skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
many people don't know what an end time is maybe start with an interesting paragraph describing end times and why they matter. I dunno?
Then would someone mind clarifying this statement by Paul Graham?

"... A famous example of this is Steele & Sussman's discovery,
during the writing of Scheme, that Actors and closures
were the same thing."

-ref: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
TheSixtyOne.com's Jobs Page 'Voting Rings' Problem
While I agree with you, I don't think this situation should be considered resolved. People have a tendency to see businesses like Citi as one person or entity, as in, "Well, Citi screwed up royally, but then later they called back to apologize." This isn't what happened. Three individuals who were Citi employees engaged in discriminatory business practices, and then a fourth individual chimed into apologize and clarify Citi's official position.

The first step in a situation like this is to hold Citi, the business, accountable for its actions. This step is done - they have responded claiming that this is not standard practice, and apologized for the inconvenience.

The next step should be to hold the people responsible for this accountable, individually. Fabulis should demand a written apology and full explanation of what transpired from each of the employees who told them the account was frozen for "objectionable blog content." If a reasonable explanation cannot be produced, they should be fired.

IMHO, until the individuals who engaged in these practices are held personally accountable, Citi should not be considered "off the hook." While their official policy may be honorable, their practices will not change unless they send a strong message to their employees that this type of action is utterly unacceptable.
I see this as an incredible leap in branding in the most unexpected places (forms) for those sites that want to go above and beyond in appearing personal, innovative and positive. As an A/B test (as has already been pointed out) it proves nothing but deserves further insight.
It's actually surprising that more innovation hasn't happened already, considering how much of computing has moved into the browser.

Get a browser going on a machine and you have already crossed that barrier new OS' once saw as the insurmountable.
I agree with you that native apps are usually better. But, I'd rather have a slower adobe air app then a native app that is missing important features (like ability to collaborate with co-workers regardless of platform).
Software patents really need to die now.
Wikipedia says "Applied Sciences" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham), but paulgraham.com says Computer Science (http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html).
Time is the Enemy of All Deals
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1151478
Good timing. I need a patent to study and write a quick report on for an IP class I'm taking. This will do nicely.
To use Slashdot's terminology, a lot of forum software uses "retroactive sigs" (loaded from a DB, so when you change it, it looks changed on all your previous posts too), as opposed to "sticky sigs" (which get added to the text of the post at post-time and thus don't change).
Keeping Out the Trolls: Relevancy in User-Generated Content
Basically, people aren't slaves. If you want a significant change in their daily lives, involve them rather than dictate to them. I'd like to say this is so well known and obvious that it's absurd to write an article on it, but seeing the corporate behavior and especially HR that I do, it's not.
My response to this sentiment is: STFU, then, and make one of these crappy games. Then you'll have millions of dollars to make whatever kind of other awesome games you'll want forever and ever.
Isn't the obvious problem that it's a terrible idea? I can't comment on subway commuters, but I've never been especially interested in meeting people on my commute, beyond the occasional random smalltalk.

"Each one of my co-founders was a kick ass guy/girl in their own expertise but every tech/web startup needs a tech guy. This guy is actually the core of any startup, anyone else is expendable (early stage)."

This is why it's so great being a "tech guy"; you get an idea like this, build a crappy version in a weekend, if people like it, great; if not, you find out before burning through two years of your life, a bunch of personal relationships and a giant wad of VC cash.
This guy probably plays farmville and loves it.
This guy obviously has no idea how hard it is to make one of those hit games.
What about the things that aren't "good", but aren't harmful to anyone - things like lolcats and blog posts about how the whole web should be running out of home servers? Shouldn't people be able to do those?
I'm personally not all that familiar with it either, but I have read that it's a much cleaner and more modern equivalent to Unix, applying the "everything is a file" paradigm to far more. In Unix, a lot of behavior got tied into ioctl and binary sockets as the need for additional features grew. Plan 9 is far more file-oriented and textual in its interfaces, and relies more on file servers (i.e. eschewing an ftp command for an ftpfs filesystem). ESR believes that it may have died just because Unix was "good enough", which sounds reasonably plausible to me.

If someone else knows more, I would also be very interested.
On riding the mistake wave
In terms of features: more stencils (iphone elements, other little elements that balsamiq has), I find it easier to edit button text in balsamiq vs going to the properties area, ability to make a button clickable and go to another sketch, ability to add different icons, import images, and ability to share sketches to mac users/online (this is important personally... I use a PC my co-founder uses a mac... we couldn't use your app to work on wireframes together)
Ruby script to retrieve and display Comcast data usage
Libertarians are so cute!
I'm betting that this whole mess has been great for fabulis overall.

Sure, they were inconvenienced and annoyed for a day or two, but it generated lots of publicity for their startup, not to mention lots of people linking to their site.

At the end of the day, I think the only loser here is Citi.. at least I hope that's the case.
Yesss, I couldn't agree more. There are things I hate about facebook, but now that they own 'the feed', how can they not monopolise on social networking?, How is the facebook feed that much different to the twitter feed anyway?, and why didn't twitter patent it?

BIG... EVIL... CORPORATION...
It isn't wrong, it is the consequence of a simple principle:
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Quotes
How is this relevant to Hacker news?
I don't understand this at all. YouTube profits off of the video service they provide for free to their users, so they're bad?

I need an emoticon indicating total bafflement.
Sadly, I've seen no developer-centric push from Google. The SDK and tooling are excellent and the platform is very open, but the Android Marketplace itself is crap. The app descriptions and screenshots are paltry, there are no statics or metrics of any kind (other than total number of downloads and users), payment is not available in most countries, in-app purchases are nowhere on the roadmap and there isn't even a web-interface to the store!

For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty.
Although this guy is correct in saying that FarmVille, Mafia Wars, etc are really crappy, game-play wise (but excellent slot machines), I think Facebook games hold massive promise for indie developers; they're bringing casual games to a massive new audience, and I think there's a lot of money in games that provide engaging gameplay and leverage the social aspect.
I used a hosting provider who had this turned on for a while and it often had odd behavior. There are a ton of email servers that are not configured properly or are configured in complex ways. The worst case I saw was with a large corporate email system. They used some kind of round robin/load balaner. Incoming mail went through one mailserver, outgoing through multiple (different) mailservers. The greylisting would therefore always get caught in an infinite loop. Here's a rough example:

1) The greylisting would initially reject the mail from bigcorp.com.
2) Bigcorp.com would get the rejection, but the re-send would come from a different mail server: mailserver1.bigcorp.com.
3) Since this is a new IP address, the greylisting would bounce the new email.
4) Bigcorp.com would re-send, but this time from mailserver8.bigcorp.com.
5) rinse and repeat

Now, you can say that the guys at bigcorp.com are boneheads and they should hide these details from the outside world. But the reality is, as an end-user, I don't care. I just want to get my mail.
Judging by cases in a few countries, bloggers would then be responsible for anything on the page at that link.

If you reversed that, with commentors posting comments with links to the post, you'd then need aggregation to read comments, making aggregator sites and software makers vulnerable.

It doesn't really stop until we devolve down to a pre-search engine web. But since "we" will be reshaping things, that'll be all good, right?
I always enjoy watching things like this. People love to say, "I'm quitting $foo forever", but most of the time they come back. (Be it drinking, smoking, programming, writing, whatever... most people always come back.)

I think it's funny because I know three people in the Perl community that publicly said they were leaving Perl forever a few years ago, and now they are all back on IRC just like old times. Forever indeed...
Even the most computer-illiterate people I know need, on a daily basis, the ability to switch between multiple running applications.
I have to wonder how much of this is due to the limited capabilities of the iPhone, and how much is just the psychology of "physically" interacting with your apps.
Maybe someday I will understand why sexual content "sullies" a brand's reputation. (Or rather why seeing 99% skin is fine and "family friendly", but as soon as the other 1% comes out, it's suddenly dirty. Also, if sex isn't "family friendly", where exactly did these families come from?)

Actually... I know I will probably never understand this.
I want games with substance and style, richly textured and thickly layered, with real character development and breathtaking artwork. I want games which remind me of good books.

I paid $70 for this game when it was called Final Fantasy 13 and had a development budget in the upper eight figures (in dollars, not yen). If you want this from a game with a development budget in the five or lower six figures which is only paid for by 1% of all players and does not have a viral loop baked into its DNA, you apparently want to be disappointed.
Isn't insurance about spreading the cost already?
How Germany is reining in health care costs
"The problem with the Airbus series of aircraft is that the flight computer has the ultimate authority with flight controls."

Where do you have any evidence for this? As the article points out, once the speed indicators diverged, the flight computer on AF447 put itself into an alternate mode where almost all of the overrides you refer to were turned off.

At that point you're basically flying the plane directly, except that hydraulics are moving the flight surfaces for you.
A Closer Look at Evolutionary Faces
OK.

Too bad the transaction costs are so high. I guess their would be ample opportunities to invest relatively small sums in newish companies, based on some statistics about them.
The author appears to have either a few false assumptions or simply wanted to rant against FarmVille and thought mentioning Indie games was required.

Indie games come from a few places. There are non-games industry and games industry creators. Those from the games industry obviously needed to work on some game before going Indie. They get experience, connections, and money from working on games just like farmville - without that industry start, who can say if we would have ever received World of Goo or others.

Likewise, those not from the games industry needed to know videogames exist. Maybe farmville will start a teen on the path to becoming someone on the caliber of Cactus.

What goes on in pop culture influences Indies, but it definitely doesn't control nor destroy them. Does it get more people exposed to videogames? Then I can't see it hurting the Indie scene. Note: it may "damage" mainstream games to some, but that is what you should complain about.
They talk about this at length in another article in their `special report'.
Move. Problem solved.
Zygna (of FarmVille fame) has one of the most sophisticated testing and metrics operations on the Internet today. From externally observable evidence they're probably better at it than WoW and WoW is large enough to be its own national economy. (Zynga is a lot like IMVU or for that matter Toyota: I don't care if you have no interest in their product, their processes are worthy of study.)

They aren't just throwing dung at the wall and seeing what sticks: they're very, very good at what they do. For every FarmVille there are tens of thousands of games which you have never heard of: their viral growth coefficient was .95 instead of 1.05, kaboom, that is all you need to fail. The platform is getting harder to develop for, as early entrants used techniques which were what SEOs might call "a wee bit grey" to gain traction, and these are either impossible now or will result in a new entrant getting hit with the banhammer. (For example, early social games maximized their viral coefficient by adopting a spam-early spam-often policy to user notifications, which ticked off a lot of Facebook users, causing Facebook to take a number of countermeasures. Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels.)
The number of scientists and the number of scientifically literate people are two different issues.

It seems entirely plausible to me that the American education system produces more prospective research scientists than there are job openings for them, but that it also completely fails at teaching basic mathematic and scientific concepts to those who have no desire to be career scientists.
This will definitely be a patent for some enterprising soul to dive into and check the breadth of the claims being made. There is a ton of prior art out there related to this, so unless the claims are relatively narrow I can see this becoming another "let's break this patent" poster-child.
From Modular Innovation Security to Touchy-Feely Design
He seems to discount the difficulty in harnessing the virality of Facebook, especially now with the locked down channels. I think virality is far harder to get right than good art, or a good story, or good game mechanics.
Yes, and forming a union is an effective way of doing that. As other people have pointed out, it's unlikely that any more general form of legal insurance would make sense as a product. If I were a teacher, I think I'd far rather rely on a union -- made up of people who share my interests -- than a company which is going to do its best to deny my claims. And if I were an insurance exec, I don't think that insuring teachers' legal expenses would strike me as a particularly great business opportunity.
Yes, CS.
A few criticisms from someone who has tried everything in this market:

1. Security is a weak point. From their FAQ:

"Documents uploaded to crocodoc are assigned a unique, unguessable URL (e.g. http://crocodoc.com/gQlo2g), which you can selectively share with others you wish to collaborate with.

For added security, crocodoc Pro users have the option of password-protecting their documents, which are uploaded and viewed using bank-grade SSL encryption. Companies interested in running crocodoc behind their firewall can contact us to request more information on intranet deployments."

This is insufficient security for any serious business application. Nothing about data encryption at rest. Nothing about link expiration. Nothing about the authentication used for password protection. Running behind a firewall has nothing to do with the security of data once it is transmitted.

2. The format seems to be proprietary. Call me crazy, but if I'm investing the time and energy into marking up documents, I want to take them away in a portable, editable format. Maybe I missed this point on their site?
But keep in mind what the physical FBW controls on the Airbus are like -- it's a gaming joystick that you control with your left hand (if you are the captain). I am shocked that A380s can land in crosswinds at all.

There is also no non-synthetic force-feedback; if the computers don't think there is force, you don't feel any force. (Actually, I'm not sure there is any feedback on the Airbus. But I have only seen video demonstrations of the FBW system.) On mechanical or hydraulic flight controls, you can feel the control surfaces not moving because ... you can't move them. (I believed this helped the pilots of Alaska Airlines 261 realize what was happening. Everyone died anyway, but at least the pilots knew what was wrong...)

I assume if the software totally fails, the plane is simply uncontrollable. I can't believe it would be designed that way, but I can't imagine how you are going to move the control surfaces either. (The software doesn't even have to fail; it could just ignore your input. I believe that some inputs are ignored in normal operation anyway, so this could just be a simple bug.)

Anyway, FBW scares me... but I am not a pilot or airplane designer.
"Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels."

All of that is going away in five days. No more requests, no more notifications, etc.

Nobody knows what will happen! Pandemonium! Haha.
73% of Hollywood hackers are good guys, researcher says
I disagree. A Flash-based presentation layer is a liability, since it's vendor-locked.
His philanthropic pursuits are also interesting. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Philanthropy he has donated to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Methuselah Mouse Prize (anti-aging research), and the Seasteading Institute.

Edit: Actually, this makes sense considering his business acumen. He's shooting for most lives saved per dollar. The chance of success of these organizations is lower than typical charities, but the expected benefit is immense compared to typical charities. For example, let's say the Methuselah foundation has a 1% chance of finding a cure for aging. 7,000,000,000 * 0.01 = 70,000,000 expected lives saved.
Microsoft recruited top notch guns for Waledac takedown
I find that list really dubious -- it's very hard to believe that 97% of Ron Conway's investments have worked out. The only way I can imagine that being true is if there are strings pulled so that there's a fire-sale at the end that's being counted as an exit.
Or this? http://poi.apache.org/
Airbus is in the business to make money, and so are the airlines. Maybe 300,000 euros wasn't worth it for the airline, and making it free wasn't worth it to Airbus. Much better to pay the lawyers to fight over how much to pay the families of the 300 dead people...
That sounds like pretty decent advice. I have one nitpick though, which is the advice to leave blog comments everywhere and to relentlessly tell all of your friends about your startup.

That surely cannot hurt, but the return on investment of posting comments on a site is minute. I mean, I am addicted to commenting on HN and other sites daily and it is a lot of fun, but the notion that this is actually a good use of time for my startup is wishful thinking.

I would never expect to get a single customer from this. I think getting an article on TechCrunch is of debatable value... but the traffic you'd get from a comment underneath an article from people checking out your profile link is miniscule.

Regarding telling your friends -- again, it doesn't hurt, but it is thinking really small and is not sustainable. That might be a good strategy for winning a minor student council election, but the ROI is going to be utterly negligible. Basically, you could spend a week phoning everyone you know and convince them to check out your site. If you're lucky, this would roughly equal the amount of traffic you would get by having a moderately influential person spend 30 seconds writing a tweet about you.
On point 1 above: self-hosting is not necessarily the answer either. It really depends on the underlying architecture.
Of course it can be done (and has been done). But in this case it apparently wasn't.
it depends on how much leverage you have when you close the deal. participating preferred shares are definitely ugly, but depending on your circumstances, you might not have a choice.
"substance and style, richly textured and thickly layered, with real character development and breathtaking artwork"

...in the context of indie games. Context is important.

Maybe take a look at Braid or Machinarium.
Origins of Carrotmob
Actually, my own situation is slightly different. I meet the demographics (married, kids, age, full time job)--I just have a problem with getting to 9PM and making the choice of "I can spend four hours now, or no hours", and not liking either one.

I'd love to take smaller chunks but it seems if I work I get kind of wired and it's harder for me to settle down. Also of course the larger chunks are more effective. The massive breakthrough for me would be improving how I maintain mental state between sessions. I actually have this issue also in my day job, house projects--you name it. Being able to sit down and instantly know what I was working on, where in the process I need to be, what the next step is--that is my biggest impediment to the side gig and I have been trying to solve this for years.
".. I do suffer from literalism .."

So do I, that's why I paused to find it. What I should have said was "I don't think Joel's creativity is at it's maxima." You are absolutely right.
Does the 777 count? It is a fly-by-wire plane, but has never had a fatal accident.
This guy is obviously not familiar with the indie communities and offerings on XBLA, Steam and WiiWare.
Search twitter's history (beyond the 10 day limit)
I can't really speak for social games but I can elaborate on the casual side of gaming .... when we upload to sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds we submit ourselves to the mercy of a very vast, very diverse, very easily unsatisfied and very unappreciative audience ... and we need about 8 out of 10 people to like our game, and there's no second chance.

Sometimes only a handful of games satisfy these requirements a month, out of 100+ a day.

Social games I imagine are much the same .... you have to get a lot of things right first time, and your list of things that were right yesterday aren't necessarily so right today.

Really a lot of things are the same ... the difference between making a product your friends like vs. your town vs. your city vs. your state vs. your country vs. the whole world .... probably far below 1% of 1% of 'stuff' makes it to the top.