skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple's actions are not about suppressing free speech, but about making sure the app store keeps a certain standard. As an analogy, no one is stopping you from going for a drink in any kind of pub/shop/restaurant, but some establishments have stricter codes of conduct and you have to behave appropriately if you choose to frequent them. I compare these app store rants to someone ranting that they can't get drunk and noisy in a restaurant because there's nothing wrong in getting drunk. Sure there's nothing wrong, but to do so you go to an appropriate place.
They wouldn't go broke, they'd just stop charging the fees.
I doubt it's been written by hand or is maintained by hand: it may also be styled to be rendered in a dialog.
Of course there are power struggles when a king dies. There are power struggles for preselection in democracy, there are power struggles to head up unelected but supremely powerful institutions. I don't see your point.

Stability and freedom would seem to be more a function of wealth than mode of government. There are plenty of people with freedom to do pretty much nothing but die under democratic rule in Africa.

Where's the counter-corruption in democracy? Plenty of democratic countries are corrupt to the core. India. Italy. Thailand (I personally bribed a police officer there once). The powerful control the media, and the people vote for who they're told whether the puppetmaster was elected or not.

How can you try and distance democracy from the wars and torture? Is this a "no true Scotsman" argument? Those acts are the acts of a democracy in decay. You're acting like if only we did democracy better, it wouldn't happen. I'm saying - what if that's the end result of all democracy?

Anyway, don't take it too seriously, I'm just throwing ideas out there, as usual.
Except those blinking ads aren’t useless—they bring in substantial amounts of ad revenue for the New York Times. So what is OP’s point, exactly?
Scott Rafer's Blog : Lookery Prequel, Inc.*
Apple giving big media special treatment during iPhone porn prohibition
I can only attest to the difference between small-time lawyers and big-time lawyers/trusted advocates of huge companies, who do business negotiations all the time: The difference is huge, and it absolutely makes sense to hire a pro negotiator. It ultimately comes down to price/terms. And an experienced negotiator can make a huge difference there.

For you, it's a once-in-a-lifetime situation. For them, it's daily business. Guess who's better at it.

EDIT: ah well, misread that as "Ask HN". My bad.

P.S.: I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense to have an investment banker as the lead negotiator. They sure do add value in some cases, but most of the issues arising in share purchase agreements are better entrusted to lawyers.
There are a number of sites that do stuff like this, and I think that the way in which this one is superior is that the tab key functions in more or less the expected fashion.

i have both interviewed and given an interview using a different one of these, and there's nothing more frustrating on either side than listening to someone swear under their breath at the tab key switching up the dialog boxes and hitting the space key like it was going out of style.
Four Ways of Looking at Twitter
Using diamond trees to sequester carbon?
You have a good point, but we already rely on patent examiners to determine whether or not something is patentable. What this would do is give them finer granularity to the decision. Instead of saying yes, your patent on using 1-click "on the internet" is just as valid as the patents on the original transistor, patent examiners would get to say, okay, it's a neat idea, but its not /that/ revolutionary.
That's utter nonsense. The reason blacks and hispanics are not employed in silicon valley is that there are not as many skilled in IT blacks and hispanics as there are from other races in the United States.

Whatever the reasons are, it is a socio-economic problem, it's not a problem caused by any form of systematic discrimination in silicon valley.

I do not believe that I have ever seen any youtube video of a black person complaining about how he is fighting to get a job in silicon valley, but nobody is hiring him, even though he has a great number of projects online and everyone agrees his code is great.

It IS a meritocracy. If you put a bunch of bad black programmers in silicon valley and expect them to learn the tools on the job, then this will be an even greater disservice to the black community - as it would result in a negative stereotype about the quality of 'black programming'.
Making Math More Appetizing
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Googling Harder (TCP should be more Aggressive by Default)
Charts: VC shows signs of life
Tough questions without also building rapport is also bad.

I've had some interviews where they asked tough questions and I got a job offer but I declined because I felt there was no rapport or interest in my career.
Church of Scientology hires 3 veteran journalists to investigate Florida paper
Chinese Hacker Responsible For Google Attack Code Identified
Wait, people would just call somewhere and say the extension? That sounds awfully rude to me. Wouldn't you normally say, "Hi, can I have extension 432, please?"

It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human being.
Different perspective alright: the original article is better balanced http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14383730

This you're-picking-on-me attitude is annoying.
Steve Souder's browser performance wishlist
"Thankfully I puchased an Android powered HTC Magic"

Bad choice. Google has the same policy on adult applications in the Android Market. Not sure if they enforce it or not. They certainly do block some applications such as wifi tethering apps. Android is not a good choice if you want a fully open platform.
That's it? That's your idea of the difference between "really ugly" HTML and good HTML? Kids these days... makes me feel so old.
Don't capitalize the project name (e.g. "defproject X"). Perhaps this is obvious, but I was messed up by that for a while...
Structuring Great Founder Agreements
I'm no expert either. All I try to do is avoid names that are ambiguous or tough to spell. Think "del.icio.us" - Are you going to have to explain to someone every single time what your domain is, or will a casual mention be enough? Side note: this is why I think non-.com domains are almost worthless.

On my startup, DoLeaf, we got "doleaf.com" and "dewleaf.com". Probably a good thing, too, as there seems to be a decent size minority that reads "doleaf" as "doh-leef", like Homer Simpson.
If you got a different response, like "Hi, XYZ Corp, what extension would you like?", it might be politeish.

Of course anyone being quite that manual has probably now been replaced by a PBX.
Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios
Taste test: Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods produce
Wow. OK, I'm a little tired of all these recent "I'm Indian so I won't get funded", "We need women for Web 3.0" and blog-posts. I've got a little time on my hands so excuse this little diatribe:

>> "As I’ve mentioned many times before there is no innovation without diversity"

OK, well I agree with the general premise, I'd like a little elaboration on what kind of diversity you're talking about. I'm going to make the assumption that the writer's talking about racial diversity, and pose the question: How does having black skin automatically mean you're going to bring a different outlook to the table? Why shouldn't I go to Russia and find someone with an entirely different culture, background, language and religion? By that logic, that candidate will increase the diversity in my workplace far more than a Harvard educated black guy who grew up in Greenwich.

As an aside, organizations like TiE are absolutely absurd. You're trying to fight a "boys club" by forming your own boys club. The battle of racism(1) was never won with additional racism. Additionally, you're further isolating yourself from the community as a whole. Assimilate, infiltrate and smash the system from within if you really think you're being discriminated against(2).

In terms of practicality though, outrage isn't going to get you ultimately anywhere. If you don't think the Valley employs enough minorities in startups, then _start your own_. The barrier of entry is literally a 15$ Dreamhost account and a weekend reading the Django docs(3). Fork a project on Github and do something clever with it. The valley wont care if you're a philandering albino, you'll get job offers left and right if it's clever enough.

(1) I'd argue you'd have to be actively searching for instances of racism in the Valley to actually find it. I'm a second-generation Indian-American. The startup community least discriminatory group of people I've ever encountered bar crust-punks and hippies.

(2) Hint: Odds are you aren't.

(3) I'm well aware of Norvig's http://norvig.com/21-days.html, this is just for the sake of argument.
@dlib: Do you still use Kohana? We all miss the great articles you used to post on learn.kohanaphp.com.
I honestly can't believe people write posts about this.
Seesmic Web Blurs the Line between Web & Desktop Twitter Clients
If the revenue they get from the patent makes the patent worth holding, then they wouldn't. And if they don't make 100k off of it, then maybe it's not worth holding the patent for longer?

The example rises a bit steeper and starts lower than I would have suggested, but it seems reasonable to me. After all, the supposed point of patents is to make it commercially valuable to invest in research by giving you a guaranteed return if the research pays off. If you're not getting any money from your patent, then you're no worse off releasing it than sitting on it for nothing. But society will be better off if patents that aren't used are eliminated.
Well, this is a "Manager's Scrum" where each of the organizational managers/directors/leads identify what needs to be done. The individual contributors mostly work out of Jira at their own pace.

Also, I work in an operational organization, so, a lot of our design patterns are pretty well laid out, and so most of the creativity comes from improving the patterns (which we do in design review or our bi-annual architecture refresh) more than creating anything particularly innovative during the week. We're mostly focused on execution and hitting commitments - and tracking them and writing them down at the beginning of each morning makes sure we know, and hit those commitments.
I'm looking for a new todo list tool at the moment. How would it work for a vaguely GTD style?
World Wide Web For Dummies, Not Us
Google's New Ad Server Goes After the Little Guy
It depends on what kind of tech company you are talking about.

A Microsoft will have a fairly understandable business model with predictable cashflows. Conversely, most young, public tech companies are more of a gamble on management teams/product being able to execute their plan and grow. That to me is something you wont learn in books and pick up on with experience. And always remember that just because a product sounds good, or is good, it might not necessarily be a good investment. You are buying a stake in a business and if you pay too much for that stake, you decrease your margin of safety.
Presumably they'd burn even less fossil fuel if they went out of business.
Poppycock: when a company decides that it doesn't want to be seen as demeaning to women by profitting off of the sale of pornography (a highly subjective label, but one that they're going to take to safest, most conservative definition of) by taking its percentage of the App Store sale price it's absurd to say that they're being demeaning to women by _not_ taking profits from pornography.
No. Because Solitaire is not a platform. What Microsoft is being punished for is abusing its desktop OS monopoly (which was, BTW, acquired through all sort of shady backroom deals) to hijack and prevent technological advancements that could render its clients independent of its desktop software, thus inflating its profits by artificially reducing competition.

Sorry for the humorless reply, but this is an important subject and it has been shown, over and over, any misconception about it is abused to portrait Microsoft in a more favorable light.
I find it interesting that human voice communication seems to have a kind of built-in handshake to synchronize expectations of vowel sounds etc. It makes sense, but it hadn't occurred to me before now, and is probably part of the reason speech to text is so difficult.
I think this is an important question - do you "NEED" to become a 10,000 hour "expert" ?

I would never want to stereotype the entire population of earth and say that you're a failure if you're not an expert at something. Is it good to be an expert? Of course. But it's not required - there are many paths to life.
Google: The next generation of ad serving for online publishers
I thought it was a stunning example of "incentive cause bias" (http://vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.html) that the founder of a "boutique corporate law firm" would recommend that one should pay for the services of a "top M&A attorney" to decide what to do.

This isn't to say it's bad advice, but somehow it would have been more compelling coming from an entrepreneur who had been through this process rather than from the owner of a firm that benefits monetarily from offering this exact service.
I don't understand your comment. The fee would apply to the patent holder, for retaining the patent. The licensing fees could be whatever the patent holder wants, if they decide to license it. That's no different from today.

If the new way of manufacturing battery cells is of no commercial value and that you don't make any money off of it, then what's the point of holding the patent?
I second this. Recently I posted a story about a project I'm working on (Rails Tutorial, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138149), and someone made a trollish comment I felt obliged to rebut. I was pleasantly surprised to see other HN readers come to my defense with comments and downvotes. I did end up responding, but I probably shouldn't have, and next time I'll probably sit on my hands and see how it shakes out.
Indeed, mastery of technology is the last thing that most blacks and Hispanics want to achieve in life. Why is this so is an important question and the answers will, sadly, often point to discrimination. But none of it has anything to do with Sillicon Valley.
Yeah, I don't think you can claim discrimination when most of the employees are minorities, just not a certain particular minority group. If you only hired white men, you'd have a hell of a hard time running a software company.

Software (and presumably hardware/software stuff like embedded systems, chip design, etc.) is so amazingly competitive that there would not be room to turn down good programmers. I'd hire a purple-skinned guy who only spoke Elbonian if he was a real hacker, and if that's not your attitude in this industry, you're sunk.
Tahoe-LAFS: cloud storage system with provider-independent security
Thanks for the link, idlewords. Cynicalkane, who on this thread said codeine should be removed from the market? I inferred from the articles that acetaminophen and "poisons" should be removed from codeine, so people who need the painkiller aren't paying a cost with their livers because others might abuse the drug. The first nanny state move was limiting access to codeine and the sinister move was adding poison (assuming it's all true).
How do you reconcile the supposed infantilizing and misogyny with your decision to "just let my wife play with the iPod"?
80legs introduces Python API
"Radiuses" is a real, but less-common and less-accepted plural for radius. A quick search and check of references will confirm that.

"1 - 10 of about 92,000 for radiuses."

"Results 1 - 10 of about 5,700,000 for radii [definition]."
I don't care what color, creed, sex, or sexual preference you have. I care if you're innovative, can code well, and have unwavering dedication. This article is silly.
When the large s/w firms get tired of IV they can just add a line to their EULAs that bans use of their products if you refuse to contribute all your software patents to the industry-wide software patent pool.

Perhaps the EFF could administer the pool.
The other people in this category (in the US) are physician assistants. As with many things, there is a religious level war over who is more competent.

In my experience, I have had less than satisfactory experiences seeing NP's and PA's, primarily because they clearly did not have the same depth of knowledge in a primary care setting. I remember once wondering if I was being seen by a medical student or something, then I looked at the name tag and saw that he was a PA. (Apply anecdotal disclaimers accordingly.)
I wish there were stats for Eastern-Europeans employed in the tech industry in Silicon Valley; I'm betting they're classified under "White" in demographic surveys. Many tend to be immigrants to the US themselves.
Out of curiosity, why do you think questions like reverse a list without using reverse features of the language, or print out a file backwards a good judge of development skills?

I've been programming over 10 years and my opinion is that some of these questions aren't relevant for many development jobs.
I met some of the people from Docsnaps.com showing of the automated bookkeeping website. I think for an early startup the service can be real helping hand.
Popular kings? There are plenty. King Abdullah is very popular. The Ming dynasty oversaw an extraordinary explosion in trade and art. The Medici family planted the seeds of the Renaissance. The Meiji Emperor dragged Japan, kicking and screaming, into the modern world.

Maybe I shouldn't have said "king", since that has quite a specific meaning. I really meant a leader, or group of leaders, who have a great personal stake in the country and its progress. Supreme leaders care about posterity, whereas parliamentarians always have someone else to blame.

Who do you think makes the best long-term decisions? A leader who knows they will still be there in 20 years to accept the consequences, or the politician scrambling to get out a press release so he can be seen to be "doing something" about the latest opinion poll?

I do not have anything like the faith in the long-term viability of democracy, at least as we know it, that you have. I do not see how a disinterested, ignorant population has any capability to govern, or even vaguely direct, a country's path better than, say, the Standing Committee in China.

Anyway, time will tell.
I like the spirit of this but not the implementation.

Currently, if you pay 10k or whatever, you get at a patent for ~20 years. If your idea is valuable, others will (hopefully) be willing to pay royalties. If not, you'll be discouraged from filing fluff patents in the future.

If fees start low and escalate every year, there's much more of a game theory aspect. On the inventor side, you have an incentive to apply for 10 silly patents and play the lottery on each for a year instead of filing for 1 good patent that is actually valuable. On the other side, someone considering paying to use a patent might think "Gee, if we make a deal now, we have to pay royalties, but if we wait a year, then there's a good chance Joe Patentholder will not be able to pay the required fees, and then we can use his idea for free!" This doesn't mean Joe's idea is not valuable, but the incentive to wait a few months makes a patent's value too unpredicatable.

Also, what if you're negotiating with someone after 2 years and 11 months, and they decide to stall for a month to apply negotiating pressure?
Indeed... the article is so poorly written it looks more like satire.

Anyway, though it made sense to do something about the proliferation of these apps, just removing all of them was a stupid move, for both developers and users, given that there are obvious and easy technical solutions.
The major difference is that Android allows installing applications from anywhere, so you aren't limited by what Google approves.
If the app store is displaying information you aren't interested in, then that's Apple's problem. They didn't solve the problem.

Actually, for some set of their customers, they did. Not every adult is interested in buying softcore pornography.
You would be able to create pages (tabs) and organize them. You can create tasks and subtasks within them. Press 'tab' to indent (i.e. make a subtask). And when you want a task+subtasks out of your mind & sight, click the [-] or press [`] key to hide. There will be a 'completed tasks' list for each page with some started/completion date info. I might put some deadline/highlight/bold options per task but haven't thought about it fully yet.

It will vaguely do GTD like you put it but I don't think it will be a vitalist.com or even a simplegtd.com replacement. I don't think GTD itself is perfect and wrote untodos.com a year ago with 'today/soon/whenever' sections to help sort my life but it wasn't enough. What I really wanted was a place to immediately jot down my thoughts without any hassle when I was brainstorming and later sort them when I'm in a more organized mood. Hence there is no 'save' button in bulletxt (though you will have unlimited undo.)
this is particularly true (in my limited experience) if you're not a native speaker - saying something like "hello i'd like to talk to extension 123" gives people a chance to figure out your accent. also, like smiling, saying something friendly encourages people to make an effort to understand you.
Edison: The worst fisherman that ever lived
That would be a good solution for me, too. For example: It's years ago since I used Visual C on Windows, but I use C++Builder daily. I can whip up a good looking, surprise-free, standards-adhering, well behaved GUI in minutes and flesh it out to a fully functional application without hesitation in the hours after. If you'd put me behind Visual C I'd probably be looking for minutes to find the Dialog Editor (errr.... is that Windows Forms nowadays? Hmmm, I should give .Net a look someday).
In other words, it should be hard for the government to govern? Well, that's one way of looking at it.

You know, if they instituted these "sweeping changes" and the public didn't like it, they could always be voted out next time and the changes reversed (with ease!). At least that way the policy would actually get tested. And it seems that the ability to actually enact the majority's wishes is more democratic than not.
I agree. C is weird in that the programmer has to throw away almost all of his intent and just tells the machine exactly what instructions to perform. You can read C and sort of get the idea of what the programmer wanted to do, but it's difficult. In Haskell, there is very little "how" and a lot of "what" (and "why"), and so there is much more opportunity for optimization. Your work with stream fusion is a great example -- what a C programmer might think is a bunch of loops can be condensed down to one loop "sometime later". And in Haskell, these effects can be composed, whereas in C, you are stuck with what the programmer wrote.

This is why I am always confused when people say "functional programming is slow" -- current C implementations are very close to being as fast as theoretically possible, where as current FP implementations are nowhere near that (there are many optimization opportunities that are currently unexplored or unimplemented). And even with only a few optimizations, many FP implementations (GHC, OCaml, SBCL) are almost as fast as C already!
QR code integration for Foursquare
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