skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, uh, I'm an Amazon Prime customer that has already bought a Kindle. What do I get?

Edit: also, why the pic of the old Kindle? Are they giving away leftovers of the first edition?
Deciding that spirituality is a defect from this is the wrong conclusion.

The experience of spirituality itself is natural and desirable. As described in the article, it's "self-transcendence." I experience self-transcendence when I listen to good music, look at good art, or otherwise get wrapped up in ideas that are bigger than (transcend) my day-to-day life in an inspiring way.
"haven't dared"

Very well put. I'm afraid to walk through the sign up process because of all the exposure it apparently turns on. E.g. creating a public Google profile. I don't WANT a public profile, and I don't want to spend a bunch time hunting down and turning off all the things that the Buzz flow apparently turns on -- and worrying about what I've missed. E.g. it hooks into my Reader account? Picasa? Good grief!

I tend to remain respectful of HN and to try to keep my discourse constructive as well as emotionally balanced, but I really can find no other suitably expressive comment upon this than, "Fuck you, Google."
As always, beware of geeks carrying gifts.
Om Malik: Why I Am Excited About the iPad
It's also reasonable to expect someone to read the terms of the contract they enter into.

When you skip those terms of service, you're agreeing to those terms.

You also always have the choice not to tollerate them. Move away from their service. Don't use google for search. They track every search that you perform tied against your IP.

If your privacy matters, take the time to protect it.
Praise Polymaths
Actually, wasn't the "test laser" referring to the test back in August? This test actually destroyed the missile in flight, hence the significance.
I don't get the outrage. Is there some flag in GMail that you flip to say "this person is stalking me, pretend they don't exist"? No.

So at this point, her public comments are being shared with one of the people that she talks to the most. This is a problem, but it's not something Google could have avoided.

My advice is to block this person, stop commenting on blogs if it is going to endanger her life (or use real anonynimization tools), and get a restraining order against the person she fears. People are easy to get rid of if you put enough effort into it, but what I've noticed from reading Ask Metafilter (and other things) is that people enjoy having problems and don't actually want to solve them. I feel that this person is doing the same thing, "drama drama me me me".

Let the downmods begin...
"It really should have no impact on either your performance or your willingness to do something if someone else was this age or that when they did something impressive."

This is absolutely right. It's good to learn from role models, but just take what's helpful and leave the rest. Sure there were people who were younger, smarter, prettier, and smelled better, but as m_eiman said "If the timing is right and the idea and execution are excellent, it'll be big".

It's impossible to compare your situation to anybody else anyway. For example, it's impossible to tell how successful somebody is by the $80,000 car they drive. They may own it outright, they may owe more than the car is worth, you can't tell.

Actually, watch the Mixergy interview with Seth Godin, he specifically talks about being different.
Economics in One Lesson
Since when being on the wrong side is something new for them?
That's nice that they care more about UI than privacy.
How can you ever start writing something that's extraordinary if you never start writing at all? Do you really think Mark Twain started out writing Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer? It is a skill that requires effort to become good at.
The ability to filter out bias in an opinionated piece is very valuable. With practice your brain does it by itself and you hardly notice.
For what it's worth, I think you might get better responses if you asked this question on StackOverflow.
I will give you 50% of market value for your Kindle.
Same here, Readability from Arc90 http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
This is what it looks like on OS X: http://drp.ly/oopfk
Singular alumnus (masculine) or alumna (feminine), often abbreviated "alum" to avoid having to remember any of that :)
Of course, his firm is just a patent troll, so this will likely never see the light of day.
I love how he provided a solution =]
Death Star Laser Gun Zaps Mosquitoes Dead
A piece of advice: never take your freedoms for granted.

I have lived most of my childhood under a right-wing military dictatorship. The "it will never happen here" concept is a very dangerous one.
Also, I heard that Adobe's CEO totally wore the same shirt three days in a row! Gross!
The majority of people don't and will never care about their privacy, particularly when connected to the internet.

People who feel harmed by this will be upset and will hopefully understand that they were far more vulnerable than they believed, then take steps to insure that it doesn't happen again.

Some people will feign indignation at whats happened to her, claim to be boycotting google, then abandon the prospect when they see how much of a pain it is to change to another service.

Most people will never hear about this, and if they do, they won't really care. GMail works for them, they don't understand or care about their privacy. They have a service that works and is implied to be free.
I see from other comments that this may not be true, but if it isn't, I'd advise that Amazon should start doing it as soon as they can. It would be an application of the "Gilette model" of sales -- sell the razor, or the printer, or the video-game console cheap, and make your money back on selling blades, cartridges, or cartridges respectively.

For a book-delivery platform like the Kindle, this strikes me as a natural model -- a user is likely to buy a large number of books over his lifetime, and the margin of profit on a $10 e-book makes the margin of profit on a music CD look humble.

There's also the point that the Kindle is not an obviously useful sort of device. Making it widely available will overcome customer reluctance to try it out it, ensuring that it either proves its worth and spreads quickly, or proves its worthlessness and fails quickly, and minimizes the amount of time that Amazon spends in new-product limbo either way.
Google, The Cloud and the Significance of a Small Oregon Town
EntityCube - An entity search and summarization engine
This year's defense budget is the largest (as a share of GDP) since WWII. Right now, getting our economy and debt under control seem like they would do far more to ensure our future national security than incredibly expensive missile defense systems. It seems to me like you should only spend money on this stuff when you actually have money.

And really, lasers? What happens when they coat the missiles in something reflective? $200 worth of shiny metallic paint foils $200 million worth of laser.
Why the anger? Are they making you watch their videos?
Nope, theres no mention of Buzz in the accounts setting or the gmail settings. They automatically enabled it for me and I had to hunt to find the disable link in a non-standard (for their apps) place. I'm not very happy about this, honestly.
Please read the comment above http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121024

edit: or somewhere else on this page.
On Privacy (or: what Buzz failed to learn from Newsfeed)
Google to Offer High Speed Broadband.
It is assumed that people turn to a life of crime for the money ..
Yes-ish. I posted weekly programming essays in college, and post sporadically now.

I had developed lots of opinions about programming, and I couldn't clearly articulate any of them. Writing them for a broad audience forced me to adopt a consistent view of the programming world, and helped my writing develop.

As an added bonus, the internet is overly relentless when you make a mistake. It made me strive for a higher level of precision and quality that I wouldn't have developed just through my college courses.
It flies in the face of a mantra at HN: Fail early and often. It goes against the idea that you learn by making mistakes.

When you're a young, tiny startup, you can fail early and often because the costs of doing so are outweighed by the benefit of the education you get, both to yourself and to society at large.

This is Google. It's huge, it's been around the block a few times, it's already had a ton of failures, and millions of people rely on it. It can't and shouldn't have the same latitude to fail, especially in an area as important as privacy.
Agreed. I wasn't taking anything for granted, though - it was an analytical observation. I don't live in the US.
HTML may represent new business for adobe. HTML5 has more to worry about from O/S vendors and browser makers in my view. An example of this is indecision about video codecs. A rich html spec makes life easier for adobe: their primary business is tools (I was told this by a Flex evangelist as he gave people copies of the FlexSDK).
WOOT. One step closer to my death star!

Can I get a "may the (us armed) force(s) be with you?"
My entrepreneur energy has definitely changed (also in mid 30s). Ten years ago it was all about the "great idea" and working really hard. Now it's about strategy and observing the way the world works and choosing where/when to work hard. I keep feeling like I should be able to "see" the big picture better.

I think Ben Franklin said it well: "At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement."

It makes me think of a friend that's been an entrepreneur for 40 years. He carefully planned a new business where he could work 15 hours per week and make very good money. It's like he doesn't waste time doing anything unnecessary.
That's definitely not what I'm seeing, but you can always use Readability to help out. http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Looks cool. But the article estimates that the devices could cost $50. And it doesn't mention being able to tell if a mosquito has malaria -- only that it can target females because males don't bite people.
Exactly. And having a "name brand" on your CV helps more than having been to a top college. 3 years at McK or GS and you will never have trouble getting anyone to take you seriously in business. It doesn't excuse you from anything important, but it does mean you don't need to waste time establishing your credentials to everyone you speak to.
Why startups don’t die at large hedge funds
There is a MASSIVE difference between not knowing and not caring.
Thanks for the heads up. We've had an unexpected rush of uploads this morning as the east coast woke up.

We've started additional AWS Instances and things should be working normally and just a few minutes.

UPDATE (9:52 PST):
We now have 5 machines processing & resizing photos. There are still 6,500 photos left in the upload queue from earlier today. We're processing them LIFO so it may take us a few more minutes for us to get to the photos uploaded early this morning.

Since the queue is so large expect new photo uploads to take longer than they normally should.

If you have any more problems please email us directly: human -åt- divvyshot -dºt- com
So true on Prime for Christmas, they should really advertise that angle much more during the holidays for those averse to crowded malls.

I also love the fact that the 2-day shipping often comes in 1 day b/c of the efficiency of Amazon's warehouse/distribution network.
The Man Who Wants to Be the Warren Buffett of Restaurants
If publicizing an Anonymous Hold™ by a corporation with a vested interest in neutering HTML5 is now called "politics", then I want to be a fucking politician.
No mens room? That explains a lot.
Machine learning and lots of awarded PhDs will likely replace me [a good thing] for the task of neuronal reconstruction:

http://t2.ini.uzh.ch/data.html

If I have to go over several terabytes of images, manually segmenting like that, I'll need to live a thousand lives.
This morning, I've watched two coworkers open their gmail accounts for the first time since Buzz went live. In both cases, they clicked "No thanks, take me to my inbox" instead of the button to "Check out Buzz", and in both cases, Buzz was enabled anyways, and a bunch of people were listed as following/followers. We looked at their profiles, and all the followers/ees were publicly listed.

What, exactly, should they have done to keep this from happening?
NanoTest a tiny (nano) unit test for JavaScript
Editor of Nature forced to resign from climate review panel
86% of Firms Fail to Engage Employees on Sustainability
Why no usage what so ever? Any process of getting user's feedback is better than doing nothing. We are so skewed of using our own apps that we think all is perfect. Nothing ever is. I think its a great idea how to get more usage data. If I try it I will let you know how it went. I am thinking of using some screenrecording software like SilverBackApp to archive and analyze results later when not drunk :)

Janusz
Founder of http://www.UsabilityTest.com
(free usability testing for web apps)
It sounds like there are two issues here. First, that Google assumed that because they were 'frequent contacts' that they were best friends, and thus him and all his jackass friends were made followers on her Google Reader.

The second is that all the people that frequently contact HER (via an anonymous account which forwards to her Google account) now have her personal Gmail account and are following her on Buzz (and Google Reader), which she can't stop from happening.

The problem is that Google's assumed that anyone with whom you correspond frequently is a friend with whom you're willing to share all of your data, when in reality a lot of people are forced to correspond with people whom they don't like at all, and that Google shouldn't be saying 'Hey, we've created a new thing called Buzz, and we've told everyone all about you on your behalf!'

Edit: also worth mentioning: you don't 'make someone a contact' in Gmail, Google does it for you automatically whenever you e-mail someone. Also, she didn't give Google information that they were in a relationship, Google just did this automatically. Even people that she e-mailed from an anonymous address via gmail got access to her profile. Google basically gave everyone her personal info without asking if it was ok, and now she can't take it back.
How to track subscription revenue with Google Analytics?
Is there a way to configure Google Analytics to track recursive payments? Or how should one use GA to track the revenue from a subscription based website?
Maybe the next version?
It looks more and more obvious to me that over the next forty years or so we are going to start seeing true laser and particle weapons.

And they're not going to be anything like they are in science-fiction and fantasy. With blindness, invisibility of attack, instantaneous hits, and extreme heat? Much more scary, actually.
Using Git with Emacs
Divvyshot (YC W09) launches refreshingly simple photo sharing
Just like with libraries?

I buy books for a few hours of enjoyment. After I've read them, they just sit on a shelf and collect dust. Because most people are like this, the Kindle is not a poor value proposition. Even if you were only allowed to read the book exactly once, it would still be a better value (in terms of hours of time spent per dollar spent) than many things, like seeing a movie.

Everyone hates DRM, but everyone knows that DRM only lasts a few years for a given industry. Eventually the publishers realize that DRM is being used to lock them into a distributor, and they hate that more than "piracy". It happened with music, and it's starting to happen to books.

When people start getting arrested for sharing books with their lovers, then you can link to "The Right To Read" and say "I told you so". In the mean time, consider DRM as a bootstrap that will eventually go away.
I think he was being facetious.
Yes, because I like hearing myself talk. And apparently so do others.
Her post on rape jokes was also very good:
http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/a-woman-walks-into...

A good reminder (or revelation) of why rape is never funny and should be taken seriously.
Google Ad Planner
This situation is not simply a matter of inconvenience. It's a matter of users' safety including physical safety.

As an example of some thoughts on the latter:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119173

And it is not a terribly challenging intellectual exercise to realize some of the implications of the product rollout as configured and executed.

Finally, having used and observed Google products for some time now, I perceive it to be yet another in an increasing cascade of decisions and behaviors that have short-shifted legitimate and often apparent security considerations. Yes, that is my opinion. So is my parent comment. Take from it what you will.

First, in my further opinion, there are "mistakes" that are simply too significant to just forgive and learn from. They demonstrate an inability of the parties responsible to carry out their duties and responsibilities. I see Buzz as such a case.

Second, Google as an institution has let various aspects that are exposed by these situations -- from effective design and execution, particularly with respect to some aspects of security, to effective customer relations -- slide for too long. If they are going to improve, it's become apparent that as an institution they are going to have to take some dramatic action. Something that communicates to their employees that the status quo will no longer do.

It's my opinion. And maybe I'm overly pissed off at the moment. But this Buzz rollout is particularly boneheaded, and Google is better off without the employees who had responsibility for preventing such a fiasco.

Google held many customers by making enough of a show about being concerned for their privacy. It's what kept me using their search results, despite the increasing tracking they've been implementing. They are at risk of losing this perception now in the public and upon the part of their customer base.

When your customers don't trust you, your other efforts at engagement run a distant second.
Why is he being down-voted? (-3 at the moment)

Oh right, "we don't like his comment, let's get rid of it." Jesus, people, behave.

He's making his case based on his knowledge of the situation and he's doing so in an educated manner.

Me, personally, I'm in his same situation. I can't understand how people got automatically added to that Buzz thing. The link appeared in my Gmail account and I never clicked it, NEVER. I just turned it off when I learned how.
Where Did VCs Go Wrong In Online Video?
Thinking about it won't solve anything, because if you just think about it you won't do it.

If you don't like the faceless information harvesting machine Google is becoming, ditch their services. Otherwise, may as well just accept it.
How To Use YouTube To Drive Business
They were using their profile privacy settings, and it violated it, or was it more a case of the feature enabling itself in Gmail and using existing privacy settings?

Edit: And because it needs to be said here: I'm not suggesting enabling Buzz and then using existing privacy settings as a bases for how Buzz works is right. I'm just asking a question.
Scott Adams: The Problem With the Economy
Top 20 Tips on Successful Website
Before making successful website and designing it there needs to be certain things come together here are some simple tips for successful website..
Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm) on iPad: Why Apple’s design approach may not work
CDN/cloud download performance comparison (26 providers)
The Daddening Of Video Games
Solving a cash flow problem with new customers -- prudent or foolish?
Being an Entrepreneur
Yes,

To contribute back to the community blog is part of.

As outlet of my creative thoughts.

As brainstorming/honing exercise (having to write it out really helps explore/define an idea).

To solicit comments, criticisms, improvements to my ideas.

My blog is primarily about RPGs, the pen and paper kind, http://trollandflame.blogspot.com/
I'm not sure what the problem is either. I also have complete control over my privacy settings, but it seems you can't say that in this particular topic because the army of group-thinkers will down-vote you (read: censor your comment) to oblivion.

We can't have two-sided conversations in HN anymore. Either you bash Buzz/Google or get the hell out of this thread.
Which, apparently, cannot be said for the ability to refrain from lashing out with a snarky comment. I specifically said that I agree with the author's opinion and that I was asking out of curiosity whether there were other people who shared my dislike of his tone. Just because you're capable of reaching your destination through a traffic jam, doesn't mean you have to like it.
Exactly. Anyone who knows Hixie knows that he's going to continue and that the W3c has to keep up or enjoy irrelevancy vis a vis html5.
For what it's worth, the W3C has always reminded me of the United Nations. It doesn't really have a power base or coercive abilities of its own, and its authority is dependent on the willingness of its member organizations to sacrifice their objectives and their resources for its sake -- with the result that it's more a theater for proxy wars (Sun versus Microsoft historically, Microsoft versus the open-source movement today) than than an organization with a purpose and a goal.

Like the United Nations, though, the W3C has accomplished some of its purposes, and done a certain amount of good; but I think the author of this is expecting too much out of the W3C in a very Westphalian Web.

I hope no one turns this into an argument about the United Nations. My position on them is the same as Emperor Otto von Habsburg's on them and on the European Union: imperfect, but better than nothing. In particular, I hope no one wants to talk about which or how many countries (I count at least ten major powers plus any number of minor ones) have attempted or achieved real-world counterparts to Internet Explorer 6.

I know that using a political analogy for software is risky business, but the UN's dynamics and the W3C's are almost identical; so I hope that the insight we might gain from the analogy is worth the risk.
This is awesome. I am going to start doing this all the time. Its extremely good also that my target market is college students :) even better.
Well, all this really shows is just how out of touch Microsoft is. They never really grokked the web anyway.
I think this has also been recorded as happening to astronauts when they look down on the earth. It really depends on the definition of spirituality though and unfortunately in the US a lot of people carry a lot of baggage when it comes to just what that looks like to them.
You'd have to have people who were provably harmed, in a way that jurors or judges would recognized as harmed. Google will defend themselves vigorously, and likely win. And it would take a long time.

More effective to just leave gmail. It threads conversations and gives you a lot of storage. Other than that it's just email.

There are lots of cheap email options where the only way the provider makes money is by you paying them a small amount of it, not by sifting and analyzing the contents of your email and the relationships between your contacts and correspondents.
Their privacy improvements last night[1] look good on a technical level, but they don't fully address either the underlying user confusion, or the PR issue (they haven't offered a sincere apology).

[1]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users...
That's right, not all entanglements are measurements. But all measurements are entanglements. They are the "same" in the same sense that, e.g. heat and motion are the "same", or light and radio waves are the "same". Measurement can be understood in terms of entanglement. They are not distinct physical phenomena.