skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the eMusic catalog has expanded through the years to encompass most of the artists that matter. By the time iTunes came along, eMusic had a pretty good catalog...by the time iTunes started offering DRM-free music, the eMusic catalog included a huge array of major label acts.

But, I'm not really talking about iTunes. I'm talking about the hacker culture and the chilling effects of the closed iPad/iPhone ecosystem. I just couldn't let an utterly untrue statement go uncorrected. But it's not really the point of my rant.
Forking, The Future of Open Source, and Github
2. The example is a conceptual example, the points you raise can be fixed relatively easily. You can enable deadspace by requiring the mouse to be at least X pixels from a potential target.

3. You could simply turn off sticky controls when the mouse is moving quickly. Target acquisition generally has 2 phases, I high speed movement followed by a deceleration phase near the target. Just enable the sticky controls once the mouse speed drops below the appropriate threshold value.
It was on TC the other day. Does that count? Or how about this: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/cnn.pdf
Horse's mouth: http://divvyshot.com/facebook

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1237361
And I believe that. I would have done it as well. That said, there's something wrong with a startup system that's little more than an elaborate job application process. No problem for that kind of consumer space site but at the end of the day the message is clear: Never trust a startup with something important.
I include a link in each summary back to the HN comments for the article.
The Divvyshot team has talked about this and it's definitely something that we want to do. Ultimately it depends on Facebook's legal department.
I've been working on something like that for a while now -- maybe we could share some ideas?
Congratulations! This is a great app.
First off, congratulations!

Now, suggestions:

1) ability to resize tag boxes to some degree

2) ability to drag tags around, instead of having to remove and re-click to place them

3) ability to change an existing tag. Example: when my mom joined facebook, I had to go back and delete all of the tags to her name (unlinked) and then add in new tags to her name (linked to her profile). It would have been easier to have an "update tag" button that let me link that tag to her profile (preferably for the whole album, but one-by-one would be better than nothing.)

4) I know facebook stores multiple sizes of photos. It would be neat to have more direct control over that -- say, to pick our own thumbnails, or to allow certain photos to be displayed in higher resolutions.
I've been using it for a week, I like it.

Health food features: (features that are generally good for you but which you don't notice specifically at each use)

- Access via https, if you want.
- Logs deleted quickly
- Less data about you collected by Google.

Note: For Firefox, if you want to put the https version of DDG in your search box list, use the Add to Firefox link on the DDG page, rather than "Add Duck Duck Go" in Firefox's search box dropdown.

Immediately tasty features:

- Clean results page.
- Clean results page URL.
- (Some Linux distros dirty it up in Firefox.)
- If not many results, there's a link to the equivalent Google search.
- This is so polite and helpful it's classy.
- !Bang notation for alternate search engines.

The !Bang notation is enough by itself to use DDG as your default search box entry. I have alternate search engines in my Firefox search box, but I don't use them much because even "alt-downarrow ..." is just inconvenient enough to dissuade me from using it; then you have to switch it back. "!w" at the front of your query to signal a Wikipedia search is a pleasure.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Well done.
What was Divvyshot, exactly?
I don't think I can be considered an open source advocate. But the basic premise of open source ideology (the way I understand it) is no limitation in any form or shape. When you buy a hardware (or software), you should not be subject to artificial limitations imposed by the manufacturer.

PS3 is a very good example IMO. It comes with very powerful hardware, which you paid for, but you are only limited to rules placed by sony. As a matter of fact Sony goes through a lot of trouble to make it almost imposible to do anything else with the hardware.

Similarly, I should be able to install any app on my iphone/ipad that is not approved by Apple without have to go through hoops of cracking the device.
Starting a New Business in a Crowded Market - The Premium WordPress Themes
You know... in re: Apple and DRM, I think Apple has been stripping it away about as much as could be expected:

music: none on any of the music in their store anymore, now that they actually have the negotiating clout to get away with it

video: still there, but the TV/movie industry isn't yet in as bad a position as the music industry was, and if Apple tries to take away the DRM they will just leave. Note the absence of any other video store without DRM.

apps: yes, they do have DRM which is in fact entirely painless for users and the only reason you'd want to strip it off an app is to pirate it (which people do). As far as allowing non-appstore apps, a) there's jailbreaking which Apple hasn't made any significant effort to stop beyond the initial jailbreak which was via a Safari exploit that allowed arbitrary code execution, and b) one could certainly argue that the reason why they don't is to ensure that their platform continues to run well in as many cases as possible. see: the number of android apps that will quite possibly fuck up your OS in a number of ways.
IControlPad developer slams Apple gaming peripheral patent application
Hey vinhboy, I posted the article here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1237532

Let me know your thoughts and if you have any specific questions!
Equality and Governmental Responsibility
I think it's a case of picking your battles most of the time. I certainly don't care to change my own oil, but I'll gladly spend a half-hour on my weekend tuning and oiling my bike, which I use for commuting.

I also can't tell you how much time I've spent configuring my desktops which all run Linux. Sometimes the sound doesn't work, sometimes I'm hacking Wine to get a game to run, but there's always the lower-resistance path of just installing windows or going with a Mac.

I choose the battles where I enjoy the tinkering. I don't care if my car has a sealed hood or not since I don't care to tinker with it.

Some people might not want to tinker with their computer and would rather just tinker with their RSS feeds or HTML.
For how much?
As a Hokie let me add my congrats =)
I'd recommend Scratch. It's approachable and intuitive - and cross platform. It bundles loads of sprites, images, sounds, music loops, and sample projects. It also imports photos straight from your webcam.

Lot's of people will rail against a language like Scratch because it doesn't have any "real world" uses. However, teaching is a real world use, and that's why Scratch was developed. Programming concepts transcend languages.

Most people focus on Scratch's drag-and-drop interface, which does prevent syntax errors. Not fighting syntax errors means kids can spend more time learning programming concepts and experimenting with things that matter, such as arrays, variables, and stuff.

The under-talked about feature in Scratch that makes a good teaching tool is the "single stepping" mode. This mode steps through the scripts, one block at a time, allowing you to see the code "execute" as the game/story plays out. Great for debugging or learning.

Lot's of great places to find tutorials online. Try:
http://scratch.mit.edu
http://www.scratchguide.com
I can only hope someday I'm as mediocre as Zynga.
Also, it's 2010, you have ^W at your disposal, which, gasp, kills a whole word!
when i search for HN it displays it at 8th place after some irrelevant punk band and an obscure town in Montenegro.

When i search for my name (as i always do to test search engines) it doesn't show my linkedIn profile with 500+ connections at all. Even Bing learned to find it.

Summary: Not usable (yet).
These days I just treat Java like C. It has a relatively small syntax and small feature set, but it has a relatively large set of libraries available (built in and otherwise).
The language itself just isn't that interesting. It's what people are building with it (like Clojure, or Scala, or Hadoop, or Processing) that are interesting.
"Never trust a startup with something important."

Well, startups aren't the only types of companies that get bought. Acquisitions are part of the markets and across all types of companies, big or small, young or old.

The only difference is that the tech startup scene is so very loud and vocal about all this. In other markets, it's maybe a side notice in a rarely-read corporate newsletter. Nobody cares except for the individuals directly involved.

Ultimately, the bulk of these M&As happen not because a product is to be destroyed but in order to take it to another, subjectively "higher" level. It's the same here. Whether that happens, as always, remains to be seen, but both parties were willing to try.
Is there any software already that will transcribe this to text, or should I batch it out as a Mechanical Turk process?
Article Summary:

Divvyshot is a YC funded group photo sharing website that launched March 2009. They were in the process of looking for angel funding but apparently Facebook made an offer that couldn’t be turned down. Techcrunch claims the purchase price was probably very low and the purpose was to acquire the talent. Divvyshot is starting the process of shutting down their services today and will begin disabling accounts in two weeks.

http://hnsummary.com/2010/04/02/facebook-acquires-divvyshot/
On 1, I was planning to backfill with Bing. In fact, I'll move that to the top of the list and do this weekend. Side note: Bing doesn't catch "hooker news" either; and should they?

On 2, I actually have that link but have something in place to only show one per domain. Perhaps I should choose the more specific one be default. Also will change!

I hope in time, it will impress you :). Please keep sending me feedback so I can improve!
You forgot to include reddit, which can help a startup build a community around their product. :)
Seriously, I mostly listen to independent music, and I don't steal music, and I haven't bought a physical CD in something like 5 years so I'm pretty sold on downloading, and when the iTMS launched eMusic was absolutely not a draw for me. I think it's a little disingenuous to suggest that eMusic solved the same problem Apple did.

The original statement simply wasn't "utterly untrue". Sorry. I hear where you're coming from.
Perhaps you should also look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole and the number of people who speak Latin.

Then, you may also want to look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole as their primary (or only) language and compare that with the numbers for Latin.

That may give you a better appreciation for the reasoning behind Google-Translate's prioritization (though I should add that I'd also be surprised if they didn't include Latin)
I know what you mean, but I'm not sure how "important" photo sharing really is. I think we're kidding ourselves when we think we're going to "make the world a better place" in this industry. Other industries do much more to "make the world a better place" than ours does but they don't talk about it near as much as we do.
You haven't heard of the new startup fad of being "Kacquired" ?
The problem with taking seed money from big VCs
Since a year ago my commute is 4 hours per day. My last job was 100% telecommuting.

After three months I started telecommuting two days per week and try to work in an extra day here and there.

I love my job and where I work. There's nowhere close to me that offers the same opportunity. I just wish it were closer.

Moving is not a easy option because I have a family to consider. I also don't want to live near my job because I don't care for the town - in fact, there is no town, just corporate parks and plazas.

I live where I do because it's affordable. I don't own a McMansion.

It's not a perfect situation but, you work with what you have. I'm working toward pushing the telecommuting option further.

The irony is that I have to be more productive telecommuting than if I warmed a seat for eight hours :-)
Sorry, it is unlikely that anyone else will be able to get the same settlement that google received. In essence they have a special right to "orphaned" works that no one else will have.

Also, I should not I'm all for google books. I think that copyright/patents no longer need to exist in the modern world, but if they are going to stay around they need to apply to everyone equally.
Photo sharing site. The website is still up so go take a look at the tour: http://divvyshot.com/#to-details
In this community, I trust the aggregate upvotes more than one individual's assessment.
Thanks. HN gets a disambiguation page. Arguably, Hacker News should be higher. In fact, it's on my list to re-visit the ordering by popularity. It does a bit of this now, but of course could be improved.

What's your name? I should actually be promoting LinkedIn pages, so this may be a bug. I'd love to check it out.
Blodget on why the iPad has an amazing future
> How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active?

The post office told them -- hey sell their customer list.

:(
When you pay $10,000 to address $1,000 of a $5,000 loan, you have not made things any worse for the rest of us, except to help promote a system that allows unscrupulous creditors to exploit people.
God, how can people tolerate the fact that they can't adjust the throttle response map in their VW! How are they going to get optimal fuel economy if they can't change the wheel camber either?! I admit that I forgot to seasonally adjust my camber to keep proper traction in changing weather, but by golly I couldn't live with myself if all I was supposed to do was sit in the damn thing and turn the wheel. Kids these days don't even know how to drive a manual transmission! What I miss are the days of metal wagon wheels - those things lasted forever.
We don't actually have a graduated income tax in this country -- even before you get into shenanigans like creative deductions and offshore accounting.

FICA taxes and medicare taxes, adding up to 15% or so, only apply to your first 100k or so of income. So if you're making 500k, you're probably paying less in taxes as a % of your income than your secretary.

Just wanted to point that out.
Wrote this at the request of a couple of HN users - if you guys have any specific questions about the premium themes market in general or my strategy for it, feel free to ask!
On 1, I hope to improve that for verticals like music soon. I'm doing movies right now actually.

On 2, there is !i, but you say keywords don't mean much to you. Would it help to have a link to GImages on the right sidebar? Others have requested that as well.

On 3, math definitely needs a revision. Conversion syntax has improved recently. In any case, if you send me specific examples that don't work, I'd be happy to make them work.
It's a sort of photo manager that links together photos based on where they were taken from rather than by who took them. It seems especially aimed to manage photos from groups of people.
okay, i can't figure out for the life of me why one would put source code in such a format up in a public code repository.

or why one would ever want to deploy server-side python code in this manner.

here's the one-liner to extract it btw:
tail deny.py -n1 | cut -d\' -f4 | base64 -d > denied.zip
Comparing the 'openness' of the web app angle for the
iPad/iPhoneOS is a bit disingenuous, because you need
to have hosting ('in the cloud' or not) to deliver
such an app.

In this case "closed" App Store gives you even more: you don't have to think about hosting at all. Nor about CC processing, making it easy to find your app using search for all the users, etc.

I'd argue that the very "closeness" of App Store is the reason there are about ~150 000 apps available. We see many crying how closed Apple is, but how many of those whiners would actually go through the process of getting the infrastructure in place? App store takes away the boring part and lets you concentrate on your app. And let's not forget all
the free apps hosted there. How much would it cost to self-host a popular free app?
Less than $99 a year? Including your time spent managing the infrastructure?

"closed Apple" is just another rubberstamp along "overpriced Macs" which means very little. It's just a different model and it does not make it worse, even some don't like it. There are other platforms to choose, go ahead and tinker. But whining is easier, I suppose.
Sounds very interesting, something I would definitely consider purchasing for myself, as I've been interested in iPhone app development but haven't had time to read through my thick Cocoa and Objective-C books. If you can make yours simple and short, I would certainly check it out.

On a side note, I wonder if it would compete with this: http://www.amazon.com/iPhone-Application-Development-Dummies...
I have to agree with you on quality/usability. I ended up going back to the iPhone after 2 weeks with the Droid -- mostly because our Exchange server just didn't want to play nice.

My big take away after two weeks, though? Android Market apps have a long way to go to catch up to iPhone apps in terms of polish. Even some of the stuff Google supplies just isn't as nice to use. That makes me sad, since I'd like to see a little more competition.
>This is a good point, but when you buy an iPad you are giving up that choice, and you might not know it.

So?

When I was growing up, I played games. I thought they were neat. I wanted to make my own. I didn't have the tools to do it. I couldn't even easily acquire them -- mom, dad and my sister weren't going to allow the youngest family member to install Linux on the family computer, and we certainly didn't have the money to buy development tools. It doesn't matter if I could install a boot loader to dual boot -- I wasn't allowed to mess with it unless I wanted to be grounded for months.

I was allowed to dumpster dive for 386s though. And I was allowed to do whatever I wished to those computers.

As long as people are curious enough, there are no barriers. Hell, there are still cars designed in sheds (and sold to the public).
I'm not sure that Steve Jobs has ever indicated that he's against DRM as a concept, only that he thought it was pointless and self-defeating to continue selling <em>music<em> with bundled DRM. Especially with BitTorrent and p2p networks being so prevalent. His opposition to DRM on music was expressed in practical, not moral, terms.

But DRM on movies still appears to be relatively effective, even though that might soon reach the same point music did and I don't think there's much doubt that DRM on apps has prevented a fair bit of piracy. If I think back to how easy it was to get pirated apps for an S60 phone a few years ago and how not one of the people I know who have jailbroken their iPhones has paid for any of the apps they own I can definitely understand why Apple would prefer a closed system with DRM.
I was tempted to make this crack as well :)
Bragging rights about the whole framework "fitting" in only 47 lines of code?

I'd hate to submit patches to this.
It seems that the pressure drop in the "tornado" is not large enough for a condensation cloud to form; they have to make the tornado visible with smoke. So this is more of a dust devil, I guess.
Contextual Search Bar That Appears from the top on scroll
This article (written by St. John himself) goes into more detail of his thoughts on Zynga. http://www.industrygamers.com/news/facebook-games-from-zynga...

I believe many of his assumptions of Facebook games are off, but my opinion is colored red as it were.
In this case we're speculating about market evolution that will take place over the span of a decade or so... and by the time we have hard data it will be too late to change anything due to path dependence.
I was just today tweaking memcached use on one of my Rails apps and also a customer's app. In addition to using the out of the box support, I used a few simple tricks with ActiveRecord also (I wrote this up at rubyplanet.net).
For the 2nd test (after you got it up to 18 MB/s, which is higher than you'd be able to get if it were still in 100 Mbit mode), did you check if either side is CPU-bound? Rsync takes a decent amount of CPU, so that could be the bottleneck on gigabit networks.

You can also try adding the -W option, which will send the whole new file when a file's been changed, instead of the usual rsync diffs, which can be faster when bandwidth isn't the bottleneck.
It's not the systems fault that those people took out those loans. At some point, people have to take responsibility for their actions instead of always blaming somebody else.
Even if the price was small, getting a good shower of FB stock could be really awesome down the line.
That open vs. closed computers thing does not make much sense itself, but the other point is: you can create programs for iPad. Heck, you can even design hardware to be used in combination with it. You cannot do that on iPad itself, so what?
The Teenage Liberation Handbook
It's consistent for whoever wrote it.

If you want your definition of consistent, you are going to have to write your own software.
Just look at Linux on the desktop.

Picking a bad example doesn't help your point. Just look at Lotus 1-2-3, Photoshop, Skype, etc.
Not sure what you mean... the US very much does have a graduated, or progressive, income tax schedule.
In the future kids can learn hacking and civil disobedience at the same time. :-)
The power of Maybe in Haskell comes from both the existence of the type, and from the existence of sequencing combinators that understand how to handle Maybe.

Just adding a Maybe type to Java wouldn't do anything; each method would still have to handle the Nothing case in some way.

For Maybe to be useful in Java, control flow would have to change from running one line after another to "running" by applying functions, so that whether or not to run each "line of code" would be determined by a combinator that understands the semantics of Maybe. Then, of course, you just have Haskell, which already exists!

A better option for Java would be a type that could not be null. I don't think the language allows the compiler to determine this, though, which means it probably won't exist (or if it does exist, it won't be too useful).

Basically, if you want a good type system, you want to ditch Java.
"Hooker news" is obviously a made up example. A real example would be "kelvin hobles". Google correctly guesses "calvin (and) hobbes", DDG and Bing do not.
Congrats for divvyshot!
The Wall paper house offers cheap dry home for poor and displaced
What does that have to do with your original argument?
I can conceive of my ideal wife, therefore she exists!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument
A story like this and its comments really show that people do not value their time very much. Never having to go out of your way to buy stamps again far, far, far outweighs the cost of buying tomorrow's stamps with today's money. For instance, if you value your time at $50/hour and you have to go 1/2 hour out of your way every time you buy stamps, is it really worth it to quibble about the fractions of a dollar you are going to lose in the long run if you buy a lot of stamps now?
The biggest issue with facebook photos is the resolution. Most people have 7MP+ cameras now, but facebook resizes them to ~600x450. While I can understand facebook being reluctant to store large pictures, it has become the primary way for many people to share their photos, and it's a shame that so much gets thrown away.