stack up to each other, but in order to actually get any utility from the article I'd need to go to 26 providers and see their pricing.

I would also like to see latency, which for many applications is much more important than raw throughput.
"Why do they even propose this? "

Propose what, exactly? The article does not give any direct quotes, so all we have is the paraphrasing of a writer with an agenda.
Bring a laptop that you don't care about. Drunk people spill.
Not that I could come up with anything better, but is anyone else a little disappointed in what they've come up with? We need better accessorization to appeal to little girls, I guess.

Couldn't they have at least put some code on her laptop instead of 0's and 1's?
And that's the way things have always been. This is not some new development. Look at newspaper ads from 80 years ago.

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, but I'm not old enough yet to insist that everything was better back in my day.
Would be nice if they tested latency as well as bandwidth. Latency on small requests can be quite important for hosting performance as well.
Zoho Mail offers most of the Gmail feature set (including support for custom domains) with an adequate user interface.
It's not just about features but also accessibility. Or at least that's what all the standards nazis tell themselves to sleep better at night.

If you believe in accessibility over all else, following standards set by this group are essential.
About w/o legal: http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/topic.py?topic=1...
Can anyone comment on the value of truecrypt encryption? If I set a 15 character password with random numbers/letters, how long would it take to decrypt the drive at minimum?
Their existence abrades me.
I thought the most interesting part about this was the binary code on the computer she's holding spells out "BarBie" repeatedly.
I've only been a customer of FastMail since August, but I strongly echo alaithea's recommendation.

I use the web interface for preview and POP to Eudora for the real thing. Pretty much total satisfaction. You also get space for a static web site and file sharing. Pay enough (but not much) and you can use your own domains.
I'd certainly use a free Kindle over a $500 iPad.
Yes. You can apt-get or ports as many well-reviewed opens source packages are you like without problems, but when was the last time you downloaded any Windows shareware/freeware?

But for a normal person who wants to make a photo album or bingo cards, or have a nice screensaver, their first thought is to go to the internet and download a program. This is the problem.

Your or I would first:

1. See if the web site seemed legit.
2. Rule out anything with lots of Google adware or image ads
3. Find an open-source version.

But the crappy scammer site seems about par for the internet course to this person, so they download it and soon have viruses and registry entries that crowd out all their actual programs.

This happens every three or six months on a Windows computer run by a normal person, and is a huge part of why the iPad and its closed ecosystem is going to eventually take over the consumer market unless Linux geeks get serious about usability.
It's only a matter of time until Barbie loses her job to a Chinese-made equivalent.
"To create an authentic look, Barbie® designers worked closely with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to develop the wardrobe and accessories for Computer Engineer Barbie®. Wearing a binary code patterned tee and equipped with all the latest gadgets including a smart phone, Bluetooth headset, and laptop travel bag, Computer Engineer Barbie® is geek chic."

A swing, and a miss.
Agreed! Maybe we could lobby them to replace it with a DeCSS snippet.Or just be subversive and have some stickers printed up and leave them on shelves next to the Barbies.
Looks like the author should be developing his site with web standards ha hah ha ha!!
It's rather juvenile of me, but the name makes me laugh - in the dialect of my native Liverpool, the word 'divvy' means idiot.

On a less juvenile note, the UX looks beautiful, but I would imagine that it would be hard to convince people to abandon the perfectly serviceable methods that they are using to share photos already.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=divvy
Oy, Computer Engineer Barbie gets a bluetooth headset and bad taste in clothing. Shouldn't she be selling the industry, not mocking it?
Do you have any impressions or, perhaps better, specific experiences with their approach to / respect for security and privacy? (Or, does anyone who happens to read this?)
I was recently looking at CDNs, and the thing about CacheFly that I found unsettling was that their admin interface looks like it was cobbled together by an engineer, not a designer, around 5 years ago (which may be confirmed by the 2005 copyright notice on it). While that's not what their core competency is, it was just too unsettling to commit to a provider that can't provide a professional interface to their clients.

See for yourself: https://www.cachefly.com/admin/ . The pages inside the admin area look even worse.
How do they plan to make money?
Yes, because I used to write useful things.
The article is about the problem caused by not being explicit with our privacy intentions and expecting software to figure it out.
If we keep catering to the expectation that software will solve this problem, we'll miss out on lots of opportunities, including the opportunity to develop a privacy-aware society. People are able to learn these things. They will, if you let them.
Human nature is not a fixed value in this problem. It will grow around the best tools.
must-haves for whom?

I can't think of any identifiable group of users for whom this list can be the list of must-haves..
"Even with its limited use in actual warfare, the katana was the most valuable possession of a samurai, the customer." reminded me of a quote by Fred Brooks (of author of Mythical Man Month):

"A toolmaker succeeds as, and only as, the users of his tool succeed with his aid.
However shining the blade, however jeweled the hilt, however perfect the heft,
a sword is tested only by cutting. That sword-smith is successful whose clients
die of old age."
Even taken in context that statement is still very scary. He's not saying you should use judgment on what search engine to use, he's saying you should use judgment on the action alone. The fact that he watered the statement down right after and then pulled the old "we're just following the law" doesn't make it any better.
Offtopic question: why is penis censored?
I've got a little windows utility called "open". If I'm in a dos box and want to open a windows explorer instance in the current directory, I just type "open .". It globs too, so if I'd like to view all the pdf files in the current directory, I can "open *.pdf". I use it all the time.

NTP has been ported to windows, and I run it on all my machines.

rsync, of course.

NSIS for building install programs. Maybe there's something better out there--I haven't looked in a while.

I'm still on the fence about dropbox...maybe.
What about the SPAM filter?
You can just get Google Apps...since they release features for that 6-7 months after regular gmail gets them, you'll have plenty of warning if they release something like Buzz.

+ I doubt they'd be stupid enough to bring buzz to their business users.
The two features I want are conversations and easy archival.
Is Your Bandwidth Good or Hot Garbage? Find Out With YouTube Dashboard
I set up a fake account for testing and tried to search for myself using my various email addresses. They don't seem to exist. So right now I think that setting up a Profile is the key. Once you set that up, Buzz can start sharing your information and you would have to fool around with privacy settings to shut that down.

I hope I'm mistaken about this, it would seriously suck http://rot13.com/index.php?text=fhpx%20tbng%20qvpx if your profile is the key to broadcasting news about you to everyone in your (automatically generated) address book including who is frequently mailed or mailing you.
This is the blog of a Django co-founder. What does this mean for the future direction of Django as far as conforming to standards?
That's only the case for content purchased through the Kindle store. You're completely free to put content from other sources on the device, and Amazon actually goes to great lengths to make this as simple as possible: Beyond appearing as a USB mass storage device, every Kindle has a unique email address. Send a document to that address and it's instantly delivered over "whispernet" to the device.
My list is rather small:

Beyond Compare
- I have yet to find a comparison tool which is as versatile as Beyond Compare.

ClipX
- It will change your life! :)

Vim
- Can't live without it.
It might be instructive if you included why you are trying to avoid Gmail in your OP, so we can avoid suggesting other apps that might have the same issues. For example, do you dislike it because of privacy concerns? Or because it's a web app? Etc.
I couldn't look at the site, it hurt my eyes.
One of either Scott Adams or I is really ignorant of the furniture market. I've bought

* A bed
* Bookshelves
* A table
* Chairs
* A desk
* A couch

And I've never had to wait more than a week for delivery. The chairs, table, bookshelves, and bed were available to take immediately. In what universe do you have to wait 2 months for furniture?
I don't give Facebook a free pass. I don't trust Facebook or have any interest in their services, so I don't have an account. I've had a Gmail account for years, and I'm being hard on Google precisely because it's "doing pretty much the same thing" as Facebook.
It used to be that ISPs who wouldn't do anything against spammers would find that all the usenet posts by their subscribers would be deleted - in effect removing them from the internet.
At the risk of dredging up an extinct meme...

Worst. Design Choice. Ever.
As a father of two daughters I'm both intrigued and repelled by this.
We were discussing HTML5 last week in an architecture meeting, in regards to how we want to develop richer web apps within our organization. One guy asked, "When exactly will the HTML5 spec be done?"
The rest of the room laughed.
On Food Stamps and Farmville: Turning Virtual Goods into Real Worth
If you are looking for open source and to host yourself, roundcube is pretty good and has a powerful interface
i've looked but haven't found anything nearly as good as gmail. the most useful feature to me, that other services do not offer, is push (sync) email, contacts, and calendar.
Might as well call it Taxicab Barbie
SEO Industry Cries as Google Offering SEO Services
"When somebody creates a social ecology around news..."

Aren't forums and places like HN or Reddit communities built around news?
For a rant about poor quality products, the knock about delivery times of furniture is totally out of place.

Five or ten years down the line, when the legs aren't falling off because you purchased a decent quality item, are you really going to care that it took two extra weeks to deliver? And how often are you even ordering furniture?

What an odd product category to use for that example.
Why the Economics of The Aardvark Acquisition Make Sense
To be extremely charitable, he is at best describing symptoms of the problems with the economy, not the problem itself.
That's a depressing thing. Too many people (me included) are working on software or to correct problems caused by software and it is not really that important.
I disagree. I'm guessing that's exactly what they're planning. Enterprise microsharing.
I've done the sober equivalent to this (coffee shops). Not only did it point out some usability issues, like, "oh, he thinks THAT'S a button," it also proved to be a great way to generate ideas. Most of the input we received was dead wrong, but we had to think about why it was wrong, and that got us thinking in ways we hadn't thought before, which led to good ideas. I suspect the drunken version would be more fun and just as useful, assuming you are producing a consumer product. As for B2B, if your domain is specific, this might not be the most valuable use of your time.
Take a look at OMeta: http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/
How a Simple Hack Can Turn Numeric Google Profile URL Back to a Gmail Address