skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For some varieties of NSFW, I agree with you. However, I would prefer it if my 9 year old didn't see a lot of the stuff out there. Playboy spread, sure. A woman being choked by an enormous cock? Not so much....
My favourite are the dropdowns that place "popular" countries at the top. This means that if I scroll through the list then my country may or may not be where I expect it based on how the developer was feeling that day.
Having people put in fake data to satisfy a validator isn't the worst problem in the world.

If you do have a country field, but still do validation according to US rules, then very few of your international customers will ever get through it. Most will just get frustrated after several tries and then leave. By not having a country field in the first place, you're telling these people that they needn't bother, you won't be wasting their time, and then everyone is happy and won't be writing angry blog posts about it.
ThinkGeek did that before, with the 8-bit tie in 2007. It was an April Fool's joke, but so many people actually wanted one that they started producing it for real.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/looflirpa/
Try clicking the Buy Now button.
There's much worse out there than breasts. I wouldn't mind my kids seeing certain things at the appropriate ages, but there's definitely stuff I wouldn't want them exposed to.
At my last job (doing .NET Web Dev), I spent the first 2 years under a manager who knew absolutely nothing about programming or really anything technical for that matter. He was, for all intents and purposes, originally hired as a henchman to weed out bad employees because the CEO hated being the bad guy. That made him the COO and as such, the head of IT as well because of how the company was strucuted (or not structured).

The last 2 years saw me working under someone who had been programming for a living for many years. While he was, by his own words, a bit out of his prime and behind the times, the difference between working for the two was night and day. Deadlines became more attainable, requirements became more realisitic and when difficult decisions arose we had someone who could go to bat for the IT department as apposed to someone who always sided with the "sales" portion of the business.

In my mind, anyone directly overseeing a developer should know how to program as well. In small organizations and start-ups, that's not always possible, but if you're somewhat established and you have an IT/IS director, manager, CIO or what have you that can't program a lick .... I think there's an issue there.
It's an April fools joke BUT ThinkGeek has a habit of turning jokes into real products if there's enough demand - click add to cart and sign up for the email list if interested.

This is how I got my nephew a Tuantan sleeping bag - eg:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/april-fools-joke-backfires-on...
I am trying it out right now, and first impressions are good. That said, for me, Rails for complex apps and Sinatra for web services and simple apps is probably sufficient.

I continue to be pleased with how far the Ruby community has come in the last four or five years. Credit probably goes to Rails for revving up interest in Ruby.
IBM initiative aims to hook startups while they're young
"/Absolutely not. It just doesn't work./"

So you're saying then that it has never worked? That's a pretty big assumption.

I am non-technical and I think I fit pretty well with B) in that article. I always said that even if I did not /understand/ programming I certainly appreciated it. That meant I could appreciate how difficult something would be to implement, whereas those non-technical people who did not appreciate programming (my superiors) would ask for something they thought was simple then go ape when it wasn't implemented immediately.

I would spend hours locked away with my programming colleague while I explanied the business logic for what I needed, he would map out that database concepts. Eventually I got a pretty good appreciation for databases.

I'd admit it didn't work perfectly - as a first-timer and more or less accidental project manager I allowed us to over-complicate the project. Were I to do it a second time I would be much better at KISS.

Based on my experience I would have to say it is incorrect to say it "just doesn't work".
And the Tauntaun sleeping bag in 2009, apparently: http://www.thinkgeek.com/tauntaun/index.html
In some ways that seems to be what Clayton Christensen talk about in his "Innovators Dilemma" although he speaks of products development.

This is in many ways what the "good enough" paradigm is all about.
Hack Week at IMVU
Thank you, these are exactly the sorts of things I need to know. It's especially helpful to hear it from someone who has "been there".
Holy crap, I spoke too soon, haha
Um yeah that's kind of a huge oversight there Apple.
Correct. Most of Europe already have that approach.
That's an intriguing direction I hadn't thought of. Hmmm... could be some possibilities there.
How to Rant your Way Into the Front Page
Why is it scary? Engines are a significant part of airplane cost and just like planes they only make money when flying, so it totally makes sense to use working engines from grounded aircraft as a replacement for flying aircraft. All airlines do this all the time.
Ask HN: Best Way to Sell Digital Goods?
Hi HN,

I'm sure many of you are aware of digital distribution services like ejunkie, clickbank, etc... I'm looking to launch a new product soon, but I'm wondering which service is the best (or maybe there is software out there to do this for yourself)?

Ideally, best would include low cost, unobtrusive, and actionable.

So HN, what are your experiences with selling digital downloads?

EDIT: I have experience with WP-Ecommerce... But why shouldn't I be using this solution?

Thanks much!
hahahahahahha FUCK
Perhaps what would be more useful is an RSS feed. That way you get standard newsreader features like mark-as-read and show-unread and sort-by-newest for free.

Of course you don't get the sorting, but them's the breaks.
I know this is pedantic and off-topic, but why would you name the service and then have a generic "Link" to link to it, instead of just linking to the service with the name? It always helps re-align my perception when I see things I previously thought were common sense.
More like, "Oh, wow, they got a lot of attention from their market! If I write the same thing using different words, I can get lots of attention in my market!"

It works.
really good insight into the media industry, I've worked more on the inside of it under IAC, and I totally see this expectation that people will pay these media mogels for content -- I also worked at Joost, on the relative outside, trying to provide media in new ways, and the inability for the current generation of content owners to adapt is still staggering.

Even look at the recent moves of content owners and Hulu, trying to add pay-per-view charges, instead of being advertising supported. They have made a 'good' platform for viewing the content, even owned by one of the old players, NBC, but they are still looking to force the choice upon the consumer, rather than adapting their cost structures.
With such a cert, you can carry out a man in the middle attack without triggering SSL warnings (in the typical usage model for SSL), because you have a valid cert.
Excellent resources, thanks! I too have been quite impressed with Utah's tech industry. There's a lot more interesting things going on than I think most people would suspect.
The e-mail queue reminds me of my days at the college radio station, where the output of the broadcast booth passed through a 5-second delay before going out to the transmitter. That way, if something "bad" happened (f'rinstance, a caller dropped the f-bomb), you could dump the delay before it went out over the airwaves.

Thinking about it more, I'm a little surprised that this hasn't made its way into standard e-mail clients, at least as a feature.
I'm waiting for a real version Super Steve Bros.
Apple has a huge incentive to promote non-flash video. Since HTML5 is really the only decent way to do internet video without flash, the most notable thing about HTML5 (for that matter, really the only thing that matters to end users) is video.
That's a really neat solution to where to put the countdowns.
Well, geez, make it possible to have a career in engineering, then, or make it possible to have a career in science without a post-doc.

Also, stop the War on the Unexpected, where people with home-built electronics are immediately under suspicion as "terrorists", model rockets get considered to be SAMs, and any home chemistry at all is a WMD. You can't make children who have been savagely discouraged from experimenting since birth into curious, problem-solving experimenters in college.

Oh, and you should stop the whole "Intellectual Property" thing in its tracks. Ideas aren't "property", and attempting to imbue, say, mathematics/programs with legal attributes of "property" will kill all possible innovation, and the desire to innovate.
Well, it is what it is. I was hoping it would detect my browser resolution and make the video bigger -- a bit like the vidzbigger extension for Chrome.

I'm really hoping that the world realizes people actually do get commodity hardware now that runs in 1920x1080, small little layouts surrounded by oceans of whitespace on my monitor are annoying.
No idea why anyone would mod this comment down. For what it's worth, I agree completely.
I'd be curious whether this is robust enough to support an ecommerce app. How would one check whether this meets the security requirements for such besides the fact that it's build on Rack?
Mancur Olson made a similar point in his 1984 book The Rise and Decline of Nations. His argument is that as time goes on, special interests and entrenched bureaucracies take what was a simpler system and load it up with exceptions and complexity. The more complex they become, the less capable of collective action they become, leading to overall paralysis.

This is an extension of his argument from his Nobel Prize–winning 1971 book The Logic of Collective Action.
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future
Ask HN:  Register side project as company?
Should I register a side project as a company or wait for it to take off first?
this is most visible in 20th century architecture, think of gradual elimination of everything external, ornamental, unnecessarily complex in order to scale.

A long way to simplicity: from Gothic cathedrals to Woolworth building to WTC
As a designer, I think you'd be crazy to do anything but go professional. Design is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of product today (if apple can show us anything), and your partners little brother - sucks.
I've actually had some experience on both sides of the table.

When I did my first software startup I had no idea how to code, but since I'm pretty good at convincing people, calling bullshit, diplomacy, etc. I managed to get funded and got together a development team. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on what needed to be done, timelines, etc.

Fast forward some years. I've learned to code (Not a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but I know the basics) and I simply cannot comprehend how I could have managed a software company without knowing how to code. There are so many things that seem obvious now that I completely and utterly missed that it's amazing we ever got anything done.

A rewrite of Eric Raymond's famous quote captures it pretty well: "As a manager, coding is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better manager for the rest of your days, even if you never actually code a lot."
I, too, have been frustrated by the delays (I pre-ordered shortly after they opened pre-orders).

However, I wasn't surprised they missed the January ship date, and probably less surprised that they missed the Q1 ship date:

- It's a unique product. Identifying demand is difficult. My guess is their demand was underestimated. This is a product focusing on an area of life that everyone I can think of wants to "fix". All of my coworkers who I consider "early adopters", also pre-ordered after I IMed them the URL (16 people)

- It's priced significantly lower than the few alternatives that are out there. It's also designed in a way that is more convenient than similar products offered by competitors (no head bands).

- Smartphones are common now, so the barrier for entry really is the $50 for most people

- Hardware is difficult to get right. You can't just tweak a few lines of code and recompile. If something is wrong with the trial units (and I'm not saying there was, I have no idea), it can be a serious setback.

It's too late now, but here's the formula that should be applied:

- Decide the amount of pre-orders you think you can safely get out the door on time (be incredibly conservative). Set your web app to stop taking pre-orders when you get anywhere near that point.

- Before turning pre-orders back on, up the price committment, and push back the date (while notifying your initial pre-orders that they can still expect theirs on time). I know when I visited the site, I thought "Gee, I'm out $5 if they fold, who cares?" It's also the only reason I haven't cancelled my pre-order.

- Pick a very conservative ship date, then add more time. Have an option at check-out that says "if we can ship earlier, would you like us to?" to catch folks who might be caught off guard by the unexpected $45 charge. Or skip that and simply e-mail your pre-orders to see who wants one early. Nothing makes me happier than when I get something I want sooner than I expected.

- Hire someone with a history of dealing with sourcing parts, dealing with vendors/manufacturers and getting stuff out the door. These are usually not geeks and not folks who are attracted to start-ups.

- Don't take any preorders until you are sure you have the hardware right (as I said, I'm not sure if this was the problem but the delays are so long it certainly smells that way)
Is it happening in the computing devices world as well? Is the move to the iPhone/iPad a shift to simplicity?

It's interesting to note that your architectural example and Apple's devices are similar - the iPhone, to outward appearances, is quite simple to use. The innards however, are probably just as complex as any other modern operating system.
In other news.. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/different-kind-of-com...
This is one of the few blogs which I always feel smarter for having read.
Glad to hear the book is still a work in progress! I was a bit disappointed when Amazon canceled my pre-order.
From the article: Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs? ("They" are the network broadcasters.)

Sounds from the article like the correct answer is "never", or at least "not until after your organization is dead", though the author didn't come right out and say it.
The question then is not whether to run to the mountains, but when to run to the mountains.
Wakemate may or may not have handled the situation as best as they can. I do not know.
I, for one, pre-ordered and wanted this thing in my hands soon.
I am mighty pissed at the expectations set and what was delivered.

Giving premium features for free? I don't even have an idea of what the basic features look like, to get excited about premium features and accept the delays.

You might say 'take your 5$ and go some where else'. They definitely are losing me as a customer.
If only they saved me the trouble and time, I would have bought and made use of other products months ago.
Hire the designer.

"Hire" the brother to review and give constructive criticism to the design the professional designer does.

Win/Win
Divorcers and Polygamists: Evolutionary Superstars
A Superstorm for Global Warming Research
In other news.. Canada buys half of Hawaii
http://finance.sympatico.ca/news/ContentPosting?newsitemid=b...
Django resources
If you're interested in this, you should check out The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. He walks you through how large companies (most of his examples are from the hard drive industry) are often structurally incapable of embracing the revolutionary change which will inevitably overtake them.

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin... (not an affiliate link)
Why I’ll never own another server
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to be fined by FCC? http://zomg.yahoo.com/fcc-to-possibly-fine-yahoo-ceo-for-swe...
The different ways of keeping score
I take medication for Parasomnia (sleep walking/talking/eating/doing) and I have done a few over-night sleep studies. I know my quality of sleep is very poor, but I've chosen to just "sleep more" rather than take a cocktail of medications.

I will be happy to share my experiences after I receive mine and see the results on their site. I don't expect it to compare to what my sleep doctor can get, but it'll be interesting to see how close/far they are. I don't have a blog, so I guess it'll just be a reply to this thread.
Best April fools prank ever =D
Tweaking our Backlog Review Meeting
Disqus.com is hiring a senior operations engineer (San Francisco)
Whoops. Moved to http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=1235368
I agree that the layouts could do better, but at the same time people need to snap out of this every-application-gets-maximised habit.

I use my 1920x1200 screen with a main app (e.g. browser) taking up the left 2/3 and auxiliary apps sharing the remaining 1/3 (if required, otherwise blank desktop) http://i.imgur.com/s3IaV.png
This is something called Silverlight that is totally different from Silverlight.

Netflix could have built their own DRM system that runs on the iPad, but I'm guessing they just used RDF to distract and confuse the studios.
I decided to submit this because I think that the discussion around the iPad has focused on it being somewhere between an iPhone and a Laptop. However, I think this really obscures the fact that is a device almost soley intended for consumption.

Instead, in my mind the iPad is a small, powerful and portable TV. I think that this is much less a about a revolution in computing, and more a revolution in how content is consumed.
Too bad Apple would never approve an emulator. It would be cool if they got the licensing for all those games though.
I would say that depends on whether or not you expect any income to start and also if you are assuming any liability with your side project. Registering as a company will help shield you from this (at least in the U.S.).
also works: sudo shutdown -h now
does not work: shutdown -h now
It has been my experience that direct managers of technical people who don't have at least a competent grasp of both technical perspective and business perspective are doomed, almost without exception. This is fairly obvious when you think about it, because these people are a bridge between two worlds, and need to command the respect of both.

The problem is that most managers with only one perspective don't seem to appreciate what they're missing, think they're a good manager anyway, and often receive positive reinforcement of this illusion when the side they do understand (and probably support too much, at the expense of the other side) praises them.
This is an example of a good apr1 joke becuase it'd be so awesome.

A custom cabinet and a full install of MAME with the games hosted on an external usb drive in the cabinet? It sounds crazy but I'm pretty sure it'd rule.
I don't think it's a good solution for internet filtering, however, I think it's a good solution to prevent accidental porn exposure (APE).

I work in a rather open office environment now. Our management has no problem if employees blow off some steam by surfing to a site that might not be work related as long as its not excessive (just like they don't punish people for going to the break room to get a candy bar from a machine, or going outside to smoke).

However, click the wrong link and end up with porn (or something otherwise seriously inappropriate for a typical work environment) and you get noticed very, very quickly.
Why MBAs fail at Entrepreneurship
How much liability can there be? Following all copyright/trademark laws and such..
> People often confuse creative destruction with societal collapse.

If you're in the buggy whip biz when it fails, its destruction is a form of societal collapse.

Remember - a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job.

People fight to keep their "phony, baloney jobs" because said jobs are their jobs - the phony, baloney is external to them.
The interface and outward appearance is simple, but the internals most certainly are not. There are still hundreds of components from dozens of manufacturers combined to make a physical product. In the case of the iPhone there's one of the largest mobile operating systems on there.

Computer chips are getting more and more complex as well, now with more levels of caching and inter-core communication.

I think we have a long way to go before we get simpler computers, but that does cause us to wonder if we will get to the point that they are just too complex.
The First Pre-Production Chevy Volt Rolled Off the Assembly Line
Thanks for clearing that up. On rereading it, you might be right that he meant it was unrealistic for anyone to think they'd actually do it - not that the timeframe was off.
I disagree, I find "omit all words" to make as little sense as "omit no words". Personally, I find it more likely to default to "omit some words". This, of course, does not describe the type of words we should be omitting, but rather that there exist words that we should omit. Saying "omit needless words" does describe the type, adding more information which is not there otherwise, making it a "needed" word.
maybe my memory has failed me but, didn't microsoft just get sued over supporting this not to long ago and had to change it or they would no longer be able to sale office?
Exactly! That probably saved them from billion $$$ fines. Seen from this angle, this is a total success.
I agree, it's supposed to be a joke claiming that 'needless' is a needless word. I'm saying I do not understand the joke because I believe 'needless' is actually a necessary part of that sentence.
I have said this before, and I will say it again: There are other things than just boobs on the internet. My primary job function is to build classifiers to categorize Internet content and yes, porn is a big one, but not the only one. BTW, most of the porn that people are concerned about is not nudes, but hardcore porn, rape simulation, U15 stuff, child porn, etc. Also there is the category of illegal content (child porn) that is just ruins your day to find. Other categories that parents are commonly concerned with is violence, drugs, abortion, etc.
How is being so popular that you can churn your product out fast enough a disaster? Sounds like a resounding success to me!

If you make something that people are desperate to own, time heals all wounds.
Disqus is hiring a senior operations engineer (San Francisco)
Don't let your creativity be destroyed by Apple.

I'm sure someone will jailbreak it by the time someone builds this.
Thanks for the reference. I've long wondered if a societies collapse could be precipitated by an excessively complex system of legislation.
Olson didn't win the Nobel Prize. You're thinking of Elinor Ostrom's book "Governing the Commons", which extended Olson's work considerably, and which led to Ostrom's prize.

Thanks for the tip on Olson's 1984 book, which I'd never heard of. Curiously enough, while reading Shirky's article, my mind kept turning to Olson and Ostrom, and their work on collective action.
Ask HN: Am I the only one who doesn't give a crap about the iPad?
Kind of getting sick of all the articles "iPad being used as X" on HN and everywhere else. Not saying it's a bad device but I mean, come on...