skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure if the article got updated, but it says: "Horowitz stressed that Google would still offer a version of Buzz within Gmail, in addition to any independent version".
Firstly, I most highly commend you for your existing use of English. It's not an easy language to learn, and the item you've pointed to is really rather good - I only spotted a few small errors that matter, and I'm very picky. It's certainly much, much better than I ever got at French, German, Danish, Swedish, Bulgarian or Spanish. Overall, they didn't really detract from the item.

For many people it won't matter much, but for a few it definitely will. You need to decide how much it matters to you, and if you decide it matters, you need a copy-editor. You don't want someone to write the copy, you just want someone to tidy it up and remove the worst of the errors without changing the content much.

What contacts do you have? My circle of contacts would, for me, each copy-edit a few hundred words a fortnight. Depending how much I wrote, that would probably be enough without imposing on them too much. I'd also then buy them a beer, or cook them a meal every couple of weeks to say thank you.

There are also tools such as the Link Grammar. After spell checking, type what you want into that and see if you get one parse. If so, you're done. It's easy to download and install, and not so hard to automate.

That would be my recommendation.

PS: I'm a complete grammar-nazi and am probably much more severe than most people. Trust me - it was pretty good.
This is an exceptionally honest and forthright look at the pros/cons of a freemium model versus a simple free trial. I tip my hat to the Pollers for being willing to express their conundrum in such clear language in a public forum. Kudos.
Did you read the book? If so, would you recommend it?
Olympic Luge Death Day Before Olympics Start
Looks like he explains his objection at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Feb/0360... and says it's not a "formal complaint" at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Feb/0365...
There's nothing wrong with being partisan. In fact, it's wrong to be non-partisan about important issues like freedom. If you're non-partisan about free speech, what are you partisan about? What freedoms would you have to lose to become partisan?
Google Buzz Reveals Tech's Twenty Most Media-Connected People
Emacs and Screen
I read the book and recommend it.
revenue is not made by "interesting" products. and for a shopping cart, i'm not sure it's necessarily that much more intuitive.
If you use a client-side js framework like JQuery or Prototype, the cross browser compatibility isn't an issue since it's taken care of for you.

The user agent it reports as is irrelevant - it's not a full http client. You can use other ruby tools to fetch a page if you want, and then feed harmony the document.

As others pointed out, testing is probably the main use case, but it offers other obvious possibilities; for instance, talkerapp.com needed a way to easily validate js syntax for their plugins.
Cool, sounds like it could be a good workaround if you forgot to start with a version of your documents that works without js.
Flagged for being mainstream news, not hacker related, devoid of technical interest, and containing a photo of medical treatment being administered to someone who later died.

This is car-crash "journalism".
"The innovation on the web has always begun with the code -- and always with proprietary solutions."

Minor correction: lots of innovation has taken place in open source implementations first, which aren't proprietary.
I'm curious what a better nutrition labeling system would look like. I think each country has a different system. It would stand to reason that at least a few have something better than the US system.
Right or wrong, NOT acting is often a far worse sin. Do you live your life in hesitation, questioning your every move? The silver lining is that everyone is as equally wrong as you. The world rewards those who cause motion, who act. Energy excites.

It is also interesting to consider that you might be wrong about how wrong somebody is. What if you are both right, that you have not considered their issue in a context they perceive?

We perfectionists strive to be right and worry too much about being wrong. How complicated we make our lives.
So my point is (I'm the author) is: Transparency requires innovation. It requires government to take and make risks.
For me, the most worrying thing about working in technology has been how as I keep working, I learn more and more about technology. And it gets easier to forget how large that 'shit you don't know that you don't know' category is, compared to when I was a snot-nosed high schooler and painfully aware that I didn't know pretty much anything...

I'm still not sure how to go about maintaining that perspective. It would be nice if there was a reliable technique one could apply but I suspect it requires frequent 'oh, I just f--ked up' gut checks, like taking down a production website. Maybe the mark of a truly brilliant person is that they're able to maintain that perspective better than others?
A very impressive and passionate presentation. Jamie's use of shock value is very effective and probably necessary to get people to listen and take action.
I'm actually diagnosed, and these people with behavioral problems who say that they're "autistic" annoy me because it makes teachers assume you are going to be a little brat. People should not be allowed to proclaim they have a disorder without going to see a paediatrician and getting it diagnosed. It seems asperges/autism is the new "fad", like adhd was a while ago. It's becoming way too over diagnosed.
Nah, you'll just receive a ticket for Internet pollution in the mail. Be sure to pay it on time or a warrant may be issued.
This was a most troubled release from google, almost everything was done wrong, to alienate common non-techy users and privacy advocates. Just check out the Buzz help forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/label?lid=3a6323...), it's pure hatred.

However I would still love if they have the guts to make it stay. Out of all attempts at social media (i.e. facebook, ff and twitter) this one looks like the only acceptable solution which does not seem to suck (no ads, no flashy children toys, no annoying "updates" from hardly known people, and no character limit which dumbs down posts from even the brightest authors). If it is removed from gmail, it will sadly die. If it stays, public will learn to live with it.
these people who claim they are the "real deal" and aren't make me sick.
On the other hand, Google has a lot of resources and lawyers to fight off the government if they come knocking, and they've been known to fight to the max in the past.

You? Not so much. If the FBI shows up at your door, you're toast.
Unfortunately there aren't very many names available to startups these days. You can thank domain squatters for that. Once we can afford to buy something nicer we'll probably get rid of Divvy.

In the meantime we just have to take heart that the population of the liverpool metro area (850k) is 0.01% of the world's population.
The Friction Between Capital and Ideas
On Windows, my tasks generally involve using Visual Studio for editing files and Remote Desktop for deployment. On Linux, I think a lot more before I type out that one liner.

So, what value does Total Commander provide? I'm always interested in being more efficient.
Didn't happen with Tim Ferriss. People will get caught each time :-)
Pushing to non-bare repositories is always considered harmful.
I found this rant a bit vapid - you'll find more usable information here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041452 (or read Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories).

I think Oliver clearly identifies a problem (and quite passionately believes in what he says), but the solution seems squishy - "fighting obesity" and "education" are great ideas but when you empower people with bad ideas that's probably worse than useless. Besides, the problem isn't educating the kids but the parents.
Where else are you going to download the Savage Love podcast?

http://podcasts.thestranger.com/savagelove/

A school that tried to offer a sex-ed course that explicit would probably be sued. The internet gets a free pass.
Sugar = fat.

A lot of food says 0% fat, when the ultimate result of all that sugar is essentially fat.
Are you kidding? Officials don't face any real consequences of Screw Ups? How about Van Jones-- who, 8 years ago, said something stupid, and lost his job as energy czar? There are dozens of casualties like this.

Let's not conflate oversight with openness, too. You can oversee an institution without openness, but you usually can't be open without oversight.

My point is this: When google messes up, we give Google a chance to listen and rectify. When Government messes up (which it always will, because it is run and managed by human beings), we don't. And we ought to.
In what language is 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3? (I guess C# with decimal literals, but you'd have to specify that with a suffix)
20,000 users all the time with total anonymity and no site-related income and it doesn't matter how you're doing video.
In the past few months I had the opportunity to meet some very accomplished, respected people. It made me simultaneously depressed and amazed. Depressed how limited human beings actually are - the smartest people in the world actually aren't that different from you or I. Amazed how much we were able to accomplish as a race in a relatively short time span, despite how incredibly limited we are.
@RiderOfGiraffes Thanks a lot for your feedback.

I really appreciate it! Thanks also for pointing me to the right direction. I am going to check the Link Grammar.
You can't plagiarize what you don't know you don't know about...
"Educated" is the past tense. Some people just stop learning after a while, even though there were capable of it in the past.

People that have education and continue to get it are the people that can "avoid these problems"... but we don't really have a good word for "educated and able to learn", so the OP just said "educated".
Exactly so: if you put your address and other contact information online, people will find it.

I started off agreeing with her complaint, but it suddenly struck me: she's trying to avoid an abusive ex-husband - why on Earth did she even put that information in her Google profile to start with?

I have estranged family members, which is exactly why I don't put that sort of information in online profiles, and I'm not even worrying about an abusive husband who has my email address.
You don't think 7 figures is enough of a bonus?

Considering the employees are taking zero risk, I'd say it's perfectly fair compensation.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chrome-Team-Gets-Millions-in-...
I agree completely with this. While it is admirable that you have come this far with your English, poor English will interfere with your message for a lot of people. There is no shame in hiring a copy editor, best selling novelists rely heavily on their editors.

I would also advise that you read more. Pick up a novel that you find interesting. The more you expose yourself to well written English, the better your English will become.
It's somewhat hard to compare price in a column, though, because they have totally different pricing models. Some charge monthly fees for VPS slices depending on their size; others charge by the hour, also dependent on the size; some flat-price bandwidth up to some level while others charge for all bandwidth by the GB; etc.
Jaiku?

Orkut?

We're on strike three at the most conservative count.
Google Buzz: The Big Misdirection
I program elevators for a living. AMA
> Sure, I wish it supported higher resolutions, but the medium-res images are good enough for 95% of people.

Where did you get 95%? I've heard this before yet I don't know of anyone (besides us) who's actually taken the time to ask users if med-res is good enough.

When founding Divvyshot I used Amazon mechanical turk to conduct a quick market survey (with hundreds of respondents). A few highlights:

77% of respondents knew what hi-resolution photos were and preferred them.

43% had manually increased the resolution setting on their camera.

77% had been promised photos from a social event within the last few months and had never received them.
Sugar != fat in terms of the content of food. If something has zero fat but 400 calories, then it's still bad for you but in a different way. Either way, it's clearly labeled.

The problem is that people don't know how to interpret the labels. Better education would help with that. Weight watchers, for example, has their points formula which boils down the calories, fat, and fiber values into a single number that is easier to understand. Some food packages even include the WW points number -- but it wouldn't be very accurate or scientific to mandate that sort of thing.
Ahh, that makes sense, I guess.
re Ajaxian:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-html5-standards-blocking-a...

It relates to the whole RDFa vs Microdata argument, which itself is being used as a proxy for the W3C vs WHAT-WG power struggle. RDFa is the W3C’s solution for embedding meta-data into HTML, whereas Microdata is Ian Hixon’s baby. The W3C working group recently voted to split Microdata out of the HTML5 spec, something that Hixon, as editor, was not pleased about. He did it for the W3C spec, but not for the WHAT-WG, thus meaning the two specs are no longer in sync.

Whoever is right, Ian Hixon’s opinion should be only be considered in light of his personal stake in this issue, and his often demonstrated disdain for the W3C and its processes in general. Portraying the W3C as a secretive, compromised organisation helps to drive people toward the WHAT-WG. Of course, the WHAT-WG, being a smaller, invitation-only group of browser vendors, is in many ways more opaque than the W3C, it just lacks some of the bureaucracy around it.
Yeah it's REALLY bad. Funny thing is, and I don't know if this is store-specific or what but as an Apple employee working at the retail store, I got access to all of my email thru squirrelmail. You could only hit it from behind their firewall, but it's http://webmail.apple.com (it will fwd to https://webmail.apple.com/src/login.php if you cancel out of the login prompt, which for anyone who's used squirrelmail, is the standard login page)

Of course I was also given a mobileme account (which uses a pretty slick desktop-like web UI for mail) but I was shocked that they didn't do like a Google-Apps style rebrand of MobileMe email for their own @apple.com accounts. Pretty sad if you ask me.
Indeed. I would have expected 415003079.
I think Google should remove Buzz from GMail by default. Technically it probably makes no difference. Same privacy risks either way. The bigger issue is perception. I think most people approach GMail as a private space. They are very aware of the private data they keep in GMail. They've been using GMail for users under this assumption of privacy. All the sudden this public information exchange is one click away. If every bit of my information on Facebook was leaked I wouldn't be too upset because I've always approached it as a public space. I have an expectation that nothing on FaceBook is really private. I have an expectation everything in GMail is.
There is a newer version (version 2.0) available:

http://www.projectcartoon.com/cartoon/1

You can even create your own version (the default contains even more pictures with captions):

http://www.projectcartoon.com/create/
Google's social skills are like Frankenstein ...
Objective-C for C++ programmers
Great introduction in Objective-C for C++ programmers. Covers Objective C 2.0 aswell.
One good thing came out of this mess. I went through all the various Google products I've used in the past and deleted as much of me as I could.
It's a land grab. They had to gain users and build social/advertising groups quickly. I think there's something going on behind the scenes with Twitter and/or Facebook that terrifies Google right now. Otherwise they wouldn't have made such a bone headed move. They know better. The deployment strategy was a carefully calculated risk in my opinion.
I like this a lot. 98% of Javascript code people write does not need to be tested in the actual browser -- but it does need testing. Traditionally, people say "oh it's Javascript, who cares" and then their site only works by coincidence (or more frequently, just doesn't work). Making it easy to write proper unit tests will save people the stress of testing algorithms in the browser (either manually, or by loading a page with Test.More tests), or more likely, encourage them to actually think about their Javascript code as code. You know, that stuff you test, refactor, etc.

(FWIW, a coworker and I did this a few years ago with Rhino and a custom-hacked mock DOM. Doing it with a real DOM, like what an XML parser gives you for your actual page, is much better! Hopefully that's what this library allows.)
But what if the information wasn't private before, merely public, but not in the same context? This is what I think happened with Buzz. Nothing new was made public. It's just the public things weren't really public before.

This is the question: if up until now, you had an option that set things to 'public', but they weren't really public, should a new feature unset your previous choices? Should a new feature change your privacy settings?
@marilyn Thank you! I actually read a lot but no novels. I usually read rails, design books and tech blogs these days. I will need to find some time and squeeze some novel in so it is not tech oriented content only.
Yup, thanks. Someone quickly responded that he had wished to be formal earlier (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2010Feb/0002...):

So I object to the chairs' decision that these documents are in scope.

I suppose a formal objection is decided by the domain lead, or appealed to the Director, and the team contact can help with this process? it's not in the special HTML-WG-only process document how this group goes about appealing decisions which the chairs seem to have made.

If I need to use the word "formally" in there somewhere, or if there's some "Formal Appeal Change Proposal" form I'm supposed to fill in, recapitulating all of the email arguments made to date, suggesting the documents "change" by disappearing, and written in iambic hexameter, please let me know.

That quickly devolves into some discussion of possible uses of the word 'formal', the minutes of a phone conference, other emails, typos, and also some serious conversation about whether or not the private lists should be used this way. Tab Atkins Jr. wrote this:

I would like to register my strong disapproval of this entire affair.
This was an abuse of the member-only lists. Any Objection, potential
or not, should _always_ take place on the public list. I am
disappointed in the author of the private emails for their actions.

It really all is surprisingly like the senate, which to my mind is a shame. Having said that, maybe there's some inevitable thing that happens when this many people, much money, etc. are involved.
Wondering what made you learn Bulgarian, I'm bulgarian that's why I ask :)
Nope, I couldn't either
I suppose the question then becomes, is the study of female parters abusing their male counterparts getting even 20% of the total number of relationship abuse stories?
Straining the limits of C#
Her most frequent contact was provided with a list of her public blog posts? OH NOES.
Maybe the people at Google didn't see it this way.

"Inferring privacy preferences for a new feature, based on privacy choices in the existing software, is a recipe for failure."

That would be how to apply this to Buzz.
Dashboard?

https://www.google.com/dashboard/
Yes. Yahoo's aesthetic melds better with Apple's own than with either Microsoft or Google. Apple bought Quattro so they are obviously cooking up something with advertising, which is another area in which Yahoo has value.
Being able to just hand out an URL instead of burning several CDs or repeatedly handing out and collecting some USB drive if you want to exchange high resolution photos sounds like an advantage to me.

Email is still no alternative. Gmail, for example, has a 25 MB limit. Good for maybe five photos. Something like dropbox might be. (But you cannot share there if your friends don’t have accounts.) – edit: Ah, just noticed that’s seemingly also the case with divvyshot.

Well, that’s a problem you should work on – I cannot and will not force my friends to sign up for anything when I just want to share photos. That sort of defeats the whole purpose. There already is a unholy proliferation of all kinds of services you need a password for. That’s nice if all you want is a nice collection of great tools (you can pick and chose and end up only with a handful) but not so nice if you have to force your friends to sign up when you want to use the thing for one of its main use cases.

I bet you could make it possible to download and maybe even contribute (adding photos by sending them via Email, maybe?) without needing to sign up. Your use cases should work without me having to force people to sign up and hate me and your service as a consequence.

I know your whole signup process is dead simple (make it even simpler be not having people type their password twice) and you don’t even need to use your real Email address and you don’t even send out a welcome Email (all great things, really, I wish everyone were like you) but I know quite a few people (and not just nerds) who are allergic to any kind of signup form.
We always operate with imperfect knowledge. So we must make decisions based on probable outcomes. Is the child more likely to be better off if not hit by the car? Since the chance of death is high, then yes.

You also have to factor out things that appear on both sides of the equation. Any of the possible positive things you have prevented that also could happen had you intervened are irrelevant to the decision.

We never have perfect knowledge, but we must act anyway. The alternative is to be frozen and do nothing, ever.
Ask HN: Should we give incentives ?
I've been thinking how to, or if we should, give incentives at my company.

We are slowly becoming profitable. We are "ramen profitable" since both of the founders live from our salary. But we have three angel investors who would like a reward on their investment. And seven more employees.
I've been reading articles by HBS and some blogs.

One possible scheme i've thought of is this one.

First cover all costs including salaries, taxes, credit, etc.
Build a 5% reserve for legal or other.
As long as profits are 20% of sales or lower, pay them as dividends to investors.
Redistribute any profits above 20% of sales to founders and employees.
Please update this headline, it's inaccurate
That works great until a spambot decides to start spamming <1000 common usernames>@yourdomain.com
What got me is switching buzz off does not disable people following you - you have to individually block people.
They did a similar thing with searching through emails - there was no option to disable that feature.

It is like Google is saying - "We give you free services, so now we own all your data. And just so you know, we don't do evil - so pls don't judge."

Must be funny in the rich man's world. They are wasting away shareholders' profit share in their hubris or competitive fear.
I do not have a Google profile, but I did re-activate Buzz this evening so that I could go back in and block any followers I had.

I edited the list of people that Buzz automatically followed on my behalf and un-followed all of them.

I edited the list of apps whose status changes would be automatically Buzzed ( like Picasa ) and removed them.

Then, I deactivated Buzz again.

I suspect that I'm going to have to repeat this process periodically.
Try ImDisk: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk
Spamhaus is one list. There are hundreds. (See http://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl-list.php for starters) Some are nearly impossible to get off of.
Yes. We can always use more defensive linemen.