skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know WHY it bothers me, but I should mention that it DOES -- the 'square' in the logo is rectangular, and my mind can't get over that.

I'd rework the logo entirely if you could actually, and I don't know when the 'feedback on the left side of the page' became a popular phenomenon, or who started it, but I honestly find it to be extremely silly.

That said, I like the overall look of the site, though it's obviously quite spartan at this point.
All patent suits are evil. If all software patents were enforced, no new software could be written without licensing thousands or tens of thousands of patents from hundreds of holders. And no free software could be written at all. So the answers to all your your questions is "yes".

Except the last, which is kinda dumb. "BLOOPT" would no doubt be a trademark violation, you can't patent a name. But yeah, if Loopt filed a patent suit against someone simply for competing with them, then it would be evil too.
You ought to post this link separately.
The only reason I have a computer resting on my lap is because it has a keyboard that needs resting there.
Yeah they are using computers. but computers are increasingly like appliances, and there is a huge gulf between clicking buttons in an UI and messing with code in an editor.

I remember way back, when I had to learn all this stuff about DOS and RAM just to get Ultima 7 to work on my computer. I had a friend who couldn't get sound to work correctly on his PC in StarCon2, so he soldered together his own sound card to get it to work. Nowdays you don't need to do that with modern computers and most of time you can't even do that even if you wanted to, because modern software and hardware are exponentially more complicated now.
Well, I did link to a blog post with more info about the 10'000 hours, including a reference to Gladwell.

EDIT: edited the OP, added explicit reference to Gladwell. Thanks for pointing that out.
Tech Thoughts: Why Google Will Avoid the Desktop OS
It lobby accuses german gov of hypocrisy
If they're not natively handled, you can't regex them.
If they're not natively handled, you can't convert any numbers that might be in them to numeric values.

Yes, they're common enough (especially in Japan) and encodings have to be baked deeply in if you really want to use everything that a Rubyist expects to be able to use.
And that HTC's own-branded Android devices compete and better iPhone in a lot of ways. When I moved from iPhone to hero, my contacts suddenly all had photos from Facebook, I didn't have to open apps to check twitter or stock prices, I could add a shortcut to SMS my girl right onto the home screen, and I didn't have to sync anymore.
It's called dramatic license.
What's the use? If you'd all rather be reading, I can't imagine your parties are terribly thrilling
However, strong multi-taskers also tend to draw many people into their activities. When (resulting) failure calls for accountability, "everyone" was involved and the (perceived) blame quotient is not high enough for any individual to effect real change.

An anecdotal observation, but a general experience of mine in corporate life.

Sometimes, it's actually the "hero" who tackles a problem single-handedly, who fare worst. Because blame can easily be apportioned to him or her in great measure, whether deserved or not.

Isolation is often the kiss of death in such environments.

[/cynicism]
I know it seems that way, but I don't think he is. Exaggerating a bit, possibly, but not kidding.
Apple's 'style of multitouch' is the same multitouch Bell invented in the 60s. Pinch to zoom has been around for decades, Apple's genius is in bringing that to smartphones - unfortunately that's not patentable, so they have to resort to 'using a gesture to unlock a device' and other such specific (and obvious) applications of the concept.
That makes sense. I think the key will be the community norms (and social features to support those norms) that you build, but you seem aware of that. Looking forward to seeing how things evolve!
both network and finance analytics are near the top for projected job growth. with inelastic graduation rates this means increased salaries. it makes sense that entrepreneurs that can come into this space and automate some of it will kill.
It's also supposed to be an incorrect implication for Ruby most of the time. It should be possible to do a single encoding trivially (e.g., if all of your data is shift_jis or UTF-8), but rather than trying to (badly, and usually unsuccessfully) hide the encoding difficulties from the programmer if you've got mixed encodings, Ruby has chosen to be a little more up front about encodings.

The reality may be a bit differently, but I recall seeing an email message from Matz on ruby-core last year suggesting that it was supposed to be trivially easy to work with one encoding (specifically mentioning UTF-8, but implying others).
The MIT Guide to Avoiding Burnout
Haha, good point about the []. And also thank you for the input on the feedback link.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162832
So far they're #1 in a couple of categories and #119 overall.
That's how I see it too. Right now, I'm waiting on other people on most of the projects and I'm thinking about better interfaces or architectures for some. It helps me to have other things to work on that are productive to distract me from the angst that builds up when I'm waiting on someone else or calendar time like you said.

Something I read a while back said "sleeping on it helps." If you're only working on one thing, then you may be spinning wheels that your brain can do itself when given the right amount of time to evaluate or even discover all the options.

Another reason I can do this is a lack of demands from a timeline. A lot of project die simply because there wasn't enough time to let them evolve or find a market or they were "ahead of their time." That's fine, just be patient and work on something else. If it's a VC backed idea, that's not an option. You can't tell investors, "Hey we're just going to wait right here and see what happens..." But often times that's really the best route to success.
Are there really people out there that are "just" idea guys? I can't imagine they could get very far in life without picking up some other skills.

Often people consider the 'idea guy' to be the ceo, or marketing person, because that persons direct work is often not visible in the product itself.

However, if you think of the Steve Blank model of creating customers and defining products, isn't that a great fit for an idea person? Somebody who can have an idea, talk to potential customers, and figure out what the final product should REALLY be?
I rather think you're confusing part of his accusation as his own statement.
You're implying that Apple's particular implementation of multi-touch is some sort of essential for life. It's not. At least not yet.
Actually a patent already has to be 'not obvious to an engineer sufficiently skilled in the art' if I remember correctly, although that's almost never applied.
I'd like to think adults are more mature than kindergarten-level exclusion, fellow hackers most of all.

People who aren't into geek things often display contempt of them, viewing rpgs and sci-fi as immature and weird. My guess is that she didn't even see that she giving off a "listen dorks, don't invite me to play pretend wizard with you" vibe. Because my experience is that geeks are enthusiastically inclusive.
Analysis of mentions across social media platforms enriched with sentiment graphs etc. All wrapped up in nice UberVU graphs.
Apple make good laptop hardware though. Here's a better idea: keep your existing Mac, but buy an HTC Desire as your next phone.

You get a lot of features the iPhone doesn't have (pictures for your contacts, social network integration, streaming, no sync requirement, a faster CPU) and stick it to Apple at the same time.
> I hate to be that guy, but seriously? I have never witnessed this kind of behavior before. In fact, from my experience at Cal, all of the student groups are absolutely desperate for anyone to join, let alone a girl!

Alright, I'm a dude, but I think I can say a few things on this. Here's my biases: I train for and play sports for fun, I've never played D&D, I don't watch or read sci-fi, and I don't really play video games (and if I do, they're sports games).

In my college CS department, I was definitely not invited to anything that any of the other students were doing. I'm not saying I wanted to be, but probably greater than 90% of my CS classmates were in the D&D sci-fi crowd.

I think you underestimate the intimidation factor; I truly don't think that I was mean or overbearing to them, and we worked together just fine on projects, but we all kind of believed implicitly that we belonged to different speheres.

I suspect that a similar dynamic is often at work when women interact with that kind of group.

(edited to add: except the Jordanians! I forgot, we had a small group of Jordanians in the group that I got along with great, they taught me to smoke houkah and we watched soccer together. They weren't involved with the CS kids either.)
I could be wrong but I don't think this situation is the same as Microsoft's.

Apple has full control over whats installed on an iPhone. They openly admit that they block any applications that compete with theirs. Couldn't Google do the same?
I appreciate the need to get different angles, TechCrunch however isn't a credible source of information (they throw great parties though).

I'd love to see a Mashable or CodeSketch or whatever perspective though. Someone else contributed John Gruber's post on the topic and was modded up accordingly.
Eating slower is a lot easier than not eating at all, so it can provide a starting point. After constantly being told to exercise, eat less, eat healthier, buy organic, etc., some people have reached the point where there willpower is so low, they can't choose a starting point from that huge list. They need something small that will give them a little nudge in the right direction, to start a positive feedback cycle.
Agreed - likely not any one thing, but a combination of several trends.

Quants are smart, but not necessarily in a startup way - they could definitely be on the startup team (build the product, crunch the data, etc.), but might not be the best fit as a founder (obviously this is a sweeping generalization, but so was your "almost all of the smart people on Wall Street are quants")

There are plenty of other smart people that make up Wall Street (traders, investment bankers, pwm, sales / marketing) and likely better equip to take on the multi-faceted beast that is a startup venture. Also, few were safe in 09, regardless of what role they filled.

Rents in New York definitely need to come down in order for the innovation / startup hub to continue it's upward move ... having banks and funds recover and salary / bonus talk coming back will not help either.
Yup. He said who gave him the iMac. People who called my interview a joke are still trying to figure out if he got the iMac and who gave it to him. But he did the Mixergy interview on the iMac and talked about who gave it to him.

And, making fun of Daniel is a slam dunk right now. Everyone seems to be doing it. I think the more honorable thing is to think when others are outraged.
Cool link, will check out.
How Apple and Google's Romance Turned To Hate
Questions for the author whom I presume is unavailable...

If it was clear to both parties that the other did not enjoy the same activities... why would you expect to be invited to those activities? Why would it bother you to not be invited to an activity you probably would not enjoy?

The only answer seems to be that she was lonely, so she put on a mask to fit in... not really surprising but seems a bit shallow and I can't imagine it really being personally fulfilling. Would not her time have been better sent seeking out those with whom she shares more common interests?

Hope I am not too badly missing the point.
wireless headphones? pricey, but might be worth it
It'd be illegal on the road too - it needs license plates, lights and a tax disc, and the rider should have a motorcycle license and a helmet. An electrically-assisted bicycle is still a bicycle, but take the pedals off and add a throttle and it becomes a motorcycle. I believe the laws are similar in the rest of the EU, although some states have a 'light motorcycle' vehicle class which would ease (though not entirely obviate) homologation as a motor vehicle.

I expect the machine to fall into the same regulatory and marketing abyss as the Segway - too expensive, not enough speed or range and illegal in most jurisdictions.

I don't see what's wrong with pedalling, especially over the meagre 9-10km range advertised for the yikebike. If you're not fit enough to comfortably ride three miles each way to work, you really need the exercise.
They can push an update to Android and can switch the search provider to Google with/without user consent.
"Currently geo indexing is limited to indexing squares with no "wrapping" at the outer boundaries."
Loren's just reporting it - and says he got his info from multiple sources.

He didn't ask for bribes, nor did he tell anyone he'd provide a bribe. Yes he's a dirty, agressive man, that makes puppets of his enemies to mock them, but that's just his personality - his ethics aren't being called into question here.
Welcome to Google, the new capital of Kansas
The author has a website dedicated to "mesofacts", including a blog that supposedly will provide a steady flow of mesofact updates. (Given how slowly mesofacts are supposed to change, I wonder how long one can supply a steady flow of interesting mesofact updates for. We'll see.) http://www.mesofacts.org/blog.html is the blog.
The company I work for ocasionally does SMS campaigns (eg text-in competitions) and they recently switched from Clickatell to TynTec[1].

[1] http://www.tyntec.com/
How much of the comments do you read? I find it hard to believe you would have the time for so many posts and peoples opinion on them.
Hacker Newspaper removes all TechCrunch stories: http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/

Wouldn't catch this story but it would remove a lot of drama.
I have an iPod touch, so I'm familiar with the interface. In some ways it is MUCH simpler to tell scrollable vs non-scrollable. At the same time, it isn't really a huge issue on the iPhone, but yes there is a difference.

The iPhone home screen may be the best example. I've got a screen full of icons, and nothing really tells me that there is another page of icons waiting (unless I look at the very small dots at the bottom of the screen).
On the ZuneHD, I have two cues. 1) the gap at the top, and 2) the last item is partially cut-off as a hint that there is more to come.

If zune had just had the list without the gap at the top, you would only know you've reached the top by the end of scrolling. The negative space, I find, to be a nice way to say that you're at the top or bottom, without adding another UI element like a bar or something.

On the iPhone, they've accomplished this with an 'over scroll' which shows me just black space and then springs back to the icons. Try it yourself, on your home screen scroll too far right, or too far left.
The Zune has the same effect, though it isn't necessary because they've added the negative space.

The Zune uses negative space in applications as well, though I feel they could have done a better job, I'm sure it will improve.
As for the negative space on the right, on the Zune, you can use that to control volume in the music player (though it brings up a function screen which I'm not a huge fan of), the use of a large negative space makes it so I can control the volume without having to look at the device (changing tracks can be done with a swipe, so no look for that is really good too). For some reason he button which is located at the usual volume spot on the iphone doesn't change the volume. I'm not sure why.
So CS compelled her to look like this?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johncarney/3515851216/

I'm not really buying that she's a Barbie girl.
Forget how many angels fit on a pin
All of the points in this article can be applied to SeatGeek, as well.
That is definitely not my experience.
I imagine he's pissed off that people are trying to act like he's in the wrong, when he didn't ask for a bribe (like the TechCrunch reporter), nor state he'd provide a bribe (like the poster).

I've never met Loren but in general he is refreshingly honest and enjoys raining on the parade of anyone that thinks blogging, parties, and thinly-transparent self-promoting charity events matter more than products do - generally using puppets as a preferred form of expression.

We desperately need him to come to London sometime.
Firm control over one's product and patent lawsuits against one's competitors are very different things. Firm control is annoying, frustrating, and maybe borderline evil (in the tech sense of the word as pg defined it), but suing competitors' manufacturers for treble and punitive damages is definitely evil. It would take a revelation of truly bad behavior on HTC's part for me to think otherwise.
The injunctive relief sought goes rather farther than "stop using our particular implementation of multi-touch". I think you need to go back and read the complaint (there's a great writeup right now at http://lwn.net). Yours seems to be a knee-jerk defense of your favorite company, but this is not a trivial or common license action.
"Hilarious" is editorializing by the submitter, not part of the original title. For what it's worth, this article is one of the least hilarious things I have read recently, but of course tastes vary.
I think that's real application evolution at work: You have new projects and new requirements all the time, but they're _similar_ projects. It is natural to gradually build out a framework of reuse. That's different from the "the entire business should have uniform software" misconception described in the article. There, the owners are grabbing for an efficiency that simply isn't present in that situation.
How to procrastinate like Leonardo da Vinci
The audio appears to be back up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JIp3yStpmg
10-questions interview with Paul Graham
For those of you who haven't tried it, MongoDB offers a pretty amazing balance of features and usability. The user community is friendly, and the developers are incredibly responsive.
I just built my co-founder finder (http://amb.itio.us/) with MongoDB as a backend, my second project with the DB. My only regret was the lack of this exact feature.
Or Kuhhandel.
Blog for free self defense information at Pro Self Defense Products
But if I blocked hacker news, how would I find this informative article?
Agreed; this really was what impressed me most. Pulling off a long shot like that is really quite challenging technically.
> Voting doesn't matter in the US

Sadly, there appears to be more than an element of truth in this. The secret ACTA negotiations began under the Bush administration and have continued seemlessly under Obama. In both cases, corporate interests (the MPAA and RIAA) are running the show behind the political frontmen.

The most effective political response in the USA may be to organise people in primary elections to select candidates based on their stance on these issues.

> it seems like some EU countries really have their act together

The European parliament uses proportional voting systems, which mean it's practical for people like the Pirate Party to seek election. The same is true for many European national legislatures. If enough Pirates get elected, they may find themselves part of ruling coalitions and will have real power to change things.

Also, if enough people vote Pirate, other parties may start to realise that support for ACTA and similar is a vote loser.

> And the EU is big enough to tell the US to fuck off.

The way I see it is that Pirates are likely to gain power in Europe first, and will then use that to spread Pirate ideals around the world.
Trying to get to the next page.

I tried clicking. Double clicking. I tried the arrows at the bottom. (They even have nice mouse overs that say Next Page/Previous Page.) I tried changing the view type. None of these let me scroll through the presentation.

Based on other comments in this thread I tried putting my mouse on the boundaries of the image. OK, that works. It is a cool idea. But it is an interface that is different from how everything else on the web works. Once you know to do it it is easy. But it isn't exactly the easiest interface to discover when you aren't looking for it. That would be OK if it was just a backup shortcut for people who realized it. But the traditional interface that should be the primary one for people who don't know the site doesn't work. Hence the problem.

The reason that Firefox worked for me is that the browser is in a different place on the screen and therefore I naturally was over the right area of the page. So pure luck.

Incidentally this is the kind of deficiency that is better caught with usability testing than A/B testing. Take 20 people, sit them down with your website, and ask them to complete a task. See what they have trouble with. If you've never done it before you'll likely be shocked at the result.
Watch: I choose to ignore the warranty clause per clause 0. Also, since that clause exists, I can choose to apply it to other code I combine it with (unlikely, but its a dumb license that way)

Past that, I'm not convinced that due to clause 0 that it can be combined with other code, and I am of the opinion that more licenses are not good for open source development in general.

A responsible coder, given the desire in the wtfpl, would adopt a richard hipp style posture, or choose mit,bsd or apache.
Yeah, I've been pondering over similar problems with anything totally anonymous. I think a combination of asymmetric keys for verification and intelligent throttling might do enough to prevent most of the damagers.

If nothing else, picture an internet where your upload location is totally anonymous (TOR), but you can sign everything you do with a key (already in place, but nothing does it easily, much less free and ubiquitous). Journalists / investigators can be anywhere, but verify that they're them, without fear of being discovered by their uploading data. Undercover journalist heaven.
It seems to part of a longer game, I think certain companies are not wanting "Google Voice" to revolutionise phone calls. There is a lot of companies making a lot of money for not a lot of bandwidth.
Interestingly, Buffet's style is more applicable to an average rich person's (oxymoron?) position then is the investing type of most other uber-investors: Buy or buy stock in companies you want to own.

I see what you are saying and you are right. But this doesn't have to be an argument from authority (he made it, so he knows what he's saying). It can just be about the strength of his ideas regardless of where they come from.
Oh, please. If Spolsky doesn't want to continue blogging, I think the world will survive. For a couple years now all Joel has offered to the software community is: "here, read this, listen to my Stackoverflow podcast while I whore out Fog Creek."

The few times he actually decides to really talk software, it's pretty good, and his VC stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing he contributes that the world can't get from a dozen other guys.

And frankly, he comes across as kind of an a-hole in his podcasts. Atwood is a much nicer guy.