skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny how when the FCC demanded that bloggers disclose any gifts they receive while covering something they were all in arms about it. It was mandated to avoid situations like this. If they want to be accepted as serious journalism they have to expect to be treated as such. If you fuck up, lie, take bribes or violate journalism ethics then expect to fired and hung out to dry.
Very likely. The intense, problem-solving focus doesn't hold well in social interaction.

A common social quirk of smart people, when they're young-- say 5-10, is to come out with a really good retort 5 seconds after it was appropriate and when it's no longer funny (because it requires a conversational "rewind"). This is because they've put a lot of energy and focus into saying the "right" (funny, most socially beneficial) thing instead of going with the flow.
What's wrong with Firefox?

Their biggest innovation for a long time has been Greasemonkey (was that done by Mozilla, or a plugin? Dunno, doesn't really matter). And it can't even run JS before the page loads.
Craigslist is using Redis
Why would you think you'd be down-voted for that?
To me, this sounds a lot like cognitive dissonance. It seems like Joel believes that his blog has primarily served to further Fog Creek and that he does his blog because he enjoys it. To cope with these two competing ideas, he comes up with a new one: he likes his blog because it promotes Fog Creek. Therefore, when the blog quits being beneficial to Fog Creek, he quits.

I actually find this sad. In hindsight, some of Joel's writings might not seem terribly radical, mostly because they've since been accepted. But most of them were when he actually wrote them. I think we underestimate the effect that Joel has had on the software industry.
It's interesting that 3 studies came up with the conclusion that the business model of the USPS is so poor privatization is untenable without considering the fact that maybe privatization would come up with a better business model. Right now, the USPS is a government sponsored monopoly that is failing spectacularly. Allowing private companies into the market might not only improve the business model but come up with something fantastically different that fits the needs of the consumers.

Looking at a failed business model and saying "That model is so bad even private companies couldn't fix it" seems like putting the cart before the horse. Private companies are going to find their own business model, one that isn't terrible, because their livelihood depends on it.
This much seems clear: the iPad will change how mobile workers work. Cops, postal workers, meter readers, field technicians & scientists, doctors, you name it.

Furthermore, it will disrupt numerous markets: portable DVD players, GPS units, PDAs, laptops, industry-specific bespoke mobile platforms (what is that thingy the UPS guy uses?), control systems, newspapers, magazines, you get the idea. Anything less would not be worth Apple's time.
Simple story - large labor intensive service with massive legacy costs (millions of retirees and the physical infrastructure to move mail to every corner of the U.S.) meets dramatic drop in demand caused by technological disruption (faxes in the 80s to Internet/Email in the 90s).
Biggest-ever ACTA leak: secret copyright treaty dirty laundry motherlode
Or from Mickey Mouse.
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo:

> "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."
Feelmax makes shoes that look a bit less odd than Vibrams.
At http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1085721 it looks like some people wrote a Greasemonkey script to remove iPad stories. Maybe you could adapt that JS to your liking?
Steve Jobs, visited PARC in 1979 and was impressed and influenced by the Xerox Alto, the first computer ever with a graphical user interface. Jobs designed the new Apple Lisa based on the technology he saw at Xerox.
> This much seems clear: the iPad will change how mobile workers work. Cops, postal workers, meter readers, field technicians & scientists, doctors, you name it.

I'm afraid I haven't been paying attention: is there a brief, cogent argument for why the iPad will do this whereas the Tablet PC form factor did not?
Is it really necesary to hide posts? Is it such a distraction to just skip over the stories that are not interesting to you?

I ask because on a good day, I'm interested in maybe half of the stories on the front page, and it's always been that way for me. I thought it was the same for everyone...
The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google's latest buy
Reminded me of the android camera issue on the Droid :) ...dates!
It renders correctly?
Face recognition is a really hard problem
Apple Goes After HTC In Lawsuit Over 20 iPhone Patents
And what would preclude requiring that private enterprises that wish to compete in this sector with servicing remote areas?
Ah ok, I didn't know about these statutes, very interesting
What about being scared of Google doing semantic analysis of your e-mail? Or Google remembering your search results during several months? Google doesn't tax your money, but it does tax your privacy. To me that sounds just as expensive.
Trouble is, it’s usually add-ons in the first place that are causing these issues. I recently uninstalled Invisible Hand and noticed an immediate improvement in speed for example.
Lenovo X-series tablet - Starting model price: $1879.00 (currently on sale for $1399.00).

Apple iPad - Starting model price: $499.00.

I think it does not matter whether the Lenovo tablet is more fully featured. People will buy the iPad without a second thought, because it is affordable, and then make it work for this purpose.

Additionally, and I hate to admit this, but the iPad will probably have greater fashion value to be seen with in a boardroom than the Lenovo tablet.
p.s. Sorry about the whining. I haven't finished my first coffee of the day :-(
It must be comfortable to think that those who disagree with you does so because they are intimidated by awesomely intelligent liberals such as your heroes (and perhaps yourself?).

I don't think that, but I think anti-intellectualism is a major reason why Clinton and Obama both got mired in ad hominem attacks that made it difficult to get anything done.
I used Emacs Starter Kit (http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit) and it set everything up for me in seconds.
Count me in.
YikeBike - The world's first super light electric folding bike. | Urban Freedom
I dunno, some stories are uninteresting, with others I irritate myself glancing at them. On reddit I use that feature regularly to hide anti-App store rants while I ignore posts asking proggit which language to learn first without hiding them.
Zune as well: http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/zune-news/38143-cause-zune-...
What about Chrome, before it added extensions? What about Safari? There are a vast number of ways that other browsers are better than IE, the extensions are just one component of that.
I'd cynically say that it's because any post starting with "I'm sure I'll be downvoted, but..." tends to get a much better score than it otherwise would, even if it's not particularly applicable.
Sub $200 Android tablets arrives: is the iPad doomed?
For a tutorial on solving sudoku using Dancing Links, see this tutorial: http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~xche635/dlx_sodoku/
The Rise of DevOps
CityDesk, which was originally supposed to be "the" Fog Creek product, but had the misfortune of being most applicable to an audience Joel couldn't reach.

Copilot (née Aardvark) is doing just fine. Indie shops love it for taking a look at problems on their customer's computers. Not really the market we thought we'd nail when we first launched it, but, again, it ends up reinforcing Joel's statement.
Pragmatism in URL design
Ask HN:  Responing to the RFS, app ideas for the IPAD
After slogging through the monster YCRFS thread posted yesterday, I thought we might as well get one of these started sooner rather than later and have a more focused discussion on the actual apps.

So, any ideas for great IPad apps?
> My biggest criticism of the barefoot running crowd is that they usually treat it as a way of life. They always run barefoot, when that's not really necessary.

Disagreement about the validity of the "lifestyle" argument aside: when is it necessary to wear shoes? What are the disadvantages, apart from "massive callouses"?

> I forgot to explain the non-obvious disadvantages of barefoot running. While humans ran barefoot before shoes were invented, the typical prehistoric human wasn't as heavyset as the typical westerner. Feet, legs, and backs aren't evolved to properly support overweight joggers. Proper shoes can help correct problems in running form/gait that an individual's muscles or connective tissues can't compensate for.

It is undoubtedly unwise for someone that drastically overweight to start jogging cold turkey and that there is a literal breaking point in fitness to start barefoot running, but do you have some sources for the argument that those issues can be corrected with shoes (rather than, say, starting with a bike or elliptical machine)? Especially since joint issues in ankles and knees in particular - areas that barefoot running helps in - are prevalent among the obese.
For example, possibly, tracking each unique install:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=5d2b...
Insubordination? Infinity Ward cofounder gone from Activision
Memory (speed) matters - even in Erlang
230 Billion dollars in losses.
That's what I thought. I tried removing various plug-ins to figure out which one was the problem. I got down to only having ad-block enabled and I didn't want to disable it.
Which Burger Chains Dominate the U.S. Landscape?
Fog Creek Copilot I am guessing (www.copilot.com)
Alas, the junk is why they only expect to lose B$238 instead of B$500. Well, I can only speak for Canada, but up here they get a huge amount of revenue from delivering junk mail. I sympathize with you, there's so much of the stuff that I am tempted to place a blue recycling bin marked "Current Resident" on my door step with a slot in the side for mail :-)

I can only guess that all that junk works. And I suppose it does... I keep the ones for local restaurants that deliver what may be good food...
Read about the development and individuals involved with the history of different types of music. I suggest this because you probably won't instantly like styles of music that are significantly different from what you already listen to. For example, if you're not familiar with jazz, listening to an acclaimed classic like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue might strike you as boring, or as just cool mood music, but when you have developed an ear for it, it's mind blowing.

Unfortunately, it seems like there is a sore lack of good criticism--critical studies of music that attempt to understand the music more than rate it--and this is especially true of popular music (pop, rock, rap, country, electronica, etc.). I can think of one place that's really good for rock history: Only Solitaire (http://starling.rinet.ru/music/index.htm). That guy's opinions are certainly not the last word on that music, but he does do a good job of putting artists and albums in context. For other kinds of music, maybe start with a Wikipedia article and go from there and see what you find.
Why should people in economically viable communities be forced to subsidize people who chose to live in remote areas? Of course this makes the subsidized people better off, but it doesn't make society as a whole better off. Society is better off when resources are spent efficiently. The only practical way to ensure efficiency is to let prices be set by a free market.

If settlement of remote areas is a good investment then it will occur even if the settlers have to pay the market prices for their services. Arguing for subsidization is an admission that settlement is not a good investment.
At work I test on Chrome and Opera(and on IE in VirtualBox), but my main workhorse is still Firefox (on Ubuntu 9.10).

Why? The wide choice of extensions. I do try to disable most of the ones I am not using at the moment, some tend to crash things.

Still, one has to admit Firefox has bloated quite a bit since early days pre 1.0.
I guess I don't understand what you are saying here. I'll assume you aren't blaming the USPS for your junk mail. Are you suggesting they should raise their rates? That would raise more money and reduce the incentive for "snail mail spammers."
Blackberry 9700 ONYX
One in four Germans wants microchip in body
Original: http://www.weathersealed.com/2010/02/23/a-disturbance-in-the...
Apparently there are still people/companies who roll their own leap year routines... :-/
the government must consult engineers, civil liberty orgs and people in the know on these policy moves because this is obvious scaremongering.
Looks like you are addressing problem [3] as explained in "Startup ideas we did like to fund" (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html). Excellent!
That's definitely nice for me the developer, but it doesn't really matter much for me the consumer. It's a pretty small handful of sites that haven't been wrangled to work in IE. Maybe we'll see more growth in CSS3, Canvas, etc, in use on sites that care less about IE, but for now in practice, that's not much of a difference.
That's a significant bias, but perhaps a more significant one is that most people buying the game have probably already tried out the free one and enjoyed it enough to want to pay money for it.
Querulous, Twitter's Scala library for SQL databases
An artificially low price is what excludes private enterprises. It also encourages people to be inefficient by shielding them from the true cost of living in remote areas.
I should add that I'm using Aquamacs, and avoided the Emacs Starter Kit due to the following note on the page you linked:

"Some have reported getting it to work with Aquamacs. However, since Aquamacs is not portable, it's difficult to test in it, and breakage is common."
They're "failing" just as much as private health insurance is "succeeding".

Just leave the USPS as is and do the incremental fixes required to make them break even. No need for them to make a profit.
Ah - an almost perfect example of UK Tabloid reporting:

Moral panic over something that doesn't yet exist, and even if it does work is only going to give access to information people have chosen to make available.

But lets not let facts get in the way of fearing the internet.
Exclusive Lamps Tiara and Saint-Germain-Des-Prés By Almerich « Lighting Universe
Here's hoping whatever the case is, that these guys break out and make a sweet independent venture. IW has done more with the franchise than Treyarch ever could, and that's a testament to their work.
I love that apple drives innovation in hardware and interface design. I hate that the patent system we have now actively hinders the adoption of apple's innovations.

Apple complains that competitors are stealing apple's technology, as though apple's success relies entirely on technology x or y. Not true. Apple's success is based on its polish and attention to detail, something which competitors have an incredibly hard time copying. I for one, love when competitors copy apple, because it forces apple to up its game.
A naive bookmarklet isn't what you really want.

What you ideally want is a personal karma filter. A way to track your interests client-side in addition to the HN sieve. "Clickety on the Ignore button and goodbye human interest stories involving douche*"

How to make one securely, though, can be a bit of a problem.
The only reason I'm keeping Firefox installed on my machine is Firebug. Although, I have to mention that during my last small JS project I only used Google Chrome's built-in developer tools, and I liked what I saw. Maybe FF 4.0 will be a game changer, but for the moment the actual FF is just too darn slow for a daily usage.
If you're interested in doing this, just use 80legs, which lets you provide your own applications to customize web content processing (http://80legs.pbworks.com/80apps).
Good artists borrow, Great Artists steal - Pablo Picasso, I think Jobs also quoted that phrase as well
Backstage at Mobile World Congress 2010
Some of the other browsers definitely have a feature set that's more compelling without extensions. FF really doesn't for me though. The two things I can think of are a slight increase in speed, and the awesomebar (which actually negates some of the speed advantage because it's so slow).
Their new UX guru, Mike, also runs konigi.

http://konigi.com - which is a great UX resource
Pandora.com and thesixtyone are pretty much it for me. I have the Pandora One subscription, and I have that running almost 40 hours a week. If I hear something I like, I create a station for it.

Last.fm had a sweet obscurity filter that would give you crazy indie band music, which was a nice feature.
Yes, I understand that. And that's why "people" (which I thought referred to the majority) don't care about this stuff and these stupid policies get through senate & house. Those who benefit from these policies know how to make the majority care-- everyone cares about child exploitation, and terrorists-- but we haven't quite figured out how to make majority aware that this is a double edge sword or propose better alternatives (the hard part).
Why should people in economically viable communities be forced to subsidize people who chose to live in remote areas?

That is emphatically not what his comment stated, nor how the effects work.

The specific argument is that by spending $1 to provide a service to a group of people, you increase the size of the economy, and consequently the tax base in that area, by more than $1, thus turning a net profit.
I do not particularly like Google; too much power in one unaccountable entity. Fortunately the sentiment has gained popularity of late.

Chrome might be a really nice and fast browser, but Firefox is - as yet - fast enough and it provides the 4 addons that I find essential to browsing.
The difference between Sun systems and everything else out there in the late 1980’s (mostly Novell Netware or Microsoft LAN Manager networks) is that Sun networks just worked, all the time.

Ugh, not quite. I installed and configured an early version of DECNet-PC (ultimately renamed PathWorks) on a 4-node Vax 8650 cluster in late 1986 that networked three Epson PC's over ethernet to a common virtual DOS drive mapped on an RA81. It was solid as a rock, behaved itself well, and easily shared files for WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase.

An early Netware (2.11?) network had been setup three floors above us to show the power of 'client-server' computing. It crashed at least 5 times daily when it finally would run and its unreliability got two of my co-workers fired because they couldn't make Novell's empty promises work.

Lan Manager? Late 1980's? Are you kidding?

Sun started by unseating DEC in the scientific desktop market with their "workstations," not their network.

Just look at the nodes on maps of the early ARPANet if you don't believe me. PDP's, VAX's and mainframes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpnet-map-march-1977.png.

When Scott McNealey announced that the "network was the system" he was taking direct aim at DEC whose installed systems already made up the world's largest collection of networked computers and pc's, were clustered to 16 nodes and more, offered full load balancing, were tied to gigs and gigs of storage using high-speed teflon interconnects and routinely ran 200 days and more without a restart.

Don't get me wrong, Unix/NFS was nice, but it needed a lot more work to compete with DEC, VAX/VMS and Ultrix. What prevented DEC from eating Sun's lunch was it's insistence on centralized computing using terminals. Had they fully understood what they had in DECNet-PC back in 1986 there never would have been a need for Novell, or Banyan Vines, or WFW 3.11 or any of the other wannabe's and Sun's "networked desktop workstation" would have been a much more difficult sell.

Here's the spec for a VMS filename circa 1985:
NODE "accountname password"::device:[directory.subdirectory]filename.type;ver

Here's a typical EDT (text editor) command:
$ edt orion"system somepwd"::dua0:[sysfiles.configs]mylog.txt;4

Meaning: Use the text editor "edt" to open version "4" of the file named "mylog.txt" that's located in the "configs" directory under the root directory named "sysfiles" on drive "0" attached to disk unit "a" on the node named "orion". Log me in using the "system" account with password "somepwd."

From anywhere in the world as long as it's on the network.

Everytime I configure Samba I think about those Epson PC's.
Privacy taxation without representation :)
You've said that it can be seen as a long-term investment for society. Definitely! The United States has taken such long-term investments in the past as it subsidized people settling all over the continent. However, there's a difference between investing in something that has a future and throwing money after a lost cause. Some places are simply rural. Some people don't want increased commerce or activity around them. Plus, if you're talking about government revenue from taxes, if these communities withered away and the residents moved to less rural areas, the government would make the taxes off of them there - and potentially greater taxes since they'd be in a more economically active area.

That said, I think that a smart idea might be to create tiered service that is aware of the investment proposal. So, new communities get "first class" service for their first 15 years - mail delivered every day just like it would be in Boston. After the initial "investment period", service will be determined by the cost of delivery. Urban areas might get 6-day service. Suburban areas, 5 day service. Rural areas, MWF service. Highly rural areas, TF service. Mega-rural, no houses within 15 mile type places get mail once a week (considering that, in this scenario, a carrier would only be delivering mail to a maximum of 28 households in a day, I think that sounds somewhat reasonable). That would keep commerce running while reducing costs.

And I'm not sure there'd be too much objection to such a plan. I have a co-worker who is from a community that you can't get to by road - you have to go by boat. It is disconnected from things and that's how the residents like it to be. Granted, it's still nice to be able to get deliveries, but they're more into making things for themselves.

Does that sound like an interesting proposal? It's definitely important to keep people connected, but maybe they don't need to be connected every day. If one has situated themselves in a location apart from society, maybe it's ok that we stay connected with them, but not quite as connected as we do with those who have located themselves at the center of society.

EDIT: After talking with my co-worker, most rural places have the same every-day service, but there are middle of nowhere places that do only get mail once a week.
Agreed, regardless of whether you disagree with him or not, his post is quite topical to this article.
do you use any other marketing tools/techniques other than clickbank?
A good test for this might be to use tineye to search for a picture of yourself.
True, commerical mail seems to be their main business. I've heard of supervisors get mad at letter carriers who have too many households who don't wish to receive flyers and ads. And there doesn't seem to be any way to refuse "Adressed Admail" except by contacting the company that sends it.

Something the post office could do is to leverage their local infrastructure and work with the couriers. If I miss a UPS delivery, and have to ask nicely to get a 2nd delivery attempt. Picking up the package at the local post office would be a lot easier for everyone.
Updates on Django nonrel for App Engine