skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A text-to-speech converter sounds like an awful way read to listen to a book.
Maybe DRM is an idea that comes from anyone who creates content and wants to get paid for it.

Yeah, most of the DRM implementations out there are a PITA, but what choice do content creators have anyway? I recently read that 90% of the installed base of World of Goo was pirated. How would you feel if someone stole 90% of your web startup's source code? Oh, you say you lock your source repository that down with tight security at the network and server level? How is that conceptually different from DRM, exactly? I realize that the implementation is very different, of course, but that's not my point.

Besides, I don't expect DRM implementations to be so painful in the future. DRM on PCs sucks because it attempts to close the barn door after the livestock has escaped. If you want to see a device where content control was built in from the ground up, consider the xBox, which is basically a special purpose PC that with tightly controlled installation rights and distribution of content. So the DRM can be relatively unobtrusive.

Or look at Steam, which has gotten quite a bit better than it was a few years ago. And they've been experimenting heavily with bringing down the price point for games, now that every paying user doesn't have to subsidize 10 thieves.
Totally off-topic, I know, but I was expecting some kind of description of a virtual quarry or code pebbles or something.

More on topic, this seems to suffer from the same lack of control that most "cloud" software does. When they pull your link because your website is too popular (or not popular enough), what happens then?

Not really a complaint, I guess, more of a question -- is this something that comes up as an issue practically, or in most cases is it not an issue as a site grows?
Some people have that draining effect on me, which is usually why I try to cut those people out of my life. Many people I know are fun and energizing, because they take life and themselves easy. However many of my ex-friends have been the self-centred and self-absorbed kinds that just make your dealings with them laborious.

I don't mean to be harsh or cold, but it's not my job to deal with someone elses problems day in day out. I purposely chose not to go into the psychology fields for that reason. I have my own problems, I have my own stresses, the reason I get together with friends is to forget the problems and relax.

I think it's a good guide in life to route out the sources of problems and stress in your social circles and remove them. I'm an introvert, perhaps not so much as others but I'm certainly not an extrovert by any measure, but with the right groups I can be going out almost nightly and I don't feel the usual drain.

Although I have to say, I will likely always look forward to two days alone.
Perhaps you can handle that sort of criticism, but most people cannot, and it would not behoove them to guess to which category you belong.
Hottest web browsers on adult sites - stats
I love that ad. It was part of the original "power of dreams" campaign (they are writing text books about that) and all those honda ads rocked.

The only sad thing is it isn't a true device; it was filmed in sections.
They do do that. Remember the guy in jail for some manga he bought? The government found it because they randomly opened his mail. Then they decided he should go to prison for 15 years for having that box addressed to him. (And that's not even child porn, it was just books!)
This looks useful for hardcore fantasy sports fans. However, I have always felt like Fantasy Sports need a lower barrier to entry for fans, not tools to make hardcore fantasy players better. As a casual sports fan I can definitely see the appeal of Fantasy Sports, but whenever I enter a league with friends I still get dominated, which is no fun. I think there could be a huge market for simpler, social Fantasy Sports games.
How to begin to teach yourself how to code, starting from scratch
To phrase this a little differently: what makes or breaks an investor is being able to separate the actual long-term value of "owning a piece of this company" from the stock's relative motion. Being up 30% or down 50% isn't what matters. Being overvalued or undervalued by the current market is what matters.

Don't toss money away on a gamble that something might become worth more in the future (rule 1), but do spend money on good-to-great companies that should be worth more than their current price and should remain stable over the long term (rules 2-4).
If you want to start doubting your own sanity install screen recorder software and play it back at the end of the day. Every now and again you will discover things you do you had no recollection you were doing.
I hope apple knows they will lose that fight.
How I love the "The Flash-hater side-step".

If you read, I wasn't talking about adoption rates (although that is also an issue worth noting).

You might have noticed that I mentioned that Flash brought about new innovations to the web. Most notably, how video is handled.

Try to look forward and see beyond HTML5, just as you seem to have no problem doing with HTML5 adoption rates.
Shaving Cream ideas
Not only that, but many people's default usernames included the last four of their social, if not the entire thing!
But how?
Amazingly, DVD Commentary Helped Give Roger Ebert His Voice Back
I enjoy reading hacker news comments because they tend to be mature and express interesting ideas well. I hope your future comments do not resort to childish name calling as you do in this one.

As for your point, that you feel patents like the multi-touch patent are justified, I would point out that many people disagree with trivial patents such as this, or even software patents in general. It is developers and IT people that are upset with Apples highly controlled development environment. Alienating this group of people may eventually backfire.
True, but just because it starts as a personal project doesn't mean it has to stay that way. For example, z/OS's TERSE (a compression utility) was once someone's personal project, but is now shipped with the operating system. I'm sure there are many such examples. That said, these personal projects are no longer treated as such, and have gone through Test, and et cetera before being included in the system release.
What Furnishing an Empty Apartment Teaches Us About Feature Requests
Remember the guy in jail for some manga he bought?

I don't remember that, but I don't pay regular attention to the news.
I have to admit, you've got a point. I feel a little bit like the Christian who insists on starting every conversation with a discussion about how you ought to let Jesus into your heart. I will think a little bit and see if I can defend my position this evening.
i see that you take our credentials for yahoo and you take us to the url to add a player. Can you actually, post the transaction for us as well? Or are you giving the users the chance to review the change before submitting?
I like this a lot. I built a much less polished version of this for my use last year which only supported ESPN fantasy mashed up with footballguys.com ranking data. I didn't immediately see but are you planning on charging for this?
It seems like this would be a problem on Python as well, no?
I agree with you. New players have no chance when facing experienced fantasy players. This make them more likely to drop out during the season and make everyone in the league unhappy (including the experienced players).
BUT if the beginners had tools (like Pickemfirst;) they will be able to compete right away... I feel that Pickemfirst does lower entry barrier, at least that's waht we had in mind when designing it.
Blogspam (no original content, just multiple sources).

Real URL of HTC response is: http://www.slashgear.com/htc-respond-on-apple-patent-suit-ar...
Software Engineering Humor
HTC respond to Apple: “committed to defending” their own innovations
The iPod touch's greatest weakness is its small size. Eliminate that and you have something you can really use for ebooks and video (and for that matter, an ebook reader and 10" portable DVD player duct-taped together already cost as much an iPad even before you throw in the digital picture frame). But having a larger landscape for multitouch apps represents a lot of potential.

The greatest weaknesses of a PC are its complexity and its UI. A PC is complex enough that a novice user can either completely fuck it up or is terrified to try doing more than a limited number of tasks with it. And that's an inclusive or.

PG, in 2001:

"When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what's happening inside it. ... My mother has a computer that she uses for email and for keeping accounts. About a year ago she was alarmed to receive a letter from Apple, offering her a discount on a new version of the operating system. There's something wrong when a sixty-five year old woman who wants to use a computer for email and accounts has to think about installing new operating sytems. Ordinary users shouldn't even know the words "operating system," much less "device driver" or "patch.""
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

Even if you're accessing web apps, people still have to wrangle with the operating system a good deal. People need a limited device that gets out of the way and doesn't need them to administer it. And it turns out that a limited device can also make some security guarantees about running native apps, as well.

The keyboard/mouse UI is pretty nice, but still a weakness in some respects. Keyboards are fast and mice let you do spacial things with a screen. Unfortunately, keyboards in most contexts have somewhat arbitrary effects ("/" means search, "command-z" means undo) so people don't use them outside of entering text, and mice are not especially fast. Both devices are also rather indirect. Multitouching a handheld device is about as fast as a keyboard and probably even more intuitive than a mouse. And the directness is unmatched. It can even reproduce maybe 70% of a keyboard just by pushing a keyboard up onto the screen. This seems obvious in retrospect now that we've had iPhones for years, but once again--the weakness of the iPhone and iPod touch is the small screen size.

And in the laptop context, the keyboard and trackpad physically get in your way. Why have a touchpad which indirectly controls a cursor when you can just touch the screen? The keyboard has more use, but when you take the tradeoff of eliminating it, you can get a lot closer to the screen and carry it around in a usable state far more easily. I've spent a lot of time carrying around open laptops, and it's pretty unwieldy.

I don't think the iPad will be revolutionary until it doesn't require a PC to sync to. It would also help if it was cheaper--cheap enough that you could have one in each room, at least. And I'm not completely convinced myself. But there are enough signs that they're onto something that I'm intrigued.
The video does not show it but we've started to insert ads inside our browser extensions. We'll try to keep our product free, that's our goal.
Well, first thing is making sure your relationship is mutually beneficial. If you're paying money to woofoo there is no reason for them to pull the plug, not any more than your hosting company pulling the plug on you, or even your cell phone company. There are many things in live we don't own, and it's usually not a disaster.

The other thing of course if they pull a plug on you, you quickly replace it with another similar copy-paste javascript thingie. You do need to worry about backups and data portability ahead of time though.
My idea of hanging out is to read books with the other friend.

Though, my friend is a theoretical physic geek.
Congrats on the launch. I saw the presentation for this at the FSTA conference and thought it was a great demo. I'm glad to see that the add-on is as good as it looked on stage.
He's quoting someone else there. He's presenting that quote as a "shorter and better" account of his situation, but I don't know if every extreme should be taken literally.
Distributed Ruby: Mark Bates Sheds New Light
It seems the most obvious solution is to store strings in a standard encoding (say UTF-8) and to always convert strings to it at the time of their creation. Is there a technical reason why Ruby doesn't do this?
Really like the idea. Will be a great additional to cheat sheet sites like http://www.fftoolbox.com (I know the owners, which is why I use this particular link).

I cant tell you how many hours I've spend going through Waiver Wire lists to check and see if they are available in my leagues. Will definitely be using this when fantasy football starts back up again!
You may be overcooking your chicken:) I roasted a nice organic chicken last night and the meat was amazingly soft and almost melted in your mouth.
It's a fair point. Lots of people over extend themselves socially and they suffer intellectually because of it. I know far too many people who just have a causal interest in different topics but have no substance. They can repeat things they read on a blog but they have no original ideas because they don't spend the time to do the reading. I think being a smarter person with original ideas has a lot of social value so it's not completely incompatible. Quality over quantity.
I don't really want to perform add/drop transaction in the add-on. The main reason is that I don't want yahoo (or others) to complain that I am taking page views from them. Giving the user the chance to review the transaction is also a plus.
"someone you'd not want to piss off if you have any future-sight whatsoever"

All joking aside.....from reading your posts, something seems a bit off about you. You seem to be introspective, but it really seems you have some deep seeded issues, maybe you should talk to someone about it?
And I guess the business lesson here is to learn to spot dissonance in your business strategy.

Sun engaged the consumer market with propaganda. That was the extent of their engagement. (Remember all those Sun ads during the dotcom bubble?)

But in reality, Sun was in reality only engaging geeks. Sun has never failed as a company catering to geeks.

Somebody in that company should have noted that their desire (Sun for the masses) and their actions (Sun for techies) were not congruent.

Proof is in the fact that in the case where the general public has little input - the backend -- Sun was (and remains) spectacularly successful. The mistakes made here are far less specific to Sun, and very much related to the dissonance between being in business to make money and being enlightened hippies who are making substantial contributions to the industry, for free.
Please critique our little website
HTC had a touch-based dialler on their WinMo 5 devices, I wonder if they have a patent for this or other touch techniques in their portfolio?
Javascript: OOP Style Performance
"It's like a netbook or laptop but less useful."

To us less useful means less depth.

To the general market less useful means less confusing.

Less confusing in consumer devices = win.
Has Yahoo actually complained? I heard that they were opening an API for their fantasy sports products.
maybe the one place where you really shouldn't follow a strict grid is when you are using overlays. the darker box that contains the video is seen as being "on top" of the main title area. but the top of the video is aligned with the end of the title area. that makes the lower edge of the title area "carry across" into the overlay, which is confusing.

if you move the video down slightly then it will look more convincing / natural / real. you might also try moving the dark area right a little, so that the title area "sticks" out to the right. moving the entire dark area down slightly would also give the descenders in the title text a little more room (there's the same problem on the left below "better picks today" - are you trying to squeeze too much in "above the fold"?). you could gain some space by moving to a white background and losing the middle (white) layer / frame (yeah, like everyone else - but perhaps that's why...)

to me it looks very much like you / your designer has been following "grids" without thinking about when they make sense (although otherwise it does look pretty good / clean - just the small details that look odd).

also, why the huge footer (ff)?
Would you buy your own product that way?
please suggest fftoolbox to contact us... Our goal is to aggregate content from as many sources as possible.

about the time lost you lost checking waiver wire lists: that's exactly what I experienced, and why I decided to create Pickemfirst!
Violent behavior is also a fundamental personality trait. Just because someone controls their violent tendencies in one environment vs another, doesn't mean that they aren't a violent person.

It's more likely that the job attracted him because it put him in a position where he could accept bribes. This is analogous to the attraction of pedophiles to the priesthood.
tell that to the Goldman Sachs Alpha Fund
Excellent point.

Youtube was down this morning and the embedded videos were gone, too. That's javascript widgets for you.

We built our service (Feed.Us) so if our servers & code burn in a fiery ball of destruction, it won't effect your site.
I assume you are somehow related to this site. Let me give you a bit of advice: look at that sentence above and realize that you did not get into what it actually does until after 50% into the sentence. I don't really care about "awesome" and "private" part, before I start caring about that I need to know what it can do for me. This is the problem with the article as well. If you want to get the word out you need to cut to the chase.
I know nothing about the author, but there are some statements made that suggest that the author hasn't had to deal with the wild-and-woolly reality of encodings out there in a lot of extant data. One only wishes that all data were UTF-8.

What Ruby 1.9 gets absolutely right is that its String implementation is completely encoding agnostic (by which I specifically mean that it doesn't force your data to be encoded in a particular way). There are encodings for which there is no safe UTF-8 roundtrip (you can successfully convert the data to UTF-8 nicely, but when you convert back to UTF-8 to that encoding, you won't get the original input back; you'll get a slightly different output).

Rubyists in Japan don't have the luxury of dealing with Unicode all the time; they still get lots of data in ShiftJIS and other encodings. (The same is true of Rubyists elsewhere, but since US-ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8, most folks don't know the difference; Win1252 is a pain in the ass, though.) If you have to do ANY work with older data formats, you curse languages that force you to use UTF-8 all the time instead of letting you work with the native data.

Most developers don't think about i18n nearly enough in any case; there's a lot more to worry about that simply using Unicode doesn't solve for you. Even the developers of Ruby have to worry about the fact that LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE (U+00E9) is the same as LATIN SMALL LETTER E (U+0065) COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT (U+0301); it doesn't begin to address the capitalization of 'ß' ('SS', which isn't necessarily reversible) or that in Turkish 'ı' capitalizes to 'I', but 'i' capitalizes to 'İ'. Don't EVEN get me started on number formatting...

EDIT: Added the last paragraph.
What you're describing is a classic case of channel conflict. The same problem largely killed off several CAD software vendors back in the day. It was also one of the key reasons why Novell's NetWare business failed after being highly profitable for years.
ugh, this again. Warren Buffet is an outlier. Never model your behavior on outliers. If you want to know how to get rich look at the average rich person (small business owner).
Potential litigation? Given that (1) I would have absolutely no legal leg to stand on, and (2) I'd rather get another job and advance my career than spend a year suing someone, blackballing myself in the process: why would I possibly do that? If that thought even went through anyone's mind, I'm insulted, because I'd have to be an idiot to try to pull that off.

All of your suppositions assume that the potential employer knows and understands all of your motivations! They don't. Maybe you're a wonderful, stand-up guy. But maybe you're not. They have no way of knowing for sure. So it's only natural for them to assume that some applicants may give them grief if they provide an "honest answer" as to why that particular applicant was not hired. Whether or not you, specifically would cause them grief is totally and completely irrelevant unless, perhaps, they have an explicit reason to believe that you, specifically wouldn't cause them grief. Can you provide any reason that you, specifically should be treated differently than all other applicants who they interview, including the ones who would cause them grief if they were told exactly why they were not hired?

On the topic of litigation, even if you didn't have a leg to stand on legally (which may or may not be true), even launching a frivolous legal claim against them can be annoying and costly to them. They still have to grab a lawyer to advise them on the matter and they still have to defend themselves against anything you may or may not bring forward, frivolous or not.

There's no benefit to helping out someone who applied to work at your company and might be doing something of interest to you in the future? Really?

Really! Fog Creek undoubtedly receives a veritable plethora of job applications. The chances that you specifically will be of great interest to them in the future outside the scope of being employed with their company is slim as a matter of probability, assuming that you don't already have some kind of working relationship with their company. If you do already have a working relationship with Fog Creek, you should take this issue up with them directly instead of on Hacker News.
4 Months with Cassandra at Cloudkick (YC W09)
I'm in the same boat. I think Apple should consider adopting that bullshit "Don't be evil" mantra.
So it's just a forum for developers and designers? How is it better than hundreds of other forums out there? Why should I pick this one over all the others?
great feedback, Andrew! Thanks, I will definetely make some changes to my home page. You are correct about the "home grown" feel. I am a developer and didn't have any budget to invest in outside help. This might change soon.
Oh, much more than that: his Strategy Letters are full of insights. He was one of the first to speak against being too focused on looking for VC. He has always been a proponent of BDUF but rejected any kind of "software engineering certification" as a measure of code quality.
No longer a there there. There.com closing.
The technical reason is that it's a stupid idea. Not all encodings can be safely round-tripped through UTF-8, which means you can end up losing some data. (Consider http://homepage1.nifty.com/nomenclator/perl/ShiftJIS-CP932-M... as a quick example: "Actually, 7915 characters in CP-932 must be mapped to 7517 characters in Unicode. There are 398 non-round-trip mappings.")

Loss of text data is bad.
Python "cheats" by converting everything to Unicode internally. It seems like a simple solution, but it's not a solution since not everything can be converted safely back to the original encoding.
As I say, I disagree. It's less useful for consumers, because you can't type on it properly, you can't rest it on your lap, you can't view any flash websites, etc etc.

It's the geeks that are hailing it as useful.

I can't see how my kids would use an iPad, and I can't see how my mum would use an iPad.
Great, if they can figure out a way to make the tax apply only to Microsoft and people who've made a killing there.

If it means that Windows prices have to go up, excellent. Microsoft has skimped on stuff like getting security right, so we've all been subsidizing their business model by incurring the cost of dealing with the problems their infected machines cause.