skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting perspective. That seems like the niche held by magazines and "the Sunday paper". It's ironic that they provide a solution to information overload and yet are slowly being killed by the firehose itself.

Do they have the better content model? Is it just the cost of providing that type of service that makes the delivery model impossible in today's world, where we expect news to be free?
My Internet Brain
All these reviews say essentially the same thing:

We can see the vision Apple had, but you should probably wait til that vision is further along, but I still like it and will probably buy one and so should you if you can afford it without consideration.
I laughed out loud at this line:

risks that make quitting the day job seem like choosing between the urinal and the toilet

In my time in the corporate world, I spent hours upon hours in meetings over decisions just as vain.
I saw his tweet mentioning it and thought maybe there was a second mystery book coming. This makes much more sense!

http://twitter.com/stuartsierra/status/11484474610
http://news.ycombinator.com/best

Not exhaustive enough - I also would wish for a HN with only the best links...
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I'll definitely be checking out those sites.
I'm not going to treat a cosmic ray corrupting one single network packet the same way I treat a hurricane cutting off power to a datacenter for 2 weeks. I do see the intellectual appeal in doing so, but we'll just have to agree to disagree!
Thanks! I appreciate the insight and showing me what to look out for. I have a good lawyer, so I hope he would have my back with terms like those.
However, I always had some recognition as to the vapid nature of what I was doing. Mystery and his pickup hucksters want to nullify that socialized feeling, feeling themselves justified by our selfish genes and tribal heritage.

That's the part I should have focused on more, judging by some of the comments. I don't object to promiscuity; I object to delusional promiscuity. Having experience with it, I wanted to say that it is a lot more glamourous on paper than in real life.

Ignoring the "vapid" nature of it all, I failed to include one of my personal most important lessons: sex for women, even if ostensibly casual, is rarely consequence free. They are wired differently. Occasionally you'll get a girl who just wants a meaningless night, but more often than not, they'll pretend they are okay with it while hoping for more. Considering the pickup artist community has rules about (effectively) going on three dates, it is misleading if you are only after sex.

That being said, it's not like me being in shape and telling fat people to work out more. It's me telling people who are not assholes that, having once been an asshole, you should not aspire to be one.
Some have taken to calling this perspective "slow news". See:

http://mediactive.com/2009/11/08/toward-a-slow-news-movement...
Japan got it's last hurrah of severed heads when it brutalized Nanking. I guess after Japan's devastating loss to America, who did not display the heads of our enemies, they accepted that their methods were sort of .. Barbaric?
Easy link to their site: http://www.learnbat.com/

I've met San a few times. A good guy!
Check out the story of how Steve Jobs cried his way to a deal.

I should probably clip the Steve Jobs stories because Chris tells them so well.
AdLib - Apple’s secret iPad web framework?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQlpDiXPZHQ
Why do you assume you'll have to build your own widgets?
"This article seems like it belongs on some sleazy askmen.com type of site rather than the WSJ."

Hit the nail on the head...to even be having comparisons on the level of men vs. women is showing a shocking lack of nuance for WSJ...
These numbers just make me sad. That much advertising trying to warp and control us. We've come a long way, baby.
The tendency towards inflated-familiarity varies by region and industry. I think LA/entertainment led the way, but online social networks are bringing the same friend-inflation worldwide.
None of these can be definitively affirmed or rejected by facts.

They're interesting questions but they're either unanswerable (time, oodb) or entirely application dependent (pain, hiring).
Nearly 5 years later, the Rails "build a blog" demo is revisited with Rails 3
Can't Hushmail still send you a bad java applet, though?

I think Hushmail is trustworthy -- in the sense that they're not going to deliberately deliver broken code except when forced to by law enforcement.
Huh; I was poised to flag this for being more stupid follow-the-leader anti-/pro-Apple BS, but this is actual study and criticism.
Uhm, of course they're not the same thing... but they have the same effect. The point is that the system remains available even if a node becomes unavailable for _whatever_ reason. I'm not sure what you're disagreeing on... There are common and uncommon modes of failure. Of course we should prioritize handling the common ones. But if we can handle all of them at once that's ideal. And, as I said in an earlier comment, when you're doing a million operations a second, failures that are one-in-a-million happen every second.
I think part of the problem is that this article doesn't recognize different categories of friends. The guys I play poker with or go out on a hike with aren't necessarily my closest friends. But there's other guys where we get together, typically one-on-one, and have serious discussions about our relationships, our kids, our fears and concerns in life.

(FWIW, my ex didn't really grasp this either: "Why do you need to go out with so and so tonight? You hang out with your friends at work every day")
You'd hope.

I'm aware of AWS firewall blocks at various sites.

Have a look around at some of the forums for web masters, and you'll find wholesale blacklisting of these server farms is regularly discussed. And implemented.

The presumption being that outbound connects from these server farms are usually something where the VPS has vastly more bandwidth, or bugs, or breaches; where the attackers and the spammers and the scrapers have quickly adopted or targeted these server farms just because of their capabilities.

And yes, there are well-intentioned folks using AWS that are getting painted with this same brush.
Things like patents and trademarks must be defended.

Apple may be doing this to demonstrate that it owns multi-touch and that it will not tolerate 3rd party multi-touch implementations.

This would be in their defense in the suit against HTC.
Add ".qr" to any goo.gl URL to get its QR code.
For comparison, the original "Build a blog in 15 minutes demo" from Nov. 2005 is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY
I almost entirely agree with your post, though I'll note that the Apple II was unique specifically because it came pre-assembled in a plastic case and was marketed to "regular people". Still, obviously most users were hobbyists, just less "hardcore" than those who assembled their own Altairs.
The headline is a little bit misleading. The app was rejected for using the peek interface not the pinch to expand. Tons of apps use the pinch to expand gesture it's just what the gesture does visually that Apple has a problem with. This is a subtle distinction and I still think Apple are in the wrong but the headline of the original article is unclear.
I don't think patents have to be defended like trademarks and even if they do Apple could definitely license the patents to people who pay for the developer program. I don't think this helps their case against HTC at all.
No, they expressly forbid you from implementing your own interpreter or running unsigned machine code.

They're just fine with you using their extremely performant javascript implementation.
I think the traditional magazines do this really well.
Woz has always about being open and modular and extensible. Jobs has always been about the opposite -- and for good reason; the early Macs were typically more stable and functioned better simply because of that lock-in.

But history has played this over and over again, and Woz always wins. Vendors work out standards; the user experience consolidates.

If you give people the freedom and trust them, they'll work it out. Or you can trust a benevolent dictator to work it out for you. Most Apple afficianados will say the most people don't want that freedom; I'm here to tell you that they do.

We don't have to debate. Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month, after the faithful have all bought theirs. Woz will win. Woz always wins.
Verizon CEO: Studies be damned, US is tops in broadband
Perhaps not, but this doesn't make them unimportant, and again this is why it's clever marketing. Frame the discussion in terms of things that you do well, even if they're not the most important considerations (e.g. "one keyspace per install").

It's a good sales technique: "Do you like holidays?" "Yes" "Well, now that I know you can say yes, do you want to buy this product?"
Not really...
"But can the feds force Hushmail to modify the Java applet sent to a particular user, which could then capture and sends the user’s passphrase to Hushmail, then to the government?"
...
"... The general point is that it is potentially detectable by the end-user, even though it is not practical to perform this operation every time. This means that in Java mode the level of trust the user must place in us is somewhat reduced, although not eliminated.

The extra security given by the Java applet is not particularly relevant, in the practical sense, if an individual account is targeted."
Once we had Microsoft imposing restrictions on how we could use their system and now we have Apple dictating how their system can be used. But Apple 's got one drawback; iPad's got very viable rivals such as WePad, ChromeOS, MobLin Microsoft had no really threatening rival at the time.

Apple 's attitude of power is therefore ridiculous, they seem to think that their tablet PC is something only they can develop and master, however it's not. Soon there will be millions of free and of equivalent quality Tablet PC's around and Apple 's iPad will only constitute a minority of them.
It's an obviously complicated question.

Men and women are different. They are, and there's nothing wrong with that. Different people fall at different points along their stereotype lines.

Where the difference can lead to conflict is when people on opposite sides of that difference don't notice or acknowledge it, and/or don't accept it. "How could you possibly think different from me?"

Anecdote of one: When my kid was four in pre-school their class played a game where they threw water balloons out on a measured field. Each time the balloon didn't break you threw again.

When the balloon broke you were to go stand at the side of the field, at the distance where your balloon broke, to mark your score.

All the boys stood proudly by their distances. All the girls clustered with the first girl at her score point.

There may be social pressure for men and women to act as their stereotypes, but I think it comes in part from actual differences.
I get this same vibe from a lot of older folks (or people who want to sound like them, all grizzled and what). True, from a hardware standpoint, Apple devices are closed. What matters today however, is that they are open devices from the perspective of a platform and web software developer.

Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone? And lets not forget that we make stuff for normal people here. Not just hackers like us. As it turns out, most folks don't want a hardware-hackable machine. They don't care enough for USB ports. The tablets being championed by MSFT in the previous decade were not much more moddable than the iPad, but I don't see anyone yelling at MSFT about that.
> Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month

We already watched the sales of the iPhone, and we saw how that went. Same type of device, same type of complaints by openness advocate, and what was the result? Are you guys going to just keep on saying this stuff until some closed Apple product fails, then say that's proof that people want openness, ignoring the litany of preceding closed devices that succeeded? I'm here to tell you that this is not a very good argument.
It's also a classic Steve McQueen movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070511/

As a side note, Papillon is French for "Butterfly" probably signifying his desire to be free.
like hnsummary but for everything else?
Ask HN: What DSLR should I buy?  New/Used?
I'm an amateur photographer and am going to purchase my first SLR very soon. I'm looking into the Canon XSi with the kit 18-55mm lens and getting the 55-250mm lens to go with it. However I'm haunted by the fact that the camera goes on sale for +-$300 once in a while - it makes me want to wait.

Would I be better off getting a (better) used camera (off ebay or craigslist), waiting for a ridiculous sale, or getting the XSi at a decent price ($550 with the kit lens)?

Any photographers on here?
People will buy it because of the hype, they think it will meet their needs, and those perceived needs will be defined in the marketing.
Really it's about fear, the fear of learning.
People now know they need a computer, but they're terrified of learning to use it, and they're not really interested in computers anyway. As a cheap, disposable, toy-like unit the iPad can likely succeed in that market.
It's not so much that dumbed-down computers discourage learning, more that they justify inability.
Those of us who deal with constant tech support from friends and family or even at work know all too well the cost of ignorance.
People in this age are expected to read and write, but using a computer in powerful ways is considered magic and unobtainable, this is to everyone's detriment.
I have an analogy: morbidly obese people given electric carts to wheel around walmart in.
One of your best interviews. Actually now that I have finished listening to the whole interview, the Steve Jobs part was only one of the highlights. The rest was amazing too.
You're wrong. Read section 3.3.2 of http://www.eff.org/files/20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf

Search the document for "interpreted code"

They expressly forbid it except for "included interpreters" aka javascript.

So hypercard is out of the running.
I think there's a truth to both: other men have approach anxiety, so just concentrate on dealing with that before they have anything useful to say. As a result, they used 'canned openers' which have given these guys the worst rep.
But they do serve a purpose, and every one of the PUA guys encourages and pushes people to move beyond these as soon as possible.
My point was that for an interactive application it doesn't take a very long time for user experience to degrade substantially.

And we've glossed over my points about newer databases exposing these knobs to clients. It's possible to do exactly what you're describing using Cassandra, for example (er, you might have to do some consistency level tweaking to make writes fail if you can't get a quorum of authoritative nodes, but it wouldn't be hard - and I'm not even sure if that's necessary). It's not possible to do it with MySQL or PostgreSQL without building some intelligent partitioning layer on top. And that layer will probably make it impossible to do joins and add relationship constraints, so you lose any benefits these systems bring to the table.
If all else fails, we can get pie-eyed!
Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone?

I must have forgotten that because it isn't true. On my P800 or Blackberry I could install any app, not just approved ones.

(Edit: I wonder if this meme about the "cell phone dark ages" comes from the millions of people who switched from dumbphones to iPhone and thus aren't personally familiar with the actual smartphone state of the art circa 2006.)
Google Code Jam 2010 registration now open
I'd say a couple months at least. If you look at past and present future enhancements listed for their other services (such as RDS replication, Windows reserved pricing, etc.) they've all spent many months in development after the point at which they were mentioned to customers.
I know what you mean, but I put it down to people new to the internet. They often are bad at typing so take shortcuts like 'u', and they've never written before as much as one does online. Within a year or two there's definite improvement in my experience; practice with touch typing and with composing text.

Country has nothing to do with it IMO, except that the US rarely sees people in their 20s discovering the internet for the first time.
The author seems to be making the classic mistake of assuming everyone is coming to the material for the same reason.

He is apparently past the stage of promiscuity and was looking for help finding a true mate. The MM disappointed him. So now he's preaching against the MM itself, rather than against the MM as a tool to meet his particular goal.

I bet if confronted about the contradiction, he'd claim he never meant to disparage the young using the MM to improve their own "youthful promiscuity" experience.

Whether he'd change his article is another story. He'll clearly get more attention as it is.
I agree that evaluating whether to switch to a solution now, or wait for something even better, is always a question you should ask.

But the term "vaporware" exists for a reason. Waiting for something that may or may not be everything it's promised is risky too. The Maglev ruby VM is a good example; they were demo-ing close to 10x performance a couple years ago, but when they finished implementing the fully ruby spec it was something like... 20% faster.

A lot can change when you go from demo-ware to a real production ready product. Neither Fathom nor Volt is going to be at Cassandra levels of stability in 3 months. More like a year... if things go well.
I agree. Microsoft was required to open their APIs for 3rd party developers. I don't see why Apple should get away with it. I hope you are correct and iPad's alternatives provide decent market competition, forcing Apple to review it's preposterous position on 3rd party apps. But I fear they won't stop until someone takes legal action against them - their market position is too strong, and I think the rivals you mention aren't really any thread for them.
I will talk to a friend about a problem only if they can help solve it.

Huh. I find that talking to many and sundry friends about problems helps me to understand the problem. Something about refining how I articulate the issue helps me organize it in my mind, which in turn informs any action I may take.
> What's really sad is that 70s-era technology is better than what we have today. No more SR-71. No more Concorde.

Define "better".

The Concorde was a scam - middle class citizens were taxed by England and France to subsidize a supersonic luxury plane that only the rich could afford to buy (subsidized) tickets on.

The SR-71 was the best tool we could build at the time. Once technology got better, we replaced it with satellites.

The fact that it leaked fuel, flew at Mach 3, had a crew of 2, etc. are not features, they are flaws.

Yeah, it's cool as all heck.

...but don't kid yourself that it's better than what we've got now.
The consumer isn't choosing the iPhone or iPad because it is closed, they are choosing it because it is easy to use, sexy, and supported by lots of apps. You can still have those things and be open, and Android is proving it.
Valid point.

Although, by using these techniques, the end result is a worse user experience, which seems very anti the Apple I knew. (I say this as a former employee)

I can understand Apple refusing apps where the experience sucks, but forcing developers to modify their app to make the UX worse than Apple's bundled app seems a little ridiculous and anti-consumer.
Nor are they "objections".
Health Insurers Stop Offering New Coverage to Small Businesses in MA
Is the TLDR: Have smaller API's for your libraries?
برنامج اعطال 6030 - شركة الصباحي
A Timeline of Important Events at Digg
> Any other tips others have for raising capital would be extremely appreciated! Thank you!

You really need at least one of the following three things to successfully raise capital:

1. Traction.
2. A successful track record.
3. A personal recommendation from someone the investor respects.

It might be possible to get a small amount of seed funding with just a good idea and a prototype/demo (e.g. Ycombinator).

Also, I cannot recommend venturehacks.com strongly enough.
and the comodore 64 was a kit?
Yeah, I imagine every thinker does. I'm also amazed as always how much overlap there is everytime I talk with someone else about their list.
Tell HN: elememory.com - weekend project. Embarrassing, but functional.
Looking for some feedback on a recent weekend project I put together.

I created it so that my kids can study their weekly Bible verses, but it works with any long passage of text.

It's only been tested with Firefox and Chrome on Windows, so let me know if you end up using a different OS/browser combo and your experience. I'm also very interested in hearing your thoughts about the project. It works, and my kids can use it...so it counts as a "minimum viable product in my book."

http://elememory.com | Elememory can help you study long passages of text
Android gained 5.2% of the US smartphone market between December 2009 and February 2010, while the iPhone lost 0.1% (http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=9184).

Of course I'm not going to declare the iPhone a failure - it's clearly done very well. But I think it's still a little early to call it a winner.
I'd say a masters in computer science isn't exactly what you want if you want to go into web development.

There really is nothing stopping you from starting to build a portfolio now. Start simple, some well designed static html/css pages. Then get some jquery in. Then get on a shared host and start with php/python/ruby.

I assume if you've made it to hackernews you are slightly technically competent. And if not I don't think a masters program will even admit you and if they did I don't think they'd be teaching you the things you need to learn.

If anything I'd suggest a web design program.
If anyone is interested in a bit more of the history behind the aircraft (also the U-2 and the F-117), do check out Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir... by Ben Rich

It's a great read!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316743003
God I can scarcely think of few ways better to destroy your partner's respect. I know I'll get downvoted but meh. You should already have your own means of tracking 'todo' and you should be in charge of what ends up on there.
Huge congrats to 280North for shipping this. The CommonJS and Jake stuff is awesome. It's also good to see the tableview and outlineview stuff make it back into the main branch.

PS: What's the latest with Atlas, guys?
Little that we know about, that is.

Blackbird was black for a very long time.

As for one program that we do know a little (more) about, there's X-37B:

http://www.physorg.com/news189528362.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av012/100402x37update/

And the X-43D and X-51A Waverider and DARPA FALCON hypersonic aircraft, and various other X planes.

Various known and likely various unknown black UAVs.

And whatever Burt Rutan is up to.
this problem solving motivated sharing is more accurately the key difference! What I wonder is why is not more often the focus of these articles?
Unfortunately it's hard to get a web job today that isn't ultimately about advertising. We're all advertisers now.